Neither Australia nor Papua New Guinea were Isolated completely or Closed off from Contact and Diffusion: culture/religion and plants/animals, throughout their histories

Damien Marie AtHope’s Art

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“Phylogenetic and demographic analyses show that dingoes originate from dogs in southern East Asia, which migrated via Island Southeast Asia to reach Australia around 8,300 years ago, and subsequently diverged into a genetically distinct population.” ref

“Currently, the earliest evidence for dog dispersal into the Greater Australian region and surrounds is found in Australia (Madura Cave 3,210–3,361 years ago), New Ireland (Kamgot, c. 3,000–3,300 years ago), and Timor-Leste (Matja Kuru 2, 2,886–3,068 years ago). Previously, the earliest published dog remains for the large continental island of New Guinea was from Edubu 1 (2,314–2,700 years ago) in Caution Bay, south coast of mainland PNG.” ref

Shamanism Origins 34,000 years ago, and the Origin of Dogs as Tutelary Spirits?

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“Tianyuan Man, a 40,000-year-old individual from western Beijing. One of the earliest modern humans found in East Asia, his genetic sequence marks him as an early ancestor of today’s Asians and Native Americans. That he lived where China’s current capital stands indicates that the ancestors of today’s Asians began placing roots in East Asia as early as 40,000 years ago. Farther south, two 8,000- to 4,000-year-old Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers from Laos and Malaysia associated with the Hòabìnhian culture have DNA that, like the Tianyuan Man, shows they’re early ancestors of Asians and Native Americans. These two came from a completely different lineage than the Tianyuan Man, which suggested that many genetically distinct populations occupied Asia in the past. But no humans today share the same genetic makeup as either Hòabìnhians or the Tianyuan Man, in both East and Southeast Asia. Why did ancestries that persisted for so long vanish from the gene pool of people alive now? Ancient farmers carry the key to that answer.” ref

“People domesticated millet in northern China’s Yellow River region about 10,000 years ago. Around the same time, people in southern China’s Yangtze River region domesticated rice. The process took thousands of years, and societies in East Asia grew increasingly complex, with the rise of the first dynasties around 4,000 years ago. That’s also when rice cultivation appears to have spread from its origins to areas farther south, including lands that are today’s Southeast Asian countries. When rice farmers from southern China expanded southward, they introduced not only their farming technology but also their genetics to local populations of Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers. The overpowering influx of their DNA ended up swamping the local gene pool. Today, little trace of hunter-gatherer ancestry remains in the genes of people who live in Southeast Asia. Farther north, a similar story played out. Ancient Siberian hunter-gatherers show little relationship with East Asians today, but later Siberian farmers are closely related to today’s East Asians. Farmers from northern China moved northward into Siberia, bringing their DNA with them, leading to a sharp decrease in the prevalence of the previous local hunter-gatherer ancestry.” ref

“Genetically speaking, today’s East Asians are not very different from each other. A lot of DNA is needed to start genetically distinguishing between people with different cultural histories. Past populations were more diverse than today’s. The DNA of people who lived in coastal southern China 9,000-8,500 years ago, we realized that already by then, much of China shared a common heritage. Because their archaeology and morphology were different from that of the Yellow River farmers, we had thought these coastal people might come from a lineage not closely related to those first agricultural East Asians. Maybe this group’s ancestry would be similar to the Tianyuan Man or Hòabìnhians. But instead, every person we sampled was closely related to present-day East Asians. That means that by 9,000 years ago, DNA common to all present-day East Asians was widespread across China.” ref

“Ancient DNA reveals rapid shifts in ancestry over the last 10,000 years across Asia, likely due to migration and cultural exchange. Today’s northern and southern Chinese populations share more in common with ancient Yellow River populations than with ancient coastal southern Chinese. Thus, early Yellow River farmers migrated both north and south, contributing to the gene pool of humans across East and Southeast Asia. The coastal southern Chinese ancestry did not vanish, though. It persisted in small amounts and did increase in northern China’s Yellow River region over time. The influence of ancient southern East Asians is low on the mainland, but they had a huge impact elsewhere. On islands spanning from the Taiwan Strait to Polynesia live the Austronesians, best known for their seafaring. They possess the highest amount of southern East Asian ancestry today, highlighting their ancestry’s roots in coastal southern China.” ref

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Shamanistic and Animistic Cultures map by “The Shamanism Magazine” (http://SacredHoop.org)

https://sacredhoop.org/Free-Guide-To-Shamanism/Sacred-Hoop-Free-Guide-To-Shamanism.pdf

https://vebuka.com/print/171116090613-9bd8504b25af4f7e2fe52d3cfe620241/quotSACRED_HOOPquot_GUIDE_TO_SHAMANISM

Reincarnation/Rebirth in Indigenous Religions (Siberia, Americas, and Aboriginal Australians), Celtic druids, as well as “Indian Religions” such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism

Shamanism-related Trickster god/spirit, Raven or Crow

Investigating Asian Shamanism: “Wu” (Chinese shaman) and (Chinese shamanism) “Wuism” or “Wu” religion as well as Others to Understand

“Although the classic model and most complete expression of shamanism is found in the Arctic and Central Asian regions, the phenomenon must not be considered as limited to those countries. It is encountered, for example, in Southeast Asia, Oceania, and among many American aboriginal tribes, although it does not play a role of the first order in Africa except among those few groups that have remained hunters and gatherers, such as the San. A distinction is to be made, however, between the religions dominated by a shamanistic ideology and by shamanistic techniques (as is the case with Siberian and Indonesian religions) and those in which shamanism constitutes instead a secondary phenomenon.” ref

“Shamanism is prevalent in the Malay Peninsula and in Oceania. Among the peoples of the Malay Peninsula, the shaman heals with the help of celestial spirits or by using crystals of quartz. But the influence of Indo-Malayan beliefs is noticeable, too, as when shamans are said to change into tigers or to achieve trance by dancing. In the Andaman Islands the shaman gets his power from contact with spirits. The most common method is to “die” and return to life, the traditional pattern of shamanic initiation. The shamans gain their reputation through their acts of healing and the quality of the weather they create through meteorological magic.” ref

“The distinctive marks of Malayan shamanism are the calling forth of the tiger’s spirit and the achievement of the trance (lupa), during which the spirits seize the shaman, possess him, and reply to questions asked by the audience. Mediumistic qualities also are characteristic of different forms of shamanism in Sumatra, Borneo, and Celebes. Among the Ngadju-Dayak of Borneo there exists a special class of shamans, the basirs (literally, “incapable of procreation”). These intersex individuals (hermaphrodites) are considered to be intermediaries between heaven and earth because they unite in their own person the feminine element (earth) and the masculine element (heaven). Possession by gods or spirits is a peculiarity of Polynesian ecstatic religion. The extreme frequency of possession in that region has made possible a proliferation of priests, inspired persons, healers, and sorcerers, any of whom may perform magical cures. For this reason it is not possible to speak of shamanism stricto sensu in Polynesia.” ref

“Among Australian Aborigines, a person becomes a shaman through a ritual of initiatory death, followed by a resurrection to a new and superhuman condition. This initiatory death, like that of the Siberian shaman, has two specific marks not found elsewhere in combination: first, a series of operations performed on the candidate’s body (opening of the abdomen, renewal of the organs, washing and drying of the bones, insertion of magical substances); second, an ascent to heaven, sometimes followed by trance journeys into the otherworld. The revelations concerning the secret techniques of the medicine men are obtained in trance, a dream, or in the waking state before, during, or after the initiatory ritual proper.” ref

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“Aboriginal Australian Y-DNA is C-M347 and K-M526\*, with S-P308 and M-M186.” ref

“The dominant Y-DNA haplogroups in Papua New Guinea are M (M-P256) and S (S-M230), which represent the older, indigenous Melanesian genetic background, along with C-M38. There is also a significant presence of O-M122, which is of Austronesian origin and indicates later migrations into the region.” ref

“O-M134: Found frequently among speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages, among members of the Kazakh Naiman tribe with a moderate distribution throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia. O3-M122 is the commonly shared genetic signature of Sino-Tibetan speaking ethnicities. O-M119 (which was known briefly as O-MSY2.2, until the SNP MSY2.2 was found to be unreliable) is found frequently in Austronesian-speaking people, with a moderate distribution in southern and eastern Chinese and Kra-dai peoples. An association with the spread of Austronesian languages in late antiquity is suggested by significant levels of O-M175 among island populations of the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, including the East African littoral. The O-M175 haplogroup is very common amongst males from East and Southeast Asia. It has two primary branches: O1 (O-F265) and O2 (O-M122). O1 is found at high frequencies amongst males native to Southeast Asia, Taiwan, the Japanese Archipelago, the Korean Peninsula, Madagascar, and some populations in southern China and Austroasiatic speakers of India. O2 is found at high levels amongst Han Chinese, Tibeto-Burman populations (including many of those in Yunnan, Tibet, Burma, Northeast India, and Nepal), Manchu, Mongols (especially those who are citizens of the PRC), Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipinos, Japanese, Thais, Polynesians, Miao people, Hmong, the Naiman tribe of Kazakhs in Kazakhstan, Kazakhs in the southeast of Altai Republic, and Kazakhs in the Ili area of Xinjiang.” ref

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Revealing the prehistoric settlement of Australia by Y chromosome and mtDNA analysis

“Recent molecular studies on humans have likewise yielded a diversity of interpretations, ranging from a deep but undated split distinguishing Australians even from their immediate neighbors to the north in New Guinea to a very recent immigration event within the Holocene in the past 10,000 years. However, there was a minor gene flow into Australia, and this could have taken place before the land bridge between Australia and New Guinea was submerged ≈8,000 years ago, thus calling into question that certain significant developments in later Australian prehistory (the emergence of a backed-blade lithic industry, and the linguistic dichotomy) were externally motivated. Archaeological data indicate the intensification of density and complexity of different stone tools in Australia during the Holocene period and the emergence of backed-blade stone-tool technology. The first Dingoes (Canis lupus dingo) also appear at about the same time (3,500–4,000 years ago) and were proposed to have been introduced by new human arrivals, from India, along with new stone tool types.” ref

Occurrence of a “New Guinean” Lineage in Northern Australia

“M-P34 is the second most frequent haplogroup in northwest New Guinea (30.9%) and the most frequent haplogroup in New Guinea (average frequency 46.8%). This haplogroup is of Melanesian origin, but its distribution is not homogeneous across New Guinea. Unlike C-M38, it reaches its highest associated Y-STR diversity in Papua New Guinea. Coalescent analyses suggest that M-P34 arose around 7,356 years ago in what is now Papua New Guinea and spread westwards toward southwest New Guinea, northwest New Guinea, and Eastern Indonesia as well as eastwards and northwards into Island Papua New Guinea. Agricultural people from the East Asian mainland speaking an Austronesian precursor language emerged in Taiwan about 5,500 years ago, and elements of the population were moving on toward the Philippines about 4,000 years ago. Arrival in the Bismarck Archipelago north of New Guinea is now known to be as early as 3,400 years ago, with subsequent dispersal into the coastal regions of northwest mainland New Guinea. This Austronesian expansion had a considerable impact on the linguistic diversity of northwest New Guinea, but its impact on the Y-chromosome diversity of this region was low (2.5–7.4%). However, the frequency of Austronesian-associated Y-chromosomes (O-M119 and O-M122) is considerably higher in populations from other regions of New Guinea (on average 21% in Austronesian-speaking groups and 7% in non-Austronesian–speaking groups).” ref

4,000 years ago, migration from India into Australia

“Australia experienced a wave of migration from India about 4,000 years ago, a genetic study suggests. It was thought the continent had been largely isolated after the first humans arrived about 40,000 years ago until the Europeans moved in in the 1800s. But DNA from Aboriginal Australians revealed there had been some movement from India during this period. There is a pretty clear signal from looking at a large number of genetic markers from all across the genome that there was contact between India and Australia somewhere around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. The genetic data could not establish the route the Indians would have taken to reach the continent, but it was evidence that Australia was not as cut off as had been assumed.” ref

Pama-Nyungan languages are only 4,000 years old

“Research also offers an intriguing new perspective on how Aboriginal culture itself developed, raising the possibility of a mysterious, internal migration 4,000 years ago. About 90% of Aboriginal communities today speak languages belonging to the “Pama-Nyungan” linguistic family. Language experts are adamant that Pama-Nyungan languages are much younger than the original peopling over 37,000 years ago; they instead date back 4,000 years, and coincide with the appearance of new stone technologies in the archaeological record. Scientists have long puzzled over how – if these communities were completely isolated from each other and the rest of the world – they ended up sharing a language family that is much younger? The traditional answer has been that there was a second migration into Australia 4,000 years ago, by people speaking this language.” ref

“But the new research finds no evidence of this. Instead, the team uncovered signs of a tiny gene flow, indicating a small population movement from north-east Australia across the continent, potentially at the time the Pama-Nyungan language and new stone tool technologies appeared. These intrepid travellers, who must have braved forbidding environmental barriers, were small in number, but had a significant, sweeping impact on the continent’s culture. Mysteriously, however, the genetic evidence for them then disappears. In short, their influential language and culture survived – but they, as a distinctive group, did not. “It’s a really weird scenario,” Willerslev said. “A few immigrants appear in different villages and communities around Australia. They change the way people speak and think; then they disappear, like ghosts. And people just carry on living in isolation the same way they always have. This may have happened for religious or cultural reasons that we can only speculate about. But in genetic terms, we have never seen anything like it before.” ref

The Aboriginal Australian “Language” only goes back 10,000 years ago

“Australia’s indigenous languages have one source, a study says. Evidence to suggest that indigenous Australians have lived on the continent for at least 65,000 years. However, the languages are all derived from a mother tongue, known as Proto-Australian, that was spoken about 10,000 years ago. More than 200 languages were spoken at the time of British settlement in 1788. Researchers said the language family had spread and diversified from a small area in northern Australia. With a starting point was likely the Kimberleys [in Western Australia] and the Top End [upper Northern Territory].” ref

“The term Australian language refers to any indigenous language spoken on the Australian continent. There is just one small boundary question for the languages of the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea. These two languages are spoken: one of them (Meryam Mer) is Papuan, and the other one (the Western Torres Strait language) is classified as the Australian language of the Pama-Nyungan family. The important thing to stress is that Australian languages share no real similarities with Papuan languages or with Austronesian languages, which are the two other groups of languages we find in Oceania (and note that ‘Papuan’ itself is not a single family, but simply a complex residual group with somewhere between forty and sixty unrelatable groupings and isolates at our present stage of knowledge). How many language families are there in Australia? If we take the word “family” to mean “a maximum group of related languages”, something like Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic, someone who is a lumper who believes in grouping things together might reply there is just one Australian family,” ref

“The languages of Australia are the major historic and current languages used in Australia and its offshore islands. Over 250 Australian Aboriginal languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact. Humans arrived in Australia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, but it is possible that the ancestor language of existing Indigenous languages is as recent as 12,000 years old.” ref

“Most Australian languages belong to the widespread Pama–Nyungan family, while the remainder are classified as “non-Pama–Nyungan”, which is a term of convenience that does not imply a genealogical relationship. Johanna Nichols suggests that the northern families may be relatively recent arrivals from Maritime Southeast Asia, perhaps later replaced there by the spread of Austronesian. That could explain the typological difference between Pama–Nyungan and non-Pama–Nyungan languages, but not how a single family came to be so widespread. Nicholas Evans suggests that the Pama–Nyungan family spread along with the now-dominant Aboriginal culture that includes the Australian Aboriginal kinship system. In late 2017, Mark Harvey and Robert Mailhammer published a study in Diachronica that hypothesized, by analysing noun class prefix paradigms across both Pama-Nyungan and the minority non-Pama-Nyungan languages, that a Proto-Australian could be reconstructed from which all known Australian languages descend. This Proto-Australian language, they concluded, would have been spoken about 12,000 years ago in northern Australia.” ref

Proto-Pama–Nyungan

“Proto-Pama–Nyungan is a hypothetical ancestral language from which all Pama–Nyungan languages are supposed to have derived. It may have been spoken as recently as about 5,000 years ago, much more recently than Aboriginal Australian peoples are believed to have been inhabiting various parts of Australia. How the Pama–Nyungan languages spread over most of the continent and displaced any pre-Pama–Nyungan languages is unknown; one possibility is that language could have been transferred from one group to another alongside culture and ritual. Given the relationship of cognates between groups, it seems that Pama-Nyungan has many of the characteristics of a sprachbund, indicating the antiquity of multiple waves of culture contact between groups. Dixon in particular has argued that the genealogical trees found with many language families do not fit in the Pama-Nyungan family.” ref

“Proto-Pama–Nyungan may have been spoken as recently as about 5,000 years ago, much more recently than the 40,000 to 60,000 years indigenous Australians are believed to have been inhabiting Australia. How the Pama–Nyungan languages spread over most of the continent and displaced any pre-Pama–Nyungan languages is uncertain; one possibility is that language could have been transferred from one group to another along with culture and ritual.” ref

Papuan Languages

“The Papuan languages are the non-Austronesian languages spoken on the western Pacific island of New Guinea, as well as neighbouring islands in Eastern Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and East Timor. It is a strictly geographical grouping, and does not imply a genetic relationship. New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse region in the world. Besides the Austronesian languages, there arguably are some 800 languages divided into perhaps sixty small language families, with unclear relationships to each other or to any other languages, plus many language isolates. The majority of the Papuan languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea, with a number spoken in the Bismarck Archipelago, Bougainville Island, and the Solomon Islands to the east, and in Halmahera, Timor and the Alor archipelago to the west. The westernmost language, Tambora in Sumbawa, is extinct. One Papuan language, Meriam, is spoken within the national borders of Australia, in the eastern Torres Strait.” ref

“Several languages of Flores, Sumba, and other islands of eastern Indonesia are classified as Austronesian but have large numbers of non-Austronesian words in their basic vocabulary and non-Austronesian grammatical features. It has been suggested that these may have originally been non-Austronesian languages that have borrowed nearly all of their vocabulary from neighboring Austronesian languages, but no connection with the Papuan languages of Timor has been found. In general, the Central–Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages are marked by a significant historical Papuan influence, lexically, grammatically, and phonologically, and this is responsible for much of the diversity of the Austronesian language family. Statistical analyses designed to pick up signals too faint to be detected by the comparative method, though of disputed validity, suggest five major Papuan stocks (roughly Trans–New Guinea, West, North, East, and South Papuan languages); long-range comparison has also suggested connections between selected languages, but again the methodology is not orthodox in historical linguistics. The Great Andamanese languages may be related to some western Papuan languages, but are not themselves covered by the term Papuan.” ref

“Joseph Greenberg proposed that the Andamanese languages (or at least the Great Andamanese languages) off the coast of Burma are related to the Papuan or West Papuan languages. Stephen Wurm stated that the lexical similarities between Great Andamanese and the West Papuan and Timor–Alor families “are quite striking and amount to virtual formal identity […] in a number of instances”. However, he considered this not evidence of a connection between (Great) Andamanese and Trans–New Guinea, but of a substratum from an earlier migration to New Guinea from the west. Greenberg also suggested a connection to the Tasmanian languages. However, the Tasmanian peoples were isolated for perhaps 10,000 years; their disappearance wiped out their languages before much was recorded of them, and few linguists expect that they will ever be linked to another language family.” ref

“William A. Foley (1986) noted lexical similarities between R. M. W. Dixon‘s 1980 reconstruction of proto-Australian and the languages of the East New Guinea Highlands. He believed that it was naïve to expect to find a single Papuan or Australian language family when New Guinea and Australia had been a single landmass for most of their human history, having been separated by the Torres Strait only 8000 years ago, and that a deep reconstruction would likely include languages from both. However, Dixon later abandoned his proto-Australian proposal, and Foley’s ideas need to be re-evaluated in light of recent research. Wurm also suggested the Sepik–Ramu languages have similarities with the Australian languages, but believed this may be due to a substratum effect, but nevertheless believed that the Australian languages represent a linguistic group that existed in New Guinea before the arrival of the Papuan languages (which he believed arrived in at least two different groups).” ref

Austroasiatic Languages

“The Austroasiatic languages are a large language family spoken throughout Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia, and East Asia. These languages are natively spoken by the majority of the population in Vietnam and Cambodia, and by minority populations scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China. Scholars generally date the ancestral language to c. 3000 – 2000 BCE or 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, with a homeland in southern China or the Mekong River valley. Sidwell (2022) proposes that the locus of Proto-Austroasiatic was in the Red River Delta area around c. 2500 – 2000 BCE or 5,000 to 4,000 years ago. Genetic and linguistic research in 2015 about ancient people in East Asia suggests an origin and homeland of Austroasiatic in today’s southern China or even further north.” ref

Oceania Mythology

“Myths from all over the world have a mother and father figure in them. The mother is usually the Earth, and the father the sky. This pattern may be attributed to the fact that life emerges both from Mother Earth and from the womb of a mother. People of ancient times were mystified by the creation of children and vegetation. Therefore, they found links between mothers and Mother Earth. In calling the sky ÒFatherÓ a sense of unity is created, as in the bonds of matrimony. Some myths have the mother and father figures represent different characteristics of nature, but the element is still present. The Greek creation myth told of the goddess, Gaia, and the god, Uranus, who fell in love. Uranus was the sky, and Gaia was the Earth. Together they had many children and grandchildren, who created the plants, animals, stars, and springs. The unity of Gaia and Uranus created a sense that the universe was one.” ref

“Two gods, in the Japanese creation myth, created Japan together. After exploring the island, they were married and Izanami gave birth to three children, Amaterasu, who became the sun, Tsuki-yumi, whom they made into the moon, and Sosano-wo, their unruly son. Once again, the theme of a mother and father appeared, though this time they were not the sun, earth, and sky. The Australian Aborigines believed that the Sun Mother created all the animals, plants, and bodies of water on earth upon the urging of the Father of All Spirits. These two divine beings did not actually have children. Only their names reflected the mother-father theme. However, the Sun Mother was portrayed as one who gives life to the sleeping spirits. A human mother also gives life to a spirit.” ref

“The Mythology of Oceania and the Gods of the Pacific region are both complex and diverse topics. The stories developed over many centuries on each of the islands that make up Oceania. While some gods are shared between many groups of islands, others are specific to one set of islands or even to a single island. Their exact roles are often overlapping, as one god can appear in different places under different names. A god may also appear in many different forms. Oceania is a general name applied to a very vast region including Polynesia, Micronesia, Australia, Tasmania, and more. Even among these groups (ex. Polynesia), there are still many different societies and tribes within their own cultures. This list is not a complete list of mythologies, just a collection of the more well-known beliefs in different regions.” ref

“The most well- known and perhaps most widely believed creation myth in Polynesia starts with Po. Po is a darkness void of all light and life. At some point, stirrings began within Po, and then a light began to shine until eventually day was created. After day came the Heaven Father and Earth Mother, named Rangi and Papa. Rangi took Papa, and the gods were born. There are various versions of this myth among the cultures of Polynesia, but many agree that the first gods came from them. However, some versions suggest that Rangi took several more wives to create additional gods who then created all that is on Earth. One shared concept among many Oceanian cultures is the belief in ghosts. A common story among several islands is that the spirit of infants are manifested in dolphins, often identified by them playing all day.” ref

“Very little is known about the beliefs of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia regarding the creation of the Earth. While there have been vague mentions of everything being created by a deity or supernatural being, there is little information on the identity of this being or how important they are to the tribes. What we do find in Aboriginal mythology is many stories about native animals such as pelicans and kangaroos, and how they came to be. One story involves an extramarital affair; a woman named Narina lay with Kilpuruna, who was the friend of her husband Yuruma. Yuruma discovered their affair and pushed Kilpuruna from a tall tree. The fall was devastating enough that Kilpuruna was flattened and transformed into a blanket lizard, while Yuruma became an Eagle forever hunting lizards. Narina transformed into a cockatoo and flew from place to place, crying for her lost lover.” ref

“Another myth explains the creation of the moon and the sun. In the beginning, there was no light, and the people had to search for food in the darkness and eat it raw. Purukupali, believed to be the first man created, and his friend Japra, decided one day to rub two sticks together, and a fire started. Purukupali knew that this fire was going to help the people, so he gave one torch to Japra and one torch to his sister Wuriupranala, and told them to keep the torches lit no matter what. Japra and Wuriupranala became the moon-man and sun-woman, forever walking across the sky to keep the Aboriginals from ever falling into darkness again.” ref

“The people of Micronesia continued to believe in their gods and stories, such as the various creator-gods. One of note is the creator-god Loa, who reigns over the Marshall Islands. It is said that the first man and woman, Wulleb and Limdunanij, came from his leg. Micronesia is similar to Australia in that it lacks detailed creations and instead focuses on smaller stories such as the sun, moon, and certain cultural practices. One such story is about the theft of the moon. A chief asks all the people in his tribe to bring him the moon, and says that whoever brings it to him can marry his daughter.” ref

“A poor boy who finds out how to steal the moon brings it to chief, except the moon is wrapped in covers. The boy tells the chief not to remove the covers and then takes the chief’s daughter to marry. The chief doesn’t listen to the boy and removes the covers, and as he takes off each one, the moon gets brighter and brighter until finally, he removes the last cover and the moon becomes unbearably bright and shoots back into the sky. The chief goes to the boy to tell him what happened and asks the boy to retrieve the moon again, but the boy says it is not possible and suggests they leave the moon in the sky for all to see.” ref

“The rats she had made had changed into bats; there were giant lizards and fish with blue tongues and feet. However, the oddest of the new animals was an animal with a bill like a duck, teeth for chewing, a tail like a beaver’s, and the ability to lay eggs. It was called the platypus. The Sun Mother looked down upon the Earth and thought to herself that she must create new creatures lest the Father of All Spirits be angered by what she now saw. She gave birth to two children. The god was the Morning Star, and the goddess was the moon. Two children were born to them, and these she sent to Earth. They became our ancestors. She made them superior to the animals because they had part of her mind and would never want to change their shape.” ref

“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have a rich and diverse range of creation stories. Groups share legends of how the Creator Spirits brought life to the land, some referring to one god or spirit, and others mentioning several Spirit Gods. Part of the beauty of these creation myths is how many share common events or features and yet highlight the diversity and contrasts between First Nations people and their beliefs, often linked to differences in the local landscape.  The Rainbow Serpent is a Creator Spirit who appears in many creation stories and is called by several names, such as Kajura and Borlung. The Rainbow Serpent is said to have come to Earth from the sky and created water and all life associated with water. Some Indigenous communities tell of the Rainbow Serpent living within large expanses of water and creating all the landscapes and animals. In some versions of the creation story, the Rainbow Serpent tries and fails to eat a kangaroo and, in rejecting the animal, creates Uluru.” ref

“Evidence of a 12,000-year-old cultural ritual was unearthed in Australia. Each fireplace is associated with a single shaped stick made of Casuarina wood that is about 10,000 to 12,000 years-old. Sticks that date back to the end of the Last Ice Age indicate a ritual was likely passed down for 500 generations. Sticks found preserved in fireplaces in a cave southeastern Australia that date back to about to the end of the Last Ice Age, indicate that the ritual intended to cure or hurt has been passed down for roughly 500 generations. “These rituals were performed by Mulla-mullung, akin to modern doctors, to heal people, or to place a spell on them. Such rituals could be used for healing or for harm, depending on the circumstances of each ceremony. Each Aboriginal group has its own language, dances, world views etc, some of which are shared with neighboring groups, others not. That means that you don’t have population movements like you do in many other parts of the world, but rather very long and continuous connections with places, people and cultural practices.” ref

“Melanesians have several basic stories about how the first humans appeared. In some places these beings descended from the sky. The Ayom people of Papua New Guinea, for example, say that Tumbrenjak climbed down to earth on a rope to hunt and fish. When he tried to return to the sky, he found the rope cut. His wife threw down fruits and vegetables, including cucumbers that became women. The offspring of Tumbrenjak and these women became the ancestors of different cultural groups. In other places, the first beings came from the sea or emerged from underground. Among the Trobriand islanders, the ancestors of each clan emerged from a particular spot in a grove of trees, or from a piece of coral or a rock. The Keraki of Papua New Guinea believe that the first humans emerged from a tree, while others say that they came from clay or sand, blood, or pieces of wood.” ref

“Snakes, Monsters, and Twins. Snakes appear in the myths of many Melanesian peoples as a symbol of fertility and power. In some myths, they are said to control rain; in others, animals and humans emerge from their slaughtered bodies. Some snake-beings wander from place to place, giving gifts to humans and teaching them how to grow crops or perform magic. The Arapesh of New Guinea believe that spirits called marsalai live in rocks and pools and sometimes take the form of snakes or lizards. The marsalai shaped different parts of the landscape and then became guardians of their territory. Twin brothers appear as central characters in many other Melanesian myths. These pairs often include one wise and one foolish brother, such as To-Kabinana and To-Karvuvu. Myths about twins may also represent the presence of both helpful and harmful forces in nature, such as nourishing rains and violent storms.” ref

“People throughout Melanesia generally believe in an afterlife. Among the Kiwai of Papua New Guinea, the land of the dead is known as Adiri; in Vanuatu one of its names is Banoi. The god of the dead also has various names; in parts of New Guinea he is called Tumudurere. In Vanuatu people say that humans have two souls—one goes to an afterlife while the other takes the form of an animal, plant, or object. The route taken by souls to the land of the dead is often well defined. The people of the Fiji Islands believe that this path is dangerous and only the greatest warriors can complete the journey. In other places, the success of the journey depends on whether the proper funeral rites have been carried out. Souls that go to the afterlife often visit the land of the living as ghosts by taking on human or animal form. Ghosts sometimes help the living, but they can also frighten them and interfere with certain activities. Some places have special types of ghosts, such as beheaded men with wounds that glow in the dark or the ghosts of unborn children.” ref

“Afekan is the goddess of creation and knowledge in the Tifalmin mythology of Papua New Guinea. Afekan lived with men in the beginning to teach them “how to live in strength and dignity”, along with the secrets and rituals of men. She also created taro, pigs, and various cultural things. She has a brother, Umoim, who became the first man to die. Afekan is equivalent to the goddesses Afek of the Telefol and Mountain Ok people, Karigan of the Faiwol people, Paatakanib or Fitipkanib of the Mian people, and Fiitiir by the Bimun-Kuskusmin people.” ref

“In Papua New Guinea, men in the Crocodile Clan embody the crocodile: their totem and symbol of strength and power. They believe that humans are the offspring of migrating ancestral crocodiles; their initiation ceremony (for males only!) takes boys and moves them through androgyny and into manhood – albeit with a crocodile spirit. Men of the crocodile clan are heavily scarred to look like the reptiles they epitomise. Circles of scar tissue surrounding their nipples mimic crocodile eyes; nostrils are carved near the abdomen. Their backs are scarred in the form of the powerful animal’s rear legs and tail. And, during a crocodile-clan initiation ceremony. The young men were taken, under the protection of their mothers’ brothers, to the haus tambaran (spirit house), where hundreds of cuts were incised: symbolically bleeding out their mothers’ postpartum blood to make them ‘men’ of their father’s lineage. Tigaso tree oil and clay were applied to the open wounds. Then the boys lay down by a smoky fire to infect the wounds so that keloid scar tissue was produced. During the whole process, flutes and hour-glass shaped kundu drums played to ‘confuse the women’. Other sources talk about the two months that the young men are sequestered in the spirit houses, learning their clan genealogies, the significance of every clan song and ceremony, and the origins and spiritual purpose of every image or object in the haus tambaran.” ref

Australian Dreamtime Stories: The Turtle

Turtles and the Torres Strait Islander Culture

“In the Torres Strait Islands, a beautiful archipelago at the tip of Australia, turtles hold a particularly special place. Torres Strait Islander tradition tells us that turtles are a gift from the ancestors. Dreamtime stories, passed down for generations, weave tales of creation where turtles play a pivotal role. These stories not only explain the natural world but also instil a sense of responsibility for its well-being. The deep connection goes beyond the narrative. For Torres Strait Islander people, turtles have been a crucial food source for millennia. The significance of turtles in Torres Strait Islander culture extends beyond food. Turtle imagery adorns carvings, paintings, and even utensils. However, hunting has always been approached with immense respect and guided by a set of cultural practices.” ref

“Hunting is often limited to specific times of the year, avoiding breeding seasons and protecting vulnerable hatchlings. Rituals and taboos accompany hunting practices. These may involve restrictions on who can participate, the use of specific tools, or even pre-hunt rituals to appease the spirits and ensure a successful hunt with minimal impact. Torres Strait Islander society is matrilineal, with women playing a central role in cultural transmission. Traditionally, women have had a unique relationship with turtles. While hunting was primarily a male domain, women often played a crucial role in processing and preparing the catch. There are also stories and beliefs specific to women and turtles. In some communities, menstruating women were restricted from interacting with turtle hunting activities, reflecting a belief in maintaining a spiritual balance.” ref

The Turtle and the Island- Papua New Guinea

“Long, long ago, in the days when turtles had teeth, there lived a great sea-turtle, the mother of all sea-turtles, who spent her time swimming about the wide sea that now men call the Pacific Ocean. Slowly she swam, feeding on the fish that lived in the sea and the plants that grew there, and snapping up the shellfish that lurked in the rocks where the sea bordered the land. She swam from one side of the sea to the other, to and fro between the lands that bordered that vast ocean. She lived in the sea, but she swam both above and below the surface of the water; above the surface, she breathed the clear, fresh air and felt the warmth of the sun. She looked up to the sky and saw the sun by day and the moon by night, and the birds that flew across the ocean from land to land. She looked down into the sea and saw its dark, cold depths.” ref

Sometimes the turtle grew tired of swimming and rested just below the surface of the sea, but she often longed to rest in the warmth and sunshine. She thought how pleasant it would be if only there were a piece of land in the middle of the great ocean where she lived. In a dark, secret cave far below the sea where the turtle swam, there lived a man. His skin was black, and in all that great ocean, he was the only man. He had no wife, no children, no tribespeople. The man was lonely in that cave beneath the sea. His heart was heavy as a stone on the seashore. He was weary of being alone. One day, as the turtle swam about, she came to a place in the middle of the ocean where a great hill of sand was raised up from the bottom of the sea. The hill was so high that the top of it almost reached above the surface of the ocean.” ref

“If I were to bring more sand to add to this big hill, soon it would rise clear above the water,” thought the turtle. “The sun would shine down upon it by day, and it would be a place where I could rest and enjoy the warmth and the clear air when I grow tired of swimming.” So the turtle went to another part of the ocean floor, where she dug up rocks and more sand, and these she brought back to the hill, so that it grew higher and higher. She did this more times than anyone could count. The sun rose and set, the moon waxed and waned day after day, and still the hill grew higher. And at last it became a huge island in the middle of the sea, and the turtle saw that her work was finished.” ref

Then the birds that flew across the ocean from land to land brought seeds of plants and trees and dropped them on the island. Grasses, flowering plants, and tall trees sprang up, covering the rocks and sand. It was a beautiful, fertile island, surrounded by the sea which teemed with fish large and small. The turtle rested on the sun-warmed ground of the island she had made. No longer did she have to spend her whole life swimming through the wide ocean and resting just below its surface. And although she still swam about as before, she never strayed very far from the island she had made.” ref

Australian Aboriginal Deities

“In Australian Aboriginal mythology, Baiame (or Biame, Biami, Baayami, Baayama or Byamee) is the creator god and sky father in the Dreaming of several Aboriginal Australian peoples of south-eastern Australia, such as the Wonnarua, Kamilaroi, Guringay, Eora, Darkinjung, and Wiradjuri peoples. After creating things, he returned to the sky, and people called him the Sky Hero, All Father, or Sky Father.” ref

“Adnoartina is known as a religious deity in the Australian Aboriginal culture. This deity is described as taking the form of a gecko lizard and is considered to be a sacred ancestral being. Adnoartina offers an Indigenous understanding to the creation of Uluru, an Australian historical landmark. This landmark is regarded as one of the most sacred land formations in Australia and an ‘iconic’ tourist attraction. Adnoartina is derived from the Indigenous Diyari people, alternatively transcribed as ‘Dieri.’ The Diyari community is located in South Australia, east of Lake Eyre. This cultural group recognises Adnoartina as one of the great spirits in dreamtime stories.” ref

“Altjira, Arrernte sky god who created the earth. Arrernte contacts explained altjira, whose etymology was unknown, as an eternal being who had no beginning. In the Upper Arrernte language, the proper verb for “to dream” was altjirerama, literally “to see God”. Strehlow theorised that the noun is the somewhat rare word altjirrinja, which Spencer and Gillen gave a corrupted transcription and a false etymology. “The native,” Strehlow concluded, “knows nothing of ‘dreamtime’ as a designation of a certain period of their history.” Strehlow gives Altjira or Altjira mara (mara meaning “good”) as the Arrernte word for the eternal creator of the world and humankind. Strehlow describes him as a tall, strong man with red skin, long fair hair, and emu legs, with many red-skinned wives (with dog legs) and children. In Strehlow’s account, Altjira lives in the sky (which is a body of land through which runs the Milky Way, a river). However, by the time Strehlow was writing, his contacts had been converts to Christianity for decades, and critics suggested that Altjira had been used by missionaries as a word for the Christian God.” ref, ref

“Bobbi-Bobbi, benevolent Binbinga snake deity. In myths of the Binbinga people of northern Australia, Bobbi-Bobbi was a supernatural being who lived in the heavens in the Dreamtime. He was a huge snake, similar to the Rainbow Serpent, and was originally benevolent towards humans. From the heavens, he saw that humans needed more than just water to survive, so he created flying foxes for them to catch and eat. When the bats flew too high for the humans to catch them, Bobbi-Bobbi removed one of his own ribs and gave it to humans, who used it as the first ever boomerang.” ref, ref

“The Rainbow Serpent or Rainbow Snake is a common deity often seen as the creator god, known by numerous names in different Australian Aboriginal languages by the many different Aboriginal peoples. It is a common motif in the art and religion of many Aboriginal Australian peoples. Much like the archetypal mother goddess, the Rainbow Serpent creates land and diversity for the Aboriginal people, but when disturbed can bring great chaos. There are many names and stories associated with the serpent, all of which communicate the significance and power of this being within Aboriginal mythology, which includes the worldview commonly referred to as The Dreaming. The serpent is viewed as a giver of life through its association with water, but can be a destructive force if angry. The Rainbow Serpent is one of the most common and well-known Aboriginal stories and is of great importance to Aboriginal society. Not all of the myths in this family describe the ancestral being as a snake. Of those that do, not all of them draw a connection with a rainbow. However, a link with water or rain is typical. When the rainbow is seen in the sky, it is said to be the Rainbow Serpent moving from one waterhole to another, and this divine concept explained why some waterholes never dried up when drought struck.” ref

“Julunggul, Yolngu rainbow snake goddess associated with initiation, fertility, rebirth, and water.” ref

“In Arrernte mythology, Karora is a bandicoot ancestral deity. According to one legend, during the Dreamtime, Karora lay sleeping in the earth when from his head rose a tall pole called a tnatantja. It was a living creature, its bottom resting on his head and its top reaching up into the sky. From his armpits and navel emerged bandicoots, who dug their way out of the earth just as the first sun rose into the sky. Karora followed them, seized two of the animals, then cooked and ate them. His hunger sated, he lay down to sleep again, and a bullroarer emerged from under his armpit. It took on human form and grew into a young man, and when Karora woke, his son danced around him. It was the very first ceremony.” ref

“Kunapipi, also spelt Gunabibi, (‘womb’) is a mother goddess and the patron deity of many heroes in Australian Aboriginal mythology. Kunapipi gave birth to human beings as well as to most animals and plants. Now a vague, otiose, spiritual being, “the old woman” (Kadjeri) once emerged from the waters and travelled across the land with a band of heroes and heroines, and during the Dreaming she gave birth to men and women as well as creating the natural species. She could transform herself either into a male or female version of the Rainbow Serpent.” ref

“Mamaragan, lightning deity. In Australian Aboriginal mythology (specifically: Kunwinjku), Mamaragan or Namarrkon is a lightning Ancestral Being who speaks with thunder as his voice. He rides a storm–cloud and throws lightning bolts to humans and trees. He lives in a Billabong. Namarrkon is the lightning man. Namarrkon soaks up the sun’s rays, which form bright arcs of light across each of his shoulders. He is mostly unseen, living high in the sky and riding storm clouds. He makes thunderous sounds by striking the clouds with stone axes fixed to his head, elbows, and knees.” ref

“Mangar-kunjer-kunja, Arrernte lizard deity who created humans. In Arrernte religion and mythology, Mangar-kunjer-kunja is a lizard Ancestral Being who created humans. He found the first aboriginal beings, Rella manerinja, on one side of a hill; they were fused together and he separated them with a knife and cut holes for their mouths, ears and noses, then gave them the knife, spear, shield, fire, boomerang and the tjurunga, and lastly gave them a system of marriage.” ref, ref

“Nogomain, a god who gives spirit children to mortal parents. In Murrinh-Patha mythology, Nogamain created himself from nothingness.” ref, ref

“Wollunqua, snake deity associated with rain and fertility. Wollunqua, also written Wollunka or Wollunkua, is a snake-god of rain and fertility in Australian Aboriginal mythology of the Warramunga people of the Northern Territory of Australia, a variation of the “Rainbow Serpent” present in the mythology of many other Aboriginal Australian peoples.” ref, ref

“Wuriupranili, a solar goddess whose torch is the sun. In the mythology of the Tiwi people of northern Australia, the Sun Woman Wuriupranili (or Wuriunpranilli) is a solar goddess whose stringybark torch is the Sun. When she wakes each morning in the east, she lights a small fire, which mankind sees as the first glow of dawn. She then decorates her face and body with red ochre. Often, the pigment is blown into the air where it stains the clouds, resulting in a red sunrise.” ref, ref

“Yurlungur, Yolngu snake deity who swallowed and regurgitated the Wawalag sisters; associated with initiation and rebirth.” ref

“Anjea, fertility goddess or spirit, in whom people’s souls reside between their incarnations.” ref

“Dhakhan, ancestral god of the Kabi. In Gubbi Gubbi mythology, Dhakhan is an ancestral spirit. He is described as a giant serpent with the tail of a giant fish. He often appears as a rainbow, as this is his way of travelling between the watering holes, which are his homes. He is also the creator of the snakes and serpents that live within the waterholes.” ref, ref

“Yalungur, god of the first baby. In the Australian Aboriginal mythology of the Bullanji people, Yalungur is a great bird, an eagle or hawk. He was castrated either by Gidja or by Gidja’s brother Mali so that Gidja could create the first woman.” ref, ref

“Akurra, great snake deity of the Adnyamathanha people. In the mythology of the Aboriginal people of South Australia (specifically, the Adnyamathanha people from the Flinders Ranges), Akurra is a great snake deity, sometimes associated with the Rainbow Serpent. Adnyamathanha elders describe it as a giant water snake with a beard mane, scales, and sharp fangs, whose movements shaped the land. Akurra is associated with the power of the shaman, and nobody else may go near him with impunity.” ref, ref

“Balayang, bat deity and brother of Bunjil. In the mythology of the Aboriginal people of south-eastern Australia (specifically, the Kulin nation), Balayang or Pallian the bat was a brother of Bunjil the eaglehawk, but lived apart from him. Because of his black colouring, Balayang was associated with Crow, and thus belonged to the moiety in opposition to Eaglehawk. Another story credits him with creating or finding Crow women (and thus marriage partners for the Eaglehawk moiety).” ref, ref  

“Binbeal, Kulin rainbow deity and son of Bunjil. In Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology, Binbeal is a spirit associated with rainbows.” ref, ref   

“Bunjil, Kulin creator deity and ancestral being, represented as an eagle. Bunjil, also spelt Bundjil, is a creator deity, culture hero and ancestral being, often depicted as a wedge-tailed eagle in Australian Aboriginal mythology of some of the Aboriginal peoples of Victoria.” ref, ref 

“Daramulum, southeast Australian deity and son of Baiame.” ref

“Gnowee, solar goddess who searches daily for her lost son; her torch is the sun.” ref

“Dilga, Karadjeri goddess of fertility and growth, and mother of the Bagadjimbiri.” ref

“Kidili, Mandjindja moon deity who was castrated for attempting to rape the first women, who in turn became the Pleiades.” ref

“Ungud, snake deity associated with rainbows and the fertility and erections of the tribe’s shamans.” ref

Papua New Guinean Deities

“Abeguwo is a goddess within Melanesian mythology. It is believed by some that she resides in the sky, and when she feels the urge to urinate, she does so onto the Earth in the form of rain. She is worshiped by people who hold indigenous beliefs in the region of Melanesia and the island of New Guinea, but also in the surrounding region.” ref 

“Afekan is the goddess of creation and knowledge in the Tifalmin mythology of Papua New Guinea.” ref

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“None of our ancient dogs from China belongs to the A1a haplogroup, A1b possibly emerged around 9,500 to 8,500 years ago and underwent a rapid population size expansion of dogs around 7,500 years ago, which is consistent with the emergence of the major branches of the A1b haplogroup. The emergence of the major branches of the A1b haplogroup coincides with a shift in food production in China around 10,000–8,000 years ago and the rapid spread of agricultural communities across the. The population expansion of dogs around 7,500 years ago might be caused by a growth in food supply. As the food supply improved, not only did the human population size increase, but also the population size of animals that lived alongside humans. The expansion of Australian dingoes and Pacific dogs descended from East Asian dogs. “At least two lineages of dogs were apparently introduced to the island of Southeast Asia, the dingo and village dog.” ref

“Even after sea levels rose and separated Australia and New Guinea around 8,000 years ago, significant trade and cultural exchanges continued, particularly between Papua New Guinea and the Torres Strait Islands, which acted as a bridge to northern Australia. A 7,000-year-old dog from the Tianluoshan site in Zhejiang province China possesses a haplotype basal to the entire haplogroup A1b lineage. The subhaplogroup A1b2 includes Pacific dogs who separated from ancient dogs in Yellow River and Yangtze River basins around 7,200 years ago, and Southeast Asian dogs from around 6,000 years ago. Ancient dogs in the Yellow River and Yangtze River basins are related to an ∼5,500-year-old population related to the ancestors of the SEA dogs, an ∼3,300-year-old population related to the ancestors of dogs from Cook Island and other Pacific Islands, and an ∼2,700-year-old population related to the ancestors of dogs from New Zealand and Hawaii. The divergence time of each branch is earlier than the archaeological records (the presence of domesticated dogs in SEA from ∼4,000 years ago). One of the earliest archaeological sites with evidence of dogs in the Pacific Islands dates back to ∼3,000 years ago, which is consistent with our results. The highest frequency of A1b is found in present-day Australian dingoes (100% belong to haplogroup A1b4) and precolonial Pacific Island dogs (95%, 40 out of 42 belong to haplogroup A1b2). Following their dispersal to South China, and then into Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and remote Oceania, they were largely replaced by dogs belonging to other lineages in the last 2,000 years in present-day China, especially North China.” ref

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“Recent studies have suggested that dogs were domesticated during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) in Siberia, which contrasts with previous proposed domestication centers (e.g. Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia). 12,900 to 1,000 years ago. The majority (112/119, 94.12%) belonged to haplogroup A, and half of these (55/112, 49.11%) belonged to sub-haplogroup A1b. Results suggest that East Asian dogs originated from northeastern Eurasian populations after the LGM, dispersing in two possible directions after domestication. Recent studies based on ancient DNA (aDNA) have suggested that dogs may have originated in Siberia. Dogs are generally more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia (northern East Asia and eastern Siberia) than to those from western Eurasia (Europe and the Middle East), and an eastern Eurasian-related source appears to have contributed approximately 100% of the ancestry of early dogs in Siberia, the Americas, East Asia, and northeastern Europe. It was proposed that during the harsh environment of the last glacial maximum (LGM), the ancestor of dogs was domesticated due to coexistence with humans in Siberia, also suggesting a domestication process in eastern Eurasia.” ref 

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Ancient DNA Evidence from China Reveals the Expansion of Pacific Dogs

“The ancestral homeland of Australian dingoes and Pacific dogs is proposed to be in South China. However, the location and timing of their dispersal and relationship to dog domestication is unclear. Here, we sequenced 7,000- to 2,000-year-old complete mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genomes of 27 ancient canids (one gray wolf and 26 domestic dogs) from the Yellow River and Yangtze River basins. These are the first complete ancient mtDNA of Chinese dogs from the cradle of early Chinese civilization. We found that most ancient dogs (18/26) belong to the haplogroup A1b lineage that is found in high frequency in present-day Australian dingoes and precolonial Pacific Island dogs, but low frequency in present-day China. Particularly, a 7,000-year-old dog from the Tianluoshan site in Zhejiang province possesses a haplotype basal to the entire haplogroup A1b lineage. We propose that A1b lineage dogs were once widely distributed in the Yellow River and Yangtze River basins area. Following their dispersal to South China, and then into Southeast Asia, New Guinea, and remote Oceania, they were largely replaced by dogs belonging to other lineages in the last 2,000 years in present-day China, especially North China.” ref

“Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris), the first species to be domesticated by humans, were trained not only for practical roles such as guarding, assisting in hunting, and providing companionship, but they also held significant importance as offerings in funerary rituals and other ceremonial practices. This underscores their integral role in human cultural expressions. In China, the tradition of burying dogs alongside humans can be traced back to the Jiahu archaeological site in Wuyang, dating back to the Neolithic period (∼8500 years ago). During the Shang Dynasty, the ritual of dog sacrifice underwent a series of evolutionary stages, with its prevalence notably increasing in the late Shang period (∼3000 years ago).” ref 

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Origin and Spread of the Dingo

“At the end of the last glacial maximum and the associated rise in sea levels, Tasmania became separated from the Australian mainland 12,000 years ago, and New Guinea 6,500–8,500 years ago by the inundation of the Sahul Shelf. Fossil remains in Australia date to around 3,500 years ago, and no dingo remains have been uncovered in Tasmania, so the dingo is estimated to have arrived in Australia at a time between 3,500 and 12,000 years ago. To reach Australia through Island Southeast Asia, even at the lowest sea level of the last glacial maximum, a journey of at least 50 kilometres (31 mi) over open sea between ancient Sunda and Sahul was necessary, so they must have accompanied humans on boats.” ref

“An mDNA study of ancient dog remains from the Yellow River and Yangtze River basins of southern China showed that most of the ancient dogs fell within haplogroup A1b, as do the Australian dingoes and the pre-colonial dogs of the Pacific, but in low frequency in China today. The specimen from the Tianluoshan archaeological site, Zhejiang province, dates to 7,000 years ago and is basal to the entire haplogroup A1b lineage. The dogs belonging to this haplogroup were once widely distributed in southern China, then dispersed through Southeast Asia into New Guinea and Oceania, but were replaced in China by dogs of other lineages 2,000 years ago.” ref

“Dingo bone fragments were found in a rock shelter located at Mount Burr, South Australia, in a layer that was originally dated 7,000–8,500 years ago. Excavations later indicated that the levels had been disturbed, and the dingo remains “probably moved to an earlier level.” The dating of these early Australian dingo fossils led to the widely held belief that dingoes first arrived in Australia 4,000 years ago and then took 500 years to disperse around the continent. However, the timing of these skeletal remains was based on the dating of the sediments in which they were discovered, and not the specimens themselves.” ref

“The oldest reliable date for dog remains found in mainland Southeast Asia is from Vietnam at 4,000 years ago, and in Island Southeast Asia from Timor-Leste at 3,000 years ago. The earliest dingo remains in the Torres Straits date to 2,100 years ago. In New Guinea, the earliest dog remains date to 2,500–2,300 years ago from Caution Bay near Port Moresby, but no ancient New Guinea singing dog remains have been found. “The dingo is closely related to the New Guinea singing dog: their lineage split early from the lineage that led to today’s domestic dogs, and can be traced back through Maritime Southeast Asia to Asia. The oldest remains of dingoes in Australia are around 3,500 years old.” ref

“The earliest known dingo remains, found in Western Australia, date to 3,450 years ago. Based on a comparison of modern dingoes with these early remains, dingo morphology has not changed over these thousands of years. This suggests that no artificial selection has been applied over this period and that the dingo represents an early form of dog. They have lived, bred, and undergone natural selection in the wild, isolated from other dogs until the arrival of European settlers, resulting in a unique breed. The earliest dingo skeletal remains in Australia are estimated at 3,450 years ago from the Mandura Caves on the Nullarbor Plain, south-eastern Western Australia; 3,320 years ago from Woombah Midden near Woombah, New South Wales; and 3,170 years ago from Fromme’s Landing on the Murray River near Mannum, South Australia.” ref

“The next-most reliable timing is based on desiccated flesh dated 2,200 years ago from Thylacine Hole, 110 km west of Eucla on the Nullarbor Plain, southeastern Western Australia. When dingoes first arrived, they would have been taken up by Indigenous Australians, who then provided a network for their swift transfer around the continent. Based on the recorded distribution time for dogs across Tasmania and cats across Australia, once indigenous Australians had acquired them, the dispersal of dingoes from their point of landing until they occupied continental Australia is proposed to have taken only 70 years. The red fox is estimated to have dispersed across the continent in only 60–80 years.” ref

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Dingoes

“Dingoes have been separated from other Canis lineages for 8,000-11,000 years. Genetic studies show dingoes have little contemporary interbreeding with domestic dogs, even when they live in the same areas. While all Canis species can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, differences in breeding seasons and behaviour act as natural barriers. Unlike dingoes, domestic dogs rarely establish wild, self-sustaining populations. Some researchers have suggested dingo-like village dogs in South-East Asia are actually dingoes. While dingoes share some ancestors with these dogs, modern genetic evidence shows dingoes and their closest relatives, New Guinea singing dogs, are a separate population.” ref

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“The maritime introduction of bananas to the Philippines should not be so surprising; the Philippines were already enmeshed in maritime interactions with Taiwan and the Mariana Islands, as well as plausibly other regions within Island Southeast Asia, by c. 3500 years ago. And the geographically exclusive generation and dispersal of P (going west) and MP (going east to New Guinea), referred to here as the “original banana split,” indicates intra-regional complexity within the Island Southeast Asia-New Guinea region before 3000 years ago. Although there are comparable archaeological, genetic, and linguistic indicators of complex movements of plants, people, and things with ISEA- New Guinea region, these do not exhibit the same geographical and temporal trajectories proposed here for banana cultivars. In contrast to recurrent portrayals, material cultural elements were not just brought across the Batanes Strait from Taiwan to the Philippines. Maritime interaction was not one-way. The evidence presented and reconstruction proposed here give further evidence that suggests movements across the Batanes Strait were two-way and that cultivation practices and plants from ISEA contributed to agriculture in Taiwan, but the precise timing of introduction to Taiwan is unknown.” ref

“Musa acuminata is a species of banana native to Southern Asia, its range comprising the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. Many of the modern edible dessert bananas are derived from this species, although some are hybrids with Musa balbisiana. First cultivated by humans around 8000 BCE or 10,000 years ago, it is one of the early examples of domesticated plants. By around 7,000 years ago Musa acuminata had been distributed into New Guinea and Wallacea. Musa balbisiana, also known simply as plantain, is a wild-type species of banana. It is one of the ancestors of modern cultivated bananas, along with Musa acuminata. It is native to eastern South Asia, the eastern regions of the Indian subcontinent, northern Southeast Asia, and southern China. Introduced populations exist in the wild, far outside its native range. They spread from somewhere around the Philippines about 4,000 years ago (2000 BCE) and resulted in the distinct banana cultivars known as the Maia Maoli or Popoulo group bananas in the Pacific islands.” ref, ref, ref

ref

“The oldest Pigs correspond to the Cishan site in China (8000 years ago), and approximately 5000–4000 years ago, Austronesian-speaking rice agriculturalists from southern China migrated, either via Taiwan or Sundaland, to Southeast Asia and Oceania, as well as westward to Madagascar. This large-scale demographic expansion also left a footprint in the genomes of domestic animals that can be observed today. Two potential routes of human-mediated pig dispersal to islands in Southeast Asia and Oceania have been identified. One of these routes connects mainland Southeast Asia with Java, Sumatra, Wallacea, and Oceania, and the other links East Asia with Western Micronesia, Taiwan, and the Philippines.” ref, ref

“Major animal domesticates ALL ultimately originate on mainland Eurasia. The emerging complexity is most clearly seen with respect to the domestic pig. Archaeological remains of domestic-type pigs from northern Luzon, on the northern end of the Philippines, date to at least 4000 years. Pigs from the Taiwan-Philippines region are not the same as those found across southern Island Southeast Asia and in the Pacific; pigs in the latter region trace their proximal origins westward to the Malay Peninsula rather than.” ref

ref

“Pigs made a harrowing journey about 3,500 years ago to the most remote islands of the Pacific alongside their ancient human owners, and that partnership is revealing how the region was colonized. The popular historical thinking has been that the entire pioneering group–humans, pigs, and all of their additional living and cultural accoutrements–embarked from Taiwan as a single unit. A new DNA study of ancient and modern pigs suggests the geography is not so simple. “The traditional thought is that people left Taiwan, went to the Philippines, then [dispersed] from there. They may have, but not with pigs. Rather, the porkers that ended up domesticated across the outermost Pacific Islands, like French Polynesia and Hawaii, probably came from Vietnam.” ref

“Retracing the ancient human migration routes in the remote islands of the Pacific relies on robust models of the origins and spread of animals that were commensal to long-distance ocean voyages. Domestic pigs (Sus scrofa) in Polynesia belong to a rare mitochondrial DNA group whose geographic origins are disputed. We report new complete genome ancient DNA that suggests all founding populations of pigs in Polynesia, first settled by people about 2,800–700 years ago, can be traced back to northern peninsular Southeast Asia.” ref

ref, ref

“The domestic chicken belongs to the genus Gallus, which includes four morphologically distinct species the Red junglefowl Gallus gallus, which has a geographic distribution spanning continental South and South-East Asia, including Sumatra and Java;  the Grey junglefowl Gallus sonneratii found in West and South India; the Ceylon or Sri Lanka junglefowl Gallus lafayettii endemic to Sri Lanka; and the Green junglefowl Gallus varius found in Java and neighboring Indonesian Islands including Bali, Lesser Sundas East to Flores, Sumba, and Alor. The Red junglefowl is polytypic with five recognized subspecies.” ref

“The process of chicken domestication probably followed a commensal route, with the wild birds foraging in areas close to human settlements. The primary reason for its domestication remains unclear. In the absence of evidence for domestication for meat or egg consumption, early farmers probably preferred them for aesthetic, socio-cultural, and/or recreational purposes. Genome-wide studies support domestication during the Neolithic time ~8000 years ago (confidence interval: 7014–8768 or ~9500 ± 3300 years ago). A study examining osteological material and ancient mtDNA proposed the domestication of the chicken in the North China plains around 10,000 years ago. However, this has now been disputed by several studies challenging the species identification of the bones, the genetic information provided, and in light of the climate in north China at the time, which may not have been suitable for the wild Red junglefowl. Also, the earliest farmers of Northwest China probably exploited grain-fed pheasant Phasianus colchicus and not chicken.” ref

“From its centre(s) of domestication in Asia, chicken colonised the world through human migrations, terrestrial, and maritime trading routes. Chicken husbandry was common on the Indian subcontinent, a postulated centre of domestication, by the 3rd millennium BCE. The earliest chicken remains in the Near East are found in Iran (3,900 BCE or 5,900 years ago), Turkey and Syria (2400–2000 BCE or 4,400 to 4,000 years ago), and Jordan (1200 BCE or 3,200 years ago). In Egypt, the domestic chicken may have been introduced by 1120 BCE or earlier. During this period, chickens were probably not used intensively in the household for egg and/or meat consumption, but rather as an exotic animal for cockfighting and for displaying in the royal zoological gardens.” ref

“Eastward of the Red junglefowl geographic distribution, domestic chicken dispersed to the north, south, and east. In central and northern China, Gallus-type bones were initially reported to be widespread at Neolithic sites by the sixth/fifth millennium BCE or 8,000 to 7,000 years ago. However, a recent re-examination of the avian bones at these sites could only identify chicken bones at two sites, Xianwanggang (Henan Province) and Zhoujiazhuang (Shanxi Province), which are dated back to 3000–700 BCE or 5,000 to 2,700 years ago and 2300–1900 BCE or 4,300 to 3,900 years ago, respectively. Domestic chickens were first documented in the Korean Peninsula ~2000 years ago.” ref

“Ancient DNA sequences from chickens provide an opportunity to study their human-mediated dispersal across the Pacific due to the significant genetic diversity and range of archaeological material available. The human colonization of Remote Oceania remains one of the great feats of exploration in history, proceeding east from Asia across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. All ancient specimens and a high proportion of the modern chickens possess a group of unique, closely related haplotypes found only in the Pacific. This group of haplotypes appears to represent the authentic founding mitochondrial DNA chicken lineages transported across the Pacific, and allows the early dispersal of chickens across Micronesia and Polynesia to be modeled. Importantly, chickens carrying this genetic signature persist on several Pacific islands at high frequencies, suggesting that the original Polynesian chicken lineages may still survive. Two modern specimens from the Philippines carry haplotypes similar to the ancient Pacific samples, providing clues about a potential homeland for the Polynesian chicken.” ref

“The colonization of the remote Pacific was one of the last great human migrations, but despite the recent nature of the events, the timing and routes remain an area of considerable debate. The first colonization of Western Polynesia occurred around 3,250–3,100 years ago as part of the eastward migration of Lapita pottery-bearing peoples. This migration occurred only a few hundred years after the emergence of this distinctive pottery tradition in the Bismarck Archipelago around 3,470–3,250 years ago, although its antecedents can be traced to Island Southeast Asia (ISEA). Following the initial movement into Western Polynesia, a prolonged 1,800-year hiatus, or “pause,” is apparent before further colonization, potentially relating to the need to develop sailing technology essential for crossing the vast ocean barrier to the east (between Samoa and the Society Islands, 2,400 km. Human commensal and early domesticated species were widely, but not ubiquitously, dispersed as people colonized the Pacific. Although it has been proposed that many commensals and domesticates are late arrivals to the Micronesian islands compared with humans, we have reconstructed a link between chickens from islands in the Bismarck Sea and Micronesia that dates to ∼3,850 years ago. Such an early date is broadly consistent with archaeological evidence for human settlement of Saipan at 3,300–3,500 years ago and Palau at almost 4,000 years ago; however, few comparably early zoo-archaeological remains have been found in Micronesia to date. The inferred link between chickens from the Bismarcks and Micronesia without subsequent eastward movement does not support a two-wave model of Polynesian origins where an earlier Lapita migration wave (2,800–3,500 years ago) was mixed with a second, later wave moving through Micronesia to Western Polynesia (1,500–2,000 years ago). Our simulations suggest that there was little interaction between chickens from Micronesia and the islands further eastward.” ref

“To investigate early human-mediated dispersal patterns within the Asia–Pacific region, we examined modern chickens from islands across Island Southeast Asia, Micronesia, and Western Polynesia, because few specimens of ancient chickens were available from this area. Although the Island Southeast Asia sequences are scattered across the haplogroup D network, the majority of haplotypes from modern Pacific chickens are genetically clustered together. Within Micronesia, haplogroup D has been reported from modern chickens in Guam, although interestingly, these particular D haplotypes are not shared with any other Pacific island group. In fact, two of these haplotypes have only ever been found in Guam (H224 and H225), whereas the third Guam haplotype is shared with the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea (H032). The modern haplogroup D chickens in Guam do not appear to be significantly genetically differentiated from those in the Philippines, Japan, and Indonesia. An investigation of the discordant haplogroup D lineages in Micronesia and Polynesia using coalescent simulations identified an early movement of chickens between New Guinea and Micronesia as the most likely of five models tested. The simulations suggest that chickens were transported between Micronesia and islands in the Bismarck Sea off the coast of New Guinea and New Britain around 3,850 years ago, without further onward transportation of chickens into Western and Eastern Polynesia. In contrast, the origins of the chickens currently found in Polynesia appear to be via the standard southern route from New Guinea to the Solomon Islands, the Santa Cruz Islands, Vanuatu, and further eastward.” ref

“Across the Pacific Islands, ancient and modern mtDNA studies support a domestic chicken dispersion towards the east, up to Easter Island, following the Polynesian and Melanesian expansions. However, it remains unclear if chicken subsequently reached the southern American continent at a pre-Colombian time. A pre-Columbian Polynesian introduction of chickens to America was initially supported by radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA sequence information of a chicken bone from the archaeological site of El Arenal-1 on the Arauco Peninsula (Chile). However, the evidence is now deemed inconclusive, having been based on a single bone, non-diagnostic DNA sequence information, and in the absence of local isotopic standards to assess the relationships between diet and isotopic signatures. A recent mtDNA analysis involving native chicken from six South American countries did not find any evidence for a maternal genetic relationship between the South American chicken and their counterparts in the Pacific Islands, including Easter Island. This study rather supports a European or Asian origin for the modern native chicken of the South American continent. Additional ancient DNA samples may further clarify the issue of the origin of the South American chicken.” ref 

ref, ref

Taro (Colocasia esculenta) in Asia and the Pacific

“Taro (Colocasia esculenta) is thought to be one of the first crops cultivated by humans, and was an important crop cultivated before the domestication of rice. Previous research has hypothesized that taro strains with less astringent taste profiles were selected from wild taro by humans.” ref

“Taro is a root vegetable. It is the most widely cultivated species of several plants in the family Araceae that are used as vegetables for their corms, leaves, stems, and petioles. Taro corms are a food staple in African, Oceanic, East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian cultures (similar to yams). Taro is believed to be one of the earliest cultivated plants. Colocasia esculenta is thought to be native to Southern India and Southeast Asia, but is widely naturalised. Colocasia is thought to have originated in the Indomalayan realm, perhaps in East India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. It spread by cultivation eastward into Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Pacific Islands; westward to Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean Basin; and then southward and westward from there into East Africa and West Africa, where it spread to the Caribbean and Americas. Taro was probably first native to the lowland wetlands of Malaysia, where it is called taloes. In Australia, C. esculenta var. aquatilis is thought to be native to the Kimberley region of Western Australia; the common variety esculenta is now naturalised and considered an invasive weed in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland, and New South Wales.” ref 

“Taro is one of the most ancient cultivated crops. Taro is found widely in tropical and subtropical regions of South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea, northern Australia, and the Maldives. Taro is highly polymorphic, making taxonomy and distinction between wild and cultivated types difficult. It is believed that they were domesticated independently multiple times, with authors giving possible locations as New Guinea, Mainland Southeast Asia, and northeastern India, based largely on the assumed native range of the wild plants. However, more recent studies have pointed out that wild taro may have a much larger native distribution than previously believed, and wild breeding types may also likely be indigenous to other parts of Island Southeast Asia. Archaeological traces of taro exploitation have been recovered from numerous sites, though whether these were cultivated or wild types can not be ascertained. They include the Niah Caves of Borneo around 10,000 years ago, Ille Cave of Palawan, dated to at least 11,000 years ago; Kuk Swamp of New Guinea, dated to between 8250 – 7960 BCE or 10,250 to 9,960 years ago; and Kilu Cave in the Solomon Islands dated to around 28,000 to 20,000 years ago.” ref 

“In the case of Kuk Swamp, there is evidence of formalized agriculture emerging by about 10,000 years ago, with evidence of cultivated plots, though which plant was cultivated remains unknown. Taro were carried into the Pacific Islands by Austronesian peoples from around 1300 BCE or 3,300 years ago, where they became a staple crop of Polynesians, along with other types of “taros”, like Alocasia macrorrhizos, Amorphophallus paeoniifolius, and Cyrtosperma merkusii. They are the most important and the most preferred among the four, because they were less likely to contain the irritating raphides present in the other plants. Taro is also identified as one of the staples of Micronesia, from archaeological evidence dating back to the pre-colonial Latte Period (c. 900 – 1521 CE), indicating that it was also carried by Micronesians when they colonized the islands. Taro pollen and starch residue have also been identified in Lapita sites, dated to between 1100 – 550 BCE or 3,100 to 2,550 years ago. Taro was later spread to Madagascar as early as the 1st century CE.” ref 

“Tropical and temperate forms of cultivated taro (Colocasia esculenta) may have originated in lowland and mountain regions of Southeast Asia. In the nineteenth century, botanical exploration in Northeast India led to early suggestions that cultivated taro originated there. This and later theories regarding the domestication of taro have been based on circumstantial botanical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence, with little regard for diversity in wild populations and little regard for how such populations disperse and are used as food and fodder sources.” ref

Pottery provides key archaeological evidence for the “Out of Taiwan” theory

AI Overview: The “Out of Taiwan” theory posits that Taiwan was the origin point for the dispersal of the Austronesian language family and people across vast regions of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, from Madagascar to Hawaii. This theory is supported by linguistic, archaeological, and some genetic evidence, suggesting that an expansion of people from Taiwan, skilled in seafaring, occurred around 3,000 to 1,500 BCE, eventually leading to the settlement of islands as distant as Easter Island and New Zealand. While the theory is widely accepted as the primary model for the Austronesian expansion, recent genetic studies have introduced nuances, indicating earlier migrations into the region and a more complex population history than initially proposed.  

• Arrival in Near Oceania (c. 3300 years ago): After moving south and east from Taiwan, Austronesian pottery-making peoples reached Near Oceania (the Bismarck Archipelago and northern coast of New Guinea).
• Cultural integration: There, they intermixed with the indigenous Papuan populations. This interaction led to the “Triple-I” (Intrusion, Innovation, and Integration) model, which describes the development of the Lapita cultural complex.
• Distinctive pottery: The resulting Lapita pottery, which appeared around 3300 years ago, is famous for its intricate, dentate-stamped, and lime-infilled decorative motifs, a development from the simpler Taiwanese and ISEA styles.

• Rapid expansion: From the Bismarck Archipelago, Lapita potters and navigators expanded rapidly across the Pacific to Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa by around 1500–500 BCE.
• Pottery as a marker: The presence of this distinct pottery marks the arrival of the first human settlers in these far-flung islands.
• Evolution of styles: As the Lapita culture continued to spread and localize, the distinctive decorative motifs on the pottery became simpler and eventually disappeared in some areas. However, the tradition itself continued and evolved into the various pottery styles of Micronesia and Polynesia. 

“Pottery assemblages in sites in the northern Philippines with those from sites in the Mariana Islands. Pottery appears in this region sometime between 4000 and 3000 years ago, with the pottery of the Marianas Islands being towards the younger end of this age range. Arguments concerning the origins of the first pottery in the Marianas have been dominated to date by the correlation of selected decorative and stylistic attributes of the Marianas pottery with that of pottery found in sites in Island Southeast Asia (ISEA). The similarities and differences in the pottery at the assemblage levels, however, have never been fully articulated. Recent arguments regarding the pottery have been specifically focused on perceived parallels between the early Marianas Red pottery and the early pottery of the Cagayan Valley in the northern Philippines. Although it has not been explicitly suggested that the northern Philippines was the immediate departure point for migrant boats, it has nevertheless been argued that there are more parallels between the pottery assemblages of these two regions than any others. This has even been a contributing factor in recent revisions to the Out of Taiwan model, which concerns the migration and dispersal of Austronesian language speakers. The results presented herein, however, show that there are distinct differences in the pottery technologies of the two regions that would not be expected if the sites are directly related. Consequently, there is no clear evidence that the pottery assemblages of the northern Philippines are ancestral to those of the Marianas. While both the early Marianas Red pottery and the northern Philippines pottery assemblages originate in a red-type pottery horizon that exists in both ISEA and the Marianas, the data to date suggests only a loose affinity between the assemblages, there being a high degree of variation in the constituent pottery characteristics between regions.” ref

Prehistory of Taiwan

“The oldest known artifacts are chipped-pebble tools of the Changbin culture (長濱文化), found at cave sites on the southeast coast of the island. The sites are dated 15,000 to 5,000 years ago, and similar to contemporary sites in Fujian. The primary site of Baxiandong (八仙洞), in Changbin, Taitung was first excavated in 1968. The same culture has been found at sites at Eluanbi on the southern tip of Taiwan, persisting until 5,000 years ago. The earliest layers feature large stone tools, and suggest a hunting and gathering lifestyle. Later layers have small stone tools of quartz, as well as tools made from bone, horn and shell, and suggest a shift to intensive fishing and shellfish collection.” ref

“Analysis of spores and pollen grains in sediment of Sun Moon Lake suggests that traces of slash-and-burn agriculture started in the area since 11,000 years ago, and ended 4,200 years ago, when abundant remains of rice cultivation were found. a skeleton dated about 8,000 years ago was found on Liang Island, off the north coast of Fujian. In 2014, the mitochondrial DNA of the Liangdao Man skeleton was found to belong to Haplogroup E, which is today found throughout Maritime Southeast Asia. Moreover, it had two of the four mutations characteristic of the E1 subgroup. From this, Ko et al. infer that Haplogroup E arose 8,000 to 11,000 years ago on the north Fujian coast, travelled to Taiwan with Neolithic settlers 6,000 years ago, and from there spread to Maritime Southeast Asia with the Austronesian language dispersal. Soares et al. caution against overemphasizing a single sample, and maintain that a constant molecular clock implies an earlier date (and more southerly origin) for Haplogroup E remains more likely.” ref

“The only Paleolithic burial that has been found on Taiwan was in Xiaoma cave in Chenggong in the southeast of the island, dating from about 4000 BCE or 6,000 years ago, of a male similar in type to Negritos found in the Philippines. There are also references in Chinese texts and Formosan Aboriginal oral traditions to pygmies on the island at some time in the past. Between 4000 and 3000 BCE or 6,000 to 5,000 years ago, the Dapenkeng culture (named after a site in Taipei county) abruptly appeared and quickly spread around the coast of the island, as well as Penghu. The Dapenkeng culture (Chinese: 大坌坑文化; pinyin: Dàbènkēng wénhuà) was an early Neolithic culture that appeared in northern Taiwan between 4000 and 3000 BC and quickly spread around the coast of the island, as well as the Penghu islands to the west. Most scholars believe this culture was brought across the Taiwan Strait by the ancestors of today’s Taiwanese aborigines, speaking early Austronesian languages.” ref, ref

“Around 2500 BCE or 4,500 years ago, the Dapenkeng culture developed into locally differentiated cultures throughout Taiwan. Dapenkeng sites are relatively homogeneous, characterized by pottery impressed with cord marks, pecked pebbles, highly polished stone adzes, and thin points of greenish slate. The inhabitants cultivated rice and millet, and engaged in hunting, but were also heavily reliant on marine shells and fish. Most scholars believe this culture is not derived from the Changbin culture, but was brought across the Strait by the ancestors of today’s Taiwanese aborigines, speaking early Austronesian languages. No ancestral culture on the mainland has been identified, but a number of shared features suggest ongoing contacts. However, the overall neolithic-era of Taiwan strait is said, by scholars, to have been descended from Neolithic cultures in the lower Yangtze area, particularly the Hemudu and Majiabang cultures. Physical similarity has been noted between the people of these cultures and the Neolithic inhabitants of Taiwan.” ref, ref

“Around 5,000 years ago, farmers from what is now the southeast coast of China settled on the island. These people are believed to have been speakers of Austronesian languages, which dispersed from Taiwan across the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The current Taiwanese aborigines are believed to be their descendants. Blench considers the Austronesians in Taiwan to have been a melting pot of immigrants from various parts of the coast of East China that had been migrating to Taiwan by 4000 years ago. These immigrants included people from the foxtail millet-cultivating Longshan culture of Shandong (with Longshan-type cultures found in southern Taiwan), the fishing-based Dapenkeng culture of coastal Fujian, and the Yuanshan culture of northernmost Taiwan, which Blench suggests may have originated from the coast of Guangdong. Based on geography and cultural vocabulary, Blench believes that the Yuanshan people may have spoken Northeast Formosan languages. Thus, Blench believes that there is in fact no “apical” ancestor of Austronesian in the sense that there was no true single Proto-Austronesian language that gave rise to present-day Austronesian languages. Instead, multiple migrations of various pre-Austronesian peoples and languages from the Chinese mainland that were related but distinct came together to form what we now know as Austronesian in Taiwan.” ref, ref

“The successors of the Dapenkeng culture throughout Taiwan were locally differentiated. The Fengpitou culture, characterized by fine red cord-marked pottery, was found in Penghu and the central and southern parts of the western side of the island, and a culture with similar pottery occupied the eastern coastal areas. These later differentiated into the Niumatou and Yingpu cultures in central Taiwan, the Niuchouzi and Dahu cultures in the southwest, the Beinan Culture in the southeast, and the Qilin culture in the central east. The Yuanshan culture in the northeast does not appear to be closely related to these, featuring sectioned adzes, shouldered-stone adzes, and pottery without cord impressions. Some scholars suggest that it represents another wave of immigration from southeast China, but no similar culture is known from there either. Archaeological evidence of prehistoric cultures dating back 4,500 years was found in Nangang Village, Cimei, Penghu. The Niuchouzi Culture flourished around what is now Tainan 2,500 to 1,000 BCE or 4,500 years ago. They are known for orange pottery decorated with rope patterns.” ref

The History of Pottery in the Philippines

Filipinos have been creating pottery for over 3500 years. They used these ceramic jars to hold the deceased. Other pottery used to hold remains of the deceased were decorated with anthropomorphic designs. These anthropomorphic earthenware pots date back to 5 BCE. – 225 CE and had pot covers shaped like human heads. Filipino pottery had other uses as well. During the Neolithic period of the Philippines, pottery was made for water vessels, plates, cups, and for many other uses. The first step in the manufacture of pots is the acquisition of the starting material, clay. The clay is then pounded, added with enough amount of water, to reach the wanted flexibility, and placed in a rotating plate.” ref

“Using the hand-modeling and coil-and-scrape techniques, the height, thickness, and shape of the pot are established. After this, the rim is designed by placing a wet rag on top of it and then rotating it in the other direction. Furthermore, scraping of the walls can also be done if the walls produced are too thick. The pot, after the modeling stage, is then dried for a short period of time before the base is shaped. Also, after additional heating, small amounts of clay are added inside and outside the clay to maintain the evenness of the surface. A polishing step can also be done through the use of a polishing stone. In some cases, pots are also painted with red hematite paint for some stylized design.” ref

“There are three major complexes in Philippine Iron Age according to Solheim, Kalanay, Novaliches and Bau pottery complexes. Kalanay pottery complex pertains to Beyer’s Early Iron Age pottery of the Visayan Islands found in Negros and Mindoro; novaliches pottery complex to Beyer’s Early Iron Age pottery from Rizal province. Bau pottery, on the other hand, does not fit into the two previous complexes and could correspond instead to the Late Iron Age pottery.” ref

Pottery Reveals Polynesia’s Settlers

“Archaeologists working in a remote corner of Papua New Guinea have found evidence that the some of the legendary seafarers who first settled Polynesia 3600 years ago were from the archipelago of Melanesia–not directly from Southeast Asia as previously believed. The find indicates that the peopling of the South Pacific began with a migration from southeast Asia to Melanesia, and from there it fanned out across the remote Polynesian islands. An international team of scientists has found pottery shards, known as Sumalo ware, along with human bones and other traces of ancient life, in the Aitape hills on the Sepik coast of northeastern Papua New Guinea, which is part of Melanesia. The pottery, estimated to be about 4000 years old, is similar to more recent and distinctive Lapita pottery carried by the first settlers in Polynesia in the central and eastern Pacific. This suggests that the first Polynesians learned how to make pottery from Melanesians, not directly from Southeast Asians, says archaeologist John Edward Terrell of the Field Museum of Chicago, who led the expedition.” ref

“Along with new evidence from the genes of Polynesians, the pottery shards counter the leading theory on the settling of Polynesia, which holds that bold seafarers started from Southeast Asia and bypassed Melanesia to settle the Polynesian Islands. “We now have definitive evidence that the ancestors of the Polynesians didn’t migrate directly from southeast Asia,” says Terrell. “They were clearly living in northern New Guinea for a very long time before some people finally left Melanesia to colonize Polynesia.” The Sumalo ware in Papua New Guinea also appears to be an intermediate step between older pottery in Asia and the Lapita pottery. “Sumalo ware fills a major gap in our understanding of the genesis of pottery-making in the Pacific,” says Glenn Summerhayes of LaTrobe University in Australia. “Sumalo is the missing link,” he says, between Southeast Asian pottery and Lapita ware.” ref

Lapita culture

“The Lapita culture is the name given to a Neolithic Austronesian people and their distinct material culture, who settled Island Melanesia via a seaborne migration at around 1600 to 500 BCE. The Lapita people are believed to have originated from the northern Philippines, either directly, via the Mariana Islands, or both. They were notable for their distinctive geometric designs on dentate-stamped pottery, which closely resemble the pottery recovered from the Nagsabaran archaeological site in northern Luzon. The Lapita intermarried with the Papuan populations to various degrees, and are the direct ancestors of the Austronesian peoples of Polynesia, eastern Micronesia, and Island Melanesia.” ref

“Pottery whose detailed decorative designs suggest Lapita influence was made from a variety of materials, depending on what was available, and their crafters used a variety of techniques, depending on the tools they had. But, typically, the pottery consisted of low-fired earthenware, tempered with shells or sand, and decorated using a toothed (“dentate”) stamp. It has been theorized that these decorations may have been transferred from less hardy material, such as bark cloth (“tapa”) or mats, or from tattoos, onto the pottery – or transferred from the pottery onto those materials. Other important parts of the Lapita repertoire were: undecorated (“plain-ware”) pottery, including beakers, cooking pots, and bowls; shell artifacts; ground-stone adzes; and flaked-stone tools made of obsidian, chert, or other available kinds of rock.” ref

“The Lapita complex encompasses a very large geographic region from Mussay to Samoa. Lapita pottery has been found in Near Oceania as well as Remote Oceania, as far west as the Bismarck Archipelago, as far east as Samoa, and as far south as New Caledonia. Excavation at a site in the village of Mulifanua in Samoa uncovered two adzes that strongly indicate Lapita influence. Carbon dating of material found with the adzes suggests there was a Lapita settlement at this site in roughly 1000 BCE. Radio carbon dating of sites in New Caledonia suggest there were Lapita settlements there as early as 1,110 years ago. The dates and locations of more northerly Lapita-influenced settlements are still largely up for debate.” ref

“The Lapita complex has been divided into three geographical subregions or provincesː the Far Western Lapita, the Western Lapita, and the Eastern Lapita. Within the Far Western Lapita is the New Britain or Bismarck archipelago, including the area discovered by Otto Meyer in 1909. The Western Lapita includes the artifacts found within the Solomon Islands to New Caledonia. The Eastern Lapita is attributed to the Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa region. Discoveries of unique patterns within the Eastern Lapita region suggest a subdivision of Early and Late Eastern Lapita variations.” ref

“Linguists and other researchers theorize that the people of the Lapita cultural complex spoke Proto-Oceanic, which is a branch of the Austronesian language family widely distributed in Southeast Asia today. However, the particular language or languages spoken by the Lapita is unknown. The languages spoken in the region today derive from a number of different ancient languages, and material culture uncovered by archaeology does not generally provide clues to the language spoken by the makers of the artifacts. Furthermore, certain Lapita groups are likely to have differences in speech and appearance from their relatives in different archipelagos or islands. Matthew Spriggs sees the Lapita as the source of Oceanic Austronesian languages and of cultural and religious concepts in much of the Pacific.” ref

“The Lapita complex is part of the eastern migration branch of the Austronesian expansion, which started from Taiwan between about 5,000 and 6,000 years ago. Some of the emigrants reached Melanesia and were distant descendants of much earlier migrations into the super-continent of Sahul. There are different theories about the route they took to get there. They may have gone through the Marianas Islands, or through the Philippines, or both. The strongest support for the theory that the original people of the Lapita culture were Austronesian is linguistic evidence showing very considerable lexical continuity between Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (presumably spoken in the Philippines) and Proto-Oceanic (presumably spoken by the Lapita people). In addition, the patterns of linguistic continuity correspond to patterns of similarity in material culture.” ref

“Peter Bellwood proposed that the initial movement of Malayo-Polynesian speakers into Oceania was from the northern Philippines eastward into the Mariana Islands, then southward into the Bismarcks. An older proposal was that Lapita settlers first arrived in Melanesia via eastern Indonesia. Bellwood’s proposal included the possibility that both migration patterns happened, with different migrants taking different routes. Bellwood’s proposal is supported by the pottery evidence: Lapita pottery is more similar to pottery recovered from the Philippines (at the Nagsabaran archaeological site on Luzon Island) than it is to pottery discovered anywhere else. Other evidence suggests that the Luzon area may have been the original homeland of the stamped pottery tradition that is carried forward in Lapita culture.” ref

“Archaeological evidence also broadly supports the theory that the people of the Lapita culture are of Austronesian origin. On the Bismarck Archipelago, around 3,500 years ago, the Lapita complex appears suddenly, as a fully-developed archaeological horizon with associated highly developed technological assemblages. No evidence has been found on the archipelago of settlements in earlier developmental stages. This suggests that the Lapita culture was brought in by a migrating population, and did not – as had been proposed in the 1980s and 1990s by scholars like Jim Allen and J. Peter White – evolve locally. There is evidence that western Melanesia was continuously occupied by indigenous Papuans beginning between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago.” ref

“That evidence includes recovered artifacts. But those remnants of the older material culture are far less diverse than the relics dating from after the Lapita horizon. The older material culture appears to have contributed only a few elements to the later Lapita material culture: some crops and some tools. The vast majority of the Lapita material-culture elements are clearly Southeast Asian in origin. These include pottery, crops, paddy field agriculture, domesticated animals (chickens, dogs, and pigs), rectangular stilt houses, tattoo chisels, quadrangular adzes, polished stone chisels, outrigger boat technology, trolling hooks, and various other stone artifacts. Lapita pottery offers the strongest evidence of an Austronesian origin. It has very distinctive elements, like the use of the red slips, tiny punch marks, dentate stamps, circle stamps, and a cross-in-circle motif. Similar pottery has been found in Taiwan, the Batanes and Luzon islands of the Philippines, and the Marianas.” ref

“The orthodox view, advocated by Roger Green and Peter Bellwood, and accepted by most specialists today, is the so-called “Triple-I model” (short for “intrusion, innovation, and integration”). This model posits that the Early Lapita culture arose as the result of a three-part process: “intrusion” of the Austronesian peoples of the islands of Southeast Asia (and their language, materials, and ideas) into Near Oceania; “innovation” by the Lapita people, once they reached in Melanesia, in the form of new technologies; and “integration” of the Lapita peoples into the pre-existing (non-Austronesian) populations.” ref

ref

“Around 3,000 years ago, the researchers found, when marine shells started piling up and the earliest ceramics found in the midden fell to their final resting place. Dozens of broken pieces of pottery dating between 2,000 and 3,000 years old have been unearthed on a windswept island on the Great Barrier Reef – the oldest pottery ever discovered in Australia. Archaeological discoveries in Australia’s Torres Strait indicate ancient maritime connections with 2,600 years old Papua New Guinea earthenware and rock art depicting Indigenous trading ships, suggesting a complex network of trade and cultural exchange in the region.” ref, ref

“The Ambum Stone is a masterfully crafted stone carving, created around 3,500 years ago in the highlands of the island we now know as New Guinea. Who actually carved it and for what original purpose is not known. Nevertheless, the Ambum Stone had a life as a religious object for a group of people in Papua New Guinea before becoming an aesthetically beautiful and intriguing artifact of exotica in a Western gallery. There are 12 recorded artifacts, like the Ambum Stone: ancient stone mortars and pestles excavated from New Guinea, usually from the mountains of its interior. The smoothly curved neck and head of the Ambum Stone suggest its possible utility as a pestle when we consider its size—at about 8 inches high, the “neck” of the creature it depicts can be held in the hand, and its fat base could have been used to pound food and other materials. The tops of other ancient pestles from New Guinea are distinguished by human or bird heads, or by fully sculpted birds, while the mortars also include geometric imagery alongside avian (bird) and anthropomorphic (human) depictions.” ref 

“The Ambum Stone is prized above all others not only for its age—it is one of the oldest of all sculptures made in Oceania—but also for its highly detailed sculptural qualities. It has a pleasing shape and smooth surface, and the slightly shiny patina on some of its raised details suggests it has been well handled. The Ambum Stone was used only with stone tools. It must have taken its maker many months to chip out the rough shape then finish it carefully, and the time and effort involved in its making suggests it was special and valued by whomever it was made for. Carved in the form of some kind of animal, its features are rounded and include a freestanding neck, elegantly curved head and long nose, and upper limbs that hug its torso and appear to enclose a cupped space above its belly. Stylized eyes, ears, and nostrils are depicted in relief, and shoulder blades and what could be an umbilicus suggest the maker’s understanding of anatomy. While it is possibly a fetal-form of a spiny anteater known as an echidna, which is thought to have been valued for its fat prior to the introduction of pigs, it might also be a bird or a fruit bat, and some have speculated that it represents a now extinct mega-sized marsupial.” ref

“When the Ambum Stone first became known to Westerners in the 1960s, it was being used by a group of people called the Enga who live in the western highlands of Papua New Guinea. For the Enga, the Ambum Stone and other objects like it are called simting bilong tumbuna which literally translates as the “bones of the ancestors.” This is the Enga term for a class of cult objects which were used as powerful ritual mechanisms where ancestors reside. While the ritual object is not actually an ancestor per se, paradoxically, such sacred objects are believed to have a life of their own, and they can even move around, mate, and reproduce. Enga society is based on an organizational power structure known as the “big man” system, and the negotiation of power depends on commanding natural resources like pigs and produce, as well as supernatural forces like the goodwill of the ancestors. Power is vested with those “big men” who can cajole, organize, or even manipulate other people into giving them resources so these can be redistributed at big ritual events.” ref

Big man “system”

“A big man is a highly influential individual in a tribe, especially in Melanesia and Polynesia. Such a person may not have formal tribal or other authority (through for instance material possessions, or inheritance of rights), but can maintain recognition through skilled persuasion and wisdom. The big man has a large group of followers, both from his clan and from other clans. He provides his followers with protection and economic assistance, in return receiving support which he uses to increase his status. “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia” uses analytically constructed ideal-types of hierarchy and equality to compare a larger-scale Polynesian-type hierarchical society of chiefs and sub-chiefs with a Melanesian-type big-man system.” ref

“A big man’s position is rarely secured as an inherited position at the top of a hierarchy. Rather, big men commonly compete with one another in an ongoing process of reciprocity and re-distribution of material and political resources. Spreading the word of his power and capabilities – thereby establishing reputation and recognition among outsiders – requires the delivery of resources as tribute to relevant big men of other groups. Simultaneously, he must secure resources for his own followers in order to maintain their satisfaction and confidence in his leadership. As such, the big man is subject to a transactional order based on his ability to effectively balance these mutually opposed tasks. Concepts of the role and what it entails are relatively fluid and can vary between groups. Typically, any authority a big man may possess is neither formally defined nor universally recognized by others. His position is usually not heritable, and his descendants are not guaranteed the right to succession or any otherwise elevated status.” ref

“The term may be often found in many historical works dealing with Papua New Guinea. Andrew Strathern applies the concept of big-men to a community in Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea. Traditionally, among peoples of non-Austronesian-speaking communities, authority was obtained by a man (the so-called “big man”) recognised as “performing most capably in social, political, economic and ceremonial activities”. His function was not to command, but to influence his society through his example. He was expected to act as a negotiator with neighbouring groups, and to periodically redistribute food (generally produced by his wives). In this sense, he was seen as ensuring the well-being of his community. Such a system is still found in many parts of Papua New Guinea, and other parts of Melanesia.” ref

“Some scholars have suggested that strong leaders in certain Aboriginal Australian areas, such as northeast Arnhem Land, Bathurst and Melville Islands, western Cape York Peninsula, and among the Arrernte (Aranda) of central Australia, exhibited characteristics similar to the Melanesian “Big Man” model, particularly where ritual preeminence extended into secular influence.” ref

Haplogroup D and Migration out of Africa: Andamanese, Negrito, and Orang Asli Peoples

Andamanese Languages

“The Andamanese languages are the various languages spoken by the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean. There are two known Andamanese language families, Great Andamanese and Ongan, as well as two presumed but unattested languages, Sentinelese and Jangil. Although the languages in the Andaman Islands were once assumed to be in the same language family, it is now widely accepted that Great Andamanese and Ongan have no genealogical relationship. Thus, the term “Andamanese languages” is now a geographic label. The indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands have lived there for thousands of years. Although the existence of the islands and their inhabitants was long known to maritime powers and traders of the South– and Southeast–Asia region, contact with these peoples was highly sporadic and very often hostile. As a result, almost nothing is recorded of them or their languages until the mid-18th century.” ref

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I updated this map to English.

Negrito include: the Andamanese peoples 

“The term Negrito (‘little black people‘) refers to several diverse ethnic groups who inhabit isolated parts of Southeast Asia and the Andaman Islands. Populations often described as Negrito include: the Andamanese peoples (including the Great Andamanese, the Onge, the Jarawa, and the Sentinelese) of the Andaman Islands, the Semang peoples (among them, the Batek people) of Peninsular Malaysia, the Maniq people of Southern Thailand, as well as the Aeta of Luzon, the Ati and Tumandok of Panay, the Mamanwa of Mindanao, and about 30 other officially recognized ethnic groups in the Philippines.” ref

“The Andamanese peoples are among the various groups considered Negrito, owing to their dark skin and diminutive stature. All Andamanese traditionally lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and appear to have lived in substantial isolation for thousands of years. It is suggested that the Andamanese settled in the Andaman Islands around the latest glacial maximum, around 26,000 years ago. And genetic estimates suggest that the two main linguistic groups (Great Andamanese and Onge/Jarawa) diverged around 16,000 years ago. Recent genetic studies conclusively demonstrate Negrito groups do not share a common origin to the exclusion of other Asians. The Andamanese languages are considered to be the fifth language family of India, following the Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic, and Sino-Tibetan.” ref

“Based on perceived physical similarities, Negritos were once considered a single population of closely related people. However, genetic studies suggest that they consist of several separate groups descended from the same ancient East Eurasian meta-population that gave rise to modern East Asian peoples and Oceanian peoples, as well as displaying genetic heterogeneity. The Negritos form the indigenous population of Southeast Asia, but were largely absorbed by Austroasiatic- and Austronesian-speaking groups who migrated from southern East Asia into Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia with the Neolithic expansion. The remainders form minority groups in geographically isolated regions.” ref

“Genetic studies provided mixed evidence of modern Negrito populations, with populations considered Negrito showing diverse admixtures. Although a genetic affinity between Andaman Islanders, Malaysian, and Filipino Negritos was detected by some authors, several studies indicate that Negrito populations are closer to their neighboring non-Negrito communities in their paternal heritage and autosomal DNA on average. Most modern groups considered Negrito possess significant admixture from Austronesian or Austroasiatic sources, with Negrito groups in the Philippines found to have between 30 and 50% Austronesian ancestry.” ref

“The Semang and Maniq in the interior of the Malay Peninsula share genetic affinities with ancient Hoabinhian (10,000–2000 BCE) hunter-gatherers, while also posessing ~35% East Asian related ancestry, likely brought about by recent admixture with surrounding agriculturalist communities in the region. A rock shelter was identified in Yunnan, China, 40 km from the border with Myanmar, where artifacts belonging to the Hoabinhian technocomplex were recognized, dating from 41,500 BCE. It has been found that the physical and morphological phenotypes of Negritos, such as short stature, a wide and snub nose, curly hair and dark skin, “are shaped by novel mechanisms for adaptation to tropical rainforests” through convergent evolution and positive selection, rather than a remnant of a shared common ancestor, as suggested previously by some researchers.” ref, ref

“A Negrito-like population was most likely also present in Taiwan before the Neolithic expansion and must have persisted into historical times, as suggested by evidence from morphological features of human skeletal remains dating from around 6,000 years ago resembling Negritos (especially Aetas in northern Luzon), and from tales of Taiwanese indigenous peoples about people with “dark skin, short-and-small body stature, frizzy hair, and occupation in forested mountains or remote caves.” ref

“The native Andamanese religion and belief system is a form of animism. Ancestor worship is an important element in the religious traditions of the Andaman islands. Andamanese Mythology held that humans emerged from split bamboo, whereas the women were fashioned from clay. One version found by Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown held that the first man died and went to heaven, a pleasurable world, but this blissful period ended due to breaking a food taboo, specifically eating the forbidden vegetables in the Puluga‘s garden. Thus, Catastrophe ensued, and eventually the people grew overpopulated and didn’t follow Puluga‘s laws, and hence there was a Great Flood that left four survivors, who lost their fire.” ref

“6,000-Year-Old Negrito skull confirms presence of ‘Short, Dark-Skinned’ people in Taiwan before indigenous tribes appeared. Scientists found the skull of a female with cranial features and size similar to the Philippine Negritos and India’s the Andaman Islands. Researchers found a 6,000-year-old skull of a female individual with the same characteristics as the indigenous Negritos found in Southeast Asia. Their DNA resembles African samples, and the features of the cranium look like those of the Negritos in the Philippines and South Africa. Negrito groups are characterized by their short stature, dark skin, and fuzzy hair that is similar to that of their neighboring regions, such as the Mani in Thailand, the Semang groups in Malaysia, and the Andamanese in the Andaman Islands. All but one of the 16 recognized Austronesian groups in Taiwan have similar legends about Negrito people.” ref

“Austronesian groups have varied opinions on Negritos. Some view them as ancestors, while others see them as aliens and enemies. The “Out-of-Africa” theories suggest that Negrito groups in the Andaman Islands, Malay Peninsula, and the Philippines are descended from the earlier groups of anatomically modern humans who have traveled by land from Africa through the Arabian Peninsula, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Although it is not known where their short stature may have come from. Researchers said that a wave of Neolithic farmers that look different from the Negritos arrived in Taiwan in 4,800 BC or a few hundred years after the “Xiaoma lady.” They inhabited the areas near Xiaoma and formed larger communities that have driven the Negritos into refuge zones, such as in remote mountain areas.” ref

Sequence analyses of Malaysian Indigenous communities reveal historical admixture between Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers

“Southeast Asia comprises 11 countries that span mainland Asia across to numerous islands that stretch from the Andaman Sea to the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. This region harbors an impressive diversity of history, culture, religion, and biology. Indigenous people of Malaysia display substantial phenotypic, linguistic, and anthropological diversity. The genetic history of these people, especially Malaysian Negritos, demonstrates that indigenous populations of Malaysia are genetically close to East Asian populations. Present-day Malaysian Negritos can be modeled as an admixture of ancient Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers. Gene flow from South Asian populations into the Malaysian indigenous groups, but not into the Dusun of North Borneo. Malaysian indigenous people seeminly originated from at least three distinct ancestral populations related to the Hoabinhian hunter-gatherers, Neolithic farmers, and Austronesian speakers.” ref

“Philippine Negritos are basal to other East and Southeast Asians, and they diverged from West Eurasians at least 38,000 years ago. Also, Philippine Negritos have relatively high traces of Denisovan admixture, but not in the Malaysian and Andamanese groups, suggesting independent introgression and/or parallel losses involving Denisovan introgressed regions. Shared genetic loci between all three Negrito groups could be related to skin pigmentation, height, facial morphology, and malaria resistance. These results show the unique status of Negrito groups as descended from the First Sundaland People.  Then, the current islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo were connected with the Asian mainland, forming the landmass known as Sundaland. A cluster of islands separates Sundaland from another landmass called Sahul, made up of what is now New Guinea and Australia. There are several human populations scattered throughout Southeast Asia that are thought to be descendants of the “First Sundaland People.” They are collectively known as Negritos and are currently found in the Andaman Islands, Malay Peninsula, and several islands in the Philippines. They have been traditionally associated with a hunter-gathering lifestyle, and also exhibit physical features that are distinct from their non-Negrito neighbors, namely short stature, frizzy hair, and dark skin.” ref

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The Y-chromosome landscape of the Philippines: extensive heterogeneity and varying genetic affinities of Negrito and non-Negrito groups

“The Philippines exhibits a rich diversity of people, languages, and culture, including so-called ‘Negrito’ groups that have for long fascinated anthropologists, yet little is known about their genetic diversity. We report here, a survey of Y-chromosome variation in 390 individuals from 16 Filipino ethnolinguistic groups, including six Negrito groups, from across the archipelago. We find extreme diversity in the Y-chromosome lineages of Filipino groups with heterogeneity seen in both Negrito and non-Negrito groups, which does not support a simple dichotomy of Filipino groups as Negrito vs non-Negrito. Filipino non-recombining region of the human Y chromosome lineages reflect a chronology that extends from after the initial colonization of the Asia-Pacific region, to the time frame of the Austronesian expansion. Filipino groups appear to have diverse genetic affinities with different populations in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, some Negrito groups are associated with indigenous Australians, with a potential time for the association ranging from the initial colonization of the region to more recent (after colonization) times. Overall, our results indicate extensive heterogeneity contributing to a complex genetic history for Filipino groups, with varying roles for migrations from outside the Philippines, genetic drift, and admixture among neighboring groups.” ref

Taiwan Y-chromosomal DNA variation and its relationship with Island Southeast Asia

“DNA samples from 1658 individuals from Vietnam, Thailand, Fujian, Taiwan (Han, plain tribes, and 14 indigenous groups), the Philippines, and Indonesia. While haplogroups O1a*-M119, O1a1*-P203, O1a2-M50, and O3a2-P201 follow a decreasing cline from Taiwan towards Western Indonesia, O2a1-M95/M88, O3a*-M324, O3a1c-IMS-JST002611, and O3a2c1a-M133 decline northward from Western Indonesia towards Taiwan. Compared to the Taiwan plain tribe minority groups, the Taiwanese Austronesian speaking groups show little genetic paternal contribution from Han. They are also characterized by low Y-chromosome diversity, thus testifying for fast drift in these populations. However, in contrast to data provided from other regions of the genome, Y-chromosome gene diversity in Taiwan mountain tribes significantly increases from North to South.” ref 

“The geographic distribution and the diversity accumulated in the O1a*-M119, O1a1*-P203, O1a2-M50 and O3a2-P201 haplogroups on one hand, and in the O2a1-M95/M88, O3a*-M324, O3a1c-IMS-JST002611 and O3a2c1a-M133 haplogroups on the other, support a pincer model of dispersals and gene flow from the mainland to the islands which likely started during the late upper Paleolithic, 18,000 to 15,000 years ago. The branches of the pincer contributed separately to the paternal gene pool of the Philippines and conjointly to the gene pools of Madagascar and the Solomon Islands. The North to South increase in diversity found for Taiwanese Austronesian speaking groups contrasts with observations based on mitochondrial DNA, thus hinting to a differentiated demographic history of men and women in these populations.” ref

“Taiwan mountain tribes, Aborigines, Filipinos, and Indonesian people speak languages that belong to the Austronesian language family. Ten primary branches are usually recognized at the roots of this linguistic family. Nine of these branches are found exclusively in Taiwan and constitute the first-order subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Austronesian languages spoken outside Taiwan, including the Taiwan offshore Yami language, belong to the tenth branch, Malayo-Polynesian. This branch comprises more than 1,200 separate languages that are spoken over a huge geographic region covering Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), and hundreds of Oceanic islands all the way east towards Easter Island in the Pacific. Thus, because of the particular geographic distribution of the first-order subgroups of Austronesian, Taiwan is often considered as the potential original homeland of Austronesian speakers.” ref

“In addition to linguistics, scholars have also examined evidence from archaeology and genetics to determine the original homeland of Austronesian speakers. The most consistent and generally accepted view based on archaeological evidence suggests that Proto-Austronesian speakers, the ancestors of present-day Austronesian populations, reached ISEA via Taiwan, some 4,500 years ago, before the Iron Age, and possibly concomitant with the migration of early farming communities who expanded in Southeast China as a result of favorable climate changes. The “Out of Taiwan” hypothesis here identifies a unique movement of people leaving southeastern Taiwan more than 4,000 years ago and moving toward the Pacific and later to the Indian Ocean.” ref

Tattoos in Prehistory Ritual and Religion with a wide Dispersal of Cultures and Places

Indigenous Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand: People, Clans, Chiefdoms, Culture, Religion, Totemism, and Shamanism

Totemism in Australia and Papua New Guinea?

Shamanism in Australia and Papua New Guinea?

AI Overview: For both cultures, shamanic practices serve as a bridge between the physical and spiritual realms, with healers addressing ailments that are understood to be both physical and spiritual in nature. Both Australia and Papua New Guinea possess ancient shamanistic traditions, which share commonalities rooted in a worldview that emphasizes the interconnectedness of people, land, and the spirit world.

• Animism and ancestor veneration: Both Australian and Papuan traditional religions are often animistic, meaning they recognize that all things—including animals, plants, inanimate objects, and the landscape—are alive and imbued with spirit. Ancestor veneration is also a major component of spiritual life, with the spirits of the dead playing an active role in the lives of the living.
• A powerful, pervasive spiritual force: A concept of an impersonal, sacred energy is central to both belief systems. In Aboriginal tradition, the power of the Dreaming (or Dreamtime) links the people to their land and their ancestral past. Similarly, in Papua New Guinea, the Papuan concept of imunu describes a pervasive force that can be contained in ritual objects and accessed through ceremonies.
• The spirit world: Shamanic traditions in both regions are based on the belief that a spirit world exists parallel to the physical world, which shamans can enter to retrieve lost souls, gain knowledge, or fight off malevolent spirits. The spiritual health of the community and the environment depends on maintaining a connection with this other realm.
• Sorcery and sickness: Illness and misfortune are often attributed to sorcery or an imbalance with the spiritual world. This provides a rationale for seeking a shaman or traditional healer who can identify the spiritual cause of the illness and correct it.

The role and power of the Shaman in Australia and Papua New Guinea

• Healers and intermediaries: The shaman acts as an intermediary, navigating the spiritual realms to bring back healing and wisdom for their community. In both cultures, they serve as the primary traditional healers, addressing a variety of physical, emotional, and spiritual ailments.
• Initiatory death and rebirth: The path to becoming a shaman in both cultures can involve a ritualistic journey of initiatory death and resurrection. This often entails a profound spiritual experience, sometimes involving a trance or dream, where the individual is believed to be remade into a person of superhuman ability.
• Accessing spiritual knowledge: Shamans gain their healing and spiritual knowledge through communication with spirits, a process that can occur in a trance state, through dreams, or through deep, meditative states.
• Use of tools and ritual: Shamans use sacred tools and perform rituals to interact with the spirit world. For example, Aboriginal healers use smoking ceremonies to cleanse negative energy and utilize sacred instruments like the bullroarer to connect with spirits. In Papua New Guinea, ritual objects imbued with imunu are used to protect villages or aid warriors. 

Australian Aboriginal Religion and Mythology

“Geological research dated the formative volcanic explosions described by Aboriginal myth tellers as having occurred more than 10,000 years ago. Pollen fossil sampling from the silt which had settled to the bottom of the craters confirmed the Aboriginal myth-tellers’ story. When the craters were formed, eucalyptus forests dominated rather than the current wet tropical rainforests. There are 900 distinct Aboriginal groups across Australia, each distinguished by unique names usually identifying particular languages, dialects, or distinctive speech mannerisms. Each language was used for original myths, from which the distinctive words and names of individual myths derive. With so many distinct Aboriginal groups, languages, beliefs and practices, scholars cannot attempt to characterise, under a single heading, the full range and diversity of all myths being variously and continuously told, developed, elaborated, performed, and experienced by group members across the entire continent. Attempts to represent the different groupings in maps have varied widely. The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia nevertheless observes: “One intriguing feature [of Aboriginal Australian mythology] is the mixture of diversity and similarity in myths across the entire continent.” Aboriginal specialists willing to generalise believe all Aboriginal myths across Australia, in combination, represent a kind of unwritten (oral) library within which Aboriginal peoples learn about the world and perceive a peculiarly Aboriginal ‘reality’ dictated by concepts and values vastly different from those of western societies. Aboriginal people observe some places as sacred, owing to their central place in the mythology of the local people.” ref

“Professor Alfred Radcliffe-Brown noted that many Aboriginal groups widely distributed across the Australian continent all appeared to share variations of a single (common) myth telling of an unusually powerful, often creative, often dangerous snake or serpent of sometimes enormous size, closely associated with the rainbows, rain, rivers, and deep waterholes. Radcliffe-Brown coined the term ‘Rainbow Serpent’ to describe what he identified to be a common, recurring myth. This ‘Rainbow Serpent’ is generally and variously identified by those who tell ‘Rainbow Serpent’ myths, as a snake of some enormous size often living within the deepest waterholes of many of Australia’s waterways; descended from that larger being visible as a dark streak in the Milky Way, it reveals itself to people in this world as a rainbow as it moves through water and rain, shaping landscapes, naming and singing of places, swallowing and sometimes drowning people; strengthening the knowledgeable with rainmaking and healing powers; blighting others with sores, weakness, illness, and death.” ref

“The response to death in Aboriginal religion may seem similar in some respects to that to be found in European traditions—notably in regard to the holding of a ceremony to mark the death of an individual and the observance of a period of mourning for that individual. Any such similarity, however, is, at best, only superficial (with ceremony and mourning of some kind being common to most, if not all, human cultures). In death—as in life—Aboriginal spirituality gives pre-eminence to the land and sees the deceased as linked indissolubly, by a web of subtle connections, to that greater whole: “For Aboriginal people when a person dies some form of the persons spirit and also their bones go back to the country they were born in”. “Aborigine people [sic] believe that they share their being with their country and all that is within it”. “So when a person dies their country suffers, trees die and become scarred because it is believed that they came into being because of the deceased person.” ref

Papua New Guinea Religion and Mythology

“The Papuans are one of four major cultural groups of Papua New Guinea. The majority of the population lives in rural areas. In isolated areas there remains a handful of the giant communal structures that previously housed the whole male population, with a circling cluster of huts for the women. The Papuan people are Melanesian people composed of at least 240 different peoples, each with its own language and culture. Sago is the staple food of the Papuan supplemented with hunting, fishing and small gardens. Papuans may be related to the Iatmul on the Sepik River and to the Asmat and Marind-anim farther west along the coast. There the cultures share concepts of village “big men”, great longhouses, huge dugout canoes, headhunting and, in some areas, cannibalism. Ancestors are important, but not necessarily revered in Papuan culture. The important quality is called “imunu”, the power that pervades things, including ritual objects. Imunu is personified in the masked ceremonies. Most representations are of humans or ancestors, not plants or animals. Traditional cultural ceremonies on a large scale existed into the 1950s, but declined as Christian missionaries converted the villages.” ref

“Animistic beliefs, as well as ancestor worship, are an important part of the widespread traditional rituals and beliefs of the Papuan culture. The practical aspects of life in the region often speak to the types of deities that are revered or worshipped in said region. For example, farming communities often place great emphasis on the weather, accordingly celebrating aspects of fertility and harvest. Placating the spirits of ancestors is also a dominant theme in traditional beliefs, while the fear of sorcery and witchcraft is widespread. Many religions in post-Missionary Papua New Guinea combine elements of Christianity with these more traditional religious beliefs, to varying degrees. Papuan art forms are as diverse as they are distinctive. In a country where language varies from village to village, it can be expected that artistic expression will differ in style just as dramatically. Pottery, weapons, carvings, basketwork, and musical instruments are produced by different people in different places, according to their traditional skills and beliefs. Most provinces specialize in different kinds of weaponry. Bows and arrows are traditional in several areas. Shields have a decorative and spiritual role just as important as their defensive purposes. Gope boards are believed to possess the spirits of powerful warriors or to act as guardians of the village. Before hunting or war expeditions, the spirits were called upon to advise and protect the men. Story boards are a modern version of the fragile bark carvings villagers used to make. The boards illustrate incidents of village life in raised relief.” ref

Regional forms of Shamanism

“Siberia is regarded as the locus classicus of shamanism. A large minority of people in North Asia, particularly in Siberia, follow the religio-cultural practices of shamanism. Some researchers regard Siberia as the heartland of shamanism. The area is inhabited by many different ethnic groups, and many of its peoples observe shamanistic practices. Many classical ethnographic sources of “shamanism” were recorded among Siberian peoples.” ref, ref

“China: Wu (shaman): Nuoism, Wuism (Chinese: 巫教; pinyin: wū jiào; lit. ‘wu religion’, ‘shamanism‘, ‘witchcraft‘; alternatively 巫觋宗教 wū xí zōngjiào), refers to the shamanic practices of China. Its features are especially connected to the ancient Neolithic cultures, such as the Hongshan culture (4,700 to 2,900 BCE or 6,700 to 4,900 years ago; with Y-DNA N1a, N1c at 89%, also with C and O3a (O3a3). Chinese shamanic traditions are intrinsic to Chinese folk religion. Shamanism also persists among various ethnic minorities in China, such as the Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, Miao, Naxi, and Pumi peoples. The Hmong people are an ethnic group of people originating from Central China, who continue to maintain and practice Ua Neeb. Being a Hmong shaman is a vocation; their primary role is to bring harmony to the individual, their family, and their community within their environment by performing rituals, usually through trance.” ref, ref

“The Hmong believe that all things on Earth have a soul (or multiple souls), each considered equal and possibly interchangeable. Animal sacrifice is central to these beliefs, where it is seen as a necessary request to borrow the animal’s soul to heal a person’s affliction or to save their soul from being captured by a wild spirit for a period of 12 months. During the Hmong New Year, the shaman performs a special ritual to release the animal’s soul to a spiritual dimension. As part of its service to mankind, the animal’s soul is understood to be reincarnated into a ‘higher animal,’ possibly becoming a member of a god’s family (ua Fuab Tais Ntuj tus tub, tus ntxhais) to live a life of luxury, free of suffering as an animal. Hence, participating in this exchange by being sacrificed is one of the greatest honors for the animal. Animal sacrifice has been part of the Hmong shamanic practice for the past 5,000 years.” ref

“Vietnam: Lên đồng, Đạo Mẫu, Thánh Trần worship, and Nội Đạo Tràng, in Vietnam, shamans conduct rituals in many of the religious traditions that co-mingle in the majority and minority populations. In their rituals, music, dance, special garments, and offerings are part of the performance that surrounds the spirit journey. Shamanism is a part of Vietnamese folk religion, three branches of shamanism are known today as Đạo Mẫu, Thánh Trần worship, and Nội Đạo Tràng (of which the most famous is Đạo Mẫu). In Vietnam, this ritual practice is called lên đồng, or also known as hầu bóng, or hầu đồng, sessions involve artistic elements such as music, singing, dance, and the use of costumes.” ref

“Dukun is an Indonesian term for shaman. Their societal role is that of a traditional healer, spirit medium, custom and tradition experts, and on occasion sorcerers and masters of black magic (witchcraft). In common usage, the dukun is often confused with another type of shaman, the pawang. It is often mistranslated into English as “witch doctor” or “medicine man”. Many self-styled dukun in Indonesia are simply scammers and criminals, preying on people who were raised to believe in the supernatural. The dukun is the very epitome of the kejawen or kebatinan belief system indigenous to Java. Very strong and ancient beliefs of animism, ancestor worship, and shamanism are held by the people of the Nusantara. In common practice, a dukun is consulted when a person perceives they have an issue that has a supernatural or paranormal association. If a dukun is not known to the individual, their family or friends, word of mouth often creates a situation where the dukun will appear as if summoned, most especially in the case of possessions.” ref

“Malaysia: Bobohizan, Bomoh, and Pawang, shamanism is also practiced among the Malay community in Malay Peninsula and indigenous people in Sabah and Sarawak. People who practice shamanism in the country are generally called bomoh, and analogously pawang on the Peninsula. In Sabah, the Bobohizan is the main shaman among the Kadazan-Dusun indigenous community. A Bobohizan (Tangaa’ Kadazan term) or Bobolian (Bundu Liwan Dusun term) is a high priestess, a ritual specialist, and a spirit medium in the pagan rites of the Kadazan-Dusun in Sabah, Malaysia. The head of bobohizan or bobolian, is also the chief preserver of Momolianism, i.e. the philosophy and way of life of the Kadazan-Dusun people.” ref, ref

“Different variant exists on the origin of Bobohizan, both on the Dusun and Kadazan, the first story related to the creator God of Kinoingan, with his wife Suminundu is believed to be the first Bobohizan. Based on the myth of the traditional Kadazan, Bobohizan is said to stem from the sacrifice of Ponompuan, where she is believed to be a bobohizan during her lifetime. Another variant also tells the story of origin from the Nunuk Ragang, although it is uncertain whether the calling of Bobohizan (Bobolian in the Bundu-Liwan dialect) existed prior to or after the settling of the ancestors at Nunuk Ragang. Long after the first ancestors passing to Hibabou (Heaven), the rites, prayers, and incantations (Rinait or Inaait) were lost and forgotten. This is when Suminundu sent a spirit to earth to teach the people about the rinait (ritual poem). The spirit came every evening, calling upon anyone brave enough to learn.” ref

“Philippines: Babaylan, Anito, and Dambana, Babaylans (also balian or katalonan, among many other indigenous names) were shamans of the various ethnic groups of the pre-colonial Philippine islands. These shamans specialized in harnessing the unlimited powers of nature and were almost always women or feminized men (asog or bayok). They were believed to have spirit guides, by which they could contact and interact with the spirits and deities (anito or diwata) and the spirit world. Their primary role were as mediums during pag-anito séance rituals. There were also various subtypes of babaylan specializing in the arts of healing and herbalism, divination, and sorcery. Babaylan were highly respected members of the community, on par with the pre-colonial noble class. In the absence of the datu (head of the domain), the babaylan takes in the role of interim head of the domain.” ref

“They were powerful ritual specialists with the capability to influence the weather, and tap the various spirits in nature. Babaylans were held in such high esteem because of their ability to negate the dark magic of an evil datu or spirit and heal the sick or the wounded. Among the powers of the babaylan was to heal the sick, ensure a safe pregnancy and child birth, and lead rituals with offerings to the various divinities. The babaylans were well versed in herb lore, and was able to create remedies, antidotes, and potions from various roots and seeds. They used these to treat the sick or to aid an ally datu in bringing down an enemy, hence, the babaylans were also known for their specialization in medical and divine combat.” ref

“Oceania: Umbarra and Tunggal panaluan, on the island of Papua New Guinea, indigenous tribes believe that illness and calamity are caused by dark spirits, or masalai, which cling to a person’s body and poison them. Shamans are summoned in order to purge the unwholesome spirits from a person. Shamans also perform rainmaking ceremonies and can allegedly improve a hunter’s ability to catch animals. In Australia, various Aboriginal groups refer to their shamans as “clever men” and “clever women,” also as kadji. These aboriginal shamans use maban or mabain, the material that is believed to give them their purported magical powers. Besides healing, contact with spiritual beings, involvement in initiation and other secret ceremonies, they are also enforcers of tribal laws, keepers of special knowledge, and may “hex” to death one who breaks a social taboo by singing a song only known to the “clever men.” ref 

Why don’t I leave religion alone?

Well, I am not just an atheist, I am also an antireligionist, and its explanation is kinda in its name. No religion is dangerous, once we all lose faith.