Slow boat to Melanesia?

Stephen J. Oppenheimer () and Martin Richards
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Stephen J. Oppenheimer: Green College
Martin Richards: University of Huddersfield

Nature, 2001, vol. 410, issue 6825, 166-167

Abstract: Abstract The origin of the Polynesian islanders and of the Austronesian languages that they speak has been debated for more than 200 years. Diamond has presented the predominantly held modern viewpoint, described as the 'express train to Polynesia' model, which proposes that the ancestors of the Polynesians were early farmers who dispersed south from a homeland in South China/Taiwan, through Island Southeast Asia (replacing an indigenous 'Australoid' hunter-gatherer population), and then on east, out into the Pacific — all within the past 6,000 years1. However, evidence is accumulating from several genetic markers that Polynesian lineages have a much deeper ancestry within tropical Island Southeast Asia than this hypothesis would suggest. The new evidence implies that the Polynesians originated not in China/Taiwan, but in eastern Indonesia, somewhere between Wallace's line and the island of New Guinea.

Date: 2001
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DOI: 10.1038/35065520

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