Human settlement of Oceania marked the culmination of a global colonization process that began when humans first left Africa at least 90,000 years ago. The precise origins and dispersal routes of the Austronesian peoples and the associated Lapita culture remain contentious, and numerous disparate models of dispersal (based primarily on linguistic, genetic, and archeological data) have been proposed. Here, through the use of mtDNA from 781 modern and ancient Sus specimens, we provide evidence for an early humanmediated translocation of the Sulawesi warty pig (Sus celebensis) to Flores and Timor and two later separate human-mediated dispersals of domestic pig (Sus scrofa) through Island Southeast Asia into Oceania. Of the later dispersal routes, one is unequivocally associated with the Neolithic (Lapita) and later Polynesian migrations and links modern and archeological Javan, Sumatran, Wallacean, and Oceanic pigs with mainland Southeast Asian S. scrofa. Archeological and genetic evidence shows these pigs were certainly introduced to islands east of the Wallace Line, including New Guinea, and that so-called ''wild'' pigs within this region are most likely feral descendants of domestic pigs introduced by early agriculturalists. The other later pig dispersal links mainland East Asian pigs to western Micronesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines. These results provide important data with which to test current models for human dispersal in the region.domestication ͉ mtDNA ͉ Pacific colonization ͉ phylogeography

Despite the almost ubiquitous presence of Holocene

A systematic description is given to a Middle Pleistocene remain (M3) from Locality 1 of Ube Kosan Quarry, and three Late Pleistocene remains (frontal bone, I2 and P4) from the Kannondo cave site. These remains are important to elucidate morphological characters of wild boars inhabited the mainland of Japan during the Pleistocene, because wild boar remains dated certainly as the Pleistocene are quite limited in Japan. The remains are compared with the living and Quaternary fossil suid species known from East Asia. The morphological characters of the remains are mostly coincident with those of Sus scrofa, an extant species now widely distributed in Eurasia, but the exact identification is left pending owing to the insufficiency of the morphological data of the fossil species as well as the poor preservation of the present remains. The remains are therefore assigned to S. cf. scrofa. As regards the size of the remains, the M3 is larger than that of S. scrofa leucomystax, an extant subspecies of S. scrofa now distributed in Honshu-Shikoku-Kyushu, but is approximately as large as those of S. scrofa from other Middle Pleistocene localities. The other three remains are approximately as large as S. s. leucomystax. On the basis of the present study as well as the data so far obtained, it is inferred that the wild boar of S. scrofa or its allied form already inhabited Honshu-Shikoku-Kyushu in the middle Middle Pleistocene, and then decreased toward the Late Pleistocene. From the late Late Pleistocene to Holocene, it increased drastically, and became a dominant artiodactyl in the Holocene fauna of Honshu-Shikoku-Kyushu.