Tracking Human Migration: The Lapita Culture

Two papers published in Science a couple of weeks ago combined DNA bacterial studies and historical linguistic data to make some new conclusions on how and when the Lapita settled Remote Oceania, and where they might have originated.

Populating Austronesia: H. pylori evidence. Click here to get a larger image and complete caption. Image courtesy AAAS/Science

The Lapita culture is what archaeologists have called the artifacts left by the original populators of the lands and islands east of the Solomon islands. Current theory of the Lapita expansion suggests that, whoever they were, they populated Remote Oceania between about 3,400 and 2,900 years ago. Scholars debate where the Lapita originally came from, because the artifacts don't have clear precedents anywhere.

DNA and Bacteria

The DNA researchers, Moodley et al., traced the genetic variations of a bacteria that lives in the human gut called Helicobactor pylori. H. pylori is a bacteria that lives in the human stomach. This bacteria came with us out of Africa, and so is found in pretty much everybody living today. However, the bacteria mutated as we traversed the globe, separating into populations, and so there are identifiable subpopulations of African H. pylori, and Asian H. pylori—and you get the idea.

In tracing H. pylori around, they found some support for the peopling of Australia—more of that later—and they also found an interesting thing about the Lapita expansion. What Moodley et al. suggest, based on the types of H. pylori discovered in the people of this part of the world, is that the originators of the Lapita were from Taiwan, but they lived in the Philippines before expanding into Remote Oceania.

Language and History

The historical linguistics paper, working separately, used exclusively linguistic data to draw up an elaborate family tree of the linguistics of the Austronesian language speakers. They looked at language roots and word similarities, and, assuming gradual change, came to the conclusion that the Austronesian-speaking peoples originated in Taiwan, but they lived in the Philippines before expanding into Remote Oceania about 3500 BP.

When Scholars Agree

The interesting thing about this is the agreement of these two disparate studies about the origins of the Lapita in Taiwan. Historical linguistics is a bit iffy as a field as yet—and much of the dating used by both Gray et al. and Moodley et al. is based on archaeological evidence. The two strands of evidence, biological and linguistic, do support one another in this instance. It will be interesting to see if additional research combining the two supports other human migrations.

Sources and Further Information

• Populating Australia
• Lapita Culture
• There's a larger version of the map up above available, with a complete caption, located here.

Articles Referenced

Gray, R. D., A. J. Drummond, and S. J. Greenhill 2009 Language Phylogenies Reveal Expansion Pulses and Pauses in Pacific Settlement. Science 323(5913):479-483.

Moodley, Yoshan, et al. 2009 The Peopling of the Pacific from a Bacterial Perspective. Science 323(5913):527-530.

Renfrew Colin. 2009. Where Bacteria and Languages Concur Science 323(5913):467-468

Download all papers and a podcast interview by Colin Renfrew