GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 3 3 9
Polynesian but to the other three Austronesian subfamilies, which differ
considerably more from each other and from Malayo-Polynesian than the
sub-subfamilies of Malayo-Polynesian differ among each other.
It turns out that those three other subfamilies have coincident distributions,
all of them tiny compared with the distribution of Malayo-Polynesian.
They are confined to aborigines of the island of Taiwan, lying only
90 miles from the South China mainland. Taiwan's aborigines had the
island largely to themselves until mainland Chinese began settling in large
numbers within the last thousand years. Still more mainlanders arrived
after 1945, especially after the Chinese Communists defeated the Chinese
Nationalists in 1949, so that aborigines now constitute only 2 percent of
Taiwan's population. The concentration of three out of the four Austronesian
subfamilies on Taiwan suggests that, within the present Austronesian
realm, Taiwan is the homeland where Austronesian languages have been
spoken for the most millennia and have consequently had the longest time
in which to diverge. All other Austronesian languages, from those on Madagascar
to those on Easter Island, would then stem from a population
expansion out of Taiwan.
WE CAN NOW turn to archaeological evidence. While the debris of
ancient village sites does not include fossilized words along with bones
and pottery, it does reveal movements of people and cultural artifacts that
could be associated with languages. Like the rest of the world, most of
the present Austronesian realm—Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and
many Pacific islands—was originally occupied by hunter-gatherers lacking
pottery, polished stone tools, domestic animals, and crops. (The sole
exceptions to this generalization are the remote islands of Madagascar,
eastern Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, which were never reached
by hunter-gatherers and remained empty of humans until the Austronesian
expansion.) The first archaeological signs of something different within
the Austronesian realm come from—Taiwan. Beginning around the fourth
millennium B.C., polished stone tools and a distinctive decorated pottery
style (so-called Ta-p'en-k'eng pottery) derived from earlier South China
mainland pottery appeared on Taiwan and on the opposite coast of the
South China mainland. Remains of rice and millet at later Taiwanese sites
provide evidence of agriculture.
Ta-p'en-k'eng sites of Taiwan and the South China coast are full of fish