Polynesia - History of The Polynesian People - Mainstream Theories

Mainstream Theories

The Polynesian people are considered to be by linguistic, archaeological and human genetic ancestry a subset of the sea-migrating Austronesian people and tracing Polynesian languages places their prehistoric origins in the Malay Archipelago, and ultimately, in Taiwan.

Between about 3000 and 1000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages began spreading from Taiwan into Island Southeast Asia, as tribes whose natives were thought to have arrived through South China about 8,000 years ago to the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia, although they are different from the Han Chinese who now form the majority of people in China and Taiwan. In fact Taiwan, previously inhabited mostly by non-Han aborigines, was Sinicized via large-scale migration accompanied with assimilation during the 17th century.

There are three theories regarding the spread of humans across the Pacific to Polynesia. These are outlined well by Kayser et al. (2000) and are as follows:

• Express Train model: A recent (c. 3000–1000 BC) expansion out of Taiwan, via the Philippines and eastern Indonesia and from the northwest ("Bird's Head") of New Guinea, on to Island Melanesia by roughly 1400 BC, reaching western Polynesian islands right about 900 BC. This theory is supported by the majority of current human genetic data, linguistic data, and archaeological data.
• Entangled Bank model: Emphasizes the long history of Austronesian speakers' cultural and genetic interactions with indigenous Island Southeast Asians and Melanesians along the way to becoming the first Polynesians.
• Slow Boat model: Similar to the express-train model but with a longer hiatus in Melanesia along with admixture, both genetically, culturally and linguistically with the local population. This is supported by the Y-chromosome data of Kayser et al. (2000), which shows that all three haplotypes of Polynesian Y chromosomes can be traced back to Melanesia.

In the archaeological record there are well-defined traces of this expansion which allow the path it took to be followed and dated with some certainty. It is thought that by roughly 1400 BC, "Lapita Peoples", so-named after their pottery tradition, appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago of northwest Melanesia. This culture is seen as having adapted and evolved through time and space since its emergence "Out of Taiwan". They had given up rice production, for instance, after encountering and adapting to breadfruit in the Bird's Head area of New Guinea. In the end, the most eastern site for Lapita archaeological remains recovered so far has been through work on the archaeology in Samoa. The site is at Mulifanua on Upolu. The Mulifanua site, where 4,288 pottery shards have been found and studied, has a "true" age of c. 1000 BC based on C14 dating. Other long work by other respected archaeologists places the beginning of the human archaeological sequences of Polynesia in Tonga at 900 B.C., the small differences in dates with Samoa being due to differences in radiocarbon dating technologies between 1989 and 2010, the Tongan site apparently predating the Samoan site by some few decades in real time.

Within a mere three or four centuries between about 1300 and 900 BC, the Lapita archaeological culture spread 6,000 km further to the east from the Bismarck Archipelago, until it reached as far as Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa which were first populated around 3,000 years ago as mentioned previously. A cultural divide began to develop between Fiji to the west, and the distinctive Polynesian language and culture emerging on Tonga and Samoa to the east. Where there was once faint evidence of uniquely shared developments in Fijian and Polynesian speech, most of this is now called "borrowing" and is thought to have occurred insidiously in those and later years more than as a result of continuing unity of their earliest dialects on those far flung lands. Contacts were mediated especially through the eastern Lau Islands of Fiji and this is where most Fijian-Polynesian linguistic interaction occurred.

Tiny populations seem to have been involved at first.

They were matrilineal and matrilocal peoples upon arrival to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa and had been through at least some goodly portion of their time in the Bismarck Archipelago. The modern Polynesians, in their profound isolation from the world beyond, still show the human genetic results of a culture, when their ancestors were still in Melanesia, that allowed indigenous men, but not women, to "marry in" - deadly useful evidence for matrilocality.

Matrilocality and matrilineality went by-the-bye at some early time but Polynesians and most other Austronesian speakers in the Pacific Islands were/are still highly "matricentric" in their traditional jurisprudence. The Lapita pottery for which the general archaeological complex of the earliest "Oceanic" Austronesian speakers in the Pacific Islands are named also went by-the-bye in Western Polynesia and language, social life and material culture were very distinctly "Polynesian" by the time Eastern Polynesia began to be settled after a "Pause" of 1000 years or perhaps well more in Western Polynesia.

The dating of the settlement of Eastern Polynesia including Hawai'i, Easter Island, and New Zealand is not agreed upon in every instance. Most recently a 2010 study using meta-analysis of the most reliable radiocarbon dates available suggested that the colonization of Eastern Polynesia (including Hawaii and New Zealand) proceeded in two short episodes: in the Society Islands from 1025–1120 AD and further afield from 1190–1290 AD, with Easter Island being settled around 1200. Other archeological models developed in recent decades, which are challenged by that recent set of radiocarbon dating interpretations, have pointed to dates of between 300 and 500 AD, or alternatively 800 AD (as supported by Jared Diamond) for the settlement of Easter Island, and similarly, a date of 500 AD has been suggested for Hawaii. Linguistically, there is a very distinct "East Polynesian" subgroup with many shared innovations not seen in other Polynesian languages. Easter Island Rapa Nui is mysteriously the first to have established itself outside the group. The Marquesas dialects seem to be the source of the oldest Hawaiian speech which is overlaid by Tahitian variety speech, as Hawaiian oral histories would suggest. The earliest varieties of New Zealand Maori speech may have had multiple sources from around central Eastern Polynesia as Maori oral histories would suggest. Much linguistic and archaeological work has been done since World War II but it will apparently take a good deal more to resolve the "oldest", "only", and "never" sorts of questions the linguists, archaeologists, geneticists and others have been able to resolve to some extent for Western Polynesia.