Peoples of the sail

I call the Austronesians peoples of the sail since they spread agriculture by literally sailing out into the world.  Most areas they came to had no agriculture earlier.  The first major exception is parts of Southeast Asia’s mainland.  There, there were already farmers speaking Austroasiatic languages.  The other is New Guinea where people had developed agriculture themselves.  Austronesians came to more areas where there were already farmers.  But no Austronesian-speaking peoples are in majority there today.

The Austronesians descend from the Dapenkeng culture on Taiwan and in Fujian.  There it existed 5,500 to 4,500 years ago.  We are talking about Stone Age farmers here.  Their cultural descendants are no longer extant on the mainland.  But on Taiwan they are extant in the form of the island’s natives.  It was not until the Middle Ages that the Chinese started to move there.  The large immigration of such did not start until the 17th century.  Today the natives consists just a couple of percent of the population.

The sail was invented in East Asia before people got metal tools.  By setting sails on outrigger canoes the Dapenkeng culture reached the Philippines.  There the Malayo-Polynesian culture arose about 5,000 years ago.  Over the course of 2,000 years it spread over the Indo-Australian Archipelago.  It brought with it dog, foxtail millet, pig, rice and soy bean.  Some settled on the Malacca Peninsula and what is now southern Vietnam.  Through contact with farmers there they got chickens and taro.  Within the Indo-Australian Archipelago people started to cultivate coconut palm, elephant foot yam, giant alocasia and ube.  Above all root vegetables become more and more important during this expansion.

The Marianas, Palau and Yap were peopled during the process too.  All other land areas were when agriculture got there already inhabited by hunter-gatherers.  The farmers inevitably interbreed with people already living there.  Malays for this reason look a little different from people further north in Asia.  They have darker skin colour and have less pronounced epicanthic folds.  People their ancestors interbreed with were more similar to Papuans.  Such humans still exists as minorities in some places.  However, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines are now dominated by Malays.  They are named for the Malacca Peninsula which is named Malaya in Malaysian.  The Malays were also first to establish themselves on Madagascar.  Languages indigenous to this island are most closely related to the Dayaks’.  In contrast their biological descent is now more than half African.

Malayo-Polynesian-speaking peoples reached New Guinea early on.  From there comes banana and breadfruit.  In exchange people got chickens, dogs and pigs.  Trough trade bananas reached Southeast Asia’s mainland.  At the same time elephant foot yam, taro and ube reached New Guinea.  Together with coconut palm these consisted the base of the Lapita culture.  On islands east of New Guinea it arose around 3,600 years ago.  It gave rise to the Melanesians and later the Polynesians.

When the Lapita culture arose Malays were mixed more with Papuans.  Today’s Melanesians have around 70% of their biological descent from pre-Austronesian peoples.  I don’t know how it is with Polynesians but there is some difference in appearance.  This could be a founder effect from Samoa’s and Tonga’s first inhabitants.  Long later people continued from there out across the Pacific.

Please note that metal tools reached Southeast Asia no earlier than Antiquity.  Same applies to writing which the area got from South Asia.  State societies developed on the larger islands too.  The Melanesians’ and Polynesians’ ancestors did not take part in this development.  Were there trading contacts they were to indirect to convey such.  The island they inhabited were neither particularly large.  So when their expansion continued they were still Stone Age farmers.

During Antiquity people started to actively search for new islands.  This continued during the entire Antiquity and most of the Middle Ages.  During Antiquity the rest of what is now called Micronesia was peopled.  The Lapita culture’s descendants settled on islands from the Carolines to Kiribati.  The rest of Polynesia was peopled during the Middle Ages.  Seafarers settled from Hawaii to Easter Island to New Zeeland.  Some reached as far as South America in present-day Colombia and Ecuador.  The natives there got coconut palm and the Polynesians sweet potato.  To this day there are cultural and genetic traces of this contact.

To me it is clear these islands were not settled by chance.  The crew of a single ship can’t found a human population.  We are too sensitive to inbreeding for this to work.  The Polynesians’ largest catamarans could take 200 people.  However, not even this is enough to found a viable population.  I think one needs at least 500 since not everyone has children.  Consequentially, it is clear to me that peopled sailed to these islands deliberately.  Say some set of hunting for new islands.  If they did find one they had to later be able to find the way back to it again.  As a minimum they had to know for how many days they had sailed in which direction.  One can find out the cardinal directions using the stars.  I know two constellations useable for this purpose.  But there are certainly more.

From there developed wayfinding which was used in the Pacific.  These methods were used for trade journeys well into the 20th century.  The starting points used were:

• The Sun’s position when it is as highest.

• The stars’ positions in the sky.

• The water’s temperature and salinity.

• The waves’ different directions.

Based on these the wayfinders could find out where on the sea they were.  One has to be very smart to do this without instruments.  If such smart individuals existed the rest can’t have been idiots.  The relevant mental abilities follow a normal distribution.  This means most people’s ability is in the middle of the scale.  However, this applies to entire populations and not for small groups of a couple of dozen humans.  In such small groups of humans the chance factor matter too much.

Why did they then remain Stone Age farmers for several thousand years?  I think the explanation was they quite simply were too few.  There could only live a limited number on each one of the islands.  Even with fishing and trade each island could only sustain a limited number of people.  The fewer humans there are the fewer can come up with ideas.  In addition there were limitations in necessary natural resources.  For example ceramics suddenly ceased to be made on Samoa.  I think people quite simply run out of usable clay there.

 

Uploaded on the 25th of April 2025.