2.2 Speculative Prehistories for the Lapita Peoples
21
a Neolithic agricultural expansion. As Martin Jones [12] explains, the first principal component in the principal components analysis of genetic variation adopted
by Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues showed a series of bands running from southwest
Asia to northwest Europe, supporting the idea of an expanding wave of farmers from
the Fertile Crescent moving across Europe. Additionally,
The second principal component highlighted a community on the fringes of this wave, and
not actually part of it. The reindeer-herding Saami from northern Scandinavia (formerly
known as Lapps) had followed a separate path from north-western Asia. The third principal component seemed to the authors to mirror another popular expansion, that of Maria
Gimbutas’ horse-riders of the steppes. Each principal component was elegantly pointing to
a particular expansion, migration, or set of journeys (pp. 136–137).
But, Jones tells us, by 1995 Robert Sykes and his team in Oxford had realized
that their own
targeted analysis of one well-studied stretch of DNA was telling a quite different story
from what had emerged from Cavalli-Sforza’s masterly survey. They argued that, while
a population spread of early farmers from south-west Asia had taken place, it only contributed a small fraction to the European gene pool. There was no wave of population
advance sweeping across Europe, just a trickle. The sequence diversity had to be explained
in terms of a more ancient population. Their hypothesis cut across the core journey within
Cavalli-Sforza’s grand synthesis. The principal ancestors of modern Europeans were the
hunter-gatherers who were already there, thousands of years before the spread of farming.
Agriculture travelled as an idea more than as a community, and the presumed population
replacement had not taken place (p. 158).
Perhaps the “Slow Boat to the Bismarcks”, proposed in 1997 by Terrell and
Welsch, which allowed for cultural interactions of Taiwanese migrants with indigenous populations within Near Oceania, owed something to the radical challenge
to Cavalli-Sforza’s synthesis made by the Oxford geneticists. In contrast to the
“Bismarck Indigenous Inhabitants” model of White and Allen, however, Terrell and
Welsch’s theory retained Taiwan as the ancestral homeland for the Lapita peoples
and their Polynesian descendants.
Rejections of the concept of population replacement, implicit in the Out of
Taiwan model, have appeared in the last few years [13]. Catherine Hill et al. [14], for
example, challenge the claim that the modern inhabitants of Island Southeast Asia
largely descended “from a second wave of dispersal, Proto-Austronesian-speaking
agriculturalists who originated in China and spread to Taiwan 5,500 years ago”
and from there “dispersed into ISEA 4,000 years ago, assimilating the indigenous
populations”. They see them, rather, as predominantly descended from the modern humans who colonized Island Southeast Asia 45,000–55,000 years ago. They
address the poor quality of previous mtDNA data by sampling “almost 1000 individuals from locations throughout ISEA and by analysing the samples at a higher
resolution than done previously by including coding-region as well as control-region
variants gleaned from complete sequence data”. The authors demonstrate that the
majority of mitochondrial indigenous clades “appear to mark dispersals in the latePleistocene or early-Holocene epoch”, long before the Out of Taiwan agricultural
expansion is supposed to have occurred. This chronology enables them to link the
21
a Neolithic agricultural expansion. As Martin Jones [12] explains, the first principal component in the principal components analysis of genetic variation adopted
by Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues showed a series of bands running from southwest
Asia to northwest Europe, supporting the idea of an expanding wave of farmers from
the Fertile Crescent moving across Europe. Additionally,
The second principal component highlighted a community on the fringes of this wave, and
not actually part of it. The reindeer-herding Saami from northern Scandinavia (formerly
known as Lapps) had followed a separate path from north-western Asia. The third principal component seemed to the authors to mirror another popular expansion, that of Maria
Gimbutas’ horse-riders of the steppes. Each principal component was elegantly pointing to
a particular expansion, migration, or set of journeys (pp. 136–137).
But, Jones tells us, by 1995 Robert Sykes and his team in Oxford had realized
that their own
targeted analysis of one well-studied stretch of DNA was telling a quite different story
from what had emerged from Cavalli-Sforza’s masterly survey. They argued that, while
a population spread of early farmers from south-west Asia had taken place, it only contributed a small fraction to the European gene pool. There was no wave of population
advance sweeping across Europe, just a trickle. The sequence diversity had to be explained
in terms of a more ancient population. Their hypothesis cut across the core journey within
Cavalli-Sforza’s grand synthesis. The principal ancestors of modern Europeans were the
hunter-gatherers who were already there, thousands of years before the spread of farming.
Agriculture travelled as an idea more than as a community, and the presumed population
replacement had not taken place (p. 158).
Perhaps the “Slow Boat to the Bismarcks”, proposed in 1997 by Terrell and
Welsch, which allowed for cultural interactions of Taiwanese migrants with indigenous populations within Near Oceania, owed something to the radical challenge
to Cavalli-Sforza’s synthesis made by the Oxford geneticists. In contrast to the
“Bismarck Indigenous Inhabitants” model of White and Allen, however, Terrell and
Welsch’s theory retained Taiwan as the ancestral homeland for the Lapita peoples
and their Polynesian descendants.
Rejections of the concept of population replacement, implicit in the Out of
Taiwan model, have appeared in the last few years [13]. Catherine Hill et al. [14], for
example, challenge the claim that the modern inhabitants of Island Southeast Asia
largely descended “from a second wave of dispersal, Proto-Austronesian-speaking
agriculturalists who originated in China and spread to Taiwan 5,500 years ago”
and from there “dispersed into ISEA 4,000 years ago, assimilating the indigenous
populations”. They see them, rather, as predominantly descended from the modern humans who colonized Island Southeast Asia 45,000–55,000 years ago. They
address the poor quality of previous mtDNA data by sampling “almost 1000 individuals from locations throughout ISEA and by analysing the samples at a higher
resolution than done previously by including coding-region as well as control-region
variants gleaned from complete sequence data”. The authors demonstrate that the
majority of mitochondrial indigenous clades “appear to mark dispersals in the latePleistocene or early-Holocene epoch”, long before the Out of Taiwan agricultural
expansion is supposed to have occurred. This chronology enables them to link the