PEOPLING × LANGUAGE

The People of the Outrigger

~5,200 years ago

History · Bronze Age · Holocene · Northgrippian

About 5,200 years ago, farmers and sailors began leaving Taiwan, carrying a language family that would become the world's most oceanic: Austronesian, spoken today from Madagascar to Easter Island. Language trees trace the pulses and pauses of the advance. Ancient DNA adds a surprise: the first settlers of Remote Oceania, bearers of the Lapita culture, had barely mixed with the long-established peoples of New Guinea; that ancestry spread through the islands only later.

Why it matters

This was the last great human dispersal into lands where no one had ever lived, and its hero is the boat: outrigger and sail turned the largest ocean into a road. The expansion seeded the Polynesian voyages on one side of the world and, improbably, Madagascar on the other. Half the globe's longitudes drew their human geography from one island's departure lounge.

Dating & uncertainty

Bayesian phylogenies of 400 Austronesian languages root the expansion in Taiwan about 5,230 years ago and describe it as pulses separated by pauses; ancient DNA from Vanuatu and Tonga shows that the earliest people yet sampled in Remote Oceania, around 3,000 years ago, carried little or no Papuan ancestry, implying that it spread through the region with later movements. The anchor marks the departure from Taiwan.

Sources

1. Gray, Drummond & Greenhill (2009), Science · Language phylogenies reveal expansion pulses and pauses in Pacific settlementdoi:10.1126/science.1166858
2. Skoglund et al. (2016), Nature · Genomic insights into the peopling of the Southwest Pacificdoi:10.1038/nature19844
3. Greenhill, Drummond & Gray (2010), PLOS ONE · How accurate and robust are the phylogenetic estimates of Austronesian language relationships?doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009573

Our species’ history as one day

23:36:0523 min 55 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day