Tasmania!

The other day I met a new friend who has just returned to HK after spending 12 years of "exile" in - of all the places in the world - Tasmania! (No, that's NOT a picture of my friend)

Why the exclamation, you ask? Well, she's the first person I personally know who's been to this island featured in one of my favorite books, Jared Diamond's Gun Germs and Steel. What makes Tasmania special is that it was "the most extreme outpost of the most extreme continent." It was part of Australia until 10,000 years ago when the land bridge in between was severed by rising sea level. Those who walked to Tasmania from Australia before the flood would never get to see another thing from the mainland. Tasmania has lost all contacts with the outside world - for 10,000 years - until the Europeans arrived in 1642.

Jared Diamond uses Tasmania as an example to illustrate the significance of small population size and isolation for the pace of development. Here's his description of the state of Tasmania when the Europeans arrived,

"Tasmania was occupied by 4,000 hunter/gatherers related to mainland Australians, but with the simplest technology of any recent people on Earth. Unlike mainland Aboriginal Australians, Tasmanians couldn't start a fire; they had no boomerangs, spear throwers, or shields; they had no bone tools, no specialized stone tools, and no compound tools like an axe head mounted on a handle; they couldn't cut down a tree or hollow out a canoe; they lacked sewing to make sewn clothing, despite Tasmania's cold winter climate with snow; and, incredibly, though they lived mostly on the sea coast, the Tasmanians didn't catch or eat fish. How did those enormous gaps in Tasmanian material culture arise?"

Learn more about Tasmania and allegedly the last Tasmanian Aborigine (the one in the picture).