PEOPLING × LANGUAGE

The Austronesian Expansion

~5,200 years ago

History · Bronze Age · Holocene · Northgrippian

From Taiwan, about 5,200 years ago, farming and seafaring peoples began a dispersal that carried their languages from Madagascar to Easter Island.

The Austronesian expansion designates the dispersal, from Taiwan about 5,200 years ago, of farming and seafaring populations carrying a language family today comprising more than a thousand languages, spoken from Madagascar to Easter Island. Its chronology is established by the comparison of vocabularies: two long-separated languages share a smaller proportion of basic lexicon than two recently separated ones, and the difference, calibrated against historically dated separations, converts into elapsed time. Ancient DNA supplies a correction: the first occupants of Remote Oceania, bearers of the Lapita culture, presented only minimal Papuan ancestry, which spread through the islands during later movements.

Why it matters

This is the last large-scale human dispersal into uninhabited land, and it rests on open-sea navigation, the outrigger canoe and the sail rendering the crossing of the largest ocean practicable. It gives rise to the Polynesian settlements on one side and to the peopling of Madagascar on the other, a human geography covering half the longitudes of the globe.

Dating & uncertainty

Bayesian phylogenies established on 400 Austronesian languages locate the origin of the expansion in Taiwan about 5,230 years ago and describe it as a succession of pulses separated by pauses. Ancient DNA from Vanuatu and Tonga shows that the oldest sequenced individuals of Remote Oceania, about 3,000 years ago, carried almost no Papuan ancestry. The date retained corresponds to the departure from Taiwan.

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