The next significant expansion started from the southeast
and was much
more dramatic. Taking our cue from the family of languages with which
it is associated, we can call it the Austronesian expansion. Like the
Eskimo migration, it was the work of a prehistoric Stone Age
population, and we have to reconstruct it from a combination of
linguistic, archaeological, andmore recentlygenetic testimony. This
evidence combines to reveal a process of eastward migration from island
Southeast Asia into the Pacific starting in the second millennium B.C.
and reaching Easter Island at the eastern limit of Polynesia around
A.D. 500. As we saw in earlier chapters, correlations between
linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence can be messy. But in
this case much of the icture is unusually simple. East of the satellite
islands of New Guinea, there had been no earlier human presence, and
there is likewise no indication of later migrations from the west on a
significant scale. So here the spread of the Austronesian language
family, the appearance of the Stone Age Lapita culture or its later
derivatives, and the arrival of a particular subset of human genes, can
confidently be ascribed to one and the same event. Where the expansion
first began is not quite so clear. Linguistic and archaeological
evidence would support a homeland in southern Chinaor, more
specifically, in Taiwan, where very diverse Austronesian languages are
still spoken among the aboriginal population; but currently the genetic
evidence does not sit well with this.
Like the Eskimos, the Austronesians had a material
culture notable for
its maritime specialization, which in their case was of course tropical
rather than Arctic. Moreover, reconstruction of the vocabulary of the
protolanguage spoken by the Austronesians outside Taiwan reveals an
equivalent of the Indo- European horse and cart: the outrigger canoe
(the outrigger is attached to the canoe to keep it from rolling over).
With this relatively simple vessel, the Austronesians of island
Southeast Asia colonized an environment that has no parallel anywhere
else on the globe, the innumerable small islands of the southern
Pacific. But they settled few islands of any size; New Zealand and, far
to the west, Madagascar were the exceptions. Likewise, they did not
reach the Americas, and, a little more surprisingly, they scarcely
impinged on Australia. As a result, the impact of the Austronesian
expansion was more extensive than intensive.