The Austronesian Homeland and Dispersal

Abstract

The Austronesian language family is the second largest on Earth in number of languages, and was the largest in geographical extent before the European colonial expansions of the past five centuries. This alone makes the determination of its homeland a research question of the first order. There is now near-universal agreement among both linguists and archaeologists that the Austronesian expansion began from Taiwan, somewhat more than a millennium after it was settled by Neolithic rice and millet farmers from Southeast China. The first “long pause,” between the settlement of Taiwan and of the northern Philippines, may have been due to inadequate sailing technology, an obstacle that was overcome by the invention of the outrigger canoe complex. The second “long pause,” between the settlement of Fiji–Western Polynesia and of the rest of Triangle Polynesia, may also have been due to inadequate sailing technology, an obstacle that was overcome by the invention of the double-hulled canoe.

Ancient DNA from Guam and the peopling of the Pacific

“…A Philippine source for the foundational population of Guam is consistent with the findings of modern DNA sampling (28), the linguistic evidence (2,21), and the archaeological signature at the time of first Marianas settlement about 3.5 kya (30,43). However, computer simulations of sea voyaging instead have indicated New Guinea or the Bismarck Archipelago as probable origin points of voyages reaching the Marianas (33,34).…”

Dialects of Madagascar

“…The Austronesian expansion, which very likely started from Taiwan or from the South of China, is probably the most spectacular event of maritime colonization in human history. There is a huge literature on this subject, let us just mention a very recent survey [1] with an interesting hypothesis concerning the correlation between expansion bursts and technological innovations.…”

“…In principle one can fix τ by a single known historical date. For example, Icelandic (language 1) and Norwegian (language 2) started to separate T(1, 2) = 1100 years ago; on the other side their lexical distance D (1,2) or their overlap C(1, 2) = 1 − D(1, 2) can be easily computed from vocabulary by Swadesh approach; then, from the equation Tð1; 2Þ ¼ À t 2 ln Cð1; 2Þ the value of τ remains determined because both T(1, 2) and D(1, 2) are known.…”

A Reflection of Painting Tradition and Culture of the Austronesian Based on the Rock Art in Misool, Raja Ampat, West Papua

“…This theory was later supported by Robert Blust, a linguist, and Peter Bellwood an archaeologist. Robert Blust (1985) supported Chang's work by conducting a study that reconstructs proto-language by comparing the vocabulary of various types of plants, animals, and natural phenomena around it. Blust concludes that the place of origin for the ancestors of Austronesian speakers should be in the areas that have unstable tectonic conditions, are part of sub-tropical regions, have winters, experience storms and hurricanes regularly, and are located at the west of the Wallacea line; a place that fits most of these criteria is Taiwan (Tanudirjo & Simanjuntak, 2004).…”

“…The Middle-Eastern Malayo Polynesian sub-group branched back around 3000 BC and became Middle Malayo-Polynesian and Eastern Polynesian Malayo, which marked the migration from Maluku to the south towards Nusa Tenggara and east towards the West Papuan bird head. Finally, language branching occurred again in the eastern region, which became a subgroup of southern Halmahera until the West Papua and Oceanic languages in Melanesia and Polynesia around 2,000 BC (Tanudirjo & Simanjuntak, 2004;Blust, 1985).…”