D O M ESTIC A TIO N : TH E LESSONS FR O M NEW GUINEA

D .E. Yen A ustra lian N ational U niversity

For thirty years now, we have been aware that New Guinea was more than a passive conduit for the prehistoric transfer of agriculture to the widely adaptive destinations of the islands of Oceania from Southeast Asia. Botanical analyses of the world collections of Saccharum summarised by Brandes (1958) and Warner (1962), and of the M usa banana investigated by Simmonds (1959, 1962) indicated that the origins of sugar cane, S. officinarum , and the Australimusa banana (the Polynesianf e h i j e ’i) were New Guinean. Thus the inescapable implication has been that the Polynesian plant transfers included contributions from the cultivators (and domesticators) of the more ancient Pacific cultures of the continental islands in western Melanesia. In terms of domestication however, these two plants form but a part of a whole spectrum of local cultigens, many unique to New Guinea, or of comparatively narrow distribution in the western Pacific. Those of us who worked in the Highlands of the then Dutch and Australian administered territories in the 1950’s and early 1960’s noted the unfamiliar vegetable plants that the sweet potato cultivators grew, and Barrau’s (1958) study of Melanesian crop plants allowed us, e.g. R. Bulmer (1966), to identify them.

Even if we accepted the Southeast Asian provenience of the C olocasia-D ioscorea or taro-yam complex that dominated Oceanic cropping patterns with the later introduced American sweet potato, there were enough species of endemic origin and domestication to posit more than the status of New Guinea as an extension of the Southeast Asian centre of domestication in Vavilovian terms, but as an entity of its own. However, this was a temptation that was resisted for lack of temporal control until the beginning of Golson’s archaeological explorations of Highland agricultural systems (Golson et a l 1967) when a c.6000 year old drainage system offered clear evidence of cultivation at a time considered too early for agricultural diffusion (Yen 1971, 1973). With the more extensive excavations by Golson at the Kuk site in the Wahgi Valley, his sequence of increasingly complex drainage technology that began at some 9000 years b.p. (Golson 1977) was even stronger evidence for indigenous agricultural development. The implication was clear for early domestication in New Guinea, as early as the claims for other parts of the world. The seminal paper on New Guinea highlands prehistory by Susan and Ralph Bulmer (1964) argued that the appearance of stone implements and weapons signified a period of cultivation of taro, yams, P ueraria or bananas together w ith the exploitation of the natural fauna and flora of the region. That the two sites yielding the data base for this interpretation were dated also to c. 9000 years (S. Bulmer 1975, 1979), with evidence for pig at this level, had several implications for the temporal sequence of agricultural development when considered with Golson’s work:

(i) There was contemporaneous development of wet- and dry-land cultivation practice in the Highlands.(ii) If the major crops in this early period were the product of diffusion from Southeast Asia, their arrival in

the Highlands would be too early for the Austronesian advent into the western Pacific region. On the assumption that there was an earlier, unknown Austronesian colonisation (or other source of transfer), there would likely have been a pre-9000 year agricultural effect on the New Guinea coasts, the lowlands or at least the riverine passages to the Highlands that were the logical settlement routes posited by Robbins (1963) on botanical evidence.

(iii) If early Highlands agriculture was n ot founded on Southeast Asian plants, then the asynchronic evidence for local domestications takes on added importance for prehistory.

(iv) The presence of pig (which, at another Highlands site, White (1972) records as c.6000 years b.p.) is a further indication of domestication, but may be of a secondary rather than primary process (see later).

This cursory review sets up the theme that I wish to address in this paper - New Guinea domestication in prehistory; to consider its nature, and the influence that it has had on the development of agriculture on the island continent, and indeed, possibly on Oceanic agriculture as a whole. I have chosen to begin with animal husbandry, not only because of Ralph’s intense interest in ethnozoology, but because the examples from New Guinea can set up a structural situation that we may use as template for considering the local domestication of plants. At this juncture I feel a void - missing the good-natured argument that R.N.H. would have given me about that!

THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALSWhen man first colonised New Guinea at more than 26,000 years ago, none of the domesticated animals -

pig, dog or chicken - was endemic. So far, archaeology has not uncovered remains of dog or chicken at anywhere near the levels of antiquity of the pig finds (White and O ’Connell 1982); these faunal elements of

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Domestication: the Lessons from New Guinea 559

“traditional” subsistence are likely to have been the products of unaccounted transfer well after earliest colonisation. Although White and O ’Connell (1982:187) discuss the possibility of pigs arriving in New Guinea across the Wallacean water barriers through their own naiant capabilities, they take the generally accepted view of human carriage. In a phylogenetic analysis of the genus Sus, Groves (1981:64 e t seq.) states that the New Guinea pig, S. papuensis, is most likely the product of hybridity between S. scrofa and S. celebensis, and his hypothesis is that hybridisation occurred in the Molucca Islands. Thus a passageway for human transfer of plants and animals that is attested in ethnography, e.g. Elmberg’s (1968) study of the Mejprat of the Bird’s Head Peninsula of western New Guinea, may reflect a route of considerable antiquity. There are no reports for pig remains from archaeology in the region of Indonesia closest to New Guinea as yet; Glover’s (1986) report of excavations in Timor places the earliest at three to two thousand years ago within an economic sequence including earlier food production and hunting-gathering that goes back some13,000 years.

Baldwin (1978) has reviewed contemporary pig husbandry practices in New Guinea, and detailed them in a lowland society, the Gogodala in the Fly River region (Baldwin 1982), making the comparison with the Highlands. Baldwin distinguishes ‘breeding’ from ‘rearing’, the first being controlled reproduction through the maintenance of stud boars especially for breeding with female village pigs, although the majority of male piglets are castrated for eventual ceremonial consumption in the periodically drastic population reductions of female and barrowed animals. The Highland ethnographers contemporary with Ralph Bulmer in the 1950’s and 1960’s all attested independently to this form of controlled breeding at a time when there was little influence from European agricultural practice, e.g. Brookfield and Brown (1963:57) for the Chimbu; Heider (1970:51) for the Dugum Dani; Meggitt (1958:290) for the Mae Enga; Pospisil (1963:204) for the Kapauku; Reay (1959:12) for the Kuma.

According to Baldwin (1982:33) the remainder of New Guinea’s ethnolinguistic groups practise ‘rearing’, where all village boars are barrowed so that the maintenance of the domestic herd depends on the capture of wild piglets for raising. Baldwin (1982:36) however does record in lowland Gogodala husbandry the occasionally opportune and productive insemination of village sows by wild boars that is really another class of breeding, and one that is practised at intermediate altitudes in the Bismarck Mountain forested region by Maring speaking clans, the Bomagai-Angoiang reported by Clarke (1971:85) and the Tsembaga by Rappaport (1968:70). Rappaport’s account is particularly revealing, for his careful assessment of the effectiveness of this form of breeding has relevance for the adoption of the more intensive controlled practices of the Highlanders. The low fecundity of only 14 litters from a potential 100 in his study could be explained on the particular nucleated situation of the Tsembaga settlement during his fifteen months of fieldwork as the people awaited the culmination of the pig cycle. This kind of periodic settlement was construed as being detrimental to the pig breeding system since wild boars tend to avoid dense human settlement, thus restricting mating opportunities. The Highlands, with their generally more heavily concentrated human populations, would be a constantly less favourable environment for a Maring-type pig breeding system. Furthermore, Rappaport (1968) states that in his fieldwork area, when most of the sows are domiciled at 4000 feet altitude, there are relatively infrequent matings, for the wild boars tend to stay in forests at below 3000 feet. This may indeed be the more potent environmental factor that limits the application of the less intensive, less controlled breeding methods in the Highlands. An informant of Clarke (1971) stated that sometimes boars are kept intact for a few matings, indicating that such a known option may be exercised. This is also the breeding system reported by Bulmer (1976:172) for the Kalam of the Kaironk Valley who leave their male piglets free rein in village herds until they are eight to ten months of age, before which some mating may be effected. Bulmer further states (1976) the Kalam claim that among them pig husbandry is comparatively recent - going back perhaps a century - accompanying the extension of gardening and forest clearing and the destruction of the habitat of feral herds.

The recent paper of Kelly (1988) is a further contribution to the understanding of the wild boar-domestic sow mating system in pig breeding that he calls, as I do, ‘semi-domestication’. Among the Etoro, he details the trade and exchange relationships with the neighbouring Huli highlanders, in which traffic in live pig is dominated by the fattening of the shoats of the Huli until maturity when they are returned. While this, in its ideal manifestation, may not affect the breeding stocks of either partner in the transaction, Kelly records that unrelated compensation payments by Etoro to Huli are made in live pigs (1988:145). In this way, the Highland pigs under total domesticated conditions may receive, at least among the sows (assuming that all males are already castrated) a contribution of wild pig genes as a perhaps hidden extra benefit of the system. There is however an unsubstantiated possibility of incidental reciprocal gene infusion between the highland and fringe highland stocks if all shoats brought to maturity by the Etoro are not returned by substitution of individual animals of their semi-domestic stock.

With regard to other species in the short list of the domesticated animals of New Guinea, Baldwin (1990) again provides a particularly useful summary on breeding and rearing, incorporating the ethnographic

560 D.E. Yen

observations on C an is dog, G a llu s chicken and three species of C asu ariu s or cassowary. In Baldwin’s words, “In New Guinea and island Melanesia, . . . dogs living in association with man are encouraged to breed”. Baldwin’s own work among the Gogodala in lowlands New Guinea specifies a point of selection in that good hunters among village dogs are mated as a method of improvement. There is little indication for dog rearing in the sense of capture of pups from feral populations, and the insemination of village dogs by the latter (or vice versa apparently) is also uncommon. Wild dog populations are restricted to the remote, upper mountain ranges, so that in the absence of evidence for wild dogs running with the domestic, there is little possibility for genetic interchange with village dogs. Thus Baldwin considers that a tradition of canine breeding has developed in New Guinea and the Melanesian island region.

Chickens are probably the ‘most domesticated’ of all Oceanic animals, and are apparently only of recent introduction to the New Guinea Highlands. As village and indeed household assets at lower altitudes, there are few reports of feralisation. The one sure instance is on Nendo, the main island of the Santa Cruz group in the eastern Solomons, where a long-tailed form in the forest inland is now endangered by clearing, logging and the more common use of firearms. While there is no evidence from informants of the role of these wild fowl in breeding when the hinterlands of the island were occupied (Yen 1976), these settlements among forest and secondary vegetation, extending back at least 400 years, could have been the immediate proveniences of the feralised G allus. Bellwood (1979:149) asserts that this phenomenon is widespread on Pacific islands, leading to Baldwin’s (1990) conclusion that chickens are not truly domesticated, emphasising their scavenging subsistence, and a lack of human control in their breeding. Certainly this is untrue in nearby Indonesia and Southeast Asia where the breeding of fighting cocks is an art involving male and female parental selection. At least some elements of such selection would apply in the wider Pacific prehistory if Bellwood’s (1979) prehistoric projection of cock-fighting to Tahiti and Hawaii is true. In the meantime we will stay with the statement at the beginning of this paper on the score that chicken, where it occurs in Oceania, is closely tied to human settlement; and furthermore, with its history of some 8000 years of domestication in Southeast Asia (West and Zhou 1988), Gallus gallus could have arrived in Melanesia fully domesticated.

Although many animals are occasionally found as pets and probably inconsistently recorded in ethnographies (see Baldwin 1990, for a summary; and indeed, pig, dog and chicken may be encountered that can be described as such - even if they all eventually end up in the human alimentary cause), the one indigenous animal that can be said to have undergone a degree o f domestication is the flightless bird, the cassowary. In New Guinea, as again Baldwin (1990) reviews, the rearing method is ‘institutionalised’ whether in the Highlands or Lowlands. Captured chicks are village raised and after a time confined to pens where their foraging days are over. They are kept for their feathers, valuable as a component of ceremonial garb, for which purpose they are a trade item; they are slaughtered later, also for ceremonial occasions principally. There are no records for cassowaries of any species being bred in captivity; two of this writer’s informants in the Torricelli Mountains and in coastal Vanimo (exploiting the inland forests and grasslands) stated that male and female would not mate in captivity, and one, with humour, said that in captivity it was hard to tell one from the other - as a possible explanation for failure! Despite the cultural importance of the bird, not all societies practise domestic raising. Majnep and Bulmer (1977) give a clear functional explanation of why Kalam do not rear cassowaries that is unsurpassed for any of the examples of dom estication that are presented here.

THE NATURE OF ANIMAL DOMESTICATIONThe range of diversity o f animal breeding methods of New Guinea, best represented in the pig, may be

viewed as degrees of control of the natural breeding system, or of the intensity of husbandry. Baldwin (1978, 1982) has differentiated two forms of pig husbandry, breeding as “the intentional manipulation of the genetic inheritance of the village pig population, usually by means of the maintenance of stud boars kept especially for breeding purposes”; rearing in which all village boars are castrated so that domestic pig populations must be maintained by “the continual capture of wild piglets to be adopted, tamed, and raised. . .” However, as previously indicated, the reports from the Maring clans of the Bismarck mountains and the Etoro of the Papuan Plateau of the regular insemination of village sows by wild boars, must be regarded as a different form of breeding, and commonly reported from middle altitudinal montane situations in New Guinea, e.g. in the Eastern Highlands and the Torricelli Range. For convenience, we will use sem i-dom estication for this kind of breeding, an appellation often used without real definition. Here it has some genetic foundation, for it implies the potential for maternal selection (one-half of parentage) through the retention of some sows as the nucleus for the maintenance and building up of village pig populations as part of the ritual pig cycle. On these terms then, the Highlands p ig breeding offers selection control of both parental sides in mating, while the lowlands p ig rearing offers none, but the resultant, ‘cyclic’ herds are the product of natural selection.

The breeding/semi-domestication/rearing modes of husbandry are not so much a trichotomy, as a gradient of control, for as we have seen from cited examples, semi-domestication and rearing can occur together.

Domestication: the Lessons from New Guinea 561

There is less evidence for the interstate between breeding and semi-domestication, but the valuable account of Enga highlanders and their subsistence by Meggitt (1958) indicates some possibilities of insemination of village sows by wild boars among fringe clans (p.285) who have access to feral pigs. The breeding option, largely practised only in the Highlands until recent times, theoretically, could lead to local inbreeding, assuming a founder effect in the original genotypes that must have had a lower altitudinal provenience. However, it can be envisaged that genetic variability could have been maintained by the “natural” infusions from the lower fringe Highland communities circulating through the exchange systems that characterise those societies. ‘Rearing’ in Baldwin’s terminology, produces genotypes representative of random natural selection among feral populations, so that artificial selection by humans is largely restricted to the non-reproductive choice of captive male and female piglets for raising to consumable age. In this respect, peoples of New Guinea who do not raise pigs at all, but rely on hunting for the direct provision of food for subsistence or ritual would not even have this form of selectivity, but the selective effects on wild suid populations would be numerical and dependent on the intensity of such practice. Exclusive hunting of pigs would seem to be a

Environment

Selection

Figure 1: The modes of pig husbandry in New Guinea showing the relations between the methods in contemporaneous practice and the selection practised by man on breeding populations

coastal phenomenon, e.g. among the people of Frederik-Hendrik Island of the south coast as recorded by Serpenti (1965) and, in modem times at least, on the north coast where the peoples populating the mouths of rivers and streams, e.g. in the vicinity of the Sissano Lagoon, have alternative protein sources from the sea and practise estuarine fish-trapping technologies (Yen, field notes 1988).

Figure 1 is an attempt to summarise the traditional forms of pig production in terms of the degree of control of parental selection. Plotted against environments expressed (inadequately perhaps) as altitude, the dominant forms appear to correlate with a lineal evolutionary configuration of ecological adaptation. However, there may be an alternative interpretation: hunting, rearing and semi-domestication, with their stronger inter-class linkages, can be viewed as a single system of interchangeable dominance of components, an interchangeability that has dependence on socio-cultural arrangements such as settlement pattern, firmness o f boundaries between groups, the fluctuation of alliances. . . The Highlands pig breeding system as we have known it in ethnographic times may be one material manifestation of the complex development of the exchange systems there, and the requirements of the cyclical climaxes of the massive ritual pig-killings at greater numerical levels than are known in other parts of New Guinea - or of Oceania. The control of matings that includes timing, and the selection of parents for health and size, tameness and fecundity confer obvious advantages for greater assurance of productive capacity for pig-herding over any other of the less intensive systems. Indeed, hearing Jo Mangi (personal communication) describe the traditional ‘selection points’ exercised by his older Wahgi relatives and comparing the breeding method (of semi-domestication) in the Eastern Highlands, one could be forgiven for thinking that a version of modem progeny testing methods of animal breeding are being rendered.

Table 1 presents an arguable assemblage of the dominant forms of animal breeding, comparing pigs with the other introduced animals, dog and chicken, and the indigenous cassowary. Prepared from the literature

562 D.E. Yen

TABLE 1: THE FORMS OF HUSBANDRY IN FOUR OF THE MAJOR ANIMALS IN NEW GUINEA SUBSISTENCE AND THE BROAD ENVIRONMENTAL CORRELATES EXPRESSED IN LAND ALTITUDE

o* ^ c / / /^ < if <D°

PigsHighlands O •Mid altitudes • O • •Lowlands • • O '

DogsHighlands O •Mid altitudes O •Lowlands •

ChickensHighlands . . . .Mid altitudes • •Lowlands •

CassowariesHighlands • • •Mid altitudes • •Lowlands • •

Coding: the dominant form;

O secondary and sometimes incidental form

cited earlier, with some modifications from my own field work, it stresses the close association of chicken and dog with man. It seems that cassowary in all of its specific forms cannot be brought into domestication further than the rearing stage in part at least because of the bird’s growing fierceness in captivity. We have noted that the Kalam, who number some 15,000, do not raise birds from captured chicks, and thus the exploitation of cassowary among them is restricted to the variety of hunting techniques described by R. Bulmer (1968). While biological explanation may suffice for the relatively slow progress of cassowary domestication in New Guinea compared with that in the adventive animal species, it may be that the complex cultural relationships of man and bird genus as described by R. Bulmer (1967) and Majnep and Bulmer (1977) have a restraining effect. I have never had a satisfactory answer to what are probably culturally insensitive questions as to why a larger number of chicks are not aggregated after capture for raising, selection and breeding. I should have read Bulmer more carefully!

Comparing Figure 1 with Table 1, it becomes obvious that the gross correlation o f environment and reproductive control of the pig does not hold for the other species. The general ‘advanced’ modes of breeding in pigs, dogs and chickens, varying in altitudinal ranges, may simply be a legacy of the introduction of already domesticated animals, with pigs having the innate superiority for naturalisation in the prehistorical New Guinea context. Thus the situation could have been one of secondary or re-adaptation - a common element in the colonisation process addressed by biologists, e.g. Brown and Burdon (1987). But alternatively it may be, as Flannery e t a l (1988) recently suggested on archaeological evidence, for prehistoric m an’s penchant for transport of other undomesticated animals in Melanesia, that the hybrid Sus of the Moluccas was earlier introduced into New Guinea in similar fashion. Thus, New Guinea and the western Melanesian islands, some of which are now known to have been settled since the Pleistocene (White et a l 1988; Wickler and Spriggs 1988), may have had a part in the prim ary domestication of what was to become the Oceanic pig. Thus the process, whose steps are still evident in New Guinea, was in fact a more complex one involving not only time, but space, the characteristic of the biological secondary colonisation, and in our terms, re­domestication. If however we take the gradient of breeding control that we have observed as representing the N ew G uinea system , there was one important consequence: the interlinking of the components of the system ensured that genetic variability of pig stocks was maintained. In such a light, the system is hardly ‘primitive’, and it is by no means clear that the genetic consequences are incidental and unrecognised in the ethnobiology of the traditional agriculturists of New Guinea.

Domestication: the Lessons from New Guinea 563

THE DOMESTICATION OF PLANTSIn addressing the issue of domestication through the animal breeding practices in New Guinea, the

obvious emphasis has been on the control of reproduction. The motility of animals allows greater potential for feralisation, and thus for the action of natural selection on a significant proportion of breeding populations - as we have seen, with particular relevance to the important pig. With domesticated plants, an intermediary is usually necessary for dispersal, whether man, most often through crop residues in swidden cycles between final harvest and fallow, or through transport by animals or birds, as suggested by R. Bulmer (1966) for sweet potato seed. The naturalisation (or feralisation) of plant domesticates depends on the competitive ability of the species which often needs augmentation by certain environmental conditions at the outset of colonisation. The American sweet potato, Ipom oea batatas, in New Guinea is one such example. In many regions up to some 1700m above sea level, it has become naturalised in open, disturbed environments such as roadsides and in coconut, coffee and cacao plantations formerly cultivated, probably with the sweet potato as a subsistence dominant. It is in such contexts, as well as in abandoned gardens, where it can survive the competitive effects of secondary vegetation growth and spasmodic, opportune harvest to provide not only a reserve of clonal planting stocks, but, through flowering and seed set, produce new phenotypes or varieties from genetic recombination in the highly heterozygous, out-crossing species (Yen 1960). A cycle of breeding and maintenance of variability is thus constructed that evokes comparison with the situation in domestic animals, particularly the pig in New Guinea (Figure 1). R. Bulmer’s records (1965, 1966) of the beliefs of Highland peoples on the role of seed in the formation of new sweet potato varieties “influenced not only by observations of nature but by cosmological ideas” (1965:239) are a further attestation of the ethnobiological depth of indigenous knowledge which probably extends over the whole cultigen range. Although the agronomic control of breeding in sweet potato is the most conservative of all natural breeding systems, vegetative or clonal reproduction, as a constant selective force, it has not resulted in sterility, or even significant transformation of out-crossing to self fertilisation. This is probably due to another agronomic factor, the habitual planting of mixed varieties within individual fields. Thus when seasonal fluctuations are favourable for seed production, the natural cross fertilisation for the species is encouraged. Vegetative reproduction then serves to preserve the gene recombinations favoured by native selection, slowing down the evolutionary possibilities that may exist in the species. This pattern applies to the other traditional staple crop species - C olocasia taro and the D ioscorea yams, as well as a significant number of the putative New Guinea domesticates (Table 2).

The various species of domesticated yams as well as the genera of taro are also regarded as being of exotic origin, but of greater time depth of introduction into New Guinea than the sweet potato. This contention, as old as ethnobotany in the Pacific, is now under question. The wild yams of New Guinea have never had the scrutiny that has been focussed on the Asian, American and African forms (Coursey 1967); the relationships of the taro genera of the family Araceae, C olocasia, A locasia, C yrtosperm a, A m orphophallus in their Pacific distribution have generally been tied to the hypothetical west to east human dispersal of agriculture without further detailed analyses except for the cytological approaches to C olocasia taro of Yen and Wheeler (1968) and Coates et a l (1988). In the latter case, it has been the recent awareness of biologists of the long known existence of wild C olocasia and its use among the Australian Aborigines recorded in explorers’ journals and more recent investigations of Aboriginal food resources that has prompted the further chromosome study. Without going into detail, the results of comparison of the karyotypes of representative samples of wild and cultivated forms of C olocasia esculenta from Australia, New Guinea, the Pacific Islands, East and South Asia indicate that the species could have been the result of two separate domestications - Southeast Asian or Indian, and Oceanic or Sahulian. Thus natural, pre-agricultural dispersal in terms of the Laurasian ‘collision’ of some 20 million years ago (Whitmore 1981) is an implication of the data. It follows that New Guinea could have been a centre of domestication which, again on cytological evidence, was the source for taro that reached the outer margins of Polynesia in prehistory. We cannot say as much on evidence from D ioscorea , but for taro, the contemporary reflection of ‘stages of domestication’ and the possibilities of gene exchange between wild and cultivated forms with the maintenance of variability indicate the parallel with the sweet potato as well as the pig in the prehistory and history of domesticates.

The importance of vegetative reproduction for New Guinea and Oceanic crop plants has long been noted; facultative sexual reproduction as a source of variability is however a more recent realisation. This binary character is shared by important crops such as the Araceae, Dioscoraceae, sugar cane, sweet potato and a number of endemic New Guinea domesticates (Table 2). However, among the latter there is a group of taxonomically disparate cultigens which are functionally sterile, non-seed forming such as the Australimusa banana and particularly the vegetables of the grass family, Setaria palm ifolia and Saccharum edule. The continental island is also the centre of greatest known diversity of the diploid form of the Eumusa banana (Simmonds 1959:125), but the important edible forms of this group in the Pacific Islands are of the chromosomal type whose primary origin was in India, and secondarily in eastern Malaysia. The seedless

564 D.E. Yen

TABLE 2: THE CULTIGENS PUTATIVELY OF NEW GUINEA ORIGIN*

AREA OF ORIGIN USE EXTENSION OF ADAPTATION REPRODUCTIVESPECIES NEW GUINEA PACIFIC MODE

HIGHLAND (H)Abroma angustum V SHemigraphis sp. V C+Oenanthe javanica V c+Pandanus brosimos n C/SPandanus julianettii n c /sRorippa sp. V sRungia klossii V HF c+Setaria palmifolia V HF, LM c

HIGHLAND FRINGE (HF)Cordyline fruticosa a/r H, LM, C, I. pan-Pacific cMusa (Australimusa) f LM, I. tropical Polynesia cPandanus conoideus f L, I. c /s

LOW MONTANE (LM)Artocarpus altilis f/n HF, L, C, I. pan-Pacific sBurckella obovatum f C, I. E. Solomons sCanarium decumanum n I (Manus) E. Indonesia, Borneo sCanarium indicum n L, C, I. C. Solomons, Vanuatu sCanarium lamii n L, C. sDioscorea sp. t c+Piper methisticum s L, I (Manus) Polynesia, Micronesia cPometia pinnata f L, C, I. E. Solomons, W. Polynesia s

LOWLAND (L)Colocasia esculenta (?) t H, LM, C, I. pan-Pacific c+Cyrtosperma chamissonis t I. W. Polynesia, Micronesia c+Metroxylon rumphii X c+Metroxylon sagu X C, I. c+Saccharum edule V HF, LM. Vanuatu, Fiji cSaccharum officinarurrtt X H, HF. pan-Pacific c+

COASTAL (C)Terminalia copelandii n LM, L. s

ISLANDS (I)Talinum triangulare V Manus s

* Plants for human consumption; “industrial plants” are also included in the major source for this ethnobotanical information, Powell (1976).

Coding: USE:v = leaf or bud vegetable; n = nut or sees; a/r = personal adornment/ritual; f = fruit; t = tuber; x = stem extracted food

REPRODUCTIVE MODE or propagation method by cultivators:S = seed sown: C = clonal material planted: + = possibly also gathered, wild plants can be transferred for planting, and may hybridise naturally with cultivated; these possibilities all inherent in seeded category.

fruits of Australimusa and Eumusa bananas are due to formation without fertilisation, parthenocarpy, and Simmonds (1959:29) attributes this sterility to a complex of female sterility genes, triploidy and chromosome structural change that are likely to have occurred, at least in part, during the domestication process. Little is known of the biology of the graminaceous vegetables, but their sexual sterility is accompanied by a swelling of the ‘normally’ flowering shoots which are the edible portions. In the case of S. palm ifolia , the wild form with its prolific seed panicles offers a great contrast to the domesticated form. Thus in their final domesticated forms, all of these plants must rely on somatic or vegetative mutation for new variability - and indeed this must have occurred, for New Guinea cultivators recognise a large number of horticultural varieties.

Domestication: the Lessons from New Guinea 565

A further example of sterility that dictates clonal propagation is the kava plant, P ip e r m ethysticum . Although the species is dioecious (separate male and female plants) Lebot et a l (1986) and Lebot (1988) have shown that the female sterile kava is probably a direct descendant of P. wichm annii, endemic to New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Lebot’s view is that this human selection occurred in Vanuatu, on the grounds of significantly great phytochemical variability of the clonal varieties there. The distribution of P. m ethysticum as a cultigen in New Guinea, best summarised by Brunton (1988), however, leaves open the possibility that, like the chicken and dog adventive to New Guinea, kava could have been introduced as an imperfect domesticate into Vanuatu as a secondary centre of variability. It is not an uncommon phenomenon for such centres to produce wide arrays of cultigen phenotypes or cultivars from genetically variable or highly mutable parentage. The sweet potato in New Guinea with its importance as human and animal food is one; the early cultural importance of kava in Vanuatu (Brunton 1988) prompted large plant populations on which cultivators could exercise selection for useful somatic mutations. It is hardly necessary to point out that in these reproductive factors, the parallel between domestication of plants and animals diverges; animal sterility where it occurs is an entirely negative value, while clonal reproduction is only the property of the lower animal orders.

One of the most important parthenocarpic fruits in the Pacific, and specifically in Polynesia, is the breadfruit, A rtocarpu s altilis. In eastern Indonesia and New Guinea, there are seeded as well as relatively seedless forms however, and in many societies, the seeds are as important a source of food as the pulpy flesh. Thus there is a cline or a west-to-east gradient across the Pacific of seeded to seedless breadfruit, with, in the border region of Melanesia and Polynesia, a mixed set of the two in the eastern Solomon Islands, Samoa, Tonga, and virtually all varieties of eastern Polynesia seedless. In New Guinea, seedless forms are claimed, but this writer has never seen one; in all cases of such claims, ‘relatively seedless’ has to be our descriptor. Furthermore, the propagation of the ‘seedless’ varieties is by seed! Recent fieldwork in the Torricelli Mountains region of northern New Guinea, at some 500m above sea level, reveals that varieties of breadfruit are classed as seeded or ‘seedless’ with both domesticated as village and garden trees. Both forms are said to occur in the forests (the species being commonly acknowledged by foresters as a part of the rain forest flora), and seeds or seedlings may be taken for raising (rearing?) as cultivars.

Taking into account the common proximity of garden to forest there, the breadfruit situation (if these observations are accurate renditions of the information offered) does recall again the structure that we have built up o f pig husbandry, the gene exchange relationship of wild and cultivated and the potential for maintenance of variability in the species. Figure 1 could be repeated with the substitution of breadfruit for pig. It is contradictory, but necessary, to point out that the New Guinea agriculturists and domesticators, with their considerable penchant for vegetative propagation, have not been recorded as using this means of breadfruit breeding. Certainly the incidence of adventitious shoot growth from the base of breadfruit trees in New Guinea is rare, and we are uncertain whether this has a genetic basis or is environmental, for in both wild and garden contexts there, the competitive effects of accompanying flora are in contrast to the relatively clear settings provided for the species under cultivation in Polynesia.

Finally in this section it may be appropriate to refer to current study of the tree genus Canarium in New Guinea. In this case there is little doubt that this is the area of domestication, and that the breeding system of the various species conforms more with the animal parallel that I have tried to draw. Leenhouts, the most recent revisor of the family Burseraceae to which the genus belongs, states (1959:328), “in more recent times the main centre of speciation developed in New Guinea”. While although the species are monoecious (male and female flowers on the same tree), they are functionally cross fertilising because flowering of the two sexes does not coincide. There are no instances of vegetative reproduction in any of the domesticated (or wild) species studied.

Canarium indicum is a widespread species of considerable importance as a subsistence and ceremonial food in New Guinea and the Melanesian islands in coastal and low altitudinal rain forest environments, spreading eastward as far as the eastern islands of Indonesia and into the San Cristobal and northern Vanuatu. It is also the source of canoe and building woods, and its wood resin was valued for lighting and caulking functions. There seems little doubt that it, like breadfruit, is a natural component of New Guinea rain forests where it is still exploited in the gathering activities of subsistence agriculturists. As a cultigen, its maximal expression is coastal and on the islands, where its arboricultural role as a perennial producer in the taro-yam- sweet potato annual round is integral. In areas more isolated from the sea, e.g. the middle Sepik and the Yuat Rivers, the tree still forms a part of the cultigen range in village gardens, but wild representatives of the species are known in the general proximity: their seedlings are in fact sometimes brought in for planting. In the higher settlements, e.g. in the Torricellis near Lumi Station the often single cultivated trees are so close to wild specimens that are in all probability fertilised by them in a situation of gene exchange. One might be sceptical about the informants’ assignment of wild and cultivated categories were it not for the breadfruit example in the same locality, and further, their typing of another species C. lam ii as cultivated only. This

566 D.E. Yen

species appears to have its centre of domestication in the Markham Valley of northeastern New Guinea, and its distribution on the north coast as cultigen reaches as far as Vanimo at the Irian Jaya border. There are however, isolated reports of feralisation, e.g. in the Madang area, but no specimens of truly wild examples in the forest have been reported or found so far.

Again, this partial summary of the ongoing C anarium study contains (without the question of founder stocks as adventive) the elements of the husbandry story of pigs in New Guinea - and the parallel that can be drawn with the interpretative Figure 1.

DOMESTICATION AND AGRICULTURAL SYSTEM - A SYNOPSISIn this paper the commitment is the control of reproduction as the cardinal characteristic of domestication;

the degree of control indicates the degree of domestication. Using the synchronic evidence of “stages” of progression in New Guinea pig husbandry, the evolutionary analogy may be appropriate enough, with the environment for natural selection being imperfectly altered through m an’s intercession. Perhaps Figure 2, as an alternative for Figure 1, may better encompass that contention through simplicity - and obviousness, as a process of enlarged focus for plant and animal species, and omitting the again imperfect environmental correlation that does not apply to other species.Using the pig as the primary and most comprehensive example of development of domestication, we have looked on the steps as the interconnected units in what we could call the New Guinea pig husbandry system. Neither basic wild/feral hunting or the derivative progressive control methods are abandoned in terms of the whole system (analogous to evolutionary extinction); rather are they dispersed spatially in that system. Over the range of domesticate plants of New Guinea (Table 2) there have been a number o f specific examples exemplified that show similar pathways of husbandry development. Such development should not be taken as contemporary, parallel in time in each case to that of pig; but as we have seen, there is enough archaeological evidence to suggest that some integrated agriculture that incorporated the components of animal husbandry, plant cultivation and perhaps arboriculture and hunting-gathering is of considerable antiquity, and structurally was still the system in ethnographic times. Indeed the wild forms of progenitor species, through their occasional yet regulated gene infusion into cultivated populations, were and are an essential genetic pan of the agricultural system. While all of this may be couched in biological and perhaps evolutionary terminology, it is in the socio-cultural connections that the motor force for the whole organic system must be sought.

Trade and exchange are, of course the other essential components of subsistence systems, and these in New Guinea, particularly inter-group, are the channels, the mechanisms through which gene exchanges can be made in the domestic biota, the ‘higher’ developmental stages. The accounts of Kelly on the Etoro pigs and of Meggitt on the Enga are very clear examples of social phenomena, with cultural bases of quite different values, yet imbuing the agricultural situations with the opportunities for gene exchange within the systems of cultural exchange between or within groups practicing semi-domesticate and domesticate pig husbandry.

With plants their transfer appears to be more clearly secular, and the renewal or supplementation of varietal stocks of sweet potato affected by frost is an obvious example. However, in modem times with increased mobility of even the remotest peoples, horticultural curiosity is a big factor in promoting transfer. Examples are the Canarium transfers we have mentioned, and many others like the m arita or Pandanus conoideus now a market item in Manus whose transfer is attributed to medical assistants working in Goroka. In more traditional times however, plants could have been a part of the chain of exchange routes that distributed marine shell and other valuables between the Highlands from the coast (Hughes 1977), with even more frail linkages. Thus even at formative stages, these routes could have provided the means of transfers at varietal and species levels by which gene exchange within species and even hybridisation between species could occur to produce the variability on which the cultivators could enact selection.

I have alluded to the ethnobiological knowledge of the New Guinea agriculturists, and questioned without answer the possibility that this construction that I have put on the system is not known, or a version of it known - the concept of wild and cultivated in their utilitarian, functional relationship. To this end, it may be apposite to quote one of the earlier, great New Guinea ethnographers, F.E. Williams (1941:246-7) who, referring to the “imitative magic” of the people of Lake Kutubu, describes the planting of sugar cane, sweet potato and banana with mutterings of metaphorical identifications of the cuttings as wild species grass, vine and broad-leafed plant respectively, the planter wishes his plantings to grow with as much vigour as the wild species. It is a step, perhaps a long one, to his recognition of the genetic contribution of feral forms to his domesticated plants?

Sometimes ethnoscientists tend to treat native classification systems as ends in themselves. Others however, among them Bulmer and Majnep, with special skills in subject languages are able to go beyond in plumbing concepts of environment. A recent example is Conklin’s (1986) account of the orientation of rice planting among the Hanunoo and their view of the nature and direction of winds. What I have tried to say in this paper concerns the genetic aspects of the agricultural environment, but from an etic standpoint with only

Domestication: the Lessons from New Guinea 567

some supporting evidence coming from internal emic sources. Ralph would find wry humour in the fact that I now reverse the direction of an acknowledgement he made to me in one of his papers when he said that I would regard with apprehension his wilder speculations!

o -

9=c?

Selection control

Domesticated

Developm ental line

Figure 2: The development of domestication in New Guinea plants and animals. The figure to the left of the “Progression” line represents the development of artificial selection from natural selection, while the figure to the right expresses the developmental stages (Figure 1) in the fashion of an evolutionary tree. Read together, the two parts of this figure portray not only development over time, but also that all their features exist in the ethnographic present.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In writing this paper, textual reference alone to the work of Jim Baldwin on the New Guinea domesticated animals is insufficient; he gave me the central idea, even though he might not know it. Win Mumford again rendered my strange designs into clear diagrammatic form. Also I acknowledge the help of two young colleagues in this Department: Jo Mangi who shared with me traditional information on pig breeding from his native Wahgi Valley and from his wide experience in other Highland and fringe Highland areas, including the Eastern where his wife was bom; and Chris Ballard who pointed out to me the important Kelly paper. I am solely and inescapably responsible however, for my use of these and the other invaluable sources.

To Ralph Bulmer, thank you . . . .valel

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