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that the size of the regional population is the strongest single predictor of societal complexity.
Complex centralized societies are uniquely capable of organizing public works (including irrigation systems), long-distance trade (including the importation of metals to make better agricultural tools), and activities of different groups of economic specialists (such as feeding herders with farmers’ cereal, and transferring the herders’ livestock to farmers for use as plow animals). All of these capabilities of centralized societies have fostered intensified food production and hence population growth throughout history.
What mechanism does the modern state (and its antecedents) use for redistribution?
THUS, FOOD PRODUCTION, which increases population size, also acts in many ways to make features of complex societies possible. But that doesn’t prove that food production and large populations make complex societies inevitable.
Hence a large society must be structured and centralized if it is to reach decisions effectively.
Thus, competition between societies at one level of complexity tends to lead to societies on the next level of complexity if conditions permit.
But wars, even between mere bands, have been a constant fact of human history. Why is it, then, that they evidently began causing amalgamations of societies only within the past 13,000 years?
tribute received by the Aztecs each year from subject peoples had included 7,000 tons of corn, 4,000 tons of beans, 4,000 tons of grain amaranth, 2,000,000 cotton cloaks, and huge quantities of cacao beans, war costumes, shields, feather headdresses, and amber.
Until then, it had supported the most distinctive human societies, and the least numerous human population, of any continent.
The largest Torres Strait island lies only 10 miles from Australia. Islanders carried on a lively trade with Native Australians as well as with New Guineans. How could two such different cultural universes maintain themselves across a calm strait only 10 miles wide and routinely traversed by canoes?
A glance at a map (Figure 15.1) suggests that the colonists must have originated ultimately from the nearest continent, Southeast Asia, by island hopping through the Indonesian Archipelago. This conclusion is supported by genetic relationships between modern Australians, New Guineans, and Asians, and by the survival today of a few populations of somewhat similar physical appearance in the Philippines, Malay Peninsula, and Andaman Islands off Myanmar.
Australian languages and New Guinea’s Papuan languages are unrelated not only to Asian languages but also to each other, except for some spread of vocabulary in both directions across Torres Strait.
When Europeans first flew over the highlands in the 1930s, they were astonished to see below them a landscape similar to Holland’s. Broad valleys were completely deforested and dotted with villages, and drained and fenced fields for intensive food production covered entire valley floors. That landscape testifies to the population densities achieved in the highlands by farmers with stone tools.
lowland New Guinea swamp dwellers live as nomadic hunter-gatherers dependent on the starchy pith of wild sago palms, which are very productive and yield three times more calories per hour of work than does gardening. New Guinea swamps thus provide a clear instance of an environment where people remained hunter-gatherers because farming could not compete with the hunting-gathering lifestyle.
With a mere 1,000,000 people, New Guinea could not develop the technology, writing, and political systems that arose among populations of tens of millions in China, the Fertile Crescent, the Andes, and Mesoamerica.
Density is Destiny
New Guinea has by far the highest concentration of languages in the world: 1,000 out of the world’s 6,000 languages, crammed into an area only slightly larger than that of Texas, and divided into dozens of language families and isolated languages as different from each other as English is from Chinese.
even the largest language groups (still with a mere 100,000 speakers) were politically fragmented into hundreds of villages, fighting as fiercely with each other as with speakers of other languages.
Why were New Guineans unable to develop the institutions to organise people speaking the same language? How were Eurasian groups sharing a language but politically fragmented manage to overcome the same problem?
microsocieties alone was far too small to support chiefs and craft specialists, or to develop metallurgy and writing.
How come 100,000 is suddenly a small number? Isn't this the size of a chiefdom elsewhere?
But they did not use dingos / dogs for food, as did Polynesians, or for cooperative hunting of wild animals, as did New Guineans.
Any incipient farmers in Aboriginal Australia would have faced similar cycles in their own populations. If in good years they had settled in villages, grown crops, and produced babies, those large populations would have starved and died off in drought years, when the land could support far fewer people.
We think of Australian Aborigines as desert people, but most of them were not. Instead, their population densities varied with rainfall (because it controls the production of terrestrial wild plant and animal foods) and with abundance of aquatic foods in the sea, rivers, and lakes.
Even within the relatively moist and productive eastern side of the continent, exchanges between societies were limited by the 1,900 miles from Queensland’s tropical rain forests in the northeast to Victoria’s temperate rain forests in the southeast, a geographic and ecological distance as great as that from Los Angeles to Alaska.
Because the Australians remained nomadic hunter-gatherers, they acquired only those few Macassan products and practices compatible with their lifestyle. Dugout sailing canoes and pipes, yes; forges and pigs, no.
European settlement reduced the number of Aborigines by two means. One involved shooting them, an option that Europeans considered more acceptable in the 19th and late 18th centuries than when they entered the New Guinea highlands in the 1930s.
The other means involved European-introduced germs to which Aborigines had had no opportunity to acquire immunity or to evolve genetic resistance. Within a year of the first European settlers’ arrival at Sydney, in 1788, corpses of Aborigines who had died in epidemics became a common sight.
I already mentioned the ecological differences between China’s cool, dry north and warm, wet south. At a given latitude, there are also ecological distinctions between the coastal lowlands and the interior uplands. Different wild plants are native to these disparate environments and would thus have been variously available to incipient farmers in various parts of China.
This appears to contradict the earlier point about the skies of food through Eurasia
Stratified societies whose rulers could mobilize large labor forces of commoners are also attested by huge urban defensive walls, big palaces, and eventually the Grand Canal (the world’s longest canal, over 1,000 miles long), linking North and South China.
The Semang Negritos persisted as hunter-gatherers trading with neighboring farmers but adopted an Austroasiatic language from those farmers—much as, we shall see, Philippine Negrito and African Pygmy hunter-gatherers adopted languages from their farmer trading partners. Only on the remote Andaman Islands do languages unrelated to the South Chinese language families persist—the last linguistic survivors of what must have been hundreds of now extinct aboriginal Southeast Asian languages.
The population movement that brought Achmad’s and Sauakari’s ancestors to Java and New Guinea, respectively, termed the Austronesian expansion, was among the biggest population movements of the last 6,000 years. One prong of it became the Polynesians, who populated the most remote islands of the Pacific and were the greatest seafarers among Neolithic peoples. Austronesian languages are spoken today as native languages over more than half of the globe’s span, from Madagascar to Easter Island.
while 374 languages are spoken in the Philippines and western and central Indonesia, all of them are closely related and fall within the same sub-subfamily (Western Malayo-Polynesian) of the Austronesian language family.
The famous Java Homo erectus fossils prove that humans have occupied at least western Indonesia for a million years. That should have given ample time for humans to evolve genetic and linguistic diversity and tropical adaptations, such as dark skins like those of many other tropical peoples—but instead Indonesians and Filipinos have light skins.
Why the confusion between homo erectus and homo sapiens?
That event evidently took place too recently for the colonists to evolve dark skins,
This assumes that sexual selection favours darker skin. There is no reason for skin colour to change unless the genes for darker skin somehow more successful.
Before the recent overseas expansion of Europeans speaking Indo-European languages, Austronesian was the most widespread language family in the world.
One specific type of artifact linking Taiwan’s Ta-p’en-k’eng culture to later Pacific island cultures is a bark beater, a stone implement used for pounding the fibrous bark of certain tree species into rope, nets, and clothing.
The invention of the double-outrigger sailing canoe may have been the technological breakthrough that triggered the Austronesian expansion from the Chinese mainland.
If the expansion had proceeded from tropical Southeast Asia’s Malay Peninsula to the nearest Indonesian island of Sumatra, then to other Indonesian islands, and finally to the Philippines and Taiwan, we would find the deepest divisions (reflecting the greatest time depth) of the Austronesian language family among the modern languages of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, and the languages of Taiwan and the Philippines would have differentiated only recently within a single subfamily.
Proto-Malayo-Polynesian contains words for many tropical crops like taro, breadfruit, bananas, yams, and coconuts, for which no word can be reconstructed in Proto-Austronesian. Thus, the linguistic evidence suggests that many tropical crops were added to the Austronesian repertoire after the emigration from Taiwan.
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.
Something feels off about this
Evidently, Austronesian settlers in the New Guinea region got the idea of “tattooing” their pots, perhaps inspired by geometric designs that they had already been using on their bark cloth and body tattoos. This style is termed Lapita pottery, after an archaeological site named Lapita, where it was described.
Even the timber for Malai canoes was obtained by trade from villagers on nearby Umboi Island, since Malai does not have trees big enough to be fashioned into canoes.
Then how did they get to Malai???
I would guess that the Lapita potters were the interisland traders of the New Guinea region in the centuries after 1600 B.C.
Does not answer the question of why Lapita pottery is confined to the islets and is relatively scarce in Mew Guinea. In fact, it raises the question of why traders' goods which were accepted on the coast for barter, weren't sent further upland?
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.
Where is the evidence of an existing aboriginal population?
The New Guinea highlands supported some of the densest populations of Stone Age people anywhere in the modern world.
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).
Perhaps this isntoo easy to agree with, but it beara striking resemblance to the European expansion in the Americas.
widespread dependence on protein-poor corn, instead of Eurasia’s diverse and protein-rich cereals;
Why does this matter? Were Native American societies protein-deficient? And so what if they were?
the three regions of the New World supporting urban societies (the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the U.S. Southeast) were never connected by fast, high-volume trade on the scale that brought plague, influenza, and possibly smallpox to Europe from Asia.
the infectious diseases that eventually became major obstacles to European colonization of the American tropics, and that posed the biggest barrier to the construction of the Panama Canal, are not American diseases at all but are caused by microbes of Old World tropical origin, introduced to the Americas by Europeans.
The Inca Empire employed an accounting system and mnemonic device based on knots (termed quipu), but it could not have approached writing as a vehicle for transmitting detailed information.
food production began to provide a large fraction of human diets around 5,000 years earlier in the Eurasian homelands than in those of the Americas.
tools. Evidently, it was much easier for one society of already sedentary farmers to “borrow” metallurgy from another such society than for nomadic hunter-gatherers to “borrow” food production from sedentary farmers (or to be replaced by the farmers).
Suggests that food production is key to all subsequent development
The calculations given in Chapter 1 tell us that even if a mere 100 pioneering Native Americans had crossed the Canadian border into the lower United States and increased at a rate of only 1 percent per year, they would have saturated the Americas with hunter-gatherers within 1,000 years.
