Ten Thousand Years of Solitude

post by agp (antonio-papa) · 2023-08-15T17:45:34.556Z · LW · GW · 19 comments

This is a link post for https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/ten-thousand-years-of-solitude

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This is a linkpost for the article "Ten Thousand Years of Solitude", written by Jared Diamond for Discover Magazine in 1993, four years before he published Guns, Germs and Steel. That book focused on Diamond's theory that the geography of Eurasia, particularly its large size and common climate, allowed civilizations there to dominate the rest of the world because it was easy to share plants, animals, technologies and ideas. This article, however, examines the opposite extreme.

Diamond looks at the intense isolation of the tribes on Tasmania - an island the size of Ireland. After waters rose, Tasmania was cut off from mainland Australia. As the people there did not have boats, they were completely isolated, and did not have any contact - or awareness - of the outside world for ten thousand years.

How might a civilization develop, all on its own, for such an incredible period of time?

If you ask any anthropologist to summarize in one phrase what was most distinctive about the Tasmanians, the answer will surely be the most primitive people still alive in recent centuries.

The "entire material corpus" of Tasmania only amounted to two dozen items in total - and did not include mounted stone stools, bone tools, or any clothing at all. Despite average low temperatures in winter of 41 degrees Fahrenheit, the Tasmanians were completely naked. In addition to the poor quality of tools in Tasmania, they also refused to eat fish, which were plentiful in the waters around the island. The material culture and wellbeing of the Tasmanians was significantly worse off than that of the Australians.

Australian products absent in Tasmania included the spear-thrower, a hand-held device to increase a spear’s throwing distance and propulsive force; ground or polished stone tools; mounted stone tools, such as hatchets or adzes with a handle; bone tools, such as needles and awls; fire-making equipment, such as a fire drill; and nets, traps, or hooks to catch fish, birds, or mammals. Without mounted stone tools, Tasmanians couldn’t fell a big tree, hollow out a canoe, or carve a wooden bowl. Without bone tools, they couldn’t sew warm clothes or watertight bark canoes. 

The poverty of the Tasmanians was shocking to the first European explorers. They did not understand how the Tasmanians could have reached the island without boats, and they didn't understand why the Tasmanians had astonishingly little technology. The 'arrival' question is easy to answer - they walked there when the oceans were lower - but it's the technology question that I find most fascinating. If the Tasmanians came from Australia, then shouldn't they at a baseline have the tools and skills that the Australians possessed at the time that they left? But in fact the Tasmanians seem to have regressed since the beginning of their isolation.

The Tasmanians actually abandoned some practices that they shared with Australia 10,000 years ago. This idea violates cherished views of human nature, since we tend to assume that history is a long record of continual progress. Nevertheless, it is now clear that Tasmanians did abandon at least two important practices. 

One was the production of bone tools. With bone, one can fashion objects virtually impossible to make out of stone or wood--such as needles. In southeast Australia at the time of European discovery, aboriginal Australians were using bone tools as awls and reamers to pierce animal hides, as pins to fasten the hides into cloaks, and as needles to sew hides into still warmer clothing or to knit fishing nets.  As recently as 7,000 years ago, Tasmanian tools included bone tools that resembled Australia’s awls, reamers, and needles. Thereafter, the variety of Tasmanian bone tools gradually decreased with time until they finally disappeared around 3,500 years ago. That seems a significant loss, because warm clothing sewn with bone needles would surely have been useful in Tasmanian winters. 

The other, equally surprising loss was the practice of eating fish. European explorers were astonished to find that most Tasmanians lived on the coast and yet ate no fish. Tasmanians in turn were astonished to see Europeans eating fish and refused offers of fish with horrified disgust. Yet remains at archeological sites show that Tasmanians used to catch many fish species, which accounted for about 10 percent of their total calorie intake. Most of the species they caught are still common and easy to catch in Tasmanian waters today.

Over the millennia the Tasmanians developed cultural practices that left them worse off than they were before - and their isolation prevented them from fixing these mistakes. 

In the closed system of the Tasmanians, maladaptation might have a better chance of surviving simply because of the lack of better-competing neighboring communities. If fish were not caught for several generations, much of the skill, technology, and ethnoscience concerned with their capture might also be forgotten. The isolated Tasmanians, unlike a group of tribes in a similar-size portion of a continent, would have had no opportunity of relearning such skills from neighbors even if they had wanted to. 

The Tasmanians were not the only culture to develop these "maladaptations", but they were unique in that they were unable to re-learn their lost skills.

One example involves Pacific Islanders who chose not to eat pigs; although the pig was their sole large domestic animal and a significant protein source, in several cases an island society decided to taboo pigs and killed them all. 

But in a society closely connected with many other societies, such losses are more likely to be only temporary--either people see their neighbors continuing the practice and repent their folly, or people without the practice are outcompeted or conquered by people retaining it. 

Pacific Islanders who killed their pigs eventually came to their senses and bought pigs again from other islands.  In Tasmania’s isolation, though, cultural losses were irreversible. Inventions don’t just get adopted once and forever; they have to be constantly practiced and transmitted or useful techniques may be forgotten.

Diamond's arguments in this article mirror those of Guns, Germs and Steel, and his telling of the decline of the Tasmanians is gripping. The article elaborates on this thesis - with many more examples and comparisons to other societies that developed similarly counterproductive taboos, but did not suffer the same isolation and were able to fix their mistakes.

The article also contains two other threads that I did not summarize here. One is the religious beliefs and worldviews that formed among the Tasmanians - who thought that they were the only people to exist, and the second is a graphic description of the brutalities the Europeans committed after they came in contact with the Tasmanians. I wanted to focus this summary on the technology of Tasmania - but I highly recommend reading the full article for those other details.

Sadly Discovery Magazine's website leaves a lot to be desired, it's clear they just threw the article from print online without checking any of the formatting. There are no line-breaks at all in the online version. If this bothers you enough then you can copy the article into some other text editor. There are characters for line breaks there - but they just don't render properly on their website.

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