Afarensis is a 3.5-2.8 million year old hominin from the Kada Hadar member of the Hadar formation in the Middle Awash, Ethiopia. He is approximately 41 inches tall, weighs approximately 60 pounds and has a cranial capacity of a whopping 410 cc (approximately). Afarensis is currently considered to be transitional between apes and humans and displays some traits of both. Since he spends a lot of time on the couch watching monster movies, some observers question whether he is an obligate biped (although no one has observed him climbing a tree). He also has a blog called 
Awhile back I wrote about an intriguing find on the island of Vanuatu. The island - and the find - are in the news agian. National Geographic has more info on the finds. Apparently, stable isotope analysis has been performed on the finds.
The results indicate that:
...four individuals were not born in the immediate area. This supports evidence for a rapid Lapita expansion eastward from the island of New Guinea--which today is split into provinces of Indonesia and the independent nation of Papua New Guinea--around 3,000 years ago.
The National Geographic article goes on to say that:
Analysis of strontium and oxygen isotopes in the teeth also proved the Lapita were neither solely hunter-gatherers, as had been speculated, nor intensive farmers, Bedford said. Rather, they were a mix of the two."The isotope analyses are pretty much confirming a mixed diet," Bedford said. "We've got fish, pig, chicken, and cultivated plants like taro and banana."
The tests also returned evidence of a diet rich in wild-caught fish, flying foxes, and turtles.
I haven't been able to find any papers on these finds (if anybody out there is aware of any let me know) so I won't say too much more about them, except to point out that they do have promise in helping to unravel the mystery of the Lapita people...
Comments
This find is from the Teouma site on Efate, Vanuatu. The main people working on it include Matthew Spriggs and Stuart Bedfore at RSPAS, ANU.
They had a fairly recent article on it, in Antiquity, The Teouma Lapita site and the early human settlement of the Pacific Islands:
--Simon
Posted by: Simon G | November 4, 2007 2:32 PM
Flying foxes? How did they conclude that? The Polynesians ate dogs and rats. Much easier to catch than bats. They even raised dogs for food.
My favourite theory for the origin of Lapita people is the former Sunda Peninsula. But I'm just an engineer. I approach the problem from the logistic point of view, not genetic, linguistic, or cultural.
Today only the highest mountains of Sunda are visible, as the Malaccan Peninsula and the islands of Philippines and Indonesia up to the Wallis Divide. During the Ice Age it was a single vast landmass that certainly was inhabited. When the glaciers started to melt, the sea level rose and drowned Sunda. That is a good reason to go sailing the high seas.
Papua is still above the sea, and so is Taiwan. The Papuans never sailed far. They had no need - they had higher ground to climb to when the sea level rose. Many Sundans didn't have that option, because the higher ground was already taken by previous refugees. So they had to find new uninhabited islands. The nearest were in Island Melanesia.
Posted by: Lassi Hippeläinen | November 4, 2007 3:23 PM
Lassi,
The majority of researchers in this field are convinced that the Lapita origin was ultimately Taiwan, and that this population spread started around 6,000 years ago (well after the ice age and high-sea levels, and there was no catastrophic Noah's flood type situation going on).
The scenario you're talking about sounds a lot like what the geneticist Steven Oppenheimer has proposed (and goes by the catchy name of "The Slow Boat" scenario), but only him and a few people in his lab believe that. It's only really based on some dubious genetic dating methods and flies in the face of some really strong archaeological and linguistic evidence.
If you're interested in this, you could read a paper I wrote on it here.
--Simon
Posted by: Simon G | November 4, 2007 4:23 PM
Simon - Thanks for the info. Do you have a PDF of the Teouma article that you can email me?
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | November 4, 2007 4:37 PM
Lassi, this is just my speculation, but I can imagine catching flying foxes with nets hung in trees. Sea-going people would have good netmaking skills.
Posted by: JeffL | November 4, 2007 9:46 PM
Lassi wrote, "During the Ice Age it was a single vast landmass that certainly was inhabited. When the glaciers started to melt, the sea level rose and drowned Sunda.'
True. But as Simon says the Austronesian expansion is dated after that rise. Besides which Sunda may not have been a single vast landmass but rather a series of closely spaced islands. The first Australians must have passed this way at a time of lowered sea level though, presumably at least 50,000 years ago. They were then isolated by an earlier rising sea level.
Also as Simom says, "the Lapita origin was ultimately Taiwan". But, strictly speaking, just the female lines come from there. A great deal of research has shown the Polynesian Y-chromosome lines come from islands on the way out. They're related to lines from New Guinea and so on. The Austronesians may have developed as a hybrid population in the Sunda region.
This independence of Y-chromosome and mtDNA lines seems reasonably common but is usually not taken into account by people trying to unravel prehistoric human migrations.
Posted by: terryt | November 5, 2007 2:36 AM
Thanks, Simon and terryt, for entertaining an amateur :-)
...but as an engineer I prefer physical evidence over linguistic analysis. The genetic evidence of humans may be hard to analyse, but there are other possibilities. Polynesian pigs are originally from Vietnam. That would support the origin around Sunda.
I'm mostly uncertain about timings. Even archeological evidence can only give upper limits. One hard to explain physical piece of evidence is that cave in Tuvalu that seems to have been occupied already 8000 years ago.
In small populations it isn't possible to be sure about how and how fast languages develop. There are many competing trees for Taiwanese languages alone - Wikipedia gives the number as 18. Besides, migrations of language need not match migrations of people. As an example, the Bulgarians are Turkish-Tatarians by ancestry, but they have adopted a Slavic language. And see how English has spread in the wake of Sir Francis Drake. IMHO timings based on language can't be accurate.
But anyway, what I was thinking about isn't incompatible with Taiwanese origin. I don't know where the Sundans came from, maybe Taiwan. Or maybe some Sundans fled to Taiwan. I'm incompatible with that "slow boat" model. I don't think the Lapitans spent much time near Papua, because the Polynesians don't look like Melanesians.
But where did the Sundans go? The area must have been at least as densely populated as anything else in those parts. They can't have disappeared without trace, and there wasn't enough room for everyone to stay at home.
Posted by: Lassi Hippeläinen | November 5, 2007 11:37 AM
Lassi asked, "But where did the Sundans go?"
If you're refering to Sundans who had spread through the region at the time Australia was first settled the answer is that they died out, presumably through inbreeding on islands greatly reduced in area by rising sea level. The boating ability 50,000 years ago hardly included luxury yachts. The islands of Sunda were almost certainly uninhabited when the Austronesian-speaking people first moved through them. That's why the people expanded so rapidly, food was plentiful. There is a possibility some inhabitants of parts of the Philippines and Sulawesi may go back to earlier people though.
As for the diversity of Austronesian languages in Taiwan. That's what we would expect in the region they originated. In fact it seems some were actually reintroduced to Taiwan from the south after the first wave of Austronesians had left. In other words, like all migrations, it was not simply a matter of one small group setting out and moving continuously in one directiion.
I agree that "timings based on language can't be accurate." But language distribution can support other evidence. The fact Polynesian pigs originated in Vietnam is hardly surprising. After all the Vietnamese languages are usually considered to be related to Austronesian. They are both members of the Austric family. In other words Austronesians and Vietnamese were originally the same people.
Posted by: terryt | November 5, 2007 3:27 PM
Oh. An afterthought. Lassi, where did you find the "evidence is that cave in Tuvalu that seems to have been occupied already 8000 years ago"?
Posted by: terryt | November 5, 2007 3:36 PM
(Sorry for late reply, but my home renovation project has kept me busy...)
The cave is at Nanumaga Island:
http://www.tuvaluislands.com/history-caves.htm
That article about the theories of Gibbons and Clunie is 20 years old, but I haven't found any debunking of the cave part. Other aspects seem to be argued about.
Of course you could claim that the cave isn't that old. If the islands are sinking at a rate of over one cm per year, the cave would have been above sea surface at the time of the Lapita culture. Interestingly, recent sea level measurements (for global warming) indicate that in Tuvalu the level is rising more than one cm per year, while elsewhere it is around 2 mm. Just in the right ballpark.
But then you would have to explain, why Tuvalu is sinking ten times faster than any other Pacific island, and why nobody has noticed it before.
Posted by: Lassi Hippeläinen | November 10, 2007 3:50 AM
Thanks Lassi. Very interesting. I'd not heard of the cave before and I'll try to follow it up. As you say most of the other comments in the article have been discredited.
Tuvalu is actually well to the east of Vanuatu and is specifically part of the Polynesian subgroup rather than just the wider generalized Austronesian group. The standard view is that the southern Solomons were uninhabited until Lapita, or Austronesian-speaking, people arrived (technically not yet Polynesian). They spread rapidly through till then uninhabited Vanuatu and New Caledonia. From there to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa where they were held up from further expansion for some time. It was in this last region the migrants evolved into the Polynesians. Tuvalu was first settled by people moving back west from there.
I know there is quite a movement within New Zealand to question the generally accepted pattern of Pacific human occupation. I'm not sure what the motivation is although it is intimately associated with "New Age" beliefs.
Posted by: terryt | November 10, 2007 3:30 PM
I'm coming in late because I've only just come across this report:
1)Lassi: "Flying foxes? How did they conclude that? The Polynesians ate dogs and rats. Much easier to catch than bats. They even raised dogs for food".
I kept a few flying foxes as part of my failed 'local zoo' last year. The local manangutay (collector of coconut sap for making into tuba wine) brought them in, drunk, after they'd also partaken of fresh, but fermenting coco flower
sap. See: http://www.coconutstudio.com/Shoreline%20Mammals.htm#Kabog
http://tinyurl.com/2surdl
If they're that stupid, you don't need nets to catch them. The local kids knock them down with catapults. They congregate, noisily, in any tree with ripe fruit.
Their long thin wing bones make very useful tools, like needles (and whatever it is you tie nets with).
And just how do flying foxes have any different isotopes than, say, chickens?
Dogs taste like gamey chickens.
2) Simon G "The majority of researchers in this field are convinced that the Lapita origin was ultimately Taiwan, and that this population spread started around 6,000 years ago (well after the ice age and high-sea levels, and there was no catastrophic Noah's flood type situation going on)".
Well, all of that is debateable, at least. No-one has found any direct connection between Lapita and Taiwan, except that the pots are about the same colour. (That happens when you fire clay - I have found 'Lapita' pots in Lincolnshire).
Nobody has any real idea of the 6kya Taiwan origin date (which should now be discredited on the basis that it relies on 'lexicostatistics', long derided by "the majority of researchers in this field").
3) Lassi "Or maybe some Sundans fled to Taiwan. I'm incompatible with that "slow boat" model. I don't think the Lapitans spent much time near Papua, because the Polynesians don't look like Melanesians".
They certainly don't. That bit of the story about Ans going into Vanuatu and NC is OK, and then on to Fiji and Tonga is at least plausible.
But why do Polynesians look so very different, and why did they leave their wonderful Lapita pottery behind?
4) I'm currently researching Austronesian number systems and names; an area almost totally ignored by professional linguists. But I'm floundering, because I am not quite sure how to represent my findings without appearing to be a complete nutter.
How should I explain:
- the root 'bang'for 'hand' turns up in both 'Papuan' and An words for 5 in New Guinea, and also on the east coast of Taiwan (Atayal).
- The word for 20 in many primitive number systems is 'man' because they first counted their fingers, then their toes, ending up with 'the whole bloke'. The same convention shows up in Taiwan (Saisyat) and in many Polynesian languages, including Maori.
In short, I don't think "The majority of researchers in this field" have got their story right.
Also, I don't see why a geneticist like Stephen Oppenheimer should be any more wrong with his point of view than the linguist who's managed to impose his own ideas on almost everyone else in the field.
regards
Richard
Posted by: Richard Parker | November 11, 2007 4:49 AM
Digging up your ancestors:
Austronesians in Madagascar regulary do this, to this day.
Famadihana - see: http://www.geocities.com/fontsy/dave.htm
After they've dug up granddad or Uncle ---, they spend a very short time cleaning up his bits, then wrap 'em up again and put them back.
Then they feast and get very, very drunk.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if they put Uncle ---'s bits in granddad's grave.
When I went to one of these exhumation parties, I also got very drunk, so I apologise if I can't report back with any degree of scientific objectivity.
regards
Richard
Posted by: Richard Parker | November 11, 2007 5:07 AM
No, there is genetic evidence here for example, that links Lapita and Taiwan. Incidentally, the genetic data coalesces around 9-13 KYA
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | November 11, 2007 8:53 AM
Lapita is a distinct pottery culture, very limited in time and space. You cannot have a genetic relationship between a pot and a person, but undoubtedly there are genetic and linguistic links between the peoples of Taiwan and Oceania.
There is little if any evidence of a chain linking Lapita and Taiwanese pots in any of the intervening islands. Otherwise I could expect to find Lapita/Taiwan/ish pots on my island, Siargao, off Mindanao, which is equidistant between Taiwan and the New Guinea Bird's Head. From that viewpoint, you get a very different perspective.
While the introductory article you linked me to, at PLoS, makes the standard, orthodox deduction, the paper itself does not, and is very careful to hedge its bets.
Had you read the paper alone, you would be left wondering, not if it had demonstrated that Austronesians came from Taiwan, but where the Taiwanese came from, since they are so clearly isolated from the mainland.
The orthodox hypothesis is that there MUST have been an Austronesian-speaking group, with 'Taiwanese' genes, once upon a time on the mainland, that has, unfortunately, gone entirely extinct.
It would be more parsimonious to propose that the Taiwanese originated from where their genes and language families are still found; in Island SE Asia.
The Amis think their ancestors came from the sea to the east. The Yami are thought to have descended from a migration from the Batanes Islands, to the south, within the last millenium. Their language and culture is closely related to Batanes, but not to the Taiwan 'mainland'.
Another huge missing link in the Taiwan origin story is the actual Neolithic people, the agriculturalists of the Western Plains, whose pots are supposed to have influenced the sudden flowering of the Lapita culture 4000km away.
The languages and genes of the possible later links with those people are now almost wholly subsumed by the Chinese immigrants, so nobody can say, with any real confidence, who they were.
I have put snippets from the paper 'below the fold' - read together, or in full context, they don't exactly support the 'Out-of-taiwan' theory.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Besides Taiwan and Southeast Asia, B4a occurs frequently in southern China and has been observed as far inland as among Mongolians [21,30-35]. Its deep time depth, 40,400 ± 9,600 years in China [34], significantly predates the timeframe that is relevant to the peopling of Polynesia. Therefore, this general genetic link between Taiwan and Polynesia has now been refuted as being supportive of Polynesian origins specifically in Taiwan within a recent timeframe as implicated by the fast train model [8].
In particular, Taiwanese aboriginal populations appeared closer to island Southeast Asian populations (Luzon, Philippines, Moluccas, and Indonesia) than to populations from mainland East Asia (Fujian, South Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand).
Subclade B4c1b, frequent in southern Taiwan, has been previously detected at low frequency in China, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Java.
Two distinct subgroups of B4a can be found in Taiwanese aboriginals. The first of them, B4a1a, distinguished by a substitution at np 6719 (see Figures 2, S1), occurs frequently among the Amis and Yami, whereas the second, B4a2, is common in the southern tribes Paiwan, Puyuma, Rukai, and Yami.
Interestingly, the HVS-I motif of all Taiwanese F3b samples was different from the motif commonly observed among the Chinese.
The nearly complete absence of haplogroup E in China makes it unlikely that the shallow time depth of E2 lineages in Taiwan could be explained by a migration from China. However, many populations from island Southeast Asia are still poorly covered, and the possibility that these lineages can derive from a migration from outside should be kept open.
PC analysis reveals that Taiwanese populations in general and the Amis specifically are more closely related to island Southeast Asian populations than to populations from mainland East Asia (see Figure 2). However, only haplogroups B4a1a and M7c1c substantiate the close affinity between Taiwanese populations and those from islands beyond the Philippines. Characteristic HVS-I motifs of haplogroups B5a, F3b, R9c, and E2 were also observed in the Philippines and Sabah from Borneo; haplogroups Y and M7b3 were seen as shared only with Philippines' populations. Finally, F4b and R9c lineages are noncharacteristic of Near and Remote Oceania
Consequently, according to control sequence information, sequences belonging to haplogroups B4b, D4, E2, F4b, N9a, and Y (and possibly R9c when ignoring the unique Bunun specimen) coalesced in their most recent common ancestors (MRCAs) within the last two thousand years (Table 2). These low coalescence times may be due either to drift or to bottlenecks affecting locally evolving lineages, or they may be due to founder effects following admixture with recent immigrants from outside the island.
It is highly unlikely that the increment of the compound frequency of haplogroups B, E, R9, and M7 seen among all aboriginal populations of Taiwan could be explained by drift. It seems more plausible that the ancestral population of coastal East Asia and island Southeast Asia was already enriched by the founder lineages of these haplogroups and that drift affected the frequencies of individual haplogroups while their combined frequency throughout this region remained high.
The coalescence time of haplogroup B4a1a, based on coding region mutations, is 13.2 ± 3.8 thousand years, consistent with its HVS-I-based age estimate. To test whether B4a1a could have been imported recently to Taiwan from the mainland, we genotyped the defining markers of this clade in 47 North Vietnamese and 79 Han speakers from Fujian (unpublished data), the closest province of China to Taiwan, and we did not observe any carriers of haplogroup B4a1a. The clustering pattern within B4a1a therefore provides a unique link between Polynesian, Papuan, and Taiwanese lineages, supporting their common origin around the Younger Dryas period somewhere in island Southeast Asia, possibly in Taiwan. The Polynesian and Papuan sequences occupy a derived position in the B4a1a tree, descending from their MRCA defined by a mutation at np 14022 that was not observed in Taiwanese. The derived B4a1a1 clade in Papuans and Polynesians has a coalescence time of 9.3 ± 2.5 thousand years.
Studies based on Y chromosomal and mitochondrial markers have traced in Polynesians the presence of lineages that are characteristic of Melanesians and East Indonesians but which are absent in mainland East Asia and Taiwan. Evidence for interaction or initiation of a human settlement process, directed toward Remote Oceania, somewhere in East Indonesia or Melanesia is also supported by the phylogenetic analyses of Polynesian rats, Rattus exulans.
In light of this study, the complete absence among aboriginal populations of several mtDNA haplogroups common on the Chinese mainland would suggest that the Neolithic colonizers (a) did not contribute significantly to the mtDNA pool of the pre-existing Formosan population; or (b) that the Neolithic migrants were a small group already lacking haplogroups A, C, G, D4, and M8-M10 that might have become frequent in southern China more recently.
This suggests that the motif ["Polynesian" B4a1a] may have evolved in populations living in or near Taiwan at the end of the Late Pleistocene period. Considering the differences between the Late Pleistocene and present-day shorelines of Southeast Asia, the B4a1 lineages may also have evolved in regions now submerged under the sea.
regards
Richard
Posted by: Richard Parker | November 11, 2007 10:41 PM
I think many of us are making the mistake of assuming just a small group of people left Taiwan at some time and moved, as a genetic isolate, through island Southeast Asia and on out to the remote Pacific islands. That's not how it works. The Austronesians evolved in what had become the vacant islands off the mainland Southeast Asian coast, the product of a mixture of people from around that coast. Polynesian mitochondrial DNA comes from Taiwan and Y-chromosome from islands as far away as New Guinea. Other genes presumably come from yet other places nearby. Where the Taiwanese mtDNA comes from is a fairly open question but we know humans had been in New Guinea for at least 30,000 years and probably twice that long. Years ago it was believed many aspects of island Southeast Asian culture had come south along the Coast from as far away as Japan. I don't know the current status of that theory
And of course there's no connection between Lapita pottery and Taiwan. Lapita originated in New Britain, far from Taiwan.
Posted by: terryt | November 12, 2007 3:52 AM
Lapita pottery is, justifiably, famous, but there is more to Lapita than just the pottery.
Posted by: afarensis, FCD | November 12, 2007 8:36 PM
Afarensis, as you say, "there is more to Lapita than just the pottery". And isn't it fascinating that, as far as I'm aware, the oldest pottery yet found is from Japan.
Posted by: terryt | November 12, 2007 10:35 PM
terryt:
"I think many of us are making the mistake of assuming just a small group of people left Taiwan at some time and moved, as a genetic isolate, through island Southeast Asia and on out to the remote Pacific islands. That's not how it works."
No, we're not making a mistake. That's more or less the current 'orthodox story', as put out by Blust, Bellwood, Diamond, Spriggs, Pawley & co. (and good old loyal Simon G)
But even they haven't claimed that Taiwanese "moved, as a genetic isolate". That's an almost impossible condition that you have added.
How could Taiwanese move anywhere if they didn't have any seaworthy boats?
And of course, that's not how it works.
Afarensis: "Lapita pottery is, justifiably, famous, but there is more to Lapita than just the pottery."
Just exactly, what?
Pigs & chickens - no proof
Taro, coconuts and bananas - no proof (but, if anything, eaxactly the reverse path)
Sophisticated sea-voyaging - no proof
Settlement patterns - no proof
Common language family - not a lot of proof
All of these factors were lumped together by Green as the 'Lapita complex'.
So, forget stuff like this:
Linguistics: Taiwan's gift to the world
Jared M. Diamond
Study of the giant Austronesian language family tells us a great deal about the history of Pacific peoples and boatbuilding, as well as about Aboriginal Australia.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v403/n6771/full/403709a0.html
He's reviewing his mate, Robert Blust's famous paper:
Blust, R. (1999). "Subgrouping, circularity and extinction: some issues in Austronesian comparative linguistics" in E. Zeitoun & P.J.K Li (Ed.) Selected papers from the Eighth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (pp. 31-94). Taipei: Academia Sinica.
Where dear Bob not only upped the ante on pre-proto-Austronesian languages from a few to 9, solely on sound-changes, but also wrote quite a speculative bit about boats, showing how Formosans, who had nothing better than rafts, could get out to Easter Island with catamarans.
regards
Richard
Posted by: Richard Parker | November 13, 2007 3:05 AM
The Polynesians certainly didn't sail out there on rafts, even though used them for short trips. The voyaging vaka looked probably something like this:
http://www.aloha.net/~vaka/index.html
Why they stopped using pottery? I offer an engineer's guess: they didn't need it anymore. For cooking they used leaf wraps and the umu, and for storage various gourds. All were available on location. Hauling heavy and fragile pottery around didn't make much sense.
As for eating flying foxes, I was just wondering how big a bat population would be needed for feeding any group of humans. Domesticated animals would be a more secure source of food.
Posted by: Lassi Hippeläinen | November 13, 2007 9:22 AM
Lassi, you're dead right. Even if you are only giving an 'engineer's guess' (which you greatly under-value)
- There is no trace of voyaging canoes in Taiwan. They only had the kind of bamboo rafts used, still, on Chinese rivers.
The Yami of Orchid Island, who are only Taiwanese by the accident of national line-drawing, but are otherwise closely connected with the Batanes Islands, between Taiwan and the Philippines, do have canoes (vaka) but they are only a sad copy of the real thing, that they brought with them from far to the south and east. (I'll send you chapter and verse if you request).
Lapita pots weren't functional. You couldn't cook in them, or store water. They were nicely decorated, but otherwise useless. (I'll send you chapter and verse if you request).
Polynesians certainly didn't need pottery. I've tested a coconut shell, and after 2 hours over a flaming gas ring, it was still cooking my lunchtime soup.
So Lapita wasn't a step towards pottery, 'civilisation' or anything else, but just another bit of short-term magic, just like the Cargo cults. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
which weren't just Western, but had happened many times before.
- Flying foxes - are not very good to eat, but even here on my island where almost every edible mammal or bird has already been eaten, I can go just 2km up the inland road to Victor's bar, and count thousands of them flying past, every evening at dusk. (Victor's bar is called 'Flying Fox')
regards
Richard
Posted by: Richard Parker | November 13, 2007 1:00 PM
So Richard, where did the Polynesians come from? Surely the arrival of people on islands east of Vanuatu coincides with the appearance of Lapita pottery.
Posted by: terryt | November 13, 2007 11:18 PM