Max Quordlepleen asks Can anyone confirm or correct this?
I recently read "Guns, Germs, Steel" by Jared Diamond, which gives an account of human history in terms of geography not culture. In the book, he marshals various bits of evidence to make the case that Taiwan was the first island in a series of islands hops which took the intrepid originally Eurasian seafarers to every inhabitable island in the Pacific, from Hawaii to New Zealand. They even got as far as Madagascar it seems. The migration is central to Diamond's theories because he uses it to show how the subsequent development of these isolated societies from people genetically and culturally similar was constrained by their environment. Some islands allowed abundant crop cultivation and complex societies grew; other islands didn't suit the crops the settlers brought and had little of their own so the settlers reverted to hunter-gathering.
On a grander and more complicated scale and with many more variables at work, says the book, this is what has happened to all mankind.
