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 about 5,230 years ago and show an expansion in pulses separated by long pauses, which the authors connect 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; it arrived afterwards, from around 2,500 years ago, and went on to replace the founding ancestry almost entirely. The Austronesian languages stayed. A language usually travels with the people who speak it, and here it did not.

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. Vanuatu shows why the two dates should not be merged: a linguistic date marks when a language spread, a genetic one when a population did, and in that archipelago they came apart completely.

Sources

1. Gray, R. D., Drummond, A. J. & Greenhill, S. J. (2009), Science · Language phylogenies reveal expansion pulses and pauses in Pacific settlement
2. Choin, J. et al. (2021), Nature · Genomic insights into population history and biological adaptation in Oceania
3. Skoglund, P. et al. (2016), Nature · Genomic insights into the peopling of the Southwest Pacific
4. Posth, C. et al. (2018), Nature Ecology & Evolution · Language continuity despite population replacement in Remote Oceania
5. Ioannidis et al. (2020), Nature · Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement