--- In cybalist@..., "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@...>
wrote:
>
> The article on reclassifying the species of Babyrousa (another
genus
> in the pig family) in
> http://arts.anu.edu.au/awpn/newsletters/newsletter2(1)s.pdf takes
it
> as a given that Babyrousa babyrussa [sic] was introduced to the
> islands East of Sulawesi it now occupies. Perhaps there were many
> attempts at domestication within a very small area!
>
> Incidentally, is there a *short* explanation of why there are wild
> (not feral) pigs East of the Wallace line in Sulawesi, never mind
in
> the Moluccas?
>
> Richard.
I looked up "pigs" in Stephen Oppenheimer's "Eden in the East". There
was only one reference, p. 96 (in the paperback):
"
More than people and ideas flowed to and fro between Melanesia and
Southeast Asia in those thousands of years before Lapita. Pigs were
once thought to be a Lapita import, but their remains have now been
found in the New Guinea highlands with a 5000-year-old date(43), and
at Matembek on the east coast of New Ireland with dates of 8000 and
6000 years ago (44). Another curious anachronism that had previuosly
been put on one sde as too bizarre to be acceptable is the finding of
Japanese pottery sherds in the Mele plain in Vanuatu in the 1960s.
These cord-marked [!] pottery pieces were originally identified by
Japanese experts as from the early Jomon period. Exhaustive modern
analysis of the sherds has left little doubt that these are indeed
Early Jomon and were manufactured in Japan a very long time ago. Even
old pottery sherds have been found in Matemkupkum Cave in New
Ireland, taking the Neolithic there back to the time of the first
flood (around 8000 years ago).
(43) P.V. Kirch, The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the Oceanic World,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1997, p. 43
(44) Jim Allen 'The Pre-Austronesian Settlement of Island Melanesia:
Implications from Lapita Archeology' in Ward Gooodenough (ed.)
Prehistoric Settlement of he Pacific, The American Philosophical
Society, 1996, p.22
"
Torsten