GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 3 4 5
sians managed to establish themselves in parts of southern Vietnam and
Cambodia to become the ancestors of the modern Chamic minority of
those countries.
However, Austronesian farmers could spread no farther into the Southeast
Asian mainland, because Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai farmers had
already replaced the former hunter-gatherers there, and because Austronesian
farmers had no advantage over Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai farmers.
Although we infer that Austronesian speakers originated from coastal
South China, Austronesian languages today are not spoken anywhere in
mainland China, possibly because they were among the hundreds of former
Chinese languages eliminated by the southward expansion of Sino-
Tibetan speakers. But the language families closest to Austronesian are
thought to be Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, and Miao-Yao. Thus, while Austronesian
languages in China may not have survived the onslaught of Chinese
dynasties, some of their sister and cousin languages did.
WE HAVE NOW followed the initial stages of the Austronesian expansion
for 2,500 miles from the South China coast, through Taiwan and
the Philippines, to western and central Indonesia. In the course of that
expansion, Austronesians came to occupy all habitable areas of those
islands, from the seacoast to the interior, and from the lowlands to the
mountains. By 1500 B.c. their familiar archaeological hallmarks, including
pig bones and plain red-slipped pottery, show that they had reached the
eastern Indonesian island of Halmahera, less than 200 miles from the western
end of the big mountainous island of New Guinea. Did they proceed
to overrun that island, just as they had already overrun the big mountainous
islands of Celebes, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra?
They did not, as a glance at the faces of most modern New Guineans
makes obvious, and as detailed studies of New Guinean genes confirm.
My friend Wiwor and all other New Guinea highlanders differ obviously
from Indonesians, Filipinos, and South Chinese in their dark skins, tightly
coiled hair, and face shapes. Most lowlanders from New Guinea's interior
and south coast resemble the highlanders except that they tend to be taller.
Geneticists have failed to find characteristic Austronesian gene markers in
blood samples from New Guinea highlanders.
But peoples of New Guinea's north and east coasts, and of the Bismarck
and Solomon Archipelagoes north and east of New Guinea, present a more