Holocene Population History in the Pacific Region as a Model for Worldwide Food Producer Dispersals

Abstract

Pacific prehistory (excluding Australia) since 3000 BC reflects the impacts of two source regions for food production: China from the Yangzi southward (including Taiwan) and the western Pacific (especially the New Guinea Highlands). The linguistic (Austronesian, Trans-New Guinea), bioanthropological/ human genetic, and Neolithic archaeological records each carry signals of expansion from these two source regions. A combined consideration of the multiregional results within all three disciplines (archaeology, linguistics, and biology) offers a historical perspective that will never be obtained from one discipline or one region alone. The fundamental process of human behavior involved in such expansion-population dispersal linked to increases in human population size-is significant for explaining the early spreads of food production and language families in many parts of the world. This article is concerned mainly with the archaeological record for the expansion of early food producers, Austronesian languages, and Neolithic technologies through Taiwan into the northern Philippines as an early stage in what was to become the greatest dispersal of an ethnolinguistic population in world history before AD 1500.