Chapter 3 CHAPTER 2 A NATURAL EXPERIMENT OF HISTORY

On the Chatham Islands, 500 miles east of New Zealand, the centuries-long independence of the Moriori people came to a bloody end in 1835.On November 19 of that year, 500 Maori arrived in a boat armed with guns, clubs and axes.Then, on December 5, another ship brought 400 Māori.Groups of Maori walked through Moriori settlements, announcing that the Moriori were now their slaves, and killing those who objected.At that time, if the Moriori put up an organized resistance, it was still possible to defeat the Maori, because the Maori were outnumbered by one to two.However, the Moriori have a tradition of resolving disputes peacefully.In their council they decided not to fight back, but to propose peace, friendship and sharing of resources.

Before the Moriori had time to make that suggestion, the Maori had begun their full-scale attack.In the next few days they killed hundreds of Moriori, boiled and eaten many of their bodies, and enslaved all the rest, Most of them kill at will.A Moriori survivor recalled, “[The Maori] started killing us like sheep... [We] all got terrified and ran into bushes, into burrows, into any A place where we could hide from our enemies. But it was of no use; we were found and killed—men, women and children, all at once." A Maori conqueror explained, "We took . . . as is our custom, and we caught all of them. Not one escaped. Some escaped from us, and we caught and killed them, and we killed others—but that So what? It is our custom."

The brutal outcome of this conflict between the Moriori and the Maori could have been easily foreseen.The Moriori are a very small and isolated group. They live as hunters and gatherers. What they have learned is only the simplest technology and weapons. They have no experience in fighting and lack powerful weapons. leadership and organization.The Maori invaders (from the North Island of New Zealand) came from a densely populated peasantry who had long engaged in brutal warfare, were equipped with relatively advanced technology and weapons, and operated under strong leadership.When the two groups came into contact, it was of course the Maori who slaughtered the Moriori, not the other way around.

The tragedy of the Moriori has something in common with many other such tragedies in the modern and ancient world, in that many well-armed men are pitted against few ill-equipped opponents.This clash between Maori and Moriori brought to light the horrific fact that the two groups diverged from a common ancestor less than 1,000 years ago.They are all Polynesians.Modern Māori are descendants of Polynesian farmers who immigrated to New Zealand around 1000 AD. Shortly thereafter, another group of these Maori migrated to the Chatham Islands and became the Moriori.In the centuries following the divergence of these two groups, they each evolved in opposite directions, with the North Island Māori developing more sophisticated technology and political organization, and the Moriori developing more complex technology and political organization. Simple.The Moriori reverted to their former hunter-gatherer lifestyle, while the North Island Maori turned to more intensive agriculture.

This opposite evolutionary path doomed the outcome of their final conflict.If we can understand why these two island societies developed in very different directions, we may have a model for understanding the broader problem of the different developments on each continent. The history of the Moriori and Maori constitutes a brief, small-scale natural experiment to test the extent to which the environment influenced human societies.Before you read an entire book on large-scale environmental impacts—the effects of the environment on human societies around the world over the past 13,000 years—you may have reason to wish to convince yourself of such effects through smaller experiments It is indeed significant.If you were an experimental scientist working with mice, you might do an experiment like this: choose a population of mice, divide these progenitor mice into groups, keep them in cages with different environments, and wait for many generations of these mice Come back and see what happened.Of course, such a purposeful experiment cannot be used in human society.Scientists can only look for "natural experiments" because according to such experiments, similar situations have been encountered by human beings in the past.

This experimentation began when humans settled Polynesia.In the Pacific Ocean to the east of New Guinea and Melanesia, there are thousands of dotted islands that vary widely in size, isolation, altitude, climate, productivity, and geological and biological resources (Figure 2.1).For most of human history, these islands were inaccessible by water vehicles.Around 1200 BC, a group of people engaged in agriculture, fishing and sailing from the Bismarck Islands in the north of New Guinea finally succeeded in reaching some of the islands.In the ensuing centuries, their descendants have colonized almost every small piece of inhabited land in the Pacific Ocean.This process was mostly completed by AD 500, and the last few islands were settled around AD 1000 or shortly thereafter.

Thus, within a relatively short period of time, vastly different island environments were settled, all descended from the same group of founders.The first ancestors of all modern Polynesians shared essentially the same culture, language, technology, and set of domesticated plants and animals.The history of the Polynesians thus constitutes a natural experiment that enables us to study the question of human adaptation without the usual complications of multiple population swells of different settlers robbing us of the rest of the world. Adaptation of local humans.

Within this medium-sized experiment, the fate of the Moriori constituted a smaller experiment.It is easy to trace how the different environments of the Chatham Islands and New Zealand shaped Moriori and Maori differently.While the earliest Māori ancestors of the Chathams may have been farmers, Māori tropical crops could not have grown in the Chathams' colder climate, so those settlers had no choice but to return to hunter-gatherers Life.Since they were hunter-gatherers, they could not produce surplus crops for redistribution and storage, so they could not support artisans, armies, administrators, and chiefs who did not hunt.Their prey consisted of seals, shellfish, nesting seabirds, and fish, which could be caught by hand or with a stick, requiring no more sophisticated techniques.In addition, the Chatham Islands are relatively small and remote islands that can support a total population of only about 2,000 hunter-gatherers.With no other accessible islands to colonize, the Moriori remained in the Chathams and learned to live in harmony with one another.They did this by renunciating war, and they also reduced the potential conflict of overpopulation by castrating some male babies.The result was a small, less belligerent group with crude technology and weapons, without strong leadership or organization.

In contrast, the northern (warmer) part of New Zealand is Polynesia's largest island group and is suitable for Polynesian agriculture.The number of those Maori who remained in New Zealand increased until it exceeded 100,000.They formed dense populations in local areas, and these people had long been engaged in brutal wars with neighboring populations.They supported a number of specialized craftsmen, chiefs, and part-time soldiers, as they had surplus crops that could be used for storage.They needed and made all kinds of tools, some for growing crops, some for war, and some for artistic creation.They built elaborate ceremonial buildings and numerous castles.

In this way, the Moriori and Maori developed from the same ancestors, but along very different lines.The resulting two societies didn't even know each other existed, and they never touched again for many centuries, perhaps as long as 500 years.Finally, a sealing vessel, which had visited the Chatham Islands on its way to New Zealand, brought news of the archipelago to New Zealand, where "marine fish and shellfish were abundant; the lake was full of eels; it was The land of karaka berries... there are many people there, but they don't fight, so they don't have arms." The news was enough to lure 900 Maori to take a boat to the Chatham Islands.This result clearly shows the extent to which the environment can affect economics, technology, political organization, and combat techniques in a very short period of time.

I have already mentioned that the Maori-Moriori conflict represented a small experiment within a medium-sized experiment.What can we learn from Polynesia as a whole about the impact of the environment on human societies?What needs to be explained about the differences between some of the societies on the different Polynesian islands? Taken as a whole, Polynesia appears to have a much wider range of environmental conditions than New Zealand and the Chatham Islands, although the latter prescribes an extreme (mere purpose) for Polynesian organization.Polynesians ranged from hunter-gatherers on the Chatham Islands to slash-and-burn farmers to intensive food production in some of the most densely populated areas of any human society.Polynesian grain producers have intensified their pigs, dogs, and chickens at various times.They organized labor to build large-scale agricultural irrigation systems, and built large ponds to raise fish.The economic basis of Polynesian society consisted of more or less self-sufficient families, but some islands supported guilds of part-time hereditary specialist craftsmen.In terms of social organization, Polynesian societies ranged from fairly egalitarian village societies to some of the most hierarchical societies in the world.This latter society had many hierarchical families, chieftains and plebeian classes, members of which intermarried only within their own class.In terms of political organization, the Polynesian islands ranged from individual regions divided into tribal or village units to some archetypal empires consisting of multiple islands.These proto-empires had standing military establishments designed to deal with invasions from other islands and to conduct wars of conquest.Finally, as for Polynesia's material culture, it varied from producing only personal implements to building monumental stone buildings.How should all these differences be explained? Among the Polynesian islands, at least six environmental variables contributed to these differences among Polynesian societies: island climate, geological type, marine resources, size, fragmentation and isolation of topography.Let's examine each of these factors one by one before considering their specific impact on Polynesian society. Polynesia has a range of climates from tropical or subtropical warm on most islands near the equator, to lukewarm in most of New Zealand, and sub-Antarctic cold in the Chatham Islands and southern parts of New Zealand's South Island.Although the Big Island of Hawaii lies within the Tropic of Cancer, it also has mountains high enough to sustain some alpine habitats, which occasionally receive snowfall.Rainfall also varies from place to place, with some places having the highest rainfall in the world (in New Zealand's Fiordland and the Alakai Swamp on Kauai, Hawaii), and some islands with only one-tenth of the above rainfall, which is so dry that Barely develop agriculture. Island geological types include atolls, uplifted limestone, volcanic islands, terrestrial fragments, and mixtures of these types.At one extreme, countless islets, such as those in the Tuamotu archipelago, are low-lying atolls just above the sea.There are also some earlier atolls, such as Henderson Island and Renal Island, which have risen significantly above the sea to form raised limestone islands.There are two types of atolls that make human settlement difficult, because they are entirely composed of limestone, with no other stones, only a thin layer of soil, and no perennial fresh water.At the other extreme, Polynesia's largest island is New Zealand, an ancient, geologically diverse landmass broken off from South Africa with a range of mineral resources, including commercially exploitable iron, coal, gold, and jade.Most of Polynesia's other large islands are volcanic high above the sea, never part of land, and they may or may not include raised limestone areas.These marine volcanic islands, while not possessing the geological richness and diversity of New Zealand, are at least (from the Polynesian point of view) slightly superior to the atolls in that they offer a wide variety of volcanic rocks, some of which Great for making stone tools. The volcanic islands themselves are also varied.The altitude of the higher volcanic islands brings rain to the mountains, so the islands are heavily eroded by wind and rain, with thick soils and perennial streams.This is the case, for example, with the Society Islands, Samoa, the Marquesas, and especially the Hawaiian Islands, since they are the most mountainous of the Polynesian islands.Among the lower islands, Tonga and (to a lesser extent) Easter Island also have fertile soils due to volcanic ash, but they do not have the large streams found on the Hawaiian Islands. As for marine resources, most of the Polynesian islands are surrounded by shallow water and reefs, many with lagoons.Fish and shellfish are abundant here.However, the rocky coasts and steeply-dropping ocean floors of Easter Island, Pitcairn and the Marquesas, as well as the lack of surrounding coral reefs, make for far less seafood. Size is another obvious variable, ranging in size from the 100-acre Anuta, the isolated and permanently inhabited Polynesian smallest island, to the 103,000-square-mile microcontinent of New Zealand.On some islands, the Marquesas is most notable, the inhabited zone is divided by ridges into valleys surrounded by cliffs, while others, such as Tonga and Easter Island, consist of gently rolling terrain , does not cause any obstacles to walking. A final environmental variable to consider is the degree of isolation.Easter Island and the Chathams were so small and so remote from the other islands that once immigration began, the society established there could only develop in complete isolation from the rest of the world.New Zealand, Hawaii, and the Marquesas are also remote, but the latter two did have some further contact with other archipelagos after their first colonization, and all three are composed of many islands that The close proximity facilitates constant contact between the islands of the same archipelago.Most of the other Polynesian islands maintain more or less constant contact with other islands.In particular, the proximity of the Tongan Islands to the Fiji, Samoa, and Wallis Islands allowed for regular sailings between the islands and eventually enabled Tonga to conquer Fiji. After briefly examining the various environments in Polynesia, let us now look at how these differences affected Polynesian societies.Survival is a perfectly appropriate aspect of society's production, because this aspect in turn affects other aspects. Polynesians subsisted on a variety of means: fishing, gathering wild plants, harvesting marine shellfish and crustaceans, hunting terrestrial and breeding seabirds, and producing food.Most Polynesian islands originally harbored large flightless birds that evolved in the absence of predators, with the moa of New Zealand and the flightless wild geese of Hawaii being the most famous examples.Although these birds were an important food source for the earliest settlers, especially on New Zealand's South Island, most of them soon became extinct on all islands because they were easily forced to hunt.The number of seabirds during the breeding season also decreases rapidly, but on some islands they are still an important source of food.Marine resources are significant for most of the islands, but least for Easter Island, Pitcairn and the Marquesas, where people live primarily on the food they produce. The ancestors of the Polynesians brought 3 domesticated animals (pig, chicken, and dog) and since then no other animals have been domesticated within Polynesia.Many islands still harbor all three, but the more isolated Polynesian islands are always missing one or two, perhaps because the livestock transported in canoes did not survive the long water voyages of the settlers, Perhaps it was due to the inability of livestock to be quickly replenished from the outside after they became extinct on the island.For example, isolated New Zealand ended up with nothing but dogs; Easter Island and Tikopia ended up with chickens.Unable to reach coral reefs or shallow, seafood-rich waters, as well as the rapid extinction of land-dwelling birds, Easter Islanders turned to building chicken coops for intensive poultry rearing. However, these three domesticated animals can only provide people with occasional meals at best.Polynesians relied primarily on agriculture for food production, which was impossible at sub-Antarctic latitudes because all Polynesian crops were tropical, domesticated outside Polynesia and later brought in by immigrants.Migrants to the colder southern regions of the Chatham Islands and New Zealand's South Island were thus forced to abandon the agricultural heritage their ancestors had developed over the past few thousand years and become hunter-gatherers again. People on the remaining islands of Polynesia also practiced agriculture, mainly dryland crops (especially taro, yam, and sweet potato), irrigated crops (mainly taro), and tree crops (such as breadfruit, bananas, and coconuts).The yields of these several crops and their relative importance vary considerably from island to island, depending on circumstances.Population density is lowest on Henderson Island, Renal Island, and the atolls, where the soil is poor and fresh water is limited.Population density is also low in temperate New Zealand, which is too cold for certain Polynesian crops.The Polynesians on these and other islands practiced a form of non-intensive, rotational, slash-and-burn agriculture. Although some other islands have fertile soil, they are not high enough to have long-term inexhaustible streams, so there is no benefit for port irrigation.Residents of these islands developed intensive dryland agriculture, which required labor-intensive terracing, mulching, crop rotation, reducing or eliminating fallow periods, and maintaining tree farms.Early agriculture was especially productive on Easter Island, the tiny island of Anuta, and the low-lying island of Tonga, where the Polynesians devoted much of their land to growing food crops. The most productive agriculture in Polynesia is the cultivation of taro in irrigated fields.Among the more populous tropical islands, Tonga precludes this option due to its low altitude and lack of rivers.Irrigated agriculture reached its peak in Kauai, Oahu, and Molokai, the westernmost islands of the Hawaiian Islands, because these islands are large and wet, not only have large, inexhaustible streams, but also can use water. A large number of people who come to engage in construction projects.Hawaii used forced labor to build a complex irrigation system to irrigate taro fields, resulting in a yield of 24 tons of taro per acre, the highest yield of crops in Polynesia.These productions in turn support the intensive pig farming business.Hawaii is also unique among the Polynesian archipelagos in the use of large-scale labor in aquaculture in that it has built some large fish ponds to stock milkfish and silverfish. Because of all these environment-related differences in subsistence, population density (measured as the number of people per square mile of arable land) also varied widely across Polynesia.Low population densities are hunter-gatherers in the Chatham Islands (only 5 people per square mile) and New Zealand's South Island, and farmers in the rest of New Zealand (28 people per square mile).By contrast, many islands with intensive agriculture have population densities in excess of 120 people per square mile.Tonga, Samoa and the Society Islands reached 210-250 people per square mile, and Hawaii reached 300 people per square mile.The high island of Anuta reached the other extreme of population density, 1,100 people per square mile, and the people of the island converted all the land for intensive food production, thereby squeezing in 100 acres of the island. 160 people, placing itself among the densest self-sufficient populations in the world.Anuta's population density surpassed that of modern-day Holland and was even comparable to that of Bangladesh. Population size is the product of population density (people per square mile) and area (square mile).The relevant area is not the area of ​​an island, but the area of ​​an administrative unit, which can be larger or smaller than an island.On the one hand, some islands close to each other can form an administrative unit.On the other hand, a large uneven island is divided into many independent administrative units.Thus, the size of administrative units varies not only with the size of an island, but also with the topographic fragmentation and isolation of the island. For some isolated islands, if there are no huge obstacles affecting inter-island communication, then the entire island is an administrative unit-for example, Anuta Island with 160 people.There are many larger islands that were never administratively united, whether because of their population composition or scattered groups of hunter-gatherers of only a few dozen individuals each (Chatham Islands and the southern part of New Zealand's South Island), or farmers who lived far apart and scattered (the rest of New Zealand), or farmers who lived in rugged areas that were densely populated but not administratively unified.For example, in the steep-walled valleys of the neighboring Marquesas Islands people communicate with each other by sea; each valley is a separate administrative entity consisting of several thousand inhabitants, and most of the Marquesas Islands The individual Big Island is still divided into many such entities. The topography of Tonga, Samoa, the Society, and the Hawaiian Islands allowed for administrative unity within the islands, resulting in administrative groups of ten thousand or more (over 30,000 on some of the larger Hawaiian islands). unit.The distances between the islands in the Tonga archipelago, as well as the distance between the Tonga archipelago and neighboring islands, were not too great, so that a multi-island empire of 40,000 people was able to be established in the end.Thus, Polynesian administrative units ranged in size from a few dozen to 40,000. The population size of an administrative unit interacted with its population density to affect Polynesian technology and economic, social, and political organization.Generally speaking, the larger the population, the higher the population density, the more technical and organizational complexity, and the higher the degree of specialization, for reasons that we shall examine in detail in later chapters.In short, when the population density is high, only a part of the people eventually become farmers, but they are mobilized to specialize in intensive food production, from which surplus food is produced to feed non-producers.Non-producers who could mobilize peasants included chiefs, clergy, officials, and warriors.The largest administrative units were able to mobilize large numbers of labor to build irrigation systems and fishponds that further enhanced food production.This development was especially evident in Tonga, Samoa, and the Society Islands, because these places were fertile, densely populated, and reasonably sized by Polynesian standards.This trend culminated in the Hawaiian archipelago, which included the largest tropical island in Polynesia, where high population densities and large land areas meant that there was a large pool of labor that was likely to be at the disposal of various chiefs. The differences associated with different population densities and sizes in Polynesian societies are as follows.Economies are still easiest on islands with low population density (such as the hunter-gatherers on the Chathams), small populations (small atolls), or low population density and small populations.In these societies, each household produces what it needs; there is little or no economic specialization.Specialization developed on some of the larger and more densely populated islands, culminating in Samoa, the Society Islands, and especially Tonga and Hawaii.The islands of Tonga and Hawaii supported part-time hereditary specialist craftsmen, including canoe builders, navigators, stonemasons, fowlers and tattooers. There are also differences in the complexity of societies.The Chathams and Atolls remained the simplest and most egalitarian societies.Although these islands retain the original Polynesian tradition of setting up chiefs, their chiefs wear little or nothing special. They live in ordinary thatched huts like commoners. A person either grows his own food or catches food to eat.On densely populated islands without large administrative units, social distinctions widened and the power of chiefs increased, especially in Tonga and the Society Islands. Social complexity reached its extreme in the Hawaiian Islands, where those of chief blood were divided into eight hierarchical families.Members of these families did not intermarry with commoners, but only within the family, and sometimes even between siblings or half-siblings of the same father or mother.In front of the superior leader, the common people must fall to the ground and worship.All members of the chief family, officials and some specialized craftsmen were exempted from the labor of producing food. Political organization follows the same trend.On the Chathams and the atolls, the chiefs had few resources at their disposal, decisions were made by plenary discussion, and land titles belonged to the community as a whole, not to the chief.Larger and more densely populated administrative units concentrated more power in the hands of their chiefs.Political complexity was highest in Tonga and Hawaii, where the power of hereditary chiefs approached that of kings elsewhere in the tenth world, and land was held by chiefs rather than commoners.The chiefs appointed officials as agents and used them to requisition food from the common people and conscript them for labor on large construction projects, which varied from island to island: irrigation works and fishponds in Hawaii, dances and banquets in the Marquesas In the centre, in Tonga are the mausoleums of chiefs, and in Hawaii, the Society Islands, and Easter Island are temples. By the time Europeans arrived in the 18th century, the principality or nation of Tonga had become an empire of archipelagos.Since the Tongan archipelago itself is geographically closely knit and consists of several large islands with complete topography, each island is united under a single chief; then, the hereditary chief of Tonga's largest island (Tongatapu) They united the entire archipelago, and eventually conquered some islands beyond this archipelago, as far as 500 miles away.They traded regularly over long distances with Fiji and Samoa, established the Tongan colony in Fiji, and began to plunder and conquer parts of Fiji.The conquest and management of this ocean prototype empire is achieved by a navy composed of large canoes that can carry up to 150 people each. Like Tonga, Hawaii is an administrative entity consisting of several populous islands, but due to its extremely isolated location, it is only an administrative entity confined to an archipelago.When the Europeans "discovered" Hawaii in 1778, administrative unification had occurred within each of the Hawaiian islands, and some kind of administrative union between the islands had also begun.The four largest islands—the Big Island (Hawaii in the narrow sense), Maui, Oahu, and Kauai—remain independent and control (or conspire to control) the smaller islands ( Lanai, Molokai, Kahoolawe and Niihau).After the arrival of the Europeans, King Kamehameha I of the Big Island purchased European guns and ships, and promptly proceeded to combine the largest islands in order to invade and conquer first Maui and then Oahu.Kamehameha immediately planned to invade Kauai, the last independent island of Hawaii. The leader of Kauai finally reached an agreement with him through negotiations, thus completing the unification of the archipelago. Some remaining differences between Polynesian societies to consider relate to tools and other aspects of material culture.The varying conditions of availability of new materials have created distinct limits on material culture.At one extreme is Henderson Island.This is an ancient coral reef high above the sea, with no stones other than limestone.Its inhabitants were reduced to making hatchets out of gigantic clamshells.At the other extreme, the Maori on the tiny continent of New Zealand had access to a range of raw materials and were particularly known for their use of jade.In between these two extremes are the oceanic volcanic islands of Polynesia, which, while devoid of granite, chert, and some other continental rocks, at least have volcanic rock, which the Polynesians could make into millstones for farming. Light stone axe. As for the kinds of artefacts, the islanders of the Chathams needed little more than hand-held clubs with which to kill seals, birds, and lobsters.Most of the other islanders made large quantities of fishhooks, hatchets, jewelry and other items of all kinds.On the atolls, such as the Chathams, the artefacts are small and relatively simple, made and owned by individuals, and the buildings are simple huts.Some islands with a large area and high population density supported some specialized craftsmen, who made a series of enviable items for the leaders—such as feather cloaks, which were specially made for the leaders, and it took thousands of Wan Gen Toba. Polynesia's greatest products are the monumental stone structures of several islands—the famous statues on Easter Island, the tombs of Tongan chiefs, the ceremonial platforms of the Marquesas, and the temples of Hawaii and the Society Islands.This monumental architecture in Polynesia apparently evolved in the same direction as the pyramids in places like Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mexico, and Peru.Of course the buildings in Polynesia are not as large as those of the pyramids, but that just reflects the fact that the Egyptian pharaohs were able to recruit labor from a much larger population than any chieftain on any of the Polynesian islands could arrived.Even so, the islanders of Easter Island have managed to erect some 30-ton statues - no small feat for an island of just 7,000 people who, despite their own muscles, There are no other sources of power. Thus, Polynesian island societies varied enormously in their economic specialization, social sophistication, political organization, and material production.These differences are related to differences in population size and density, island size, topographic fragmentation and isolation, and opportunities for subsistence and enhanced food production.All these differences among Polynesian societies, developed gradually over a relatively short period of time and in a relatively small part of the world, are environment-related differences that occurred in societies with a common ancestry.The cultural differences within Polynesia are basically the same as those found everywhere else in the world. Of course, the degree of variation in the rest of the world is much greater than that within the Polynesian islands.Although modern continental peoples also include groups that rely on stone tools like the Polynesians, South America also produced societies that were proficient in the use of precious metals, and Eurasians and Africans went on to use iron tools. Polynesia was realized because, with the exception of New Zealand, none of the islands in Polynesia had significant metal deposits.甚至在波利尼西亚有人定居前，欧亚大陆已有了一些成熟的帝国，南美洲和中美洲在晚些时候也出现了帝国，而波利尼西亚这时才刚刚有了两个原型帝国，其中的一个（夏威夷）只是在欧洲人到达后才和另一个联合起来。欧亚大陆和中美洲有了本地的文字，而文字却没有在波利尼西亚出现，也许复活节岛是个例外，然而无论如何，那里的神秘文字可能出现在岛民与欧洲人发生接触之后。 这就是说，关于全世界人类社会的差异性问题，波利尼西亚给我们看到的只是一个小小的剖面，而不是全貌。这并不使我们感到意外，因为波利尼西亚给我们看到的只是全世界地理差异性的一个小小的剖面而已。此外，由于在人类历史上波利尼西亚的拓殖时间很晚，即使是历史最悠久的波利尼西亚社会，其发展时间也只有3200年，而即使是最后拓殖的大陆（美洲），其社会至少也有13000年的历史。如果再给汤加和夏威夷几千年时间，它们也会达到成熟帝国的水平，彼此为争夺对太平洋的控制权而战斗，用本土发展起来的文字来管理它们的帝国，而新西兰的毛利人也许会在他们用玉石和其他材料制作的全套作品外再加上铜器和铁器。 总之，关于现存人类社会的与环境有关的差异性问题，波利尼西亚为我们提供了一个令人信服的例证。但我们只能因此而知道这种情况可能会发生，因为它在波利尼西亚就曾发生过。这在所有大陆上是不是也发生过呢？如果发生过，那么造成这些大陆的差异性的环境差异是什么？这些差异所产生的结果又是什么？

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Notes: