GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

3 4 4 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
tronesian language spoken in the distant past. To no one's surprise, that
reconstructed Proto-Austronesian language had words with meanings
such as "two," "bird," "ear," and "head louse": of course, Proto-Austronesians
could count to 2, knew of birds, and had ears and lice. More
interestingly, the reconstructed language had words for "pig," "dog," and
"rice," which must therefore have been part of Proto-Austronesian culture.
The reconstructed language is full of words indicating a maritime
economy, such as "outrigger canoe," "sail," "giant clam," "octopus,"
"fish trap," and "sea turtle." This linguistic evidence regarding the culture
of Proto-Austronesians, wherever and whenever they lived, agrees well
with the archaeological evidence regarding the pottery-making, sea-oriented,
food-producing people living on Taiwan around 6,000 years ago.
The same procedure can be applied to reconstruct Proto-Malayo-Polynesian,
the ancestral language spoken by Austronesians after emigrating
from Taiwan. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian contains words for many tropical
crops like taro, breadfruit, bananas, yams, and coconuts, for which no
word can be reconstructed in Proto-Austronesian. Thus, the linguistic evidence
suggests that many tropical crops were added to the Austronesian
repertoire after the emigration from Taiwan. This conclusion agrees with
archaeological evidence: as colonizing farmers spread southward from Taiwan
(lying about 23 degrees north of the equator) toward the equatorial
tropics, they came to depend increasingly on tropical root and tree crops,
which they proceeded to carry with them out into the tropical Pacific.
How could those Austronesian-speaking farmers from South China via
Taiwan replace the original hunter-gatherer population of the Philippines
and western Indonesia so completely that little genetic and no linguistic
evidence of that original population survived? The reasons resemble the
reasons why Europeans replaced or exterminated Native Australians
within the last two centuries, and why South Chinese replaced the original
tropical Southeast Asians earlier: the farmers' much denser populations,
superior tools and weapons, more developed watercraft and maritime
skills, and epidemic diseases to which the farmers but not the hunter-gatherers
had some resistance. On the Asian mainland Austronesian-speaking
farmers were able similarly to replace some of the former hunter-gatherers
of the Malay Peninsula, because Austronesians colonized the peninsula
from the south and east (from the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and
Borneo) around the same time that Austroasiatic-speaking farmers were
colonizing the peninsula from the north (from Thailand). Other Austrone-