GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

352 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
A.D. 1400, barely a century before European "explorers" entered the
Pacific, the task of exploring the Pacific was finally completed by Asians.
Their tradition of exploration, lasting tens of thousands of years, had
begun when Wiwor's ancestors spread through Indonesia to New Guinea
and Australia. It ended only when it had run out of targets and almost
every habitable Pacific island had been occupied.
To ANYONE INTERESTED in world history, human societies of East
Asia and the Pacific are instructive, because they provide so many examples
of how environment molds history. Depending on their geographic
homeland, East Asian and Pacific peoples differed in their access to domesticable
wild plant and animal species and in their connectedness to other
peoples. Again and again, people with access to the prerequisites for food
production, and with a location favoring diffusion of technology from
elsewhere, replaced peoples lacking these advantages. Again and again,
when a single wave of colonists spread out over diverse environments,
their descendants developed in separate ways, depending on those environmental
differences.
For instance, we have seen that South Chinese developed indigenous
food production and technology, received writing and still more technology
and political structures from North China, and went on to colonize
tropical Southeast Asia and Taiwan, largely replacing the former inhabitants
of those areas. Within Southeast Asia, among the descendants or relatives
of those food-producing South Chinese colonists, the Yumbri in the
mountain rain forests of northeastern Thailand and Laos reverted to living
as hunter-gatherers, while the Yumbri's close relatives the Vietnamese
(speaking a language in the same sub-subfamily of Austroasiatic as the
Yumbri language) remained food producers in the rich Red Delta and
established a vast metal-based empire. Similarly, among Austronesian emigrant
farmers from Taiwan and Indonesia, the Punan in the rain forests of
Borneo were forced to turn back to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, while
their relatives living on Java's rich volcanic soils remained food producers,
founded a kingdom under the influence of India, adopted writing, and
built the great Buddhist monument at Borobudur. The Austronesians who
went on to colonize Polynesia became isolated from East Asian metallurgy
and writing and hence remained without writing or metal. As we saw in
Chapter 2, though, Polynesian political and social organization and econo-