Pacific Islands Were Hardly Paradise.

• Position: Brief Article - Review

Contrary to common beliefs, the Pacific islands before their discovery by European voyagers were not populated by children of nature living in the Garden of Eden, according to Patrick Kirch, professor of anthropology and director of the University of California, Berkeley's Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology. He argues that, before Portugese explorer Ferdinand Magellan ever set sail in the Pacific, human settlement and, in some cases, overpopulation on many Pacific islands disrupted the ecological chain, sending some island societies into collapse.

"French philosophers of the Enlightenment saw these islands, especially Tahiti, as the original natural society where people lived in a state of innocence and food fell from the trees. How wrong they were. Most islands of the Pacific were densely populated by the time of European contact, and the human impact on the natural ecosystem was often disastrous--with wholesale decimation of species and loss of vast tracts of indigenous forest."

Moreover, he points out, Tahitian society was engaged in endemic warfare, with ritual human sacrifice to a bloodthirsty god named Oro, when French explorer Louis de Bougainville came for a two-week trip in 1769 and thought he had arrived in paradise. Bougainville's description of Tahiti became the basis for philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of I'homme naturel, the noble savage.

Kirch emphasizes, however, that the Pacific island peoples were no worse and no better than any other human beings. "All humans transform their environment. In the Pacific, there is no place that humans haven't modified"

His research on islands from New Guinea to Hawaii establishes that settlement of the Pacific was one of the fastest human expansions of all time. In two great leaps--the Lapita expansion from the Bismarck Archipelago near New Guinea to Samoa in the central South Pacific around 1500 B.C. to 1000 B.C. and the ancient Polynesian expansion about 1,000 years later--agricultural voyagers settled the Pacific islands in great sweeps outward from an original base, probably in Taiwan. They carried with them a Noah's ark full of domesticated plants and animals--the coconut tree (found wild in only a few places), taro and other crop plants, chickens, pigs, dogs, and a mouse-sized rodent called the Pacific rat. "They took their whole world with them" Kirch notes. "It was an amazing expansion, one of the most rapid expansions in world history prior to European colonization."

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