Re: Pig study forces rethink of Pacific colonisation

On Mar 16, 4:42 pm, Matt Giwer <jul...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
benli...@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
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.jpgisone 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.

The first thing the map does is take hundreds of miles off of the distance by
sea. At the least this puts a much different perspective on the sea travel
issue. It also puts a different perspective on human development of sea
traveling technology as the sea level rose over a thousand or so years people
went from wading through swamps to rafts to boats slowly development as the
distance increased. As to the pigs we would have a normal population on all that
turquoise land giving those hundreds of thousands of years of opportunity for
accidental migration.

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.

The region of the maps is quite close to or into the tropics and hurricanes hit
the US quite far north of that. There certainly would have been several cyclones
(typhoons) in the region each year.

Actually the region of closest proximity of the two land masses is
right around the equator. "Tropical cyclones rarely form or move
within 5 degrees of the equator" (Wikipedia, hope I got that right).
Not an area with regular typhoons.

Anyone making it far enough west would come
ashore. The low pressure in the center draws up the water and carries it ashore.
Things get swept up in it and get carried out to see when it retreats.

The Florida event you described resulted in drowning a lot of people,
not moving livestock from one county to the next.

From there everything is dependent upon storm driven currents. The issue is if
it is possible there were hundreds of thousands of years with several chances
each year for it to happen. And then it only has to happen over those small
passages not the huge expanse between islands today. How long was that ice age
when pigs had evolved into today's pigs? Off the top of my head there were
several of them over ten million years lasting about 100,000 years with
10-20,000 year breaks between them. And beyond chance close enough to an island
and a hungry pig maybe means swimming for it so there is more than just chance
involved.

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.

You have to get them there within roughly the life span of pigs which is
something like 8-12 years although likely shorter in the wild. With hundreds of
thousands of chances per ice age for say 50 miles of coast for each chance
eventually it happens. Again the point is we are not looking at today's map
where it is clearly highly unlikely if not impossible but to time when the
distances were much shorter. Shorter on the order of a few percent of today's
distances.

Actually, even today's distances are not that great in the area of
eastern Indonesia-New Guinea. It's just that there are more gaps than
there would have benn 10,000 years ago.


What I am saying is to consider the possibility in context of the land mass at
the time not in terms of today. Look at humans reaching Australia about the same
time they reached SE Asia. Of course they did as SE Asia was dry land to a
couple small straights between it and Australia. We don't have to have sea-going
humans 60,000 years ago just good swimmers or minimal raft building. There were
probably places where a decent log and the tides would make the trip happen.

I'd say forget swimming -- not the whole way anyway. They had to have
some way of getting about on the water. Accidental crossings make for
the same problem as the pig -- low chance of reproducibility. So
whether it was rafts or boats, they saw the land across the way and
decided to go there.

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.

As I read it that was the point of the article, trying to date the pig.

The article is a genetics article, connecting the bush pigs of Vietnam
with those way out in the Pacific. My point is that there is no
evidence in the ground of pigs being in Australia-New Guinea or
further east before a few thousand years ago. This is at a time when
we have many other reasons for thinking that a people with
domesticated animals, agriculture and good boats were spreading
eastwards in this area.

Ross Clark


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.

I was not disagreeing. As I said there is no point to getting involved in the
chronology until we get to where you are talking about. Do not take expansion as
disagreement.

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