Yet more on Taiwan as the origin of many Pacific Islanders

Taipei Times – archives

Pacific Islanders’ history

With reference to your review of my book, Surviving Paradise (“Notes from a very small island,” May 9, page 14), and Bradley Winterton’s doubts about my claim that Taiwanese Aborigines colonized the Pacific Islands, I would like to clarify and support this claim.

It is the orthodox view among linguists, anthropologists and archeologists that the origin point for the colonization of the Pacific Islands was Taiwan. Between 5,000 and 7,000 years ago, the ancestors of the modern Taiwanese Aborigines expanded out of Taiwan into the Philippines, Indonesia, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, mixed with local populations, and then colonized previously uninhabited islands in Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia — including the Marshall Islands.

So modern-day Pacific Islanders and modern-day Taiwanese Aborigines have common ancestors who lived in Taiwan and some of the Taiwanese Aborigines who lived 5,000 to 7,000 years ago were responsible for setting off the expansion that would eventually lead to such feats as establishing a civilization on the remote Easter Island and discovering Hawaii and Madagascar across vast stretches of empty ocean.

One reason most academics agree that Pacific Islanders originated in Taiwan is that the Taiwanese Aborigines speak Austronesian languages related to the languages spoken by Pacific Islanders. The rich diversity of Austronesian languages spoken in Taiwan indicates that the language family developed there for many thousands of years and then, more recently, was carried to other islands like the Marshall Islands.

This is similar to the Germanic languages found in Europe that shows (if we didn’t know already) that the Germanic languages arose there and were later carried to places like England, rather than vice-versa.

Modern-day Pacific Islanders feel no sense of connection toward Taiwan as an ancestral place of origin, but that is almost certainly where they came from.

PETER RUDIAK-GOULD

PhD student in anthropology, Oxford University
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