Lineage separation· Where Sapiens lives
The Austronesian expansion
4,475 BCE
The lineage that will reach the last empty islands sets out from Taiwan, carried by a farming expansion and, later, by the outrigger and the double-hulled canoe.
What the evidence shows
Four hundred Austronesian languages, arranged into a phylogeny, place the origin in Taiwan and date it to about 5,230 years ago, and show an expansion in pulses separated by long pauses, which the authors find linked to technological and social innovations. The ancient DNA tells a stranger story. The first people to reach Vanuatu and Tonga, three thousand years ago, carried almost no Papuan ancestry at all; it arrived afterwards, from around 2,500 years ago, and went on to replace the founding ancestry almost entirely. The Austronesian languages nonetheless stayed. Population replacement with language continuity is close to unheard of, and this is the clearest case of it we have.
Dating & uncertainty
Language phylogenies place the Austronesian origin in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago. Genomics finds that the East Asian ancestors of Pacific populations may have parted from Taiwanese Indigenous peoples before that expansion began. And in Vanuatu the language stayed Austronesian while the population was almost entirely replaced, which is the plainest warning available that a linguistic date and a genetic one need not mark the same event.
Sources
- Gray, R. D., Drummond, A. J. & Greenhill, S. J. (2009), Science · Language phylogenies reveal expansion pulses and pauses in Pacific settlement
- Choin, J. et al. (2021), Nature · Genomic insights into population history and biological adaptation in Oceania
- Skoglund, P. et al. (2016), Nature · Genomic insights into the peopling of the Southwest Pacific
- Posth, C. et al. (2018), Nature Ecology & Evolution · Language continuity despite population replacement in Remote Oceania
- Ioannidis et al. (2020), Nature · Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement