This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: New genetic analyses of ancient human skeletons from western Remote Oceania are shedding light on the complex history of settlement in this vast Pacific region over the past 3,000 years. With island nations such as Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga, the region is home to societies with a remarkably high degree of linguistic and cultural diversity.
An international research team led by professor Cosimo Posth of the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, in collaboration with interdisciplinary research groups from the Southwest Pacific and Europe, traced the major human migrations that helped shape the diversity of the western Remote Oceanian islands. The team was able to date the chronology of the migration waves more precisely than ever before. The new study has been published in the journal Cell.
Remote Oceania encompasses the major island groups of Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji and Polynesia. The island region forms an almost triangular shape on the map, stretching between New Zealand in the south, Hawaii in the north and Easter Island in the east—Remote Oceania altogether spans more than 30 million square kilometers (12 million square miles) of the Pacific Ocean. With more than 200 spoken languages, Remote Oceania is home to island societies shaped by past encounters between highly divergent groups, making it one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse maritime areas on Earth.
"People first reached this region during one of the greatest human expansions into the open ocean, which began in Southeast Asia around 5,000 years ago, reaching the previously uninhabited archipelagos of Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga as early as 3,000 years ago," reports the study's first author, Dr. Michal Feldman of Posth's research group. "While the first Remote Oceanians were primarily derived from a Southeast Asian source population, most present-day inhabitants of the region have ancestry from both Southeast Asian- and Papuan-related groups, due to later movements from Near Oceania," says Feldman.
"The geographic extent of the Papuan-related dispersals and their timing have not been well understood, mainly because we were missing information from key regions along the expansion routes, such as Fiji." To better understand these processes, the research team generated new genomic data from human skeletal remains of 72 individuals spanning the past three millennia. The researchers found differences in the pace of the two migration waves: "Based on genetic admixture dating, we were able to determine that the Southeast Asian-related early dispersal spread faster than the Papuan-related wave," says Posth. "While we date the presence of Papuan-related ancestry in Vanuatu to as early as 2,700 years ago, another 500 years or so passed before this ancestry is detected farther east in Fiji." In contrast, archaeological evidence shows that the early Southeast Asian wave traveled along this route much more rapidly.
"Later, a second wave of Papuan ancestry reached Fiji," Posth adds. This second wave likely came from neighboring archipelagos, such as Vanuatu, showing previously unknown genetic connections between islands in western Remote Oceania. The study also investigated the genetic history of the enigmatic "Polynesian outlier" communities in Vanuatu.
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