Description
"The last great human migration: DNA and the human settlement of the Pacific" (Part 1 of 5)
Professor Lisa Matisoo Smith, University of Otago, New Zealand.
Friday 13 May 2011
Over the last thirty years there has been a fundamental change in our knowledge of the human settlement of the remote Pacific, the last major region of the Earth to be colonised by people.
The story begins with the Neolithic expansion out of Asia via Taiwan, through Island Southeast Asia and Near Oceania and out into Remote Oceania. In the Pacific, this migration event is associated archaeologically with the appearance and spread of the Lapita Cultural Complex (about 3500 to 2000 years ago) and linguistically with the distribution of Austronesian languages. The final stage of this migration was the settlement of the Polynesian Triangle (demarcated by Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand).
While this so called "Fast Train Model" has, for the most part, been rejected by the archaeological community, this general story of the migration of a population making its way out of Taiwan and purposefully sailing through Near Oceania to the islands of Polynesia has captured the public imagination. Genetic research has also contributed to this story with the identification of molecular markers that appear to track this migration event -- in particular the distribution of the mitochondrial DNA marker known as the "Polynesian motif". But as more genetic data accumulate this simple model appears to be problematic.
This lecture will discuss the latest genetic studies that suggest a more complicated picture of Pacific settlement and population origins and show how ancient DNA analyses are allowing us to test some possible alternative scenarios for the settlement of the Pacific islands and beyond.
The Hall Lecture is UQ Archaeology's annual public lecture in honour of the founder of archaeology at UQ Associate Professor Jay Hall.
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