The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Read Online Free Page B

ofChina. During the last greatice age, which lasted from about 100,000 to 9,500 years ago, so much water was locked up in ice and glaciers that sea levels inSoutheast Asia were about 120 meters lower than today and vast expanses of today’s relatively shallow seabed were dry land. The islands of the westernIndonesian archipelago were part of a continental extension of Southeast Asia known asSundaland, whileAustralia, New Guinea, and the island ofTasmania formed a single landmass calledSahul, or Greater Australia. Between them lay stretches of open water and the islands of a biogeographical region known as Wallacea. Rising sea levels only created the configuration of islands and archipelagoes that we know today starting about 5000 BCE .
    Archaeological finds show that people had crossed fromSundaland to Sahul by about fifty thousand years ago. Theoldest stone tools of the sort necessary for making dugout logboats are only twenty thousand years old, so these trips would have to have been made on rafts of lashed logs. The oldest evidence for sails anywhere in the world is no more than seven thousand yearsold and comes from Mesopotamia, andPleistocene seafarers almost certainly propelled their rafts with poles and paddles. Although they crossed considerable distances of open water, they did not necessarily have to sail out of sight of land. The strategy that the earliest long-distance mariners seem to have devised was to go between islands that were visible from one another. A chain ofintervisible islands ran between Sunda and Sahul, and east of New Guinea through theBismarck Archipelago. Then twenty-nine thousand years ago sailors crossed from New Ireland in the Bismarcks to Buka, the westernmost of theSolomon Islands. This introduced a new degree of difficulty. New Ireland and Buka are not visible from each other, but there is an area between the two islands from which it is possible to see both at the same time. More daring still was the occupation of Manus, in theAdmiralty Islands north of New Guinea, which could only be reached by sailing completely out of sight of land for at least thirty miles. This occurred no later than thirteen thousand years ago.
    The Bismarcks and Solomons remained the limit of eastward expansion for another ten thousand years. Little is known of how society or technology evolved here, though there was clearly interisland exchange in such rarities as obsidian, a sharp volcanic glass frequently traded among ancient people. Still, the region’s hallmark is not homogeneity but diversity. Over these ten millennia the people of New Guinea and the surrounding islands came to speak hundreds of languages divided among a dozen language families, a linguistic stew found in no other region of comparable size. Life in the area was interrupted by the cataclysmic explosion of New Britain’sMount Witori around 3600 BCE , an event followed by widespread changes in social organization and technological innovation acrossMelanesia. People began to live in larger settlements, to produceceramics, to domesticate dogs, pigs, and chickens, and to develop more advanced fishing gear to catch offshore species. This period lasted for about two thousand years before a new wave of seafaring migrants swept through from Southeast Asia.
    These newcomers were part of a movement ofAustronesian-speaking people whose ancestors are thought to have originated in southern China, from where they moved east toTaiwan, thePhilippines, andBorneo, before doubling back to mainland Southeast Asia. b In the east, these people are distinguished by their ceramics, called Lapita ware, found from the Philippines and northeastern Indonesia to the Bismarck Archipelago. Having merged relatively brieflywith the people of Melanesia they encountered along the way, the bearers ofLapita culture plunged southeast from the Solomon Islands into Melanesia to reach theSanta Cruz Islands,Vanuatu (New Hebrides), the Loyalty Islands, andNew Caledonia in the twelfth