People of the Great Ocean: Aspects of Human Biology of the Early Pacific.

Bellwood, Peter

For the most part, this is an excellent and authoritative book on the human biology of the prehistoric and modern aboriginal populations of Oceania, written by an eminent and experienced researcher in anatomy and structural biology from the University of Otago in New Zealand. The aim of the book is to show how the Oceanic environment has moulded the bodies of its human inhabitants.

The first chapter sets the stage with a review of the environments of the Pacific. The second chapter then provides exhaustive data on the physique of aboriginal Pacific peoples drawn from early accounts and skeletal analyses, revealing a cline in size from small people in the west to very large and muscular people in the central and eastern islands (especially Fiji and Polynesia). Refuting suggestions that large body size would be caused by diet or mate selection, Houghton presents his hypothesis in chapter 3 (see also Houghton 1991) that large, stocky people will survive longer if at sea in prolonged cold and wet conditions, where body heat falls rapidly in the absence of shelter. To people on Neolithic canoes exposed to the elements on discovery voyages lasting days or even weeks, the sea could sometimes have been fatally cold. Houghton believes this selected over time for large-bodied people, presumably through incidences of death at sea for those unfitted for such rigours. The result, as Houghton puts it, was that Remote Oceanic peoples '. . . in a very technical sense might be regarded as oceanic Neanderthals' (p. 129).

One can of course dispute this hypothesis to some extent, as has Nicola van Dijk (1991). I find some aspects of it convincing, mainly because of the huge distances which had to be traversed in the remote Pacific. The question, of course, is how long a time would have been required for such selection to produce Fijians and Polynesians? The dates for initial human colonization beyond the Solomons obviously point towards 4000 years, or even less.

Two other chapters in the book, on skeletal morphology and health, also provide valuable data which will be of interest to archaeologists. Houghton discusses many important demographic factors such as population-growth rates (marred by some typographical incomprehensibility over Easter Island on p. 193), birth statistics and survivorship. Ancient diseases are also given extensive coverage. The skeletal samples discussed in this and other chapters are necessarily limited; there are few significant samples from Micronesia, very few truly ancient samples (e.g. early preceramic or early Lapita) from anywhere in the Pacific, and there is rather a dominance of recent material on Maoris and a few other well studied groups, mainly Polynesians. Data on the living range more widely, but again Micronesia seems to miss out. Nevertheless, Houghton does an excellent job with what is available.

At the end of the book, Houghton concludes:

'. . . the people of the Pacific, through selective adaptation and genetic drift, have to a large extent been physically shaped by their environment. This view contrasts with those that interpret the variety in terms of ancestral strains and racial types and the mixing of these. In the light of more than a century of evolutionary biology the persistence of these latter views may seem, to some, unnecessary.'

In my view, this is where the book falls down. Houghton's rather high moral tone about 'racial types' will no doubt impress some readers, but the downside is that Houghton is obliged to reject any kind of migration-based explanation for Oceanic prehistory. Instead, he favours an untenable view that Oceanic biological ancestry is ultimately limited to environmental adaptation, wrought on a population which has resided in the western Pacific for upwards of 40,000 years with no significant input from elsewhere. The basis for this view is built up in chapter 5, entitled 'Models and Methodology', wherein Houghton begins by attacking 'Out-of-Asia' migration models for the distribution of the Austronesian languages. He goes on to attack 'typological' terms such as Australoid and Mongoloid, followed by an attack on phenotypic analyses of cranial and dental variables on the grounds that the factors which affect their heritability are not fully understood; many such analyses may thus reflect no more than the constraints of the particular statistical methods used. He points out, quite rightly, that Austronesian- and non-Austronesian-language speaking populations in Melanesia cannot be clearly differentiated today in terms of biology, but, more questionably, assumes that this lack of differentiation has always existed.

Houghton also rejects the linguistic model of Austronesian dispersal by asking (p. 175) how it is possible that Austronesian-speaking people could have spread from Taiwan to Polynesia within 3000 years. This negative stance is surprising, given that he accepts, with all other prehistorians, that Oceanic people colonized from Melanesia to Easter Island in perhaps 1500 years (figure 1.8). Houghton does not refer to a number of genetic papers which demonstrate that important parts of the Polynesian genotype are more closely related to genotypes in island Southeast Asia than in Melanesia (Chen et al. 1992; Redd et al. 1995; Melton et al. 1995). He privileges 'Oceania' as somehow having a prehistory quite independent of the rest of the world since human first crossed its imaginary western border, thereby relegating 'Southeast Asia' to being a foreign land, despite the obvious continua which, in reality, have always locked these two regions together in human prehistoric terms.

Such issues aside, I found this to be an excellent book when presenting straightforward data on the biology, demography and health of Pacific peoples. On the other hand, Houghton's overall scenario for Pacific prehistory is for me incomplete and lacking breadth. Essentially, it is all trees and no wood. While purporting to offer significant insights about human prehistory, it completely lacks any detailed archaeological discussion, and absolutely no discussion at all of relevant archaeological data from Island Southeast Asia. It also lacks any informed linguistic discussion; Houghton never asks how the Austronesian languages have come to occupy their vast extent. His figure 5.1 makes it clear that he does not really understand linguistic arguments - he erroneously shows the reconstructed inter-stage entity termed by linguists 'Proto-Oceanic' as occupying the whole of Oceania, from the Bird's Head to Easter Island. The book also lacks any informed comparative cultural discussion - it is completely overlooked that the islands of Southeast Asia (including Taiwan) contain hundreds of societies which share many clearly widespread and ancestral characteristics with Oceanic Austronesian societies - art, kinship, ancestors, agriculture, canoe construction, even tattooing. Presumably this is all sheer diffusion from Houghton's perspective.

The problems with Houghton's biological data are that they are essentially timeless, apart from a few rather recent (post 2500 BP) skeletal populations. The claim that all Oceanic peoples have been developing in considerable isolation from the rest of the world for the past 40,000 years is simply not supportable from a multidisciplinary perspective. To believe such a claim is to deny the Austronesians, in particular, their history, turning them into an epiphenomenon of founder effects, adaptation and cold sea spray. Surely there is more to Pacific prehistory than this?

PETER BELLWOOD Department of Archaeology & Anthropology Australian National University

References

CHEN, L.Z., S. EASTEAL, P.G. BOARD & R.L. KIRK. 1992. Genetic affinities of Oceanic populations based on RFLP and haplotype analysis of genetic loci on chromosomes, Human Biology 64: 1-15.

HOUGHTON, P. 1991. The early human biology of the Pacific: some considerations, Journal of the Polynesian Society 100: 167-96.

MELTON, T., R. PETERSON, A. REDD, N. SAHA, A. SOFRO, J. MARTINSON & M. STONEKING. 1995. Polynesian genetic affinities with Southeast Asian populations as identified by mitochondrial DNA analysis, American Journal of Human Genetics 57: 403-14.

REDD, A., N. TAKEZAKI, S. SHERRY, S. MCGARVEY, A. SOFRO & M. STONEKING. 1995. Evolutionary history of the COII/[tRNA.sup.Lys] intergenic 9 base pair deletion in human mitochondrial DNAs from the Pacific, Molecular Biology and Evolution 12: 604-15.

VAN DIJK, N. 1991. The Hansel and Gretel syndrome: a critique of Houghton's cold adaptation hypothesis and an alternative model, New Zealand Journal of Archaeology 13: 91-9.