Palau Is An Oceania Outlier

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

The ultimate source of Oceanian and Austronesian seafaring people was one of the indigenous tribes of what is now called Taiwan (we have identified which of them it was based upon linguistic evidence), via island Southeast Asia.  

Before expanding very far east, however, these Formosan origin Lapita people admixed with Papuan people (in an encounter that amounted to a hostile conquest).

This "graphical abstract" really sums up a new paper on the topic. 

Note that the dates in this image are "before present", i.e. before 1950 by archeological convention, and not BCE. The initial settlement of Palau was roughly contemporaneous with the Greek "dark ages" after Bronze Age collapse, for example, while the admixture of the people who settled Palau was contemporaneous with the Late Bronze Age in Europe.

An educated layman's explanation of the paper explains: 

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.

The underlying paper in Cell is as follows:

Highlights

• Ancient DNA of 21 individuals from Palau spans around 2,400 years

• Papuan-East Asian admixture in Palauans predates initial settlement

• Over 2,900 years of genetic continuity in Palau

• Shared East Asian-Papuan admixture in Palau and eastern Indonesia 

Summary 

The first people reached Remote Oceania 3,000 years before present (BP), arriving roughly simultaneously in the southwest Pacific, the Marianas Archipelago, and Palau. However, no genome-wide ancient DNA data have been available from Palau, a gap we address by reporting 21 individuals from four archaeological sites dating between 2,900 and 500 BP. 

All had approximately 60% ancestry related to East Asians and 40% to Papuans, similar to present-day Palauans, the longest stretch of population continuity anywhere in Remote Oceania. The lengths of contiguous Papuan ancestry segments in the oldest individuals show that major admixture between Papuans and East Asians in the ancestors of all sampled Palauans began prior to first settlement. This differs from the pattern in the southwest Pacific, where sampled individuals of the Lapita archaeological culture from three different islands had almost entirely East Asian ancestry, with large amounts of Papuan admixture observed only hundreds of years later. 

Yue-Chen Liu, et al., "Papuan admixture predated the settlement of Palau" (March 10, 2026).

How Did India's Linguistically Austroasiatic Khasi People End Up With Tibeto-Burman Genetics?

The Khasic languages are most closely related to the Austroasiatic Palaungic language of Myanmar, and the Khumic language of Northern Laos.

The Khasi people of Northeast India speak an Austroasiatic language, but one that is in a different subfamily than India's Munda speakers and the Mon-Khemer people of Southeast Asia. Yet, genetically they are more similar to Tibeto-Burman language family speakers. 

This is because their linguistic ancestors admixed with a first wave of Tibeto-Burman people resulting in their adoption of the Khasi language. But, they lack genetic traces of a second wave of Tibeto-Burman language speakers whose language replaced that of the Austroasiatic languages in the peoples they encountered.

Northeast India, with its unique geographic location in the midst of the Himalayas and Bay of Bengal, has served as a passage for the movement of modern humans across the Indian subcontinent and East/Southeast Asia. 

In this study we look into the population genetics of a unique population called the Khasi, speaking a language (also known as the Khasi language) belonging to the Austroasiatic language family and residing amidst the Tibeto-Burman speakers as an isolated population. The Khasi language belongs to one of the three major broad classifications or phyla of the Austroasiatic language and the speakers of the three sub-groups are separated from each other by large geographical distances. The Khasi speakers are separated from their nearest Austroasiatic language-speaking sub-groups: the “Mundari” sub-family from East and peninsular India and the “Mon-Khmers” in Mainland Southeast Asia. 

We found the Khasi population to be genetically distinct from other Austroasiatic speakers, i.e. Mundaris and Mon-Khmers, but relatively similar to the geographically proximal Tibeto Burmans. The possible reasons for this genetic-linguistic discordance lie in the admixture history of different migration events that originated from East Asia and proceeded possibly towards Southeast Asia. 

We found at least two distinct migration events from East Asia. While the ancestors of today’s Tibeto-Burman speakers were affected by both, the ancestors of Khasis were insulated from the second migration event. Correlating the linguistic similarity of Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Tibetan languages of today’s East Asians, we infer that the second wave of migration resulted in a linguistic transition while the Khasis could preserve their linguistic identity.

Debashree Tagore, et al., "Multiple migrations from East Asia led to linguistic transformation in NorthEast India and mainland Southeast Asia" Front. Genet. (October 11, 2022). The body text of the introduction provides more background about the Khasi people and the current understanding of their potential origins prior to this paper:

The Khasis are one of the few populations in the world that follow a matrilineal system of inheritance. Besides the linguistic similarity, anthropologists and archaeologists have established that the Khasis have cultural similarities with Mundaris and Mon-Khmer populations. It has been shown that they share similar stone tools and have similar death rituals of erecting memorial stones for the deceased (Gurdon 1914). Linguistically, the Khasi language is more similar to languages of the Mon-Khmer branch than those of the Mundari branch and linguists have often assigned Khasi and Mon-Khmer languages to the same group (Pinnow et al., 1942; Chazée 1999). Khasi language also bears lexical and morphological similarities to some Tibeto Burman languages (Longmailai 2015). Peiros suggested a significant number of words were similar between Proto Austroasiatics and Proto-Sino-Tibetans (Peiros 2011).

Nevertheless, the presence of ancient Austroasiatics (AA) speakers across NEI still remains a possibility. Our previous study (Tagore et al., 2021) on autosomal data of the Mundari and Mon-Khmer Austroasiatics indicated that in pre-Neolithic times, the ancestors of today’s Austroasiatic speakers had a widespread distribution possibly extending from Central India to Southeast Asia (SEA), further supported by Lipson et al. (2018). They were later in time fragmented and isolated to small pockets resulting in their present-day disjoint geographic distribution. What is intriguing is that given the widespread distribution of Austroasiatic speakers from Central India to SEA across NEI and the central location of the Khasis, it is possible that the Khasis will serve as a genetic link between the two Austroasiatic groups on either side of NEI.

There have been very few studies on the genetics of Khasi, so as to reach any plausible conclusions. One previous study on uniparental markers has proposed a genetic continuity between the Mundari Austroasiatics of Central India, Khasi-Khmuic, and Mon-Khmer (Reddy et al., 2007). Using multidimensional scaling of the pairwise FST distances calculated on Y-haplogroups of Austroasiatics and neighboring populations, they found the three Austroasiatic groups (Mundari, Khasi-Khmuic, and Mon-Khmer) to cluster together. They also found the Y haplogroup O-M95, restricted within the Austroasiatics and postulated to have originated in the Mundaris, is present in the Khasis at a frequency intermediate to that of Mundaris and Mon-Khmers. They suggested an initial presence of Austroasiatics in Central India with rapid migration to Southeast Asia via the Northeast corridor carrying the O-M95 haplogroup.

Wikipedia has this to say about the Khasi people in its introduction:

The Khasi people are an ethnic group of Meghalaya in north-eastern India with a significant population in the bordering state of Assam, and in certain parts of Bangladesh. Khasi people form the majority of the population of the eastern part of Meghalaya, that is Khasi Hills, constituting 78.3% of the region's population, and is the state's largest community, with around 48% of the population of Meghalaya. They are among the few Austroasiatic-speaking peoples in South Asia. The Khasi tribe holds the distinction of being one of the few remaining matriarchal tribes of the world. Under the Constitution of India, the Khasis have been granted the status of Scheduled Tribe.

India	1,427,711
Meghalaya	1,382,278
Assam	34,558
Bangladesh	85,120

About 1 million of the roughly 1.5 million Khasi people speak the Khasi language.

About 98.5% of the Khasi are either Christian (83.1%), mostly Catholic and Presbyterian, or adhere to their own indigenous Niam Khasi religion (15.4%) which has some similarities to deism. About 0.7% are Hindus, about 0.5% are atheists, and the remaining 0.3% include similar numbers of Buddhists and Muslims.