Lineage separation· Where Sapiens lives

The Austronesian expansion

4,475 BCE

About 5,000 years ago, the lineage that would reach the last uninhabited lands left Taiwan, carried by farming and then by the outrigger and the double-hulled canoe.

Departure from Taiwan of the lineage that will reach the last uninhabited lands, carried by an agricultural expansion and then 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 about 5,230 years ago and establish an expansion in pulses separated by long intervals, which the authors connect to technical and social innovations. Ancient DNA supplies a different result. The first occupants of Vanuatu and Tonga, three thousand years ago, carried almost no Papuan ancestry; it arrived afterwards, from about 2,500 years ago, and came to replace nearly all of the founding ancestry. The Austronesian languages remained. A language ordinarily accompanies the population that speaks it, which was not the case here.

Dating & uncertainty

Linguistic phylogenies place the Austronesian origin in Taiwan around 5,200 years. Genomics establishes that the East Asian ancestors of Pacific populations may have separated from the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan before that expansion began. Vanuatu shows why the two datings must not be conflated: a linguistic date marks the diffusion of a language, a genetic date that of a population, and in that archipelago the two dissociated entirely.