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By Root 511 0

encountered Tasmanian natives, they found them not only to lack many of the skills and tools of their mainland cousins, but to lack many technologies that their own ancestors had once possessed. They had no bone tools of any kind, such as needles and awls, no cold-weather clothing, no fish hooks, no hafted tools, no barbed spears, no fish traps, no spear throwers, no boomerangs. A few of these had been invented on the mainland after the Tasmanians had been isolated from it – the boomerang, for instance – but most had been made and used by the very first Tasmanians. Steadily and inexorably, so the archaeological history tells, these tools and tricks were abandoned. Bone tools, for example, grew simpler and simpler until they were dropped altogether about 3,800 years ago. Without bone tools it became impossible to sew skins into clothes, so even in the bitter winter, the Tasmanians went nearly naked but for seal-fat grease smeared on their skin and wallaby pelts over their shoulders. The first Tasmanians caught and ate plenty of fish, but by the time of Western contact they not only ate no fish and had eaten none for 3,000 years, but they were disgusted to be offered it (though they happily ate shellfish).

The story is not quite that simple, because the Tasmanians did invent a few new things during their isolation. Around 4,000 years ago they came up with a horribly unreliable form of canoe-raft, made of bundles of rushes and either paddled by men or pushed by swimming women (!), which enabled them to reach offshore islets to harvest birds and seals. The raft would become waterlogged and disintegrate or sink after a few hours, so it was no good for re-establishing contact with the mainland. As far as innovation goes, it was so unsatisfactory that it almost counts as an exception to prove the rule. The women also learnt to dive up to twelve feet below the water to prise clams off the rocks with wooden wedges and to grab lobsters. This was dangerous and exhausting work, which they were very skilled at: the men did not take part. So it was not that there was no innovation; it was that regress overwhelmed progress.

The archaeologist who first described the Tasmanian regress, Rhys Jones, called it a case of the ‘slow strangulation of the mind’, which perhaps understandably enraged some of his academic colleagues. There was nothing wrong with individual Tasmanian brains; there was something wrong with their collective brains. Isolation – self-sufficiency – caused the shrivelling of their technology. Earlier I wrote that division of labour was made possible by technology. But it is more interesting than that. Technology was made possible by division of labour: market exchange calls forth innovation.

Now, at last, it becomes clear why the erectus hominids saw such slow technological progress. They, and their descendants the Neanderthals, lived without trade (recall how Neanderthal stone tools were sourced within an hour’s walk of their use). So in effect each erectus hominid tribe occupied a virtual Tasmania, cut off from the collective brain of the wider population. Tasmania is about the size of the Irish Republic. By the time Abel Tasman pitched up in 1642 it held probably about 4,000 hunter-gatherers divided into nine tribes, and they lived mainly off seals, seabirds and wallabies, which they killed with wooden clubs and spears. That means that there were only a few hundred young adults on the entire island who were learning new skills at any one time. If, as seems to be the case everywhere, culture works by faithful imitation with a bias towards imitating prestigious individuals (in other words, copy the expert, not the parent or the person closest to hand), then all it would take for certain skills to be lost would be a handful of unlucky accidents in which the most prestigious individual had forgotten or mislearned a crucial step or even gone to his grave without teaching an apprentice. Suppose, for example, that an abundance of seabirds led one group to eschew fishing for a number of years until the last maker of fishing