Settling The Pacific Islands

[KeyserXSoze]

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/latestnewsstory.cfm?storyID=3587478&thesection=news&thesubsection=world

ANU team unearths 3000-year-old bodies in Vanuatu

CANBERRA - Headless bodies buried 3000 years ago at the oldest cemetery found in the Pacific Islands were set to reveal the secrets of the first humans to colonise Vanuatu, Fiji and Polynesia, an Australian research team said.

The Australian National University (ANU) team said today traces of the Lapita people, who are the ancestors of all Pacific Islanders beyond the Solomons, had been found in more than 100 other archaeological digs across the region.

But few human remains had been found until the latest dig in Vanuatu.

The work has been co-ordinated by ANU archaeologist Professor Matthew Spriggs and the Vanuatu National Museum.

"Pottery found at the site dates back to 1200 BC - 200 years earlier than it was previously thought the Lapita people had arrived in Vanuatu, and the discovery of 13 skeletons has suddenly opened a rich vein of information about these ancestors of all Polynesians," Prof Spriggs said in a statement.

"This is easily one of the most significant sites in the Pacific. It is the oldest cemetery and contains the earliest group of human remains ever discovered in the region."

Prof Spriggs said finding remains of Lapita people was rare. In fact, so few remains had been found at other sites that it was thought they must have been buried at sea.

"At this site, everywhere we put a hole we dug up bodies," he said.

"Not only is the discovery significant, because unearthing so many bodies offers the first chance to see what the Lapita people would have looked like, but the cemetery also revealed a great deal about their culture through the way the bodies were buried."

He said all the adult skeletons were missing their heads.

The archaeological team found the heads had been removed some time after the bodies had been first buried, with shell bracelets put in their place.

Prof Spriggs said the site was discovered accidentally by a bulldozer driver building an embankment for a prawn farm.

He said the discovery would not have come to light without an earlier ANU training program he conducted which taught archaeology to field workers and staff from the Vanuatu National Museum.

A field worker from the same village as the driver realised the significance of a piece of pottery he had kept from the site and reported the find.

 

[KeyserXSoze]

More on Lapita

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1226505.htm

Mysterious pottery shows true face of first Pacific settlers
Staring out from an ancient piece of pottery, the mysterious face of a bearded man has given scientists a unique glimpse of what the first settlers of Fiji may have looked like.

Researchers say the "extraordinary discovery" is a vital clue in mapping out how the South Pacific came to be inhabited some 3,000 years ago, suggesting the first direct link to islands some thousands of kilometres away.

Thought to be the work of the Lapita people - a long-lost race which originated near modern-day Taiwan then migrated to Polynesia - the fragment is also at least 200 years older than any other piece found in Fiji.

"This is the first time that a clearly recognisable face design made in three dimensions on a piece of Lapita pottery has been found in Fiji," said a statement from the University of the South Pacific, based in the archipelago.

Preliminary analysis shows that the eerie-looking face consists of a prominent raised nose, the left eye and what might be eyelashes, said Roselyn Kumar of the University of the South Pacific's Institute of Applied Sciences.

There are also designs that suggest what might be head-hair, and crescent shapes on the base which were possibly intended to represent beard-hair.

The find therefore gives researchers an opportunity to gaze on the countenance of Fiji's first inhabitants, from whom modern Polynesians are believed to be descended.

But equally significant is that it is the first time that a facial design has been found on Lapita pottery outside a group of islands north of Papua New Guinea - which are some 3,400 kilometres away from Fiji.

"As such it represents an extraordinary discovery," the university said.

The find made it possible to conclude that the early people of Fiji had at some stage come from the far-off island chain, named the Bismarck Archipelago, Geography Professor Patrick Nunn said.

It could go some way towards settling the long archaeological debate on settling of Polynesia - a vast triangle of islands from Hawaii in the north, to New Zealand in the south-east and Rapanui or Easter Island in the east.

The new face fragment was found near Natadola Beach, west of the Fijian capital Suva, in the tourist area of Viti Levu island.

 

[ramonmercado]

Pacific People Spread From Taiwan, Language Evolution Study Shows
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 141146.htm

Map of the Pacific and the Language "family tree" showing the settlement of the Pacific by the Austronesian peoples. Pauses occurred before the settlement of the Philippines and before the settlement of Western Polynesia. Rapid expansion pulses occurred through the Phillipines, along the New Guinea coast, in Micronesia and in Polynesia. (Credit: Gray et al. 2009 / Image courtesy of University of Auckland)

ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2009) — New research into language evolution suggests most Pacific populations originated in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago. Scientists at The University of Auckland have used sophisticated computer analyses on vocabulary from 400 Austronesian languages to uncover how the Pacific was settled.

"The Austronesian language family is one of the largest in the world, with 1200 languages spread across the Pacific," says Professor Russell Gray of the Department of Psychology. "The settlement of the Pacific is one of the most remarkable prehistoric human population expansions. By studying the basic vocabulary from these languages, such as words for animals, simple verbs, colours and numbers, we can trace how these languages evolved. The relationships between these languages give us a detailed history of Pacific settlement."

"Our results use cutting-edge computational methods derived from evolutionary biology on a large database of language data," says Dr Alexei Drummond of the Department of Computer Science. "By combining biological methods and linguistic data we are able to investigate big-picture questions about human origins".

The results, published in the latest issue of the journal Science, show how the settlement of the Pacific proceeded in a series of expansion pulses and settlement pauses. The Austronesians arose in Taiwan around 5,200 years ago. Before entering the Philippines, they paused for around a thousand years, and then spread rapidly across the 7,000km from the Philippines to Polynesia in less than one thousand years. After settling Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, the Austronesians paused again for another thousand years, before finally spreading further into Polynesia eventually reaching as far as New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island.

"We can link these expansion pulses to the development of new technology, such as better canoes and social techniques to deal with the great distances between islands in Polynesia," says Research Fellow Simon Greenhill. "Using these new technologies the Austronesians and Polynesians were able to rapidly spread through the Pacific in one of the greatest human migrations ever. This suggests that technological advances have played a major role in the spread of people throughout the world."

The research was funded by the New Zealand Royal Society Marsden fund. The database of Austronesian basic vocabulary can be accessed at: http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/austronesian/


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Journal reference:

R. D. Gray, A. J. Drummond, and S. J. Greenhill. Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement. Science, 2009; 323 (5913): 479 DOI: 10.1126/science.1166858

 

[ramonmercado]

Using statistics that describe how an infectious disease spreads, a University of Utah anthropologist analyzed different theories of how people first settled islands of the vast Pacific between 3,500 and 900 years ago. Adrian Bell found the two most likely strategies were to travel mostly against prevailing winds and seek easily seen islands, not necessarily the nearest islands.

The study - published in this month's issue of the journal American Antiquity - suggests early Pacific seafarers "weren't just drifting around," says Bell, the study's first and senior author. "It suggests they had a strategy for the best way to discover new places: movement across the ocean in a less risky fashion - often meaning into the wind - and moving to places that were more easily visible."

The study found no evidence that other theories explained how the 24 major island groups of the Pacific Ocean were settled by speakers of Austronesian languages in double-hulled and outrigger canoes between 3,500 and 900 years ago:

• Distance wasn't a factor, since relatively nearby New Zealand was settled long after more distant parts of the Pacific. That suggests people already were adept at long-distance ocean travel when settlement of the Pacific began.
• Habitat quality and abundance of resources didn't matter in determining which islands were settled first.
• Nor was there evidence that social class differences or a desire to escape despotic rulers launched lower-class people on voyages of exploration, though a thorough test of this hypothesis requires more data. ...

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-prevailing-big-islands-pacific.html

 

[rynner2]

This is a BIG subject! Wiki has this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation

That briefly mentions:
David Henry Lewis, DCNZM (1917 - 23 October 2002) was a sailor, adventurer, doctor, and Polynesian scholar. He is best known for his studies on the traditional systems of navigation used by the Pacific Islanders. His studies, published in the book We, the Navigators, made these navigational methods known to a wide audience and helped to inspire a revival of traditional voyaging methods in the South Pacific.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Henry_Lewis

(I read stuff by Lewis when I was in my teens or twenties - if I couldn't go sailing, I scoured the nautical shelves of local libraries!).

Another experimenter with polynesian techniques was
James Wharram (born 15 May 1928 in Manchester, England) is a multihull pioneer and designer of catamarans.
In 1953, after long studies into the records of boats of the Pacific in the libraries and museums of Britain, he designed and built the first British ocean-going double-canoe/catamaran, the TANGAROA (length 23'6" / 7.2 m), which meant the beginning of cruising and transatlantic crossing with a catamaran. He was also inspired by Eric de Bisschop’s book ‘The voyage of the Kaimiloa’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wharram

James Wharram is based at Devoran, Cornwall (up a creek off Falmouth harbour):
http://www.cornwallinformation.co.uk/cornwall-people/jameswharram/jameswharram.html

He has his own company website, if you fancy building your own polynesian craft!
http://wharram.com/site/

 

[GNC]

I thought Thor Heyerdahl had settled this with Kon-Tiki, but apparently not everyone agreed with his findings. After all that trouble as well.

 

[rynner2]

Previous FTMB offerings:-

This was posted on the old Lone CG thread:
Polynesian navigators revive a skill that was nearly lost
forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/the-lone-coastguard.53104/page-8#post-1338283
Link is obsolete. The current link is:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/the-lone-coastguard.53104/page-6#post-1338283

Kon-Tiki explorer was partly right – Polynesians had South American roots
Which came first–the chicken or the European?
The threads to which these items referred are now consolidated into:

Pre-Columbian Polynesian / Native American Contact(s)
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...n-polynesian-native-american-contact-s.29969/

 

[rynner2]

I thought Thor Heyerdahl had settled this with Kon-Tiki, but apparently not everyone agreed with his findings. After all that trouble as well.

No, because all he proved was that it was possible to sail a Balsa raft from South America across the Pacific, but that's not the same as proving it was ever actually done, or done enough times to significantly influence the colonisation of Polynesia.

Most of the physical evidence still supports colonization from the east.

 

[GNC]

If you're thinking of watching the recent Norwegian Kon-Tiki film, I wouldn't bother, the scriptwriter admitted he thought the original journey was a bit dull because it went so well, so basically he made a bunch of shit up to make it more interesting as a movie. Bad show.

 

[Kingsize Wombat]

Here is a very long, but extremely interesting write up on DNA Research in the South Pacific - and the cultural and political traps encountered in the pursuit. There's 30 minutes reading here, minimum. But oh so interesting. Deals with the Lapita too, and some ancient bones from Vanuatu:

Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps?

In late 2003, while clearing land just above the seaside, a bulldozer driver found a broken piece of pottery in the rubble. The villagers of Vanuatu often happen upon shards of timeworn ceramic, which spark an idly mythical curiosity; they’re said to be fragments of Noah’s Ark, or the original Ten Commandments, or the burst water vessels of powerful ancestral spirits. These shards are often left alone, but word in this particular case traveled quickly, and the artifact soon found its way to the Vanuatu Cultural Center and National Museum, where Stuart Bedford, a New Zealand archaeologist who had studied local pot shards for years, was called in to inspect it. He immediately recognized its distinctive pattern — “dentate stamping,” an ancient technique so named because it looked as though some tiny-toothed creature had bitten an intricate pattern into the ceramic — and understood that this pottery coincided with the very first movement of ancient peoples into the South Seas.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna-paleogenomics.html

 

[ramonmercado]

Climate change drove migration 1,100 years ago.

Research led by scientists at the University of Southampton has found settlers arrived in East Polynesia around 200 years earlier than previously thought.

Colonisation of the vast eastern Pacific with its few and far-flung island archipelagos was a remarkable achievement in human history. Yet the timing, character, and drivers of this accomplishment remain poorly understood. However, this new study has found a major change in the climate of the region, which resulted in a dry period, coinciding with the arrival of people on the tiny island of Atiu, in the southern group of the Cook Islands, around 900AD. Findings are published in the paper, 'Human settlement of East Polynesia earlier, incremental and coincident with prolonged South Pacific drought' in the journal PNAS.

"The ancestors of the Polynesians, the Lapita people, migrated east into the Pacific Ocean as far as Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, reaching them around 2800 years ago. But for almost 1500 years humans failed to migrate any further into the pacific," explains lead researcher, Professor David Sear of the University of Southampton. "Our research gives us a much more accurate timescale of when people first arrived in the region and helps answer some key questions about why they made their hazardous journey east."

https://phys.org/news/2020-04-climate-colonisation-south-pacific-islands.html

 

[ramonmercado]

New study queries"Out Of Taiwan" theory.

It was one of the boldest journeys in human history: People ventured into the open Pacific Ocean in double-hulled canoes, crossing thousands of kilometers to find and settle far-flung lands.

Now, a study of the genomes of hundreds of modern Indigenous residents of Oceania provides new insights into the routes those ancient voyagers took—and who they encountered along the way. The findings suggest more mingling among ancient people in the region than many scientists had thought, including four mixing events with the extinct Denisovan lineage. Despite those intriguing results, critics say the authors failed to meaningfully involve members of the Indigenous communities who provided DNA for the study.

“It’s a really exciting paper,” says Lisa Matisoo-Smith, an anthropologist at the University of Otago, Dunedin. But she says she is troubled by an apparent lack of engagement with the paper’s Indigenous participants; the study has no Indigenous authors. “It appears [the researchers] have ticked the official boxes,” for getting informed consent, she says. “But people are beginning to realize that is not true engagement.”

Based on archaeological and linguistic data, anthropologists long ago developed a basic model of how humans came to call Oceania and the Pacific Islands home: Hunter-gatherers crossed into Near Oceania—a region including New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands—some 45,000 years ago. About 5000 years ago, farmers from what is now Taiwan headed south into the Philippines. According to this “out of Taiwan” model, they moved past Near Oceania and into Remote Oceania—which includes Micronesia, Vanuatu, and Fiji—bypassing the people already living in the region. A 2016 study of ancient genomes found that these migrants didn’t mix with the populations already living on the islands, suggesting they moved quickly. These voyagers then began to settle the Polynesian islands farther east about 1000 years ago. ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...s-pacific-critics-blast-lack-indigenous-input

 

[Kondoru]

“It’s a really exciting paper,” says Lisa Matisoo-Smith, an anthropologist at the University of Otago, Dunedin. But she says she is troubled by an apparent lack of engagement with the paper’s Indigenous participants; the study has no Indigenous authors. “It appears [the researchers] have ticked the official boxes,” for getting informed consent, she says. “But people are beginning to realize that is not true engagement.”

Oh, its not woke enough! Maybe they should have found a local geneticist?

 

[Naughty_Felid]

Oh, its not woke enough! Maybe they should have found a local geneticist?

Its a bit more complicated than that

 

[ramonmercado]

DNA tells a tale of dispersal spread over 400 years.

The peopling of Polynesia was a stunning achievement: Beginning around 800 C.E., audacious Polynesian navigators in double-hulled sailing canoes used the stars and their knowledge of the waves to discover specks of land separated by thousands of kilometers of open ocean.

Within just a few centuries, they had populated most of the Pacific Ocean’s far-flung islands. Now, researchers have used modern DNA samples to trace the exploration in detail, working out what order the islands were settled in and dating each new landfall to within a few decades.

“The whole question of the settlement of Polynesia has been going on for 200 years,” says University of Hawaii, Manoa, archaeologist Patrick Kirch, who was not involved in the research. “This is a really great paper, and I’m happy to see it.”

Archaeologists already had hints of how this great exploration took place. Studying the styles of stone tools and carvings, as well as languages, of the people on the various islands had suggested the original ancestors traced back to Samoa and that the expansion ended halfway across the ocean in Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. But they disagreed on whether it happened in a few centuries, beginning around 900 C.E., or started much earlier and lasted 1 millennium or more.

To learn more, Stanford University computational geneticist Alexander Ioannidis and Andrés Moreno Estrada, a population geneticist at Mexico’s National Laboratory of Genetics for Biodiversity, compared the DNA of 430 modern individuals from all across Polynesia (most collected for previous studies), and then eliminated later genetic input from European people. Because the researchers knew Polynesians had journeyed stepwise from island to island, their genetic analysis utilized a genetic phenomenon known as a population bottleneck. When a few dozen to a few hundred individuals from already-isolated island populations settled a new island, and then a subset of that group left to settle an additional island, and so forth, their genetic diversity would have shrunk with each voyage—like a telescope in reverse. ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...na-offers-surprises-how-polynesia-was-settled

 

[SimonBurchell]

Mods please bolt this onto a more appropriate thread - I looked but couldn't find one. Article from The Guardian:

New clues shed light on ‘pivotal’ moment in the great Pacific migration

Archaeologists say find of tools and bones changes our understanding of the Lapita people, the first to make landfall in Remote Oceania

Now I must admit I can't get my head around this "the Lapita people, the first to make landfall in Remote Oceania" but they met indigenous peoples there, according to the same article, so not the first to make landfall then, unless the indigenous population managed to walk there across the Pacific Ocean.

 

[bugmum]

My reading of the article is that the Lapita people went further than the indigenous population - they rolled up in areas already inhabited and introduced new stuff, but then they were the first to keep going to new uninhabited islands. I agree that it's a slightly confusing article in that respect.

 

[ramonmercado]

A study of maternal lineages supplies information on population movement.

Some 3000 years ago, people sailed toward the sunrise—and the last swatch of our planet uninhabited by humans: remote islands of the Pacific.

By 1200 C.E. societies flourished from the Marianas to Rapa Nui, more than 12,000 kilometers apart. How the Pacific gradually became home to these groups—and just where they came from—has long been a mystery.

Some answers and twists are emerging, thanks to a large genomic study published today. Data from nearly 300 ancient and modern individuals reveals that at least five distinct groups migrated to the islands across 3 millennia. Once an island was initially settled, women stayed, maintaining maternal lines generation after generation. In contrast, male partners came from afar.

“It’s a fascinating paper,” says Christian Reepmeyer of the German Archaeological Institute, an expert on Pacific archaeology who was not involved in the study. “It shows the complexity of the human past,” and “opens up a whole lot of new ideas about population movements.”

The study focused on Micronesia, Oceania’s northwest, which includes the Mariana and Marshall archipelagos. The region comprises an ocean expanse about the area of the continental United States, but its 2000-some islands, combined, could easily fit within the state of Delaware.

Micronesia also holds the earliest evidence of humans in a region known as Remote Oceania: 3500- to 3000-year-old campsites in the Marianas with shell beads, files made from sea urchins, and red pottery. Later inhabitants built pole-and-thatch dwellings and grew crops such as taro and breadfruit. About 1000 years ago, residents began to erect buildings on capped stone pillars, called latte, which stand today on islands such as Guam and Saipan. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/female-lineages-anchored-pacific-islands-2000-years