GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

350 ' GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
most, some of them merely adopted Austronesian languages, possibly in
order to communicate with the long-distance traders who linked societies.
THUS, THE OUTCOME of the Austronesian expansion in the New
Guinea region was opposite to that in Indonesia and the Philippines. In
the latter region the indigenous population disappeared—presumably
driven off, killed, infected, or assimilated by the invaders. In the former
region the indigenous population mostly kept the invaders out. The invaders
(the Austronesians) were the same in both cases, and the indigenous
populations may also have been genetically similar to each other, if the
original Indonesian population supplanted by Austronesians really was
related to New Guineans, as I suggested earlier. Why the opposite outcomes?
The answer becomes obvious when one considers the differing cultural
circumstances of Indonesia's and New Guinea's indigenous populations.
Before Austronesians arrived, most of Indonesia was thinly occupied by
hunter-gatherers lacking even polished stone tools. In contrast, food production
had already been established for thousands of years in the New
Guinea highlands, and probably in the New Guinea lowlands and in the
Bismarcks and Solomons as well. The New Guinea highlands supported
some of the densest populations of Stone Age people anywhere in the modern
world.
Austronesians enjoyed few advantages in competing with those established
New Guinean populations. Some of the crops on which Austronesians
subsisted, such as taro, yams, and bananas, had probably already
been independently domesticated in New Guinea before Austronesians
arrived. The New Guineans readily integrated Austronesian chickens,
dogs, and especially pigs into their food-producing economies. New Guineans
already had polished stone tools. They were at least as resistant to
tropical diseases as were Austronesians, because they carried the same five
types of genetic protections against malaria as did Austronesians, and
some or all of those genes evolved independently in New Guinea. New
Guineans were already accomplished seafarers, although not as accomplished
as the makers of Lapita pottery. Tens of thousands of years before
the arrival of Austronesians, New Guineans had colonized the Bismarck
and Solomon Archipelagoes, and a trade in obsidian (a volcanic stone suitable
for making sharp tools) was thriving in the Bismarcks at least 18,000