Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement

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 "slo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 2009-01, Vol.323 (5913), p.479-483
Main Authors: Gray, R.D, Drummond, A.J, Greenhill, S.J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ancient civilizations
Bayes Theorem
Calibration
Cultural anthropology
Databases, Factual
Emigration and Immigration - history
History, Ancient
Humans
Language
Language families
Linguistic anthropology
Linguistics
Oceanic Ancestry Group - history
Pacific Islands
Philippines
Phylogenetics
Phylogeny
Polynesia
Polynesian studies
Population Dynamics
Prehistoric era
Research Article
Social innovation
Taiwan
Vocabulary
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0036-8075
1095-9203
DOI:10.1126/science.1166858