is now dominated by the Eurasian temperate-zone staple crops of wheat (Australia's leading crop), barley, oats, apples, and grapes, along with sorghum and cotton of African Sahel origins and potatoes of Andean origins. In tropical areas of northeastern Australia (Queensland) beyond the optimal range of Fertile Crescent crops, European farmers introduced sugarcane of New Guinea origins, bananas and citrus fruit of tropical Southeast Asian origins, and peanuts of tropical South American origins. As for livestock, Eurasian sheep made 3 2. O •GUNS,GERMS, AND STEEL it possible to extend food production to arid areas of Australia unsuitable for agriculture, and Eurasian cattle joined crops in moister areas. Thus, the development of food production in Australia had to await the arrival of non-native crops and animals domesticated in climatically similar parts of the world too remote for their domesticates to reach Australia until brought by transoceanic shipping. Unlike New Guinea, most of Australia lacked diseases serious enough to keep out Europeans. Only in tropical northern Australia did malaria and other tropical diseases force Europeans to abandon their 19th-century attempts at settlement, which succeeded only with the development of 20th-century medicine. Australian Aborigines, of course, stood in the way of European food production, especially because what was potentially the most productive farmland and dairy country initially supported Australia's densest populations of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers. 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 last large- scale massacre, of 31 Aborigines, occurred at Alice Springs in 1928. 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. The principal recorded killers were smallpox, influenza, measles, typhoid, typhus, chicken pox, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and syphilis. In these two ways, independent Aboriginal societies were eliminated in all areas suitable for European food production. The only societies that survived more or less intact were those in areas of northern and western Australia useless to Europeans. Within one century of European colonization, 40,000 years of Aboriginal traditions had been mostly swept away. we can now return to the problem that I posed near the beginning of this chapter. How, except by postulating deficiencies in the Aborigines themselves, can one account for the fact that white English colonists apparently created a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy, within a few decades of colonizing a continent whose inhabitants after more than 40,000 years were still nonliterate nomadic hunter-gatherers? Doesn't that YALI'S PEOPLE • 311 constitute a perfectly controlled experiment in the evolution of human societies, forcing us to a simple racist conclusion? The resolution of this problem is simple. White English colonists did not create a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy in Australia. Instead, they imported all of the elements from outside Australia: the livestock, all of the crops (except macadamia nuts), the metallurgical knowledge, the steam engines, the guns, the alphabet, the political institutions, even the germs. All these were the end products of 10,000 years of development in Eurasian environments. By an accident of geography, the colonists who landed at Sydney in 1788 inherited those elements. Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology. Robert Burke and William Wills were smart enough to write, but not smart enough to survive in Australian desert regions where Aborigines were living. The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Australians. Of course, the society that they created was not a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy. The reasons follow straightforwardly from features of the Australian environment. CHAPTER16 How china became chinese IMMIGRATION, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, MULTILINGUALISM, ethnic diversity—my state of California was among the pioneers of these controversial policies and is now pioneering a backlash against them. A glance into the classrooms of the Los Angeles public school system, where my sons are being educated, fleshes out the abstract debates with the faces of children. Those children represent over 80 languages spoken in the home, with English-speaking whites in the minority. Every single one of my sons' playmates has at least one parent or grandparent who was born outside the United States; that's true of three of my own sons' four grandparents. But immigration is merely restoring the diversity that America held for thousands of years. Before European settlement, the mainland United States was home to hundreds of Native American tribes and languages and came under control of a single government only within the last hundred years. In these respects the United States is a thoroughly 'normal' country. All but one of the world's six most populous nations are melting pots that achieved political unification recently, and that still support hundreds of languages and ethnic groups. For example, Russia, once a small Slavic state centered on Moscow, did not even begin its expansion beyond the Ural Mountains until a.d. 1582. From then until the 19th century, Russia HOWCHINA BECAME CHINESE • 3 2. 3 proceeded to swallow up dozens of non-Slavic peoples, many of which retain their original language and cultural identity. Just as American history is the story of how our continent's expanse became American, Russia's history is the story of how Russia became Russian. India, Indonesia, and Brazil are also recent political creations (or re-creations, in the case of India), home to about 850, 670, and 210 languages, respectively. The great exception to this rule of the recent melting pot is the world's most populous nation, China. Today, China appears politically, culturally, and linguistically monolithic, at least to laypeople. It was already unified politically in 221 B.C. and has remained so for most of the centuries since then. From the beginnings of literacy in China, it has had only a single writing system, whereas modern Europe uses dozens of modified alphabets. Of China's 1.2 billion people, over 800 million speak Mandarin, the language with by far the largest number of native speakers in the world. Some 300 million others speak seven other languages as similar to Mandarin, and to each other, as Spanish is to Italian. Thus, not only is China not a melting pot, but it seems absurd to ask how China became Chinese. China has been Chinese, almost from the beginnings of its recorded history. We take this seeming unity of China so much for granted that we forget how astonishing it is. One reason why we should not have expected such unity is genetic. While a coarse racial classification of world peoples lumps all Chinese people as so-called Mongoloids, that category conceals much more variation than the differences between Swedes, Italians, and Irish within Europe. In particular, North and South Chinese are genetically and physically rather different: North Chinese are most similar to Tibetans and Nepalese, while South Chinese are similar to Vietnamese and Filipinos. My North and South Chinese friends can often distinguish each other at a glance by physical appearance: the North Chinese tend to be taller, heavier, paler, with more pointed noses, and with smaller eyes that appear more 'slanted' (because of what is termed their epicanthic fold). North and South China differ in environment and climate as well: the north is drier and colder; the south, wetter and hotter. Genetic differences arising in those differing environments imply a long history of moderate isolation between peoples of North and South China. How did those peoples nevertheless end up with the same or very similar languages and cultures?
