Journal
SCIENCE
Volume 323, Issue 5913, Pages 479-483Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/science.1166858
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- Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund
- Bright Futures
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Debates about human prehistory often center on the role that population expansions play in shaping biological and cultural diversity. Hypotheses on the origin of the Austronesian settlers of the Pacific are divided between a recent pulse- pause expansion from Taiwan and an older slow- boat diffusion from Wallacea. We used lexical data and Bayesian phylogenetic methods to construct a phylogeny of 400 languages. In agreement with the pulse- pause scenario, the language trees place the Austronesian origin in Taiwan approximately 5230 years ago and reveal a series of settlement pauses and expansion pulses linked to technological and social innovations. These results are robust to assumptions about the rooting and calibration of the trees and demonstrate the combined power of linguistic scholarship, database technologies, and computational phylogenetic methods for resolving questions about human prehistory.
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