Guns Germs And Steel Chapter 16 Outline
Chapter 16 Summary
Most of the world’s largest countries are extremely multicultural. China is a great exception. The vast majority of Chinese people speak Mandarin or a similar language, and most Chinese families have considered themselves Chinese for millennia. Diamond theorizes that China was once as linguistically and culturally diverse as Russia or Brazil, but that China began its process of unification far earlier.
To support this point, Diamond turns first to Chinese languages. Mandarin and its seven close relatives, all Sino-Tibetan languages, are collectively spoken by 1.1 billion Chinese people. These languages exist alongside 130 other languages, each of which is spoken by a much smaller population. China’s languages fall into …show more content…
One of these movements was the Austronesian expansion, a movement of southeast Asians into Indonesia and the Philippines. Diamond believes that the Austronesians were originally South Chinese or Southeast Asians. Linguistic evidence suggests that the expansion originated in Taiwan.
Archaeological records corroborate the linguistic evidence. The archaeology indicates that people making artifacts similar to those of South China replaced hunter-gatherers in Taiwan in the fourth millennium B.C. Artifacts show that these new Taiwanese had ocean-going watercraft suitable for an outward expansion. Over the next several thousand years, their pottery styles, stone tools, pigs, and crops spread outward into the Pacific Islands. They displaced hunter-gatherer populations on most of the Philippine islands and reached many previously uninhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean. They also moved east as far as Madagascar.
Diamond proposes that the Austronesian expansion replaced the original hunter-gatherer populations of the Pacific Islands for the same reasons that Europeans replaced the people of so many other cultures. The immigrants’ tools, weapons, skills, and diseases must have helped them dominate or kill most of the people they
Most of the world’s largest countries are extremely multicultural. China is a great exception. The vast majority of Chinese people speak Mandarin or a similar language, and most Chinese families have considered themselves Chinese for millennia. Diamond theorizes that China was once as linguistically and culturally diverse as Russia or Brazil, but that China began its process of unification far earlier.
To support this point, Diamond turns first to Chinese languages. Mandarin and its seven close relatives, all Sino-Tibetan languages, are collectively spoken by 1.1 billion Chinese people. These languages exist alongside 130 other languages, each of which is spoken by a much smaller population. China’s languages fall into …show more content…
One of these movements was the Austronesian expansion, a movement of southeast Asians into Indonesia and the Philippines. Diamond believes that the Austronesians were originally South Chinese or Southeast Asians. Linguistic evidence suggests that the expansion originated in Taiwan.
Archaeological records corroborate the linguistic evidence. The archaeology indicates that people making artifacts similar to those of South China replaced hunter-gatherers in Taiwan in the fourth millennium B.C. Artifacts show that these new Taiwanese had ocean-going watercraft suitable for an outward expansion. Over the next several thousand years, their pottery styles, stone tools, pigs, and crops spread outward into the Pacific Islands. They displaced hunter-gatherer populations on most of the Philippine islands and reached many previously uninhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean. They also moved east as far as Madagascar.
Diamond proposes that the Austronesian expansion replaced the original hunter-gatherer populations of the Pacific Islands for the same reasons that Europeans replaced the people of so many other cultures. The immigrants’ tools, weapons, skills, and diseases must have helped them dominate or kill most of the people they