Remote Melanesia: One History or Two? An Addendum to Donohue and Denham

Abstract

Blust (2005) proposed that certain typological traits in the Austronesian languages of Vanuatu and New Caledonia—here called “Remote Melanesia”—suggest Papuan contact influence in situ . Given the absence of any pre-Lapita archaeological tradition in this area, it now seems best to frame this hypothesis in terms of two closely spaced migrations that appear to be archaeologically indistinguishable. The first wave brought Austronesian speakers of southern Mongoloid physical type into Remote Oceania. The second wave brought Papuan speakers who had acquired the outrigger canoe complex, pottery, and some other elements of material culture from the incoming Austronesians in Near Oceania, but who remained biologically and culturally distinct from them in other ways. In time, the Papuan languages of Remote Melanesia were abandoned in favor of the more uniform and widely dispersed speech of late Proto-Oceanic speakers, but not before leaving traces of their former presence in the form of typological divergence toward a pattern that is more typical of Papuan languages than of Austronesian languages outside Melanesia.

Language evolution and human history: what a difference a date makes

“…One possibility is that there is a more complex history in this region. The languages of New Caledonia and Vanuatu show some strikingly non-Austronesian features such as serial verb constructions, and the cultures there show some unusual similarities with some cultures from highland New Guinea-including nasal septum piercings, penis sheathes and mop-like headdresses [61]. It has recently been suggested that one explanation for these similarities might be two waves of settlement into Remote Oceania, with a first wave of Austronesian-speaking settlers being rapidly followed by a second wave of Papuan peoples who had acquired Austronesian voyaging technology [61].…”

The Austronesian Homeland and Dispersal

“…This disconnect between language affiliation and physical and cultural type perhaps reaches its most extreme expression in Vanuatu, where serial verbs-virtually universal in Papuan languages, but atypical for most of the Austronesian languages-are common, languages have recurrently abandoned an inherited Proto-Oceanic decimal system of counting for quinary or other systems, and various features of material culture are utterly foreign to any Austronesian-speaking group outside Melanesia but are typical of Papuan speakers in the New Guinea area. This finding has led to suggestions that the first population of Vanuatu was Polynesian-like, but was overlaid by a subsequent influx of Papuan-speaking or heavily papuanized Austronesian-speaking people (Donohue & Denham 2008, Blust 2008. Although linguists led the way in inferring a double population history in Vanuatu, this inference has been spectacularly confirmed by the results of recent genetic studies that date the overlay to several centuries after initial settlement, and identify its locus as the island of New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago (Lipson et al 2018, Posth et al 2018.…”

Linguistic Melanesia

“…Although both these bases have good physiological motivations and can therefore be reasonably expected to emerge spontaneously, the concentration of Austronesian languages with base 5/20 in Maritime Melanesia indicates that significant areal pressure has given rise to them. This picture of convergence is reinforced by the observation that base 5 and base 20 have developed independently in even closely related Austronesian languages; over 50 distinct innovations of these bases have been documented for Austronesian languages of the Melanesian area (Blust 2008, Dunn et al 2008, Schapper and Hammarström 2013.…”