Alternate History Scenario For October 1998:
New Guinea Takes over the World (Sort of)

What actually happened: Farming came to the island of New Guinea early--arguably as early as anywhere else in the world. In the highlands of New Guinea there is evidence of farming going back close to ten thousand years. In some other areas of the world, like the Middle East and China, the start of farming was followed in a fairly short time by a rapid expansion of populations, then by the advent of states and empires. New Guinea agriculture didn't follow that path. It remained restricted to the highlands for thousands of years. Populations grew, but comparatively slowly. New Guinea farmers didn't swamp the hunter-gatherer populations around them. New Guinea changed over the next ten thousand years, but slowly. It was still in the stone age when Europeans arrived. The areas around New Guinea, and even parts of the coast of New Guinea, were populated for the most part by Austronesian people (The group which includes the Polynesians and several related people.) The Austronesians apparently came from southern China or the area around Taiwan. They started their agricultural revolution long after New Guinea, but they expanded rapidly once agriculture caught on.

What might have happened: New Guinea started early enough to have become one of the cradles of civilization alongside China and the Middle East. This scenario will look at three questions: First, why didn't they? Second, what factors could have changed to let them play that role? Third, what would result from them playing that role?

Why didn't New Guinea become a cradle of civilization? There were probably a lot of contributing factors.

• Isolation from other emerging centers of agriculture.
• Difficult travel within the island itself.
• Crops which didn't adapt well to life outside the New Guinea highlands
• Lack of large animals to domesticate
• Crops which offered relatively small advantages over hunter-gathering

Which of those factors could have changed? New Guinea had some relatively large animals up until somewhere in the last 40,000 to 50,000 years. They were marsupials called diprotodonts, distant relatives of kangaroos and wombats. The New Guinea species were relatively small for diprotodonts--no more than 600-700 pounds for the largest species.

Diprotodonts died out both in Australia and New Guinea. Judging from their fossils, they were slow moving and probably very easy for human hunters to kill. There is some controversy over whether humans or climate killed them off. In the case of the diprotodonts in New Guinea I tend to think humans were probably to blame. If they were, that gives us a Point of Divergence. Let's say that for some reason the highland tribes develop a taboo against killing one of the smaller diprotodonts--something in the 200-300 pound range. There have been cases where that sort of thing allowed animal species to survive. A recently discovered New Guinea tree kangaroo apparently survived in a limited area because local tribes didn't hunt it. Diprotodonts were somewhat larger animals, and the taboo would have to cover a large enough area to maintain a viable population, but that isn't impossible. The taboo wouldn't have to last forever. It would just have to last long enough for the locals to discover the benefits of domesticating rather than killing the animals.

So, New Guinea highlanders add a domesticated diprotodont to their package of domesticated plants. That gives them just enough of an added edge to tip them over from non-expansionistic to expansionistic. Populations grow and spread into new areas. Not all of the domesticated highland plants go with them, but some do. Once farming is established in a wider area, more plants are domesticated. They start out as weeds in gardens of the established domesticated plants, then become tolerated because they produce something edible, then finally are planted just like the original domesticated plants. New Guinea agriculture and domesticated diprotodonts spread to the New Guinea low-lands.

By 7000 years ago, New Guinea-style agriculture is spreading to the nearby islands-New Britain, New Ireland, and the Torres Strait Islands between New Guinea and Australia. It spreads to the Philippines and Sulawesa by 6000 years ago. As it spreads, it picks up new food plants. It doesn't expand on those islands as rapidly as the Austronesians did in our time-line, because the advantage over hunter-gatherers is not as big.

By around 6000 years BP, after a thousand years of voyages to nearby islands, people along the coast of New Guinea, and settlers from New Guinea on the surrounding islands are very sophisticated sailors given the limits of their technology. They expand to the north to some extent, but the proto-Austronesians limit the possibilities there. They begin expanding into the Pacific, inventing many of the same techniques that the Polynesians used in our time-line. They play much the same role the Polynesians did in our time-line, but they do it several thousand years earlier. It takes a little over a thousand years for them to occupy Hawaii and the other Pacific Islands. New Zealand is settled a little later--around 4500 years ago.

In our time-line, Polynesians apparently never settled in North or South America in large numbers. There may have been contacts in South America--most likely in Chile, but large, warlike, and agricultural Indian tribes made North and South America unattractive.

In this time-line, travelers originating from New Guinea arrive while Indians are several thousand years less advanced. People originally from New Guinea occupy several off-shore islands along the coast of the Americas. Where the population is sparse they lodge inland to some extent, especially in Northern Chile. Emerging pre-Inca civilizations in Peru and Ecuador are enriched by new food plants from New Guinea, and pass local foods back along a slow island-hopping path across the Pacific to New Guinea.

In our time-line, Austronesians actually settled the large island of Madagascar off the coast of Africa around 200 AD (plus or minus a couple of centuries). They were the first humans to reach that island. In this time-line, settlers from New Guinea reach Madagascar a couple thousand years earlier. From Madagascar they make contact with the Khoisan (Bushman and Hottentot) people of southern and eastern Africa. The disease environment there keeps them from settling in large numbers, but they do transmit culture traits and technology.

Settlers from New Guinea occupy off-shore islands along the coast of Australia, and colonize or at least contribute genes to the mainland Aborigines. They make some inroads into Tasmania. Most of the original New Guinea crops won't grow in Southern Australia, but a few do, and that is enough to start a secondary center of crop domestication among the aborigines of southern Australia.

At this point things start to spiral beyond my ability to predict them. New Guinea's package of sailing techniques spreads along the coasts of South, then North America. The Pacific becomes a route by which food plants, some food animals, technology, and genes slowly filter from New Guinea to South America and vice versa. Not everything makes it across. Only things which are useful all along the chain of islands make it all the way across the Pacific. Bows and arrows, pigs, and chickens all probably arrive in South America thousands of years ahead of schedule. Sweet potatoes, possibly corn, probably other New World food plants, make it to New Guinea and surrounding areas, along with guinea pigs, but probably not llamas. Metallurgy develops independently on the two sides of the Pacific.

Really deadly diseases would probably not spread back and forth. The distances are too large for say smallpox or measles to make it across. Malaria might eventually make it to the New World because people can be chronic carriers of it. The Polynesians didn't carry it across, but the New Guinea people would have several thousand extra years for that to happen. Some diseases would make it across. Pigs would carry some of them, including varieties of influenza. Less deadly diseases human diseases could, and probably would make it over to the New World. They would continue to evolve once they got here. There is a very good chance that some of those diseases could develop strains that would be deadly to people like Europeans who are exposed to them for the first time as adults. That could mean die-offs in both directions when this time-line's equivalent of Columbus happens.

The exchange of food plants and animals between the two hemispheres has totally incalculable results, especially if corn and potatoes spread to the Old World. Both foods could grow places where Old World crops couldn't. Tobacco adds another huge but impossible to calculate variable. China might never be unified. Tribes in the south of China could get a boost from incoming food plants and successfully resist the expansion of the Chinese. The Roman empire would probably never exist, though something like it would probably happen. It might start getting visitors from Central America. Then again, the new crops from the Americas could speed up development of the Old World to the extent that Europe discovered the New World a couple of thousand years early.

Biologically, we would lose some species and probably gain some. Dogs would get to Australia and Tasmania earlier, probably exterminating the Tasmanian Wolf and Tasmanian Devil (we'd miss you Taz). The New Guinea version of the Tasmanian Wolf might get domesticated in the interval between the domestication of the diprotodont and the advent of true dogs. In that case it might survive in feral populations on some remote Pacific or Philippine Islands, or maybe even New Zealand. New Zealand and Madagascar could lose more or less animals depending on details of their own New Guinea-derived culture. Some Moas and Giant Lemurs might survive, or some birds and lemurs which survived in our time-line might become extinct. Pacific Island birds would be even more decimated than they are in our time-line. On the other hand, some islands would have time to develop peculiar new forms of animals. Stowaway rats and small marsupials would develop new and distinctive forms on some of the islands. New breeds of domesticated and feral dogs would arise on the various islands. New and valuable breeds of food plants would be developed as the two hemisphere each got to work on improving the other's food plants. The diprotodont which started all of this would gradually fade in importance even in New Guinea as new domesticated animals filtered in.

Technology-wise, the results of all of this are far beyond my capacity to work them out. In general, I suspect that the technology level of this time-line would far exceed our own.

New Guinea, North and South America, and possibly even Southern Africa would be in a position to contribute far more to the pool of ideas and technology when that pool became global. That could be important. There are universal processes that happen as a culture advances. I suspect that there are also processes which advance in different ways depending on the underlying culture, geography, and even genetics that goes into the mix. Having several more technologically advanced cultures might have meant a much richer global culture when culture eventually did become global.

Potential weak spots:

1. Were there aspects of Polynesian sailing which could not have been duplicated with the technology of several thousand years earlier? I don't know of any, and I suppose I could have the underlying technology invented in New Guinea anyway, but I'm a little uneasy about this.
2. Could a diprotodont have survived long enough to be domesticated? Again, I don't know. It depends on exactly when they became extinct in New Guinea in our time-line, and the fossil evidence in New Guinea is scarce enough that no one can really say that within 20 thousand years. I doubt that a taboo would have preserved them for say thirty thousand years. It might have for five thousand.
3. Would a diprotodont have that kind of impact on how fast New Guinea's agriculture expanded? That depends on where the weak spot(s) in the native food plants were. If those food plants were protein-poor, populations could outgrow the amount of protein available from hunting and fishing. Having a domestic animal would fill that vital gap and let the system expand. Protein is a problem for many modern New Guinea diets, and it could easily have been a problem in the early going as well.

So, what do you think? It's a long way in time and space from World War II. Does anyone have any ideas about how this would all work out? Do you like this sort of scenario? Any feedback is welcome.