each other. 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). As a result, while the Austronesian expansion swept away the original Indonesians, it failed to make much headway in the New Guinea region, just as it also failed to make headway against Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai food producers in tropical Southeast Asia. We have now traced the Austronesian expansion through Indonesia and up to the shores of New Guinea and tropical Southeast Asia. In Chapter 19 we shall trace it across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, while in Chapter 15 we saw that ecological difficulties kept Austronesians from establishing themselves in northern and western Australia. The expansion's remaining thrust began when the Lapita potters sailed far eastward into the Pacific beyond the Solomons, into an island realm that no other humans had reached previously. Around 1200 b.c. Lapita potsherds, the familiar triumvirate of pigs and chickens and dogs, and the usual other archaeological hallmarks of Austronesians appeared on the Pacific archipelagoes of Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, over a thousand miles east of the Solomons. Early in the Christian era, most of those same hallmarks (with the notable exception of pottery) appeared on the islands of eastern Polynesia, including the Societies and Marquesas. Further long overwater canoe voyages brought settlers north to Hawaii, east to Pitcairn and Easter Islands, and southwest to New Zealand. The native inhabitants of most of those islands today are the Polynesians, who thus are the direct descendants of the Lapita potters. They speak Austronesian languages closely related to those of the New Guinea region, and their main crops are the Austronesian Package that included taro, yams, bananas, coconuts, and breadfruit. With the occupation of the Chatham Islands off New Zealand around 3 5 2 ' GUNS, GERMS, ANDsteel 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. Toanyone 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 m Chapter 2, though, Polynesian political and social organization and econo- SPEEDBOATTO POLYNESIA '353 mies underwent great diversification in different environments. Within a millennium, East Polynesian colonists had reverted to hunting-gathering on the Chathams while building a protostate with intensive food production on Hawaii. When Europeans at last arrived, their technological and other advantages enabled them to establish temporary colonial domination over most of tropical Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. However, indigenous germs and food producers prevented Europeans from settling most of this region in significant numbers. Within this area, only New Zealand, New Caledonia, and Hawaii—the largest and most remote islands, lying farthest from the equator and hence in the most nearly temperate (Europe-like) climates—now support large European populations. Thus, unlike Australia and the Americas, East Asia and most Pacific islands remain occupied by East Asian and Pacific peoples. CHAPTER18 hemispheres colliding THE LARGEST POPULATION REPLACEMENT OF THE LAST 13,000 years has been the one resulting from the recent collision between Old World and New World societies. Its most dramatic and decisive moment, as we saw in Chapter 3, occurred when Pizarro's tiny army of Spaniards captured the Inca emperor Atahuallpa, absolute ruler of the largest, richest, most populous, and administratively and technologically most advanced Native American state. Atahuallpa's capture symbolizes the European conquest of the Americas, because the same mix of proximate factors that caused it was also responsible for European conquests of other Native American societies. Let us now return to that collision of hemispheres, applying what we have learned since Chapter 3. The basic question to be answered is: why did Europeans reach and conquer the lands of Native Americans, instead of vice versa? Our starting point will be a comparison of Eurasian and Native American societies as of a.d. 1492, the year of Columbus's 'discovery' of the Americas. ourcomparison begins with food production, a major determinant of local population size and societal complexity—hence an ultimate factor behind the conquest. The most glaring difference between American HEMISPHERESCOLLIDING • 355 and Eurasian food production involved big domestic mammal species. In Chapter 9 we encountered Eurasia's 13 species, which became its chief source of animal protein (meat and milk), wool, and hides, its main mode of land transport of people and goods, its indispensable vehicles of warfare and (by drawing plows and providing manure) a big enhancer of crop production. Until waterwheels and windmills began to replace Eurasia's mammals in medieval times, they were also the major source of its 'industrial' power beyond human muscle power—for example, for turning grindstones and operating water lifts. In contrast, the Americas had only one species of big domestic mammal, the llama/alpaca, confined to a snail area of the Andes and the adjacent Peruvian coast. While it was used for meat, wool, hides, and goods transport, it never yielded milk for human consumption, never bore a rider, never pulled a cart or a plow, and never served as a power source or vehicle of warfare. That's an enormous set of differences between Eurasian and Native American societies—due largely to the Late Pleistocene extinction (extermination?) of most of North and South America's former big wild mammal species. If it had not been for those extinctions, modern history might have taken a different course. When Cortes and his bedraggled adventurers landed on the Mexican coast in 1519, they might have been driven into the sea by thousands of Aztec cavalry mounted on domesticated native American horses. Instead of the Aztecs' dying of smallpox, the Spaniards might have been wiped out by American germs
