The Art Of Transcribing For The Organ

New Guinea swamps thus provide a clear instance of an environment where people remained hunter-gatherers because farming could not compete with the hunting-gathering lifestyle. The sago eaters persisting in lowland swamps exemplify the nomadic hunter-gatherer band organization that must formerly have characterized all New Guineans. For all the reasons that we discussed in Chapters 13 and 14, the farmers and the fishing peoples were the ones to develop more-complex technology, societies, and political organization. They live in permanent villages and tribal societies, often led by a big-man. Some of them construct large, elaborately decorated, ceremonial houses. Their great art, in the form of wooden statues and masks, is prized in museums around the world. New guinea thus became the part of Greater Australia with the most-advanced technology, social and political organization, and art. However, from an urban American or European perspective, New Guinea still rates as "primitive" rather than "advanced." Why did New Guineans continue to use stone tools instead of developing metal tools, remain non-literate, and fail to organize themselves into chiefdoms and states? It turns out that New Guinea had several biological and geographic strikes against it. First, although indigenous food production did arise in the New Guinea highlands, we saw in Chapter 8 that it yielded little protein ...»