Guns, Germs, and Steel: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

In New Guinea, ethnic tensions remain high. Javans, highlanders (people from the center of New Guinea), lowlanders (coastal people), and Chinese make up sizeable chunks of the population, and each group has strong stereotypes about the other three (the highlanders are supposedly arrogant and violent, the lowlanders are effete and weak, etc.).

About 6,000 years ago, there was a demographic shift called the Austronesia expansion. (“Austronesia” refers to an area encompassing Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and many of the Pacific Islands). Ancient peoples in China and Southeast Asia migrated farther south to explore the islands of present-day Java, New Guinea, and Indonesia. Why, we should ask, did Asians colonize indigenous Javans and New Guineans instead of the other way around?

It’s important to note that the populations of Indonesia and the Philippines look a lot like the South Chinese, far more than they resemble the indigenous peoples of Australia or New Guinea. Also, archaeologists have uncovered evidence in various Austronesian areas that suggests that, until 4000 B.C., the indigenous Austronesian peoples were hunter-gatherers. Archeological evidence indicates that the earliest agriculture in Austronesia came from Taiwan. There is further evidence that agriculturalists in Taiwan spread throughout Austronesia, bringing relics of Taiwanese agriculture with them: agricultural techniques, but also domesticated animals, pottery, etc. The Austronesian explorers of 6,000 years ago, it’s hypothesized, traveled through Austronesian islands using small boats and canoes. So the present-day Austronesians (people in Java or New Guinea, for example) are probably descendants of agriculturalists who spread through Austronesia 6,000 years ago.

By studying languages, linguists have been able to hypothesize which “cultural baggage” the Austronesians spread. By analyzing similarities between the same words in many languages, one can guess that the people that speak such languages were connected through cultural diffusion. For example, the fact that the word for “sheep” in Spanish, Russian, Greek, and Lithuanian is remarkably similar would suggest that the ancient peoples of these cultures traded sheep with one another. By studying the similarities between ancient Polynesian languages and ancient Taiwanese languages, linguists have hypothesized that agriculturalists spread their crops and technologies through Austronesia from Taiwan, established agriculture throughout Polynesia and other Pacific islands, and added tropical crops to their “agricultural repertoire” along the way.

Southeast Asian agriculturalists expanded from Taiwan into the Philippines and Indonesia. By about 1500 B.C., these agriculturalists reached New Guinea. Yet they did not “overrun” New Guinea, as they’d done in Borneo, Java, and Sumatra—to this day, the New Guineans are noticeably physically different from the Javans, reflecting the differences in the two islands’ relationships with ancient agricultural colonists. The modern-day New Guinean population speaks languages not found in Java and Sumatra—languages that aren’t closely tied to ancient Austronesian languages. Why?

Diamond hypothesizes that the fact that the New Guineans already had established some agriculture meant that the Austronesians couldn’t colonize the New Guineans as completely as they did the people of Java or Borneo. The New Guineans already used polished stone tools, and were resistant to tropical diseases like malaria. So the Austronesian expansion destroyed much of the native population of Java but reached a standstill in New Guinea.

Over the course of history, certain civilizations based out of temperate climates that favor agriculture develop the technology and organization that allows them to expand and colonize other parts of the world. Notably, the parts of the world that ancient Southeast Asian societies (and modern European societies) were slow, or unsuccessful, in colonizing, such as Hawaii, Caledonia, and New Guinea, had tropical diseases, some forms of agriculture, or both. To this day, “East Asia and the Pacific Islands remain occupied by East Asian and Pacific peoples,” rather than European colonists.