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The upper extreme of 1,100 people per square mile was reached on the high island of Anuta, whose population converted essentially all the land to intensive food production, thereby crammed 160 people into the island’s 100 acres, and joined the ranks of the densest self-sufficient populations in the world. Anuta’s population density exceeded that of modern Holland and even rivaled that of Bangladesh.
Population size is the product of population density (people per square mile) and area (square miles). The relevant area is not the area of an island but that of a political unit, which could be either larger or smaller than a single island.
Why is this the relevant measure?
the area of the political unit varied not only with an island’s area but also with its fragmentation and isolation.
Many larger islands never did become unified politically, whether because the population consisted of dispersed bands of only a few dozen hunter-gatherers each (the Chathams and New Zealand’s southern South Island), or of farmers scattered over large distances (the rest of New Zealand), or of farmers living in dense populations but in rugged terrain precluding political unification.
the distances between Tonga and neighboring archipelagoes, were sufficiently modest that a multi-island empire encompassing 40,000 people was eventually established.
In general, the larger the size and the higher the density, the more complex and specialized were the technology and organization, for reasons that we shall examine in detail in later chapters.
Social distinctions and chiefly powers increased on high-density islands with large political units, being especially marked on Tonga and the Societies.
At the time of Europeans’ arrival in the 18th century, the Tongan chiefdom or state had already become an inter-archipelagal empire.
They engaged in regular long-distance trade with Fiji and Samoa, established Tongan settlements in Fiji, and began to raid and conquer parts of Fiji. The conquest and administration of this maritime proto-empire were achieved by navies of large canoes, each holding up to 150 men.
the famous giant statues of Easter Island,
Where was the population density in Easter Island yo support this kind of activity? Isn't this an outlier, and does not fly in the face of complex societies that may be needed for the tools used to build such structures?
This monumental Polynesian architecture was obviously evolving in the same direction as the pyramids of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mexico, and Peru.
Eurasians and Africans went on to utilize iron. Those developments were precluded in Polynesia, because no Polynesian island except New Zealand had significant metal deposits.
indigenous writing, which failed to emerge in Polynesia, except perhaps on Easter Island, whose mysterious script may however have postdated the islanders’ contact with Europeans.
inferred transpacific voyage that introduced the sweet potato from South America to Polynesia.
The most dramatic moment in subsequent European–Native American relations was the first encounter between the Inca emperor Atahuallpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro at the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca on November 16, 1532.
imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples.
Thanks to their mastery of horses and rifles, the Plains Indians of North America, the Araucanian Indians of southern Chile, and the Pampas Indians of Argentina fought off invading whites longer than did any other Native Americans, succumbing only to massive army operations by white governments in the 1870s and 1880s.
In the Spanish conquest of the Incas, guns played only a minor role. The guns of those times (so-called harquebuses) were difficult to load and fire,
The transformation of warfare by horses began with their domestication around 4000 B.C., in the steppes north of the Black Sea.
Their role at Cajamarca thus exemplifies a military weapon that remained potent for 6,000 years, until the early 20th century, and that was eventually applied on all the continents.
epidemic of smallpox, spreading overland among South American Indians after its arrival with Spanish settlers in Panama and Colombia, had killed the Inca emperor Huayna Capac and most of his court around 1526, and then immediately killed his designated heir, Ninan Cuyuchi.
Atahuallpa’s presence at Cajamarca thus highlights one of the key factors in world history: diseases transmitted to peoples lacking immunity by invading peoples with considerable immunity.
A smallpox epidemic in 1713 was the biggest single step in the destruction of South Africa’s native San people by European settlers. Soon after the British settlement of Sydney in 1788, the first of the epidemics that decimated Aboriginal Australians began.
In addition to the ships themselves, Pizarro’s presence depended on the centralized political organization that enabled Spain to finance, build, staff, and equip the ships.
Maritime technology coupled with political organization was similarly essential for European expansions to other continents, as well as for expansions of many other peoples.
A related factor bringing Spaniards to Peru was the existence of writing. Spain possessed it, while the Inca Empire did not.
Understandably, it never occurred to Atahuallpa that the Spaniards were formidable and would attack him without provocation.
literacy made the Spaniards heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history. By contrast, not only did Atahuallpa have no conception of the Spaniards themselves, and no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas, but he also had not even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history.
Why weren’t the Incas the ones to invent guns and steel swords, to be mounted on animals as fearsome as horses, to bear diseases to which European lacked resistance, to develop oceangoing ships and advanced political organization, and to be able to draw on the experience of thousands of years of written history?
food production was indirectly a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs, and steel. Hence geographic variation in whether, or when, the peoples of different continents became farmers and herders explains to a large extent their subsequent contrasting fates.
one acre can feed many more herders and farmers—typically, 10 to 100 times more—than hunter-gatherers. That strength of brute numbers was the first of many military advantages that food-producing tribes gained over hunter-gatherer tribes.
Even with the modern availability of synthetic fertilizers produced by chemical factories, the major source of crop fertilizer today in most societies is still animal manure—especially of cows, but also of yaks and sheep.
the first prehistoric farmers of central Europe, the so-called Linearbandkeramik culture that arose slightly before 5000 B.C., were initially confined to soils light enough to be tilled by means of hand-held digging sticks.
A more indirect way involved the consequences of the sedentary lifestyle enforced by food production.
back. In practice, nomadic hunter-gatherers space their children about four years apart by means of lactational amenorrhea, sexual abstinence, infanticide, and abortion.
nomadic hunter-gatherer societies have few or no such full-time specialists, who instead first appear in sedentary societies.
In contrast, once food can be stockpiled, a political elite can gain control of food produced by others, assert the right of taxation, escape the need to feed itself, and engage full-time in political activities.
Some hunter-gatherers in especially rich environments, such as the Pacific Northwest coast of North America and the coast of Ecuador, also developed sedentary societies, food storage, and nascent chiefdoms, but they did not go farther on the road to kingdoms.
One of the earliest cultivated plants in many parts of the Americas was grown for nonfood purposes: the bottle gourd, used as a container.
for the first time in human history, it became possible to move heavy goods in large quantities, as well as people, rapidly overland for long distances.
Even much earlier (around 4000 B.C.), at a time when horses were still ridden bareback, they may have been the essential military ingredient behind the westward expansion of speakers of Indo-European languages from the Ukraine.
For example, in 1674 B.C., horses even enabled a foreign people, the Hyksos, to conquer then horseless Egypt and to establish themselves temporarily as pharaohs.
When we trace food production back to its beginnings, the earliest sites provide another surprise. Far from being modern breadbaskets, they include areas ranking today as somewhat dry or ecologically degraded: Iraq and Iran, Mexico, the Andes, parts of China, and Africa’s Sahel zone.
why did the peoples of those areas not become farmers and herders without outside assistance, by domesticating local plants and animals?
thousands of years earlier in eastern Asia than in the eastern United States and never in eastern Australia?
thousands of years earlier in southwestern Europe than in the southwestern United States?
Once the plant or animal dies, though, half of its carbon 14 content decays into carbon 12 every 5,700 years, until after about 40,000 years the carbon 14 content is very low and difficult to measure or to distinguish from contamination with small amounts of modern materials containing carbon 14.
archaeologists are circumventing this problem by a new technique termed accelerator mass spectrometry, which permits radiocarbon dating of tiny samples and thus lets one directly date a single small seed, small bone, or other food residue.
second problem in radiocarbon dating is that the carbon 14 / carbon 12 ratio of the atmosphere is in fact not rigidly constant but fluctuates slightly with time, so calculations of radiocarbon dates based on the assumption of a constant ratio are subject to small systematic errors.
the rings can be counted up to obtain an absolute calendar date in the past for each ring, and a carbon sample of wood dated in this manner can then be analyzed for its carbon 14 / carbon 12 ratio.
