There has been massive loss of languages as well. For example, as I shall cescribe 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 often miles. When I travelled sixty miles from Okapa to Karimui in New Guinea's eastern highlands, I passed through six languages, starting with Fore (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 Fore 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 as 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 tiiiie 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?