Re: Pig study forces rethink of Pacific colonisation

On Mar 15, 4:00 pm, Matt Giwer <jul...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
benli...@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mar 14, 4:52 pm, Matt Giwer <jul...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jack Linthicum wrote:
Mitochondrial DNA suggests Pacific pigs started from Vietnam and had
stops at New Guinea before reaching Tahiti and Hawaii.
Academic quote of the year: "Pigs are good swimmers, but not good
enough to reach Hawaii. Given the distances between islands, pigs must
have been transported and are thus excellent proxies of human
movement. In this case, they have helped us open a new window into the
history of human colonization of the Pacific.
Of course Hawaii and Tahiti have to be by sea but one has to come up with
decent dates for the New Guinea part and look at the sea level at that time
during the ice age. The actual land separations were so small that a decent
cyclone and clinging to a tree would be enough to cross the water.

So I would only take the Hawaii and Tahiti arrivals seriously for attempting to
date things. Australia and all the western Pacific Islands were either hills
above dry land or separated by short distances of water.

Again science writer syndrome. Expressing things in terms of depth of knowledge
of a journalism major whereas everyone really researching Pacific migration
knows where the dry land was during the first human migrations.

You could be a little more careful yourself. At no time was there less
than a 50 km sea gap to cross to get from Asia to Australia/New
Guinea. I'm not sure how good pigs are at "clinging" to anything, but
getting a primal pig couple (or even a pregnant sow) across that kind
of gap without human assistance seems like a very outside chance.
I'm not sure what you mean by "western Pacific Islands", but to get to
the Solomons (your next stop) you have another gap of maybe 100 km,
followed by _much_ longer crossings to get to Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa,
etc. All of this is at minimum sea level during the last ice age.

http://www.giwersworld.org/images/scs.jpgis one area. While 50 km may be a
reasonable measure the question is between how large a land mass. The big patch
of aqua/turquoise was dry land as were all the little dots of that color. There
appear to have been two chains of dots that could be described as like the
Florida keys running almost all the way from the main dry land to Australia.

"Almost" is the key. This map is not much use for our present
purposes, since 50km hardly shows up, but for a pig it's a long way.

As for the clinging part I mean swimming towards something floating and trying
to climb on as part of a typhoon storm surge receding as the eye gets far
inland. I don't know just how fast such a wave would be but back in the 1920s
(30s?) a hurricane eye went over Lake Okeechobee in Florida. When the eye left
from the west side the water sloshed back east and drowned something like a
thousan people. That was back before A/C when it was malaria heaven.

Sounds spectacular, but I'm not sure how applicable it is to the pig
situation. Anyway I don't believe they have cyclones in the area we're
interested in.

As for getting enough to breed easier than imagined. All one has to do is get a
female of bearing age or younger on the land mass as a male of any age and noses
and musk will do the rest. So there are years after one fortuitous arrival for a
second fortuitous arrival to occur and several million years for these chance
events to occur.

You also have to get them there within the same time/space frame for
them to be able to breed. You were just emphasizing how big the land
masses are. I still think you're working the outer limits of
probability.

As we are pushing back human arrival in Oz to around 60,000 years BP the entire
debate is more of academic interest than anything else. The issue of arriving
separately, which came first is not of much interest unless we have
domestication of pigs long enough before humans started crossing the water that
bringing pigs with them was an option. So then we have the complication of did
humans bring the first pigs or did they bring domesticated pigs to mix with the
wild population? If the latter and if domestication was no earlier than in the
middle east then certainly they brought domesticated pigs by sea. Whether or not
there were wild pigs already of if they were hunted to extinction and a few
other questions arise.

The first inhabitants of Australia/New Guinea certainly did not bring
pigs. AFAIK there are no wild pigs in Australia and never have been.
(OK there might be feral ones in some areas now, but as in NZ they
will be 100% Euro-pig.) Pig domestication in SE Asia is of the same
era as in the Mideast, Dates for earliest archaeological pig in New
Guinea are in keeping with this time frame -- long after first
settlement.

An interesting thing that happens in Austronesian languages is that
west of New Guinea there are typically distinct words for "wild pig"
and "domestic pig". East of NG the wild word drops out and the
domestic one becomes generic.

Which brings me back to my original point. Don't hang your hat on pigs save for
places like Tahiti and Hawaii where they had to have been brought by humans.
When talking the western Pacific islands it is to easy to cloud the picture with
questions than can likely never be answered.

You've bypassed the part where I pointed out that things get harder,
not easier, when you move east of Aus/NG. You might just be able to
pig-populate that land mass without humans (though I think it's very
unlikely and there seems to be no evidence for it). But Fiji? No way.

Ross Clark

.

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