Taiwan dispersal theory backed

[dArKeR]

Noted Australian academic Peter Bellwood yesterday backed his theory that the Austronesian-speaking peoples across the Asia-Pacific region originated from Taiwan with the results of new research.

In a lecture at the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung, Professor Bellwood, the director of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University, said archeological evidence indicated that ancestors of today's Austronesian-speaking peoples, numbering about 300 million, dispersed from Taiwan to the Pacific Rim.

Bellwood said that he had collected new evidence for the theory during recent fieldwork in the Batan Islands, the northernmost part of the Philippines, and the Yer Bac prehistoric site in northern Vietnam, where he found pieces of penannular jade rings and earthenware related to the people who lived in prehistoric Taiwan.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2005/04/26/2003252035

[bemildred]

1. Very cool.

Discussed in Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel".

[Igel]

3. And reprised in his "Collapse."

Nicely, most of the linguistic work points in the same direction, with the deepest, and therefore presumedly oldest, linguistic divisions being on and close to Taiwan.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. Yes, and there's probably an Austronesian element in Japanese culture

or at least in Okinawa. Yonaguni, the southernmost island of the Okinawan chain, is less than 100 miles from Taiwan. Okinawans tend to look more like Taiwanese aborigines than they do like mainland Japanese.

Some years ago, I read an account of the peopling of the Pacific Islands from a linguistic point of view, and I do remember that New Zealand and Easter Island were the last places reached by the Polynesians. The Polynesians (as a subgroup of the Austronesians) started out in Samoa about 2000 years ago and branched out. The Hawaiians came via Tahiti and the Marquesas, or so the article said.

[bemildred]

4. I love ancient history, "deep time", it gives a sense of context.

Of being part of something BIG, of belonging.