Page 3-4 of the article entitled How to Get Rich which is at the link:
The first batch of natural experiments concerns understanding the effects of
isolation and of group size and of communication with other groups on the
productivity of human societies. Let's learn from the extreme examples of
isolation of human societies. If isolation has any effect on human
societies, the places we're most likely to see that effect are the histories
of those two islands off southeastern Australia called Tasmania and Flinders
Island. They lie about 200 miles off the southeast coast of Australia and
are separated today from Australia by Bass Straits, but those straits are
relatively shallow, so their floor lay above sea level at glacial times of
low sea level up to about 10,000 years ago. The Bass Straits between
Tasmania and Australia were then dry land, and Tasmania was part of the
Australian mainland, just as Britain used to be part of the European
mainland. When the glaciers melted, sea level rose and cut off Tasmania from
the Australian mainland. So when Tasmania and Flinders were part of the
Australian mainland, Australian Aborigines walked down to Tasmania and
Flinders from the mainland.
And then 10,000 years ago the glaciers melted, sea level rose, and Tasmania
became cut off from mainland Australia by Bass Straits, which are really
rough waters. In addition, the watercraft of the Tasmanians were
wash-through rafts that got waterlogged and sank after about a dozen hours.
The result was that the boats of the Tasmanians could not reach Australia,
and the boats of the mainland Aboriginal Australians could not reach
Tasmania.
Thus, for the last 10,000 years the Tasmanians represented a study of
isolation unprecedented in human history except in science fiction novels.
Here were 4,000 Aboriginal Australians cut off on an island, and they
remained totally cut off from any other people in the world until the year
1642, when Europeans "discovered" Tasmania. What happened during those
10,000 years to that isolated 4,000-person society? And what about nearby
Flinders Island, which originally supported a population of 200 cut-off
Aboriginal Australians? — what happened to that tiny isolated society of 200
people during those 10,000 years?
When Europeans discovered Tasmania in the 17th century, it had
technologically the simplest, most "primitive" human society of any society
in the modern world. Native Tasmanians could not light a fire from scratch,
they did not have bone tools, they did not have multi-piece stone tools,
they did not have axes with handles, they did not have spear-throwers, they
did not have boomerangs, and they did not even know how to fish. What
accounts for this extreme simplicity of Tasmania society? Part of the
explanation is that during the 10,000 years of isolation, the Aboriginal
Australians, who numbered about 250,000, were inventing things that the
isolated 4,000 Tasmanians were not inventing, such as boomerangs.
Incredibly, though, archeological investigations have shown one other thing:
during those 10,000 years of isolation, the Tasmanians actually lost some
technologies that they had carried from the Australian mainland to Tasmania.
Notably, the Tasmanians arrived in Tasmania with bone tools, and bone tools
disappear from archeological record about 3,000 years ago. That's
incredible, because with bone tools you can have needles, and with needles
you can have warm clothing. Tasmania is at the latitude of Vladivostok and
Chicago: it's snowy in the winter, and yet the Tasmanians went about either
naked or just with a cape thrown over the shoulder.
How do we account for these cultural losses and non-inventions of Tasmanian
society? Flinders Island was even more extreme — that tiny society of 200
people on Flinders Island went extinct several millenia ago. Evidently,
there is something about a small, totally isolated human society that causes
either very slow innovation or else actual loss of existing inventions. That
result applies not just to Tasmania and Flinders, but to other very isolated
human societies. There are other examples. The Torres Strait islanders
between Australia and New Guinea abandoned canoes. Most Polynesian societies
lost bows and arrows, and lost pottery. The Polar Eskimos lost the kayak,
Dorset Eskimos lost dogs and bow drills, and Japan lost guns.
----- Original Message -----
> I don't know if I'm an unusually impatient person but I have looked at
every
> link on the page below and have found absolutely nothing about aborigines
or
> fire. I am obviosly doing something wrong, but what.
> Eva
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