TODAY, THE POPULATION of Java, most other Indonesian islands (except the easternmost ones), and the Philippines is rather homogeneous. In appearance and genes those islands’ inhabitants are similar to South Chinese, and even more similar to tropical Southeast Asians, especially those of the Malay Peninsula. Their languages are equally homogeneous: while 374 languages are spoken in the Philippines and western and central Indonesia, all of them are closely related and fall within the same sub-subfamily (Western Malayo-Polynesian) of the Austronesian language family. Austronesian languages reached the Asian mainland on the Malay Peninsula and in small pockets in Vietnam and Cambodia, near the westernmost Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo, but they occur nowhere else on the mainland (Figure 17.1). Some Austronesian words borrowed into English include “taboo” and “tattoo” (from a Polynesian language), “boondocks” (from the Tagalog language of the Philippines), and “amok,” “batik,” and “orangutan” (from Malay).
That genetic and linguistic uniformity of Indonesia and the Philippines is initially as surprising as is the predominant linguistic uniformity of China. The famous Java Homo erectus fossils prove that humans have occupied at least western Indonesia for a million years. That should have given ample time for humans to evolve genetic and linguistic diversity and tropical adaptations, such as dark skins like those of many other tropical peoples—but instead Indonesians and Filipinos have light skins.
It is also surprising that Indonesians and Filipinos are so similar to tropical Southeast Asians and South Chinese in other physical features besides light skins and in their genes. A glance at a map makes it obvious that Indonesia offered the only possible route by which humans could have reached New Guinea and Australia 40,000 years ago, so one might naively have expected modern Indonesians to be like modern New Guineans and Australians. In reality, there are only a few New Guinean-like populations in the Philippine / western Indonesia area, notably the Negritos living in mountainous areas of the Philippines. As is also true of the three New Guinean-like relict populations that I mentioned in speaking of tropical Southeast Asia (Chapter 16), the Philippine Negritos could be relicts of populations ancestral to Wiwor’s people before they reached New Guinea. Even those Negritos speak Austronesian languages similar to those of their Filipino neighbors, implying that they too (like Malaysia’s Semang Negritos and Africa’s Pygmies) have lost their original language.
All these facts suggest strongly that either tropical Southeast Asians or South Chinese speaking Austronesian languages recently spread through the Philippines and Indonesia, replacing all the former inhabitants of those islands except the Philippine Negritos, and replacing all the original island languages. That event evidently took place too recently for the colonists to evolve dark skins, distinct language families, or genetic distinctiveness or diversity. Their languages are of course much more numerous than the eight dominant Chinese languages of mainland China, but are no more diverse. The proliferation of many similar languages in the Philippines and Indonesia merely reflects the fact that the islands never underwent a political and cultural unification, as did China.
Details of language distributions provide valuable clues to the route of this hypothesized Austronesian expansion. The whole Austronesian language family consists of 959 languages, divided among four subfamilies. But one of those subfamilies, termed Malayo-Polynesian, comprises 945 of those 959 languages and covers almost the entire geographic range of the Austronesian family. Before the recent overseas expansion of Europeans speaking Indo-European languages, Austronesian was the most widespread language family in the world. That suggests that the Malayo-Polynesian subfamily differentiated recently out of the Austronesian family and spread far from the Austronesian homeland, giving rise to many local languages, all of which are still closely related because there has been too little time to develop large linguistic differences. For the location of that Austronesian homeland, we should therefore look not to MalayoPolynesian but to the other three Austronesian subfamilies, which differ considerably more from each other and from Malayo-Polynesian than the sub-subfamilies of Malayo-Polynesian differ among each other.
It turns out that those three other subfamilies have coincident distributions, all of them tiny compared with the distribution of Malayo-Polynesian. They are confined to aborigines of the island of Taiwan, lying only 90 miles from the South China mainland. Taiwan’s aborigines had the island largely to themselves until mainland Chinese began settling in large numbers within the last thousand years. Still more mainlanders arrived after 1945, especially after the Chinese Communists defeated the Chinese Nationalists in 1949, so that aborigines now constitute only 2 percent of Taiwan’s population. The concentration of three out of the four Austronesian subfamilies on Taiwan suggests that, within the present Austronesian realm, Taiwan is the homeland where Austronesian languages have been spoken for the most millennia and have consequently had the longest time in which to diverge. All other Austronesian languages, from those on Madagascar to those on Easter Island, would then stem from a population expansion out of Taiwan.
WE CAN NOW turn to archaeological evidence. While the debris of ancient village sites does not include fossilized words along with bones and pottery, it does reveal movements of people and cultural artifacts that could be associated with languages. Like the rest of the world, most of the present Austronesian realm—Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and many Pacific islands—was originally occupied by hunter-gatherers lacking pottery, polished stone tools, domestic animals, and crops. (The sole exceptions to this generalization are the remote islands of Madagascar, eastern Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, which were never reached by hunter-gatherers and remained empty of humans until the Austronesian expansion.) The first archaeological signs of something different within the Austronesian realm come from—Taiwan. Beginning around the fourth millennium B.C., polished stone tools and a distinctive decorated pottery style (so-called Ta-p’en-k’eng pottery) derived from earlier South China mainland pottery appeared on Taiwan and on the opposite coast of the South China mainland. Remains of rice and millet at later Taiwanese sites provide evidence of agriculture.
Ta-p’en-k’eng sites of Taiwan and the South China coast are full of fish bones and mollusk shells, as well as of stone net sinkers and adzes suitable for hollowing out a wooden canoe. Evidently, those first Neolithic occupants of Taiwan had watercraft adequate for deep-sea fishing and for regular sea traffic across Taiwan Strait, separating that island from the China coast. Thus, Taiwan Strait may have served as the training ground where mainland Chinese developed the open-water maritime skills that would permit them to expand over the Pacific.
One specific type of artifact linking Taiwan’s Ta-p’en-k’eng culture to later Pacific island cultures is a bark beater, a stone implement used for pounding the fibrous bark of certain tree species into rope, nets, and clothing. Once Pacific peoples spread beyond the range of wool-yielding domestic animals and fiber plant crops and hence of woven clothing, they became dependent on pounded bark “cloth” for their clothing. Inhabitants of Rennell Island, a traditional Polynesian island that did not become Westernized until the 1930s, told me that Westernization yielded the wonderful side benefit that the island became quiet. No more sounds of bark beaters everywhere, pounding out bark cloth from dawn until after dusk every day!
Within a millennium or so after the Ta-p’en-k’eng culture reached Taiwan, archaeological evidence shows that cultures obviously derived from it spread farther and farther from Taiwan to fill up the modern Austronesian realm (Figure 17.2). The evidence includes ground stone tools, pottery, bones of domestic pigs, and crop remains. For example, the decorated Ta-p’en-k’eng pottery on Taiwan gave way to undecorated plain or red pottery, which has also been found at sites in the Philippines and on the Indonesian islands of Celebes and Timor. This cultural “package” of pottery, stone tools, and domesticates appeared around 3000 B.C. in the Philippines, around 2500 B.C. on the Indonesian islands of Celebes and N
orth Borneo and Timor, around 2000 B.C. on Java and Sumatra, and around 1600 B.C. in the New Guinea region. There, as we shall see, the expansion assumed a speedboat pace, as bearers of the cultural package raced eastward into the previously uninhabited Pacific Ocean beyond the Solomon Archipelago. The last phases of the expansion, during the millennium after A.D. 1, resulted in the colonization of every Polynesian and Micronesian island capable of supporting humans. Astonishingly, it also swept westward across the Indian Ocean to the east coast of Africa, resulting in the colonization of the island of Madagascar.
At least until the expansion reached coastal New Guinea, travel between islands was probably by double-outrigger sailing canoes, which are still widespread throughout Indonesia today. That boat design represented a major advance over the simple dugout canoes prevalent among traditional peoples living on inland waterways throughout the world. A dugout canoe is just what its name implies: a solid tree trunk “dug out” (that is, hollowed out), and its ends shaped, by an adze. Since the canoe is as round-bottomed as the trunk from which it was carved, the least imbalance in weight distribution tips the canoe toward the overweighted side. Whenever I’ve been paddled in dugouts up New Guinea rivers by New Guineans, I have spent much of the trip in terror: it seemed that every slight movement of mine risked capsizing the canoe and spilling out me and my binoculars to commune with crocodiles. New Guineans manage to look secure while paddling dugouts on calm lakes and rivers, but not even New Guineans can use a dugout in seas with modest waves. Hence some stabilizing device must have been essential not only for the Austronesian expansion through Indonesia but even for the initial colonization of Taiwan.
The solution was to lash two smaller logs (“outriggers”) parallel to the hull and several feet from it, one on each side, connected to the hull by poles lashed perpendicular to the hull and outriggers. Whenever the hull starts to tip toward one side, the buoyancy of the outrigger on that side prevents the outrigger from being pushed under the water and hence makes it virtually impossible to capsize the vessel. The invention of the double-outrigger sailing canoe may have been the technological breakthrough that triggered the Austronesian expansion from the Chinese mainland.
TWO STRIKING COINCIDENCES between archaeological and linguistic evidence support the inference that the people bringing a Neolithic culture to Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia thousands of years ago spoke Austronesian languages and were ancestral to the Austronesian speakers still inhabiting those islands today. First, both types of evidence point unequivocally to the colonization of Taiwan as the first stage of the expansion from the South China coast, and to the colonization of the Philippines and Indonesia from Taiwan as the next stage. If the expansion had proceeded from tropical Southeast Asia’s Malay Peninsula to the nearest Indonesian island of Sumatra, then to other Indonesian islands, and finally to the Philippines and Taiwan, we would find the deepest divisions (reflecting the greatest time depth) of the Austronesian language family among the modern languages of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra, and the languages of Taiwan and the Philippines would have differentiated only recently within a single subfamily. Instead, the deepest divisions are in Taiwan, and the languages of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra fall together in the same sub-sub-subfamily: a recent branch of the Western Malayo-Polynesian sub-subfamily, which is in turn a fairly recent branch of the Malayo-Polynesian subfamily. Those details of linguistic relationships agree perfectly with the archaeological evidence that the colonization of the Malay Peninsula was recent, and followed rather than preceded the colonization of Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
The other coincidence between archaeological and linguistic evidence concerns the cultural baggage that ancient Austronesians used. Archaeology provides us with direct evidence of culture in the form of pottery, pig and fish bones, and so on. One might initially wonder how a linguist, studying only modern languages whose unwritten ancestral forms remain unknown, could ever figure out whether Austronesians living on Taiwan 6,000 years ago had pigs. The solution is to reconstruct the vocabularies of vanished ancient languages (so-called protolanguages) by comparing vocabularies of modern languages derived from them.
For instance, the words meaning “sheep” in many languages of the Indo-European language family, distributed from Ireland to India, are quite similar: “avis,” “avis,” “ovis,” “oveja,” “ovtsa,” “owis,” and “oi” in Lithuanian, Sanskrit, Latin, Spanish, Russian, Greek, and Irish, respectively. (The English “sheep” is obviously from a different root, but English retains the original root in the word “ewe.”) Comparison of the sound shifts that the various modern Indo-European languages have undergone during their histories suggests that the original form was “owis” in the ancestral Indo-European language spoken around 6,000 years ago. That unwritten ancestral language is termed Proto-Indo-European.
Evidently, Proto-Indo-Europeans 6,000 years ago had sheep, in agreement with archaeological evidence. Nearly 2,000 other words of their vocabulary can similarly be reconstructed, including words for “goat,” “horse,” “wheel,” “brother,” and “eye.” But no Proto-Indo-European word can be reconstructed for “gun,” which uses different roots in different modern Indo-European languages: “gun” in English, “fusil” in French, “ruzhyo” in Russian, and so on. That shouldn’t surprise us: people 6,000 years ago couldn’t possibly have had a word for guns, which were invented only within the past 1,000 years. Since there was thus no inherited shared root meaning “gun,” each Indo-European language had to invent or borrow its own word when guns were finally invented.
Proceeding in the same way, we can compare modern Taiwanese, Philippine, Indonesian, and Polynesian languages to reconstruct a Proto-Austronesian language spoken in the distant past. To no one’s surprise, that reconstructed Proto-Austronesian language had words with meanings such as “two,” “bird,” “ear,” and “head louse”: of course, Proto-Austronesians could count to 2, knew of birds, and had ears and lice. More interestingly, the reconstructed language had words for “pig,” “dog,” and “rice,” which must therefore have been part of Proto-Austronesian culture. The reconstructed language is full of words indicating a maritime economy, such as “outrigger canoe,” “sail,” “giant clam,” “octopus,” “fish trap,” and “sea turtle.” This linguistic evidence regarding the culture of Proto-Austronesians, wherever and whenever they lived, agrees well with the archaeological evidence regarding the pottery-making, sea-oriented, food-producing people living on Taiwan around 6,000 years ago.
The same procedure can be applied to reconstruct Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, the ancestral language spoken by Austronesians after emigrating from Taiwan. Proto-Malayo-Polynesian contains words for many tropical crops like taro, breadfruit, bananas, yams, and coconuts, for which no word can be reconstructed in Proto-Austronesian. Thus, the linguistic evidence suggests that many tropical crops were added to the Austronesian repertoire after the emigration from Taiwan. This conclusion agrees with archaeological evidence: as colonizing farmers spread southward from Taiwan (lying about 23 degrees north of the equator) toward the equatorial tropics, they came to depend increasingly on tropical root and tree crops, which they proceeded to carry with them out into the tropical Pacific.
How could those Austronesian-speaking farmers from South China via Taiwan replace the original hunter-gatherer population of the Philippines and western Indonesia so completely that little genetic and no linguistic evidence of that original population survived? The reasons resemble the reasons why Europeans replaced or exterminated Native Australians within the last two centuries, and why South Chinese replaced the original tropical Southeast Asians earlier: the farmers’ much denser populations, superior tools and weapons, more developed watercraft and maritime skills, and epidemic diseases to which the farmers but not the hunter-gatherers had some resistance. On the Asian mainland Austronesian-speaking farmers were able similarly to replace some of the former hunter-gatherers of the Malay Peninsula, because Austronesians co
lonized the peninsula from the south and east (from the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo) around the same time that Austroasiatic-speaking farmers were colonizing the peninsula from the north (from Thailand). Other Austronesians managed to establish themselves in parts of southern Vietnam and Cambodia to become the ancestors of the modern Chamic minority of those countries.
However, Austronesian farmers could spread no farther into the Southeast Asian mainland, because Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai farmers had already replaced the former hunter-gatherers there, and because Austronesian farmers had no advantage over Austroasiatic and Tai-Kadai farmers. Although we infer that Austronesian speakers originated from coastal South China, Austronesian languages today are not spoken anywhere in mainland China, possibly because they were among the hundreds of former Chinese languages eliminated by the southward expansion of Sino-Tibetan speakers. But the language families closest to Austronesian are thought to be Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, and Miao-Yao. Thus, while Austronesian languages in China may not have survived the onslaught of Chinese dynasties, some of their sister and cousin languages did.