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  Thus, first-contact patrols had a traumatic effect that is difficult for all of us living in the modern world to imagine. Highlanders ‘discovered’ by Michael Leahy in the 1930s, and interviewed fifty years later, still recalled perfectly where they were and what they were doing at that moment of first contact. Perhaps the closest parallel, to modern Americans and Europeans, is our recollection of one or two of the most important political events of our lives. Most Americans of my age recall that moment on 7 December 1941 when they heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We knew at once that our lives would be very different for years to come, as a result of the news. Yet even the impact of Pearl Harbor and of the resulting war on American society was minor, compared to the impact of a first-contact patrol on New Guinea highlanders. On that day, their world changed forever.

  The patrols revolutionized the highlanders’ material culture by bringing steel axes and matches, whose superiority over stone axes and fire drills was immediately obvious. The missionaries and government administrators who followed the patrols suppressed ingrained cultural practices like cannibalism, polygyny, homosexuality, and war. Other practices were discarded spontaneously by tribespeople themselves, in favour of new practices that they saw. But there was also a more profoundly unsettling revolution, in the highlanders’ view of what comprised the universe. They and their neighbours were no longer the sole humans, with the sole way of life.

  A book by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, entitled First Contact, poignantly relates that moment in the eastern highlands, as recalled in their old age by New Guineans and whites who met there as young adults or children in the 1930s. Terrified highlanders took the whites for returning ghosts, until the New Guineans dug up and scrutinized the whites’ buried faeces, sent terrified young girls to have sex with the intruders, and discovered that whites defaecated and were men like themselves. Leahy wrote in his diaries that highlanders smelled bad, while at the same time the highlanders were finding the whites’ smell strange and frightening. Leahy’s obsession with gold was as bizarre to the highlanders as their obsession with their own form of wealth and currency – cowry shells – was to him. For the survivors of those Grand Valley Dani and Archbold Expedition members who met in 1938, such an account of first contact has yet to be written.

  *

  I said at the outset that Archbold’s entry into the Grand Valley was not only a watershed for the Dani, but also part of a watershed in human history. What difference did it make that all human groups used to live in relative isolation, awaiting first contact, while only a few such groups remain today? We can infer the answer by comparing those areas of the world where isolation ended long ago, with those other areas where it persisted into modern times. We can also study the rapid changes that followed historical first contacts. These comparisons suggest that contact between distant peoples gradually obliterated much of the human cultural diversity that had arisen during millennia of isolation.

  Take artistic diversity as one obvious example. Styles of sculpture, music, and dance used to vary greatly from village to village within New Guinea. Some villagers along the Sepik River and in the Asmat swamps produced carvings that are now world-famous because of their quality. But New Guinea villagers have been increasingly coerced or seduced into abandoning their artistic traditions. When I visited an isolated tribelet of 578 people at Bomai in 1965, the missionary controlling the only store had just manipulated the people into burning all their art. Centuries of unique cultural development (‘heathen artifacts’, as the missionary put it) had been destroyed in one morning. On my first visit to remote New Guinea villages in 1964, I heard log drums and traditional songs; on my visits in the 1980s, I heard guitars, rock music, and battery-operated boom boxes. Anyone who has seen the Asmat carvings at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, or heard log drums played in antiphonal duet at breathtaking speed, can appreciate the enormous tragedy of post-contact loss of art.

  There has been massive loss of languages as well. For example, as I shall describe in Chapter Fifteen, Europe today has only about fifty languages, most of them belonging to a single language family (Indo-European). In contrast, New Guinea, with less than one-tenth of Europe’s area and less than one-hundredth of its population, has about 1,000 languages, many of them unrelated to any other known language in New Guinea or elsewhere! The average New Guinea language is spoken by a few thousand people living within a radius of ten miles. When I travelled sixty miles from Okapa to Karimui in New Guinea’s eastern highlands, I passed through six languages, starting with Foré (a language with postpositions, like Finnish) and ending with Tudawhe (a language with alternative tones and nasalized vowels, like Chinese).

  New Guinea shows linguists what the world used to be like, with each isolated tribe having its own language, until the rise of agriculture permitted a few groups to expand and spread their tongue over large areas. It was only about 6,000 years ago that the Indo-European expansion began, leading to the extermination of all prior western European languages except Basque. The Bantu expansion within the last few millennia similarly exterminated most other languages of tropical and sub-Saharan Africa, just as the Austronesian expansion did in Indonesia and the Philippines. In the New World alone, hundreds of American Indian languages have become extinct in recent centuries.

  Is language loss not a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world’s people? Perhaps, but it is a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, and consequently in how they shape our thoughts. There is no single-purpose ‘best’ language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the pre-eminent languages of Western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that would not be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy.

  The range of cultural practices in New Guinea also eclipses that within equivalent areas elsewhere in the modern world, because isolated tribes were able to live out social experiments that others would find utterly unacceptable. Forms of self-mutilation and cannibalism varied from tribe to tribe. At the time of first contact, some tribes went naked, others concealed their genitals and practised extreme sexual prudery, and still others (including the Grand Valley Dani) flagrantly advertised the penis and testes with various props. Child-rearing practices ranged from extreme permissiveness (including freedom for Foré babies to grab hot objects and burn themselves), through punishment of misbehaviour by rubbing a Baham child’s face with stinging nettles, to extreme repression resulting in Kukukuku child suicide. Barua men pursued institutionalized bisexuality by living in a large, communal, homosexual house with the young boys, while each man had a separate, small, heterosexual house for his wife and daughters and infant sons. Tudawhes instead had two-storey houses in which women, infants, unmarried girls, and pigs lived in the lower storey, while men and unmarried boys lived in the upper storey accessed by a separate ladder from the ground.

  We would not mourn the shrinking cultural diversity of the modern world if it only meant the end of self-mutilation and child suicide. But the societies whose cultural practices have now become dominant were selected only for economic and military success. Those qualities are not necessarily the ones that foster happiness or promote long-term human survival. Our consumerism and our environmental exploitation serve us well at present but bode ill for the future. Features of American society that already rate a
s disasters in anyone’s book include our treatment of old people, adolescent turmoil, abuse of psychotropic chemicals, and gross inequality. For each of these problem areas, there are (or were before first contact) many New Guinea societies that found far better solutions to the same issues.

  *

  Unfortunately, alternative models of human society are rapidly disappearing, and the time has passed when humans could try out new models in isolation. Surely there are no remaining uncontacted populations anywhere as large as the one encountered by Archbold’s patrol on that August day of 1938. When I worked on New Guinea’s Rouffaer River in 1979, missionaries nearby had just found a tribe of a few hundred nomads, who reported another uncontacted band five days’ travel upstream. Small bands have also been turning up in remote parts of Peru and Brazil. However, at some point within this last decade of the Twentieth Century, we can expect the last first contact, and the end of the last separate experiment at designing human society.

  While that last first contact will not mean the end of human cultural diversity, much of which is proving capable of surviving television and travel, it certainly does mean a drastic reduction. That loss is to be mourned, for the reasons that I have just been discussing. But our xenophobia was tolerable only as long as our means to kill each other were too limited to bring about our fall as a species. When I try to think of reasons why nuclear weapons will not inexorably combine with our genocidal tendencies to break the records we have already set for genocide in the first half of the Twentieth Century, our accelerating cultural homogenization is one of the chief grounds for hope that I can identify. Loss of cultural diversity may be the price that we have to pay for survival.

  FOURTEEN

  ACCIDENTAL CONQUERORS

  The largest-scale human population shift of the past millenium has been the European conquest of the Americas and of Australia, formerly settled by other peoples. Why did conquest go in that direction rather than in the reverse direction? It was largely an accident of biogeography: Europeans inherited the most useful suite of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication, on which subsequent technological and political development depended.

  *

  SOME OF THE most obvious features of our daily lives pose the hardest questions for scientists. If you look around you at most locations in the US or Australia, most of the people you see will be of European ancestry. At the same locations 500 years ago, everyone without exception would have been an American Indian in the US, or a native (aboriginal) Australian in Australia. Why is it that Europeans came to replace most of the native population of North America and Australia, instead of Indians or native Australians coming to replace most of the original population of Europe?

  This question can be rephrased to ask: why was the ancient rate of technological and political development fastest in Eurasia, slower in the Americas (and in Africa south of the Sahara), and slowest in Australia? For example, in 1492 much of the population of Eurasia used iron tools, had writing and agriculture, had large centralized states with ocean-going ships, and was on the verge of industrialization. The Americas had agriculture, only a few large centralized states, writing in only one area, no ocean-going ships or iron tools, and were technologically and politically a few thousand years behind Eurasia. Australia lacked agriculture, writing, states, and ships, was still in a pre-first-contact condition, and used stone tools comparable to ones made over ten thousand years earlier in Eurasia. It was those technological and political differences – not the biological differences determining the outcome of competition among animal populations – that permitted Europeans to expand to other continents.

  Nineteenth-century Europeans had a simple, racist answer to such questions. They concluded that they acquired their cultural head start through being inherently more intelligent, and that they therefore had a manifest destiny to conquer, displace, or kill ‘inferior’ peoples. The trouble with this answer is that it was not just loathsome and arrogant, but also wrong. It is obvious that people differ enormously in the knowledge they acquire, depending on their circumstances as they grow up. But no convincing evidence of genetic differences in mental ability among peoples has been found, despite much effort.

  Because of this legacy of racist explanations, the whole subject of human differences in level of civilization still reeks of racism. Yet there are obvious reasons why the subject begs to be properly explained. Those technological differences led to great tragedies in the past 500 years, and their legacies of colonialism and conquest still powerfully shape our world today. Until we can come up with a convincing alternative explanation, the suspicion that racist genetic theories might be true will linger.

  In this chapter I shall argue that continental differences in level of civilization arose from geography’s effect on the development of our cultural hallmarks, not from human genetics. Continents differed in the resources on which civilization depended – especially, in the wild animal and plant species that proved useful for domestication. Continents also differed in the ease with which domesticated species could spread from one area to another. Even today, Americans and Europeans are painfully aware how distant geographical features, like the Persian Gulf or the Isthmus of Panama, affect our lives. But geography and biogeography have been moulding human lives even more profoundly, for hundreds of thousands of years.

  Why do I emphasize plant and animal species? As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane remarked, ‘Civilization is based, not only on men, but on plants and animals.’ Agriculture and herding, though they also brought the disadvantages discussed in Chapter Ten, still made it possible to feed far more people per square mile of land than could live on the wild foods available in that same area. Storable food surpluses grown by some individuals permitted other individuals to devote themselves to metallurgy, manufacturing, writing – and to serving in full-time professional armies. Domestic animals provided not only meat and milk to feed people, but also wool and hides to clothe people, and power to transport people and goods. Animals also provided power to pull ploughs and carts, and thus to increase agricultural productivity greatly over that previously attainable by human muscle power alone.

  As a result, the world’s human population rose from about ten million around 10,000 BC, when we were all still hunter-gatherers, to over five billion today. Dense populations were prerequisite to the rise of centralized states. Dense populations also promoted the evolution of infectious diseases, to which exposed populations then evolved some resistance but other populations did not. All these factors determined who colonized and conquered whom. Europeans’ conquest of America and Australia was due not to their better genes but to their worse germs (especially smallpox), more advanced technology (including weapons and ships), information storage through writing, and political organization – all stemming ultimately from continental differences in geography.

  *

  Let’s start with the differences in domestic animals. By around 4000 BC western Eurasia already had its ‘Big Five’ domestic livestock that continue to dominate today: sheep, goats, pigs, cows, and horses. Eastern Asians domesticated four other cattle species that locally replace cows: yaks, water buffalo, gaur, and banteng. As already mentioned, these animals provided food, power, and clothing, while the horse was also of incalculable military value. (It was both the tank, the truck, and the jeep of warfare until the Nineteenth Century.) Why did American Indians not reap similar benefits by domesticating the corresponding native American mammal species, such as mountain sheep, mountain goats, peccaries, bison, and tapirs? Why did Indians mounted on tapirs, and native Australians mounted on kangaroos, not invade and terrorize Eurasia?

  The answer is that, even today, it has proved possible to domesticate only a tiny fraction of the world’s wild mammal species. This becomes clear when one considers all the attempts that failed. Innumerable species reached the necessary first step of being kept captive as tame pets. In New Guinea villages I routinely find tamed possums and kangaroos, while I saw ta
med monkeys and weasels in Amazonian Indian villages. Ancient Egyptians had tamed gazelles, antelopes, cranes, and even hyenas and possibly giraffes. Romans were terrorized by the tamed African elephants with which Hannibal crossed the Alps (not Asian elephants, the tame elephant species in circuses today).

  But all these incipient efforts at domestication failed. Since the domestication of horses around 4000 BC and reindeer a few thousand years later, no large European mammal has been added to our repertoire of successful domesticates. Thus, our few modern species of domestic mammals were quickly winnowed from hundreds of others that had been tried and abandoned.

  Why have efforts at domesticating most animal species failed? It turns out that a wild animal must possess a whole suite of unusual characteristics for domestication to succeed. Firstly, in most cases it must be a social species living in herds. A herd’s subordinate individuals have instinctive submissive behaviours that they display towards dominant individuals, and that they can transfer towards humans. Asian mouflon sheep (the ancestors of domestic sheep) have such behaviour but North American bighorn sheep do not – a crucial difference that prevented Indians from domesticating the latter. Except for cats and ferrets, solitary territorial species have not been domesticated.

  Secondly, species such as gazelles and many deer and antelopes, which instantly take flight at signs of danger instead of standing their ground, prove too nervous to manage. Our failure to domesticate deer is especially striking, since there are few other wild animals with which humans have been so closely associated for tens of thousands of years. Although deer have always been intensively hunted and often tamed, reindeer alone among the world’s forty-one deer species were successfully domesticated. Territorial behaviour, flight reflexes, or both eliminated the other forty species as candidates. Only reindeer had the necessary tolerance of intruders and gregarious, non-territorial behaviour.