Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) was first colonized by modern humans at least 45,000 years ago, but the extent to which the modern inhabitants trace their ancestry to the first settlers is a matter of debate. It is widely held, in both archaeology and linguistics, that they are largely descended from a second wave of dispersal, proto-Austronesian-speaking agriculturalists who originated in China and spread to Taiwan approximately 5,500 years ago. From there, they are thought to have dispersed into ISEA approximately 4,000 years ago, assimilating the indigenous populations. Here, we demonstrate that mitochondrial DNA diversity in the region is extremely high and includes a large number of indigenous clades. Only a fraction of these date back to the time of first settlement, and the majority appear to mark dispersals in the late-Pleistocene or early-Holocene epoch most likely triggered by postglacial flooding. There are much closer genetic links to Taiwan than to the mainland, but most of these probably predated the mid-Holocene "Out of Taiwan" event as traditionally envisioned. Only approximately 20% at most of modern mitochondrial DNAs in ISEA could be linked to such an event, suggesting that, if an agriculturalist migration did take place, it was demographically minor, at least with regard to the involvement of women.

Modern humans have been living in Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) for at least 50,000 years. Largely because of the influence of linguistic studies, however, which have a shallow time depth, the attention of archaeologists and geneticists has usually been focused on the last 6,000 years--in particular, on a proposed Neolithic dispersal from China and Taiwan. Here we use complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome sequencing to spotlight some earlier processes that clearly had a major role in the demographic history of the region but have hitherto been unrecognized. We show that haplogroup E, an important component of mtDNA diversity in the region, evolved in situ over the last 35,000 years and expanded dramatically throughout ISEA around the beginning of the Holocene, at the time when the ancient continent of Sundaland was being broken up into the present-day archipelago by rising sea levels. It reached Taiwan and Near Oceania more recently, within the last approximately 8,000 years. This suggests that global warming and sea-level rises at the end of the Ice Age, 15,000-7,000 years ago, were the main forces shaping modern human diversity in the region.

This paper reviews the archaeological evidence for maritime interaction spheres in Island Southeast Asia during the Neolithic and preceding millennia. It accepts that cereal agriculture was well-established in Taiwan during the Neolithic but finds minimal evidence for the transmission of agriculture from Taiwan to Island Southeast Asia. Accordingly, the scholarly dispute in early Austronesian culture history between farming and maritime perspectives is deemed to be based on a vacuous opposition. In terms of a foraging/ farming dichotomy, Austronesians' origins were evidently associated with cereal agriculture in the region of the Taiwan Strait, but their southward expansion was predicated on maritime foraging and trade. Introd uction One of the interests Sandra Bowdler pursued. during the time I was a colleague at the University of Western Australia, was the persistence of the hunter-gatherer economy in the Kimberleys and Arnhem Land despite centuries of visitation by Macassan sea-cucumber collectors. Even though some Aborigines toured Macassar, and witnessed first-hand its agriculturally-based subsistence economy, there was not the slightest tendency for the northern Australian Aboriginal economy to incorporate agricultural practices (Bowdler 2002). My interest looks at this same interaction from an Island Southeast Asian (ISEA) point of view: Why did these visiting Macassans not make some sort of agricultural incursion into northern Australia? Why did they restrict their economic activities in Australia to trade? I see here an ethnohistorical allegory that could clarify poorly-understood aspects of the Austronesian diaspora. Austronesians are defined as people whose first language belongs to the Austronesian family. Most historical linguists assign all the ex-Taiwan Austronesian languages. from Madagascar through ISEA and the Pacific, to a single 'Malayo-Polynesian' branch, ofessentially the same time-depth as the nine branches ofAustronesian restricted to Taiwan (Pawley 2002). The hypothetical, reconstructed ancestor of these indistinguishably deep branches, both ex-Taiwan (descended from proto-Malayo-Polynesian. or PMP) and in Taiwan, is referred to as Proto-Austronesian (PAN). PAN itself would have had an ancestor, which may be labelled pre-Austronesian, distinguishable from PAN by dint of the implausibility of its reconstruction from extant Austronesian languages through standard historical linguistic techniques. While numerous proposals have been published for a deep-seated relationship between Austronesian

This paper reviews the current evidence on typologically specialized tools assigned to the Toalean tradition of the southwest Sulawesi peninsula. Bone points and a range of stone points appeared across the peninsula in the early Holocene; this probably occurred as part of the expansion of archery and improved spear technology in Island Southeast Asia at the time. The technologically most specialized Toalean tools, namely backed microliths and Maros points, were evidently confined to the southwest of the peninsula. Backed microliths occur in contexts spanning some six millennia, but Maros points were largely restricted to the immediately preceramic period, approximately 5500 to 3500 B.P. The distribution of these tool types closely matches the area where late Holocene pottery in the ornate "Sa Huynh-Kalanay" tradition has been recorded, and where Makasar languages are spoken today. Sulawesi's southwest peninsula may have effectively been an island throughout much of the Holocene, and its southwest fringe runs hard against a major cordillera. Thus, physiographic constraints laid the basis for the division of the peninsula into two "social landscapes" that display long-term continuity throughout the Holocene, notwithstanding fundamental changes in subsistence patterns and technology.

Recently published craniometric and genetic studies indicate a predominantly indigenous ancestry of Indian populations. We address this issue with a fuller coverage of Indian craniometrics than any done before. We analyse metrical variability within Indian series, Indians' sexual dimorphism, differences between northern and southern Indians, index-based differences of Indian males from other series, and Indians' multivariate affinities. The relationship between a variable's magnitude and its variability is log-linear. This relationship is strengthened by excluding cranial fractions and series with a sample size less than 30. Male crania are typically larger than female crania, but there are also shape differences. Northern Indians differ from southern Indians in various features including narrower orbits and less pronounced medial protrusion of the orbits. Indians resemble Veddas in having small crania and similar cranial shape. Indians' wider geographic affinities lie with “Caucasoid” populations to the northwest, particularly affecting northern Indians. The latter finding is confirmed from shape-based Mahalanobis-D distances calculated for the best sampled male and female series. Demonstration of a distinctive South Asian craniometric profile and the intermediate status of northern Indians between southern Indians and populations northwest of India confirm the predominantly indigenous ancestry of northern and especially southern Indians.