by Kevin Reilly
We might even speak of an urban revolution as early as 4,500 years ago, although some historians are hesitant to use the term without evidence of bronze or written languages. The earliest Indian settlement, dating from about 2500 BCE, already contained the distinctive feature of Mississippian settlements for the next 4,000 years: earthen mounds built as platforms for elite residences, temples, ceremonies, or animal-shaped mounds that communicated some sort of collective identity to strangers or the gods. At least 10,000 of these mounds could be found in the Ohio River drainage from the classical age of 500 BCE to 400 CE. All these communities displayed the elements of advanced chiefdoms. There were significant class differences between elites and commoners and a number of artisans and specialists who made pottery, hammered copper sheets, sewed clothing and wove baskets
The greatest distribution of mound-building settlements was created between 700 and 1200. The most important of these, Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, had many of the characteristics of cities despite the absence of writing or bronze. Cahokia contained 10,000 to 30,000 people and was larger than medieval London, the equivalent of Toltec Tula in Mexico. It was the largest city north of the Rio Grande before the eighteenth century. Cahokia had almost a continental trading reach, bringing it shells from Florida, copper from the Great Lakes, metals from the Appalachian and Rockies, ocean fish from the Gulf of Mexico, and bison from the Great Plains. In addition to corn and various kinds of beans from Mexico, Cahokia adopted Mexican ball games and astronomical interests. A ring of poles organized to chart the position of the sun, chart the seasons, and predict eclipses occupied a sacred site near the most important mounds and central plaza of Cahokia: “the American Woodhenge,” archaeologists call it, because of its similarity to the ancient “Stonehenge” monolith of Britain.
Americas and the World
The history of the Americas offers a pristine parallel to the history of the Afro-Eurasian world. The peopling of the Americas was a much longer process than the repeopling of inner Africa, which occurred only in the past 2,000 years. By 2,000 years ago, some American civilizations were already able to point to distant ancestors, but none of those had experienced contact with the Old World in thousands of years.
In the Americas, the agricultural and the urban revolutions occurred independently of the Eastern Hemisphere. They produced different crops, raised fewer animals, and were limited by less adaptable technologies of writing, metalworking, and transportation. Yet the people of the Americas repeated some of the same processes that the peoples of Afro-Eurasia experienced.
Americans also developed their own networks of interaction. The use of bows and arrows came from the north to Middle America, where the Aztecs rejected them since they needed to take live captives for sacrificial rites. Middle American corn spread south and north. South American copper, silver, and gold traveled up the Pacific coast to Central America, where it was adopted by the Toltec and later Middle American states. People from the Amazon sailed into the open sea and colonized the islands of the Caribbean. The great number of American languages underscores the diversity of peoples, the remoteness of some settlements, and the huge size of the Western Hemisphere. Nevertheless, crops, cultures, deities, social systems, and ball games spread far from home.
The World of the Pacific
The Pacific Ocean covers a third of the world. For most of history, its 10,000 islands were unoccupied, but human settlement of Australia and New Guinea began soon after humans began to migrate out of Africa. Most of the further islands were colonized in a final wave of human settlement that began about 3,500 years ago.
Islands and Settlers
Recently, a team of anthropologists on the Indonesian island of Flores startled the world with the discovery of the skeletons of what appears to be an entirely different human species, which they are calling Homo florensis. At this writing, scientists disagree as to whether these three-foot-tall people, who lived on Flores as recently as 13,000 years ago, are descendants of Homo erectus who traveled from Africa to Asia over a million years ago, arriving on Flores about 840,000 years ago, or the descendants of later Homo sapiens. In either case, however, all the adult skeletons of H. florensis are much smaller than their African ancestors.
Islands . Scientists explain this apparent shrinking of H. florensis—at the same time they were getting smarter, learning to make stone tools—as a process of evolution that sometimes takes place on islands. Given a limited environment, as the human population on the isolated island grew to the carrying capacity of the island, nature selected downsizing as a coping mechanism. The same thing happened to the large elephants that swam to the island: their descendants reduced to the size of cows.
Islands do not always induce shrinking, however. Sometimes an enclosed environment that offers abundant food and no natural predators can induce a species to become giants. This explains how the carnivorous lizards that came on natural rafts to the neighboring island of Komodo attained the size to be known as the Komodo dragons.
Islands are natural laboratories that stretch the boundaries of more interactive worlds. As such, they can sometimes tell us more than vast continents about what nature and humans can do.
First Wave . If H. erectus ventured into the Pacific or Flores a million years ago, we have no other evidence. The first wave of H. sapiens did not arrive before the last 100,000 to 50,000 years. This was the period of the last ice-age glaciation when the thickening ice reduced ocean levels as much as 100 yards below today’s. As a result, Southeast Asia was connected to most of Indonesia; Australia, which was not too far away, was connected to New Guinea and Tasmania. The settlement of this island continent would have required migration by sea from the Afro-Eurasian landmass (or Indonesian islands). In fact, there is some evidence on islands off the coast of India that Africans used rafts or boats even before getting to Southeast Asia and Australia.
After the glaciers melted and the oceans rose, these first modern human settlers became three different peoples on New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania. The people of Australia and Tasmania remained hunter-gatherers. The Tasmanians seem to have lost the ability to make rafts or canoes with their Stone Age tools. New Guinea also lacked animals that could be domesticated for food, but the people of the world’s second-largest island, alone of the three first-wave settlers, became farmers. Their most important crop turned out to be domesticated sugar, which is today the world’s largest crop by tonnage (more than the next two—wheat and corn—combined). The people of New Guinea also raised banana and coconut trees and two root crops: yams and taro. We do not know if these staples of the Pacific were first domesticated in New Guinea or in Southeast Asia. In any case, this New Guinean cultural complex, along with the domesticated chicken, pig, and dog that Austronesian travelers brought from Southeast Asia, nurtured a large and dense population in New Guinea, especially in highland areas where seafood was less available.
Australia . Australia was a less suitable candidate for domestication, especially after the first settlers killed off the large birds and mammals (including the many marsupials or pouched mammals related to the kangaroo). No native plants or animals were domesticated by the Australians (although sometime after 1500 BCE they adopted the Austronesian dog, or “dingo”). Australian soils were not very fertile, and much of the continent was dry desert. Australian aborigines hunted and gathered because few native plants were edible or easy to domesticate. Even today, modern scientific methods have led to the domestication of only one native plant—the macadamia nut. Nevertheless, Australian hunter-gatherers developed certain sophisticated ways of increasing the yield of their environment. Periodically, they would burn off thickets and underbrush, stampeding available animals to be captured but also, after the burn-off, reviving grasses that would attract future prey. In addition, Australians were one of the hunting-gathering people in the world to make use of water irrigation in ways that increased the food supply but did not yield to agriculture or settled villages. In this case, they channe
led water to raise and capture eels. Still, they never developed agriculture despite the fact that they traded with the agriculturalists of New Guinea and the agriculturalists of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi (Celebes), some of whom even had iron after 600 CE.
Austronesian and Polynesian Migrations
Austronesian Migrations . Long after the first settlers arrived 30,000 to 50,000 years ago, their descendants were joined by a much later second wave of agriculturalists. Around 4,000 years ago, these people came from China to Taiwan and the Philippines and then to Southeast Asia, where they cultivated coconut and banana trees, yams, and taro root and domesticated chickens, pigs, and dogs. After 1600 BCE, these Austronesian peoples brought their tropical plants, domesticated animals, sailing skills, and pottery to Indonesia, New Guinea, and the nearby islands of the Pacific. Over the next 2,000 years, their descendants, whom we call the Polynesians, ventured out to colonize the unoccupied islands of the deep Pacific: the island groups of Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, then north to the Hawaiian Islands, southwest to New Zealand (and later Madagascar), and as far east as Easter Island. This was one of the epic migrations of world history. Once they were east of the islands near New Guinea, they traveled in open waters to unknown islands where, presumably, no humans had been before.
Polynesian Migrations . Like the Bantu, the Polynesians used a system of primogeniture, by which only first sons inherited land and authority and encouraged younger sons to strike out on their own in search of new land to grow crops and raise their families. Traditions of seafaring, honed by generations of short voyages, enabled them to break out into the open ocean. From their Austronesian ancestors, they had learned to attach two or three canoes to a single platform, making it less likely to be capsized by heavy winds or waves. They learned how to sail against the prevailing easterly winds of the southern side of the equator by waiting for the occasional gust from the west. They read the dazzling nighttime sky like a road map. They learned to spot land birds far from shore and interpret clouds, debris, and the color of the water to find islands too distant to be seen.
Centuries later, a European sailor marveled at their ability to sail the open ocean without compass or charts:
He sees whether he has the wind aft, or on one or other beam, or on the quarter, or is close-hauled: he knows, further, whether there is a following sea, a head sea, a beam sea, or if it is on the bow or the quarter. . . . Should the night be cloudy as well, they regulate their course by the same signs; and, since the wind is apt to vary in direction more than the swell does, they have their pennants, made of feathers and palmetto bark, to watch its changes and trim sail. . . . What impressed me most in two Polynesians whom I carried from Tahiti to Raiatea was that every evening or night, they predicted the weather we should experience on the following day, as to wind, calms, rainfall, sunshine, sea, and other points, about which they never turned out to be wrong: a foreknowledge worthy to be envied, for, in spite of all that our navigators and cosmographers have observed and written about the subject, they have not mastered this accomplishment.14
The Polynesians had been farmers before they were sailors, so they loaded their boats with the seeds they would need in their new homes—breadfruit, coconut palms, taro, yam, and banana—and their domesticated animals—chickens, pigs, and dogs. As each generation sailed farther, they adapted to new environments and domesticated new foods. In New Zealand, only the northern tip had a tropical climate similar to that of equatorial islands. They were able to move south to cooler areas when they learned to plant the South American sweet potato, which had crossed the Pacific either on natural rafts or on Polynesian ships.15
Language and Culture
Austronesian-Polynesian colonization represented the greatest expansion of a people, culture, and language family until the expansion of the Europeans that began 500 years ago. The Polynesian stage of this migration into the far Pacific (unlike the later Europeans or the Polynesians’ Bantu contemporaries in Africa) was to unoccupied lands. Consequently, they could transplant their culture intact. They confronted no alternatives and did not have to meld, compromise, or adapt their own ways with those of others. One result is the striking similarities of Polynesian language and material culture across the vast Pacific, from Tonga to Tahiti and New Zealand to Hawaii. Some of their words and customs—like tattoo and taboo—have since entered the common culture of humanity. Their common culture was a testament to the swiftness of their colonization of truly virgin lands.
The first inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere also colonized an unoccupied land,16 but the land itself was enormous, the tools of these ancient hunters were less sophisticated, and the process of settlement took much longer. Consequently, the Americas were more culturally diverse; there were far more languages, especially in mountain areas like western Mexico and remote areas like the southern tip of South America.
The degree to which the Polynesians created a single cultural sphere can be seen by comparing their achievement in the Pacific with their own roots. There had been many different cultures and languages in the Austro-nesian homelands—Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaya, and Indonesia. Indeed, the areas that Polynesians did not settle remained highly diverse. New Guinea alone had 700 languages, a significant portion of the world’s total.
Expansions like the Bantu and Austrone-sian created common cultures very much the way the expansion of Indo-Europeans and Eurasian steppe nomads had. Austronesian peoples shared a common table of foods, similar double-hulled canoes, a pantheon of gods, rituals of harvest, sailing, sacrifice, tattooing, and an architectural style of stilt houses and outdoor platform altars. But Austronesians lacked horses (or other draft or transportation animals), and they lacked writing. Their Polynesian descendants lacked iron as well. The daring catamarans of the Pacific carried a limited range of plants and animals to islands already limited to the flotsam seedlings of Asia. Unlike the other great migrations of the world, the Polynesian adventurers sailed to a world of diminished variety. They found islands of paradise, but as history was increasingly shaped by interaction, they sailed away from the main event. They conquered the world’s greatest sea but with a ticket stamped “One Way: Pacific Only.”
Ecology and Colonization
The colonization of new ecological environments created special challenges. The ocean did not contain an inexhaustible number of uninhabited islands. The limits of settlement were reached in Hawaii in the north, Easter Island in the east, New Zealand in the south, and Madagascar in the west. To travel farther meant open ocean or settled continents. How did the colonizers adapt to limits? Inevitably, populations increased, especially on the outer islands of Polynesian seafaring. Lean boat crews of discoverers matured into complex, stratified societies of settlers. On the Hawaiian Islands, the descendants of the first settlers created complicated hierarchies of commoners, nobles, and royals. Complex chiefdoms, imperial ambitions, and religious rites created levels of interisland contact and organization that ran counter to the initial impulse of sailing off to the sunrise for new beginnings.
Hawaii, Tahiti, and Tonga were probably the most stratified complex chiefdoms, especially after the thirteenth century. Typically in Hawaii, chiefs claimed descent from one of the “first-boat” founding settlers, exercised both political and religious authority, and enjoyed privileges that were “taboo” for lesser nobility or commoners. Lesser-stratified societies, like that of the Maori of New Zealand (Aoteoroa), were governed by the leaders of subtribes who also traced their ancestry to first-boat arrivals but did not always combine political and religious authority and made decisions in consultation with the rest of the subtribe assembled in the sacred square, the marae.
With the growth of populations and more complex societies, the balance between people and nature tipped precariously. In the Maori colony that became New Zealand, species of flightless birds were hunted to extinction by people (and stowaway rats) who found them easy prey. Some societies achieved a better balance. The settlers of two of the Cook
Islands, Manihiki and Rakahanga, lived together on one of the islands while they let the other remain fallow in order to replenish vegetation and fisheries. Then, after a certain number of years, they moved together to the other island and reversed the process.17
The story of Easter Island bodes less well.18 Rapa Nui (Easter Island was the name given by the Europeans to mark the day of their discovery) lies 2,300 miles off the coast of South America. It is 1,500 miles from the nearest Polynesian island. It was the end of the great migration across the Pacific. An island full of palm trees waved to the first Polynesians 1,500 years ago. Rapa Nui offered the colonists a feast of nature—abundant vegetation and wildlife and a rich soil for Polynesian crops. The population grew to about 10,000, but as islanders cut down trees for farming and housing, the rootless soil washed into the sea, and eventually farming was limited to the areas where a few remaining trees broke the wind. Settlers cut trees for rollers so that they could move the huge sculptured heads that served as sentinels from quarry to cliff. The heads can still be seen peering out into the sea, but the people of Rapa Nui sculpted themselves into a corner from which they could not escape. Fifteen hundred miles from anywhere, in one of the most isolated parts of the planet, they managed to destroy the last tree and, with it, their food and even the material to build a raft to leave. The population crashed in famine and war. Today, the last sculptured heads still lie near the quarry, ancient stone glyphs and a system of writing that developed at the time of first European contact cry out for interpretation, and the last inhabitants survive on food and tourists flown in fresh daily.
