Recent studies in human genetics, biology, archaeology, and historical linguistics have converged to sharpen our understanding of the peopling of Oceania and the interplay of population migrations, the agents of disease and selection, and the ubiquity of change there. Together, they represent a remarkable exercise of the joint power of what one might venture to call a ''synthetic'' anthropology.
The 1993 collection of articles in Human Biology in Papua New Guinea: The Small Cosmos (edited by Robert Attenborough and Michael Alpers) offered an excellent summary of human biology and important related materials from linguistics, social anthropology, and archaeology in that area (it was in part a sequel to the volume edited by Hill and Serjeantsen in the same Oxford Press Series). The region that includes New Guinea and Island Melanesia has been synonymous with unexplained variability and complexity in both ecology and human biology, contrasting with the uniformity found in the widely dispersed islands in the Central and Eastern Pacific. As the editors say, ''within this small cosmos (of Papua New Guinea) may be displayed, in microcosm, the mechanisms and forces which have influenced the past migration of human beings into new environments and the creation of distinct cultures and languages: the dynamics of small, semi-isolated genetic pools responding to the challenges of disease, geog-