Palau Is An Oceania Outlier

This is a further refinement of an already pretty well worked out story of Oceanian origins.

About 3200 years ago, Southeast Asian seafarers known as the Lapita pushed east into the tropical islands of the Pacific Ocean, hitting nearly every habitable isle in that corner of the globe from New Guinea to Fiji and Tonga. As they did so, they left behind artifacts of their culture, including pottery stamped with distinctive geometric patterns.

But on Palau, there’s not a single shard of Lapita pottery—and the island’s inhabitants speak a language that’s distinct from the tongues spoken on other Pacific islands. So who were the first Palauans, and where did they come from?

A new study published last week in Cell suggests an answer. Genetic evidence confirms Palau’s first settlers descended from Southeast Asians who had intermingled with the Papuans, Indigenous peoples who settled the island of New Guinea some 50,000 years ago.

“It’s lovely to see a piece of Pacific history—which we’ve traditionally been at a bit of a loss to explain—finally start to come together into a more understandable story,” says Murray Cox, a computational biologist at Massey University of New Zealand who wasn’t involved in the new work.

The discovery builds on previous ancient DNA research into the origins of the Lapita themselves. That work, led by evolutionary biologist David Reich at Harvard University and his colleagues, showed that Lapita were essentially pure Southeast Asians of Taiwanese roots—but that modern populations on Pacific islands showed Papuan ancestry, too. The studies suggested this Papuan ancestry came in about 2500 years ago, as Papuans began to join the same canoe voyages that had earlier carried Lapita settlers into the region.

From Science.