The success of human beings depends crucially on numbers and connections. A few hundred people cannot sustain a sophisticated technology. Recall that Australia was colonized 45,000 years ago by pioneers spreading east from Africa along the shore of Asia. The vanguard of such a migration must have been small in number and must have traveled comparatively light. The chances are they had only a sample of the technology available to their relatives back at the Red Sea crossing. This may explain why Australian aboriginal technology, although it developed and elaborated steadily over the ensuing millennia, was lacking in so many features of the Old World ― elastic weapons, for example, such as bows and catapults, were unknown, as were ovens. It was not that they were ‘primitive’ or that they had mentally regressed; it was that they ________________________________ and did not have a dense enough population and therefore a large enough collective brain to develop them much further. [3점]

* catapult: 투석기