GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

SPEEDBOAT TO POLYNESIA • 351
years before the Austronesians arrived. New Guineans even seem to have
expanded recently westward against the Austronesian tide, into eastern
Indonesia, where languages spoken on the islands of North Halmahera
and of Timor are typical Papuan languages related to some languages of
western New Guinea.
In short, the variable outcomes of the Austronesian expansion strikingly
illustrate the role of food production in human population movements.
Austronesian food-producers migrated into two regions (New Guinea and
Indonesia) occupied by resident peoples who were probably related to
each other. The residents of Indonesia were still hunter-gatherers, while
the residents of New Guinea were already food producers and had developed
many of the concomitants of food production (dense populations,
disease resistance, more advanced technology, and so on). As a result,
while the Austronesian expansion swept away the original Indonesians, it
failed to make much headway in the New Guinea region, just as it also
failed to make headway against Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai food producers
in tropical Southeast Asia.
We have now traced the Austronesian expansion through Indonesia and
up to the shores of New Guinea and tropical Southeast Asia. In Chapter
19 we shall trace it across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, while in Chapter
15 we saw that ecological difficulties kept Austronesians from establishing
themselves in northern and western Australia. The expansion's
remaining thrust began when the Lapita potters sailed far eastward into
the Pacific beyond the Solomons, into an island realm that no other
humans had reached previously. Around 1200 B.c. Lapita potsherds, the
familiar triumvirate of pigs and chickens and dogs, and the usual other
archaeological hallmarks of Austronesians appeared on the Pacific archipelagoes
of Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, over a thousand miles east of the Solomons.
Early in the Christian era, most of those same hallmarks (with the
notable exception of pottery) appeared on the islands of eastern Polynesia,
including the Societies and Marquesas. Further long overwater canoe voyages
brought settlers north to Hawaii, east to Pitcairn and Easter Islands,
and southwest to New Zealand. The native inhabitants of most of those
islands today are the Polynesians, who thus are the direct descendants of
the Lapita potters. They speak Austronesian languages closely related to
those of the New Guinea region, and their main crops are the Austronesian
package that included taro, yams, bananas, coconuts, and breadfruit.
With the occupation of the Chatham Islands off New Zealand around