The Jared Diamond Quicklet Bundle (Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Third Chimpanzee, Why is Sex Fun?) by Nicole Silvester & Nathaniel Williams & Scott James

Author:Nicole Silvester & Nathaniel Williams & Scott James [Silvester, Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Hyperink - The Jared Diamond Quicklet Bundle
Published: 2012-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

European Colonies in 1674. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Chapter 16: How China Became Chinese

To outsiders, China appears to be linguistically, culturally and politically monolithic, rather than the “melting pot” of languages and cultures that most other large countries are. However, a map of China’s languages shows that it is more diverse than might first appear, and was almost certainly even more diverse in the past. Even so, China is much more unified genetically than any other country of its size, and the reason may be found in its geography.

China was one of the earliest centers for the development of food production, and had crops and domesticated animals almost as early as the Fertile Crescent. There may actually have been two or even more independent origins of food production within China. Its two large east-west-running rivers, the Yellow and the Yangtze, plus their numerous tributaries, were navigable along most of their lengths and provided an easy means of uniting the whole area.

The early development of food production meant that states also arose in China comparatively early, but it was unique in the way its geography allowed the whole area to remain unified once it became so. China was ruled by a powerful state through much of its very long history, though the rulership changed from time to time, so it ended up much more homogenized than other countries. These same factors meant that China was also dominant in eastern Asia as a whole, and waves of settlement spread to other areas at various times, carrying culture and technology with them.

Chapter 17: Speedboat to Polynesia

The Austronesian expansion was one of the largest population movements of the last 6000 years, and part of that was the Polynesian migrations to hundreds of remote islands in the Pacific. It began in Taiwan, once advances in sailing technology allowed the people to sail on the open sea. Austronesian peoples replaced the indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Philippines and Indonesia, and settled part of the coast of New Guinea. They brought their own crops and domesticated animals as well as their languages.

One language group within the Austronesian languages shows a much larger distribution than the others, and that is the one spoken by Polynesians, who continued to migrate out of Indonesia, to the huge number of islands we call Polynesia. These islands are as widespread as New Zealand and Hawaii. We saw in an earlier chapter that the way Polynesian society developed to exploit the very different geographies or the islands they settled provides a good example of the geographic influence on culture.

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