GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

342 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
Whenever I've been paddled in dugouts up New Guinea rivers by New
Guineans, I have spent much of the trip in terror: it seemed that every
slight movement of mine risked capsizing the canoe and spilling out me
and my binoculars to commune with crocodiles. New Guineans manage
to look secure while paddling dugouts on calm lakes and rivers, but not
even New Guineans can use a dugout in seas with modest waves. Hence
some stabilizing device must have been essential not only for the Austronesian
expansion through Indonesia but even for the initial colonization of
Taiwan.
The solution was to lash two smaller logs ("outriggers") parallel to the
hull and several feet from it, one on each side, connected to the hull by
poles lashed perpendicular to the hull and outriggers. Whenever the hull
starts to tip toward one side, the buoyancy of the outrigger on that side
prevents the outrigger from being pushed under the water and hence
makes it virtually impossible to capsize the vessel. The invention of the
double-outrigger sailing canoe may have been the technological breakthrough
that triggered the Austronesian expansion from the Chinese mainland.
TWO STRIKING COINCIDENCES between archaeological and linguistic
evidence support the inference that the people bringing a Neolithic culture
to Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia thousands of years ago spoke
Austronesian languages and were ancestral to the Austronesian speakers
still inhabiting those islands today. First, both types of evidence point
unequivocally to the colonization of Taiwan as the first stage of the expansion
from the South China coast, and to the colonization of the Philippines
and Indonesia from Taiwan as the next stage. If the expansion had proceeded
from tropical Southeast Asia's Malay Peninsula to the nearest Indonesian
island of Sumatra, then to other Indonesian islands, and finally to
the Philippines and Taiwan, we would find the deepest divisions (reflecting
the greatest time depth) of the Austronesian language family among the
modern languages of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, and the languages
of Taiwan and the Philippines would have differentiated only recently
within a single subfamily. Instead, the deepest divisions are in Taiwan, and
the languages of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra fall together in the
same sub-sub-subfamily: a recent branch of the Western Malayo-Polyne-