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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human SocietiesWe know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language. The immediate causes of that language replacement were the advantages in technology and political organization, stemming ultimately from the advantage of an early rise of food production, that invading Europeans held over Native Americans. Essentially the same processes accounted for the replacement of Aboriginal Australian languages by English, and of HOWCHINA BECAME CHINESE • 3^9 subequatorial Africa's original Pygmy and Khoisan languages by Bantu languages. Hence East Asia's linguistic upheavals raise a corresponding question: what enabled Sino-Tibetan speakers to spread from North China to South China, and speakers of Austroasiatic and the other original South China language families to spread south into tropical Southeast Asia? Here, we must turn to archaeology for evidence of the technological, political, and agricultural advantages that some Asians evidently gained over other Asians. As everywhere else in the world, the archaeological record in East Asia for most of human history reveals only the debris of hunter-gatherers using unpolished stone tools and lacking pottery ...» |
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