The appearance of people associated with the Lapita culture in the South Pacific ~3,000 years ago1 marked the beginning of the last major human dispersal to unpopulated lands. However, the relationship of these pioneers to the long established Papuans of the New Guinea region is unclear. We report genome-wide ancient DNA data from four individuals from Vanuatu (~3100-2700 years before present) and Tonga (~2700-2300 years before present), and co-analyze them with 778 present-day East Asians and Oceanians. Today, indigenous peoples of the South Pacific harbor a mixture of ancestry from Papuans and a population of East Asian origin that does not exist in unmixed form today, but is a match to the ancient individuals. Most analyses have interpreted the minimum of twenty-five percent Papuan ancestry in the region today as evidence that the first humans to reach Remote Oceania, including Polynesia, were derived from population mixtures near New Guinea, prior to the further expansion into Remote Oceania2–5. However, our finding that the ancient individuals had little to no Papuan ancestry implies later human population movements that spread Papuan ancestry through the South Pacific after the islands’ first peopling.

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

The excavation of Kilu Cave and the discovery of a Pleistocene prehistory for the Solomon Islands have already been reported in ANTIQUITY by Wickler & Spriggs (62: 703–6). Residue analysis of stone artefacts from the site now provides the earliest direct evidence for the prehistoric use of root vegetables, in the form of starch grains and crystalline raphides identifiable to genus. The direct microscopic identification of starch grains opens new avenues for the study of the plant component of human diets in the distant past.

In a recent ANTIQUITY article (65: 767-95) Atholl Anderson presented a detailed analysis of radiocarbon dates to show that the settlement of New Zealand occurred later than previously thought. In this paper Anderson teams up with another proponent of 'chronometric hygiene', Matthew Spriggs [see ANTIQUITY 63: 587-61 31, to examine the dates for the colonization of the rest of East Polynesia. Once again the generally accepted dates for initial settlement are found wanting and a later chronology is suggested. The settlement of East Polynesia, a vast region ( 2 0 million sq. km), stretching between Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island and containing little and scattered land (0.29 million sq: km), raises intriguing questions about prehistoric development of maritime skills, cultural change and adaptation to island environments, but hypotheses about these depend importantly upon the chronology of colonization. An older model had initial settlement of the Marquesas about AD 300, then dispersal to Easter Island about AD 400, Hawaii about AD 750 and the Societies and New