Austronesian peoples
The Austronesian people, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples who have settled in Taiwan, maritime Southeast Asia, parts of mainland Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar that speak Austronesian languages. They also include indigenous ethnic minorities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Hainan, the Comoros, and the Torres Strait Islands. The nations and territories predominantly populated by Austronesian-speaking peoples are sometimes known collectively as Austronesia.
The group originated from a prehistoric seaborne migration, known as the Austronesian expansion, from Taiwan, circa 3000 to 1500 BCE. Austronesians reached the Batanes Islands in the northernmost Philippines by around 2200 BCE. They used sails some time before 2000 BCE. In conjunction with their use of other maritime technologies, this enabled phases of rapid dispersal into the islands of the Indo-Pacific, culminating in the settlement of New Zealand. During the initial part of the migrations, they encountered and assimilated the Paleolithic populations that had migrated earlier into Maritime Southeast Asia and New Guinea. They reached as far as Easter Island to the east, Madagascar to the west, and New Zealand to the south. At the furthest extent, they might have also reached the Americas.
Aside from language, Austronesian peoples widely share cultural characteristics, including such traditions and traditional technologies as lashed-lug shipbuilding, tattooing, stilt houses, jade carving, wetland agriculture, and various rock art motifs. They also share domesticated plants and animals that were carried along with the migrations, including rice, bananas, coconuts, breadfruit, Dioscorea yams, taro, paper mulberry, chickens, pigs, and dogs.
History of research
The linguistic connections between Madagascar, Polynesia, and Southeast Asia, particularly the similarities between Malagasy, Malay, and Polynesian numerals, were recognized early in the colonial era by European authors. The first formal publication on these relationships was in 1708 by Dutch Orientalist Adriaan Reland, who recognized a "common language" from Madagascar to western Polynesia, although Dutch explorer Cornelis de Houtman observed linguistic links between Madagascar and the Malay Archipelago a century earlier, in 1603. German naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster, who traveled with James Cook on his second voyage, also recognized the similarities of Polynesian languages to those of Island Southeast Asia. In his book Observations Made during a Voyage round the World, he posited that the ultimate origins of the Polynesians might have been the lowland regions of the Philippines and proposed that they arrived to the islands via long-distance voyaging.File:Blumenbach's five races.JPG|thumb|Skulls representing Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's "five races" in De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa. The Tahitian skull labeled "O-taheitae" represented what he called the "Malay race".
The Spanish philologist Lorenzo Hervás later devoted a large part of his Idea dell'universo to the establishment of a language family linking the Malay Peninsula, the Maldives, Madagascar, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Pacific Islands eastward to Easter Island. Multiple other authors corroborated this classification, and the language family came to be known as "Malayo-Polynesian", first coined by the German linguist Franz Bopp in 1841. The connections between Southeast Asia, Madagascar, and the Pacific Islands were also noted by other European explorers, including the Orientalist William Marsden and the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach added Austronesians as the fifth category to his "varieties" of humans in the second edition of De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa. He initially grouped them by geography and thus called Austronesians the "people from the southern world". In the third edition, published in 1795, he named Austronesians the "Malay race", or the "brown race", after correspondence with Joseph Banks, who was part of the first voyage of James Cook. Blumenbach used the term "Malay" due to his belief that most Austronesians spoke the "Malay idiom", though he inadvertently caused the later confusion of his racial category with the Malay ethnic group. The other varieties Blumenbach identified were the "Caucasians", "Mongolians", "Ethiopians", and "Americans". Blumenbach's definition of the "Malay" race is largely identical to the modern distribution of the Austronesian peoples, including not only Islander Southeast Asians but also the people of Madagascar and the Pacific Islands. Although Blumenbach's work was later used in scientific racism, Blumenbach was a monogenist and did not believe the human "varieties" were inherently inferior to each other. Rather, he believed that the Malay race was a combination of the "Ethiopian" and "Caucasian" varieties.
File:New Physiognomy - or signs of character, as manifested through temperament and external forms, and especially in the "the human face divine. .jpg|thumb|upright=1.5|The New Physiognomy map, printed by the Fowler & Wells Company, depicting Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's five human races. The region inhabited by the "Malay race" is shown enclosed in dotted lines. Like in most 19th-century sources, Islander Melanesians are excluded. Taiwan, which was annexed by the Qing dynasty in the 17th century, is also excluded.
By the 19th century, however, a classification of Austronesians as being a subset of the "Mongolian" race was favored, as was polygenism. The Australo-Melanesian populations of Southeast Asia and Melanesia were also now being treated as a separate "Ethiopian" race by authors like Georges Cuvier, Conrad Malte-Brun, Julien-Joseph Virey, and René Lesson.
The British naturalist James Cowles Prichard originally followed Blumenbach by treating Papuans and Indigenous Australians as being descendants of the same stock as Austronesians. But by his third edition of Researches into the Physical History of Man, his work had become more racialized due to the influence of polygenism. He classified the peoples of Austronesia into two groups: the "Malayo-Polynesians" and the "Kelænonesians". He further subdivided the latter into the "Alfourous", and the "Pelagian or Oceanic Negroes". Despite this, he acknowledges that "Malayo-Polynesians" and "Pelagian Negroes" had "remarkable characters in common", particularly in terms of language and craniometry.
In linguistics, the Malayo-Polynesian language family also initially excluded Melanesia and Micronesia, due to the perceived physical differences between the inhabitants of these regions from Malayo-Polynesian speakers. However, there was growing evidence of their linguistic relationship to Malayo-Polynesian languages, notably from studies on the Melanesian languages by Georg von der Gabelentz, Robert Henry Codrington, and Sidney Herbert Ray. Codrington coined and used the term "Ocean" language family rather than "Malayo-Polynesian" in 1891, in opposition to the exclusion of Melanesian and Micronesian languages. This was adopted by Ray, who defined the "Oceanic" language family as encompassing the languages of Southeast Asia and Madagascar, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.
In 1899, the Austrian linguist and ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt coined the term "Austronesian" to refer to the language family. Schmidt had the same motivations as Codrington: he proposed the term as a replacement to "Malayo-Polynesian", because he also opposed the implied exclusion of the languages of Melanesia and Micronesia in the latter name. It became the accepted name for the language family, with Oceanic and Malayo-Polynesian languages being retained as names for subgroups.
File:Austronesian family.png|thumb|left|Distribution of the Austronesian languages
The term "Austronesian", or more accurately "Austronesian-speaking peoples", came to refer to people who speak the languages of the Austronesian language family. Some authors, however, object to the use of the term to refer to people, as they question whether there really is any biological or cultural shared ancestry between all Austronesian-speaking groups. This is especially true for authors who reject the prevailing "Out of Taiwan" hypothesis and instead offer scenarios where the Austronesian languages spread among preexisting static populations through borrowing or convergence, with little or no population movements.
File:Boracay boat sunset.jpg|thumb|Paraw sailboats from Boracay, Philippines. Outrigger canoes and crab claw sails are hallmarks of the Austronesian maritime culture.
Despite these objections, the general consensus is that the archeological, cultural, genetic, and especially linguistic evidence all separately indicate varying degrees of shared ancestry among Austronesian-speaking peoples that justifies their treatment as a "phylogenetic unit". This has led to the use of the term "Austronesian" in academic literature to refer not only to the Austronesian languages but also the Austronesian-speaking peoples, their societies, and the geographic area of Austronesia.
Some Austronesian-speaking groups are not direct descendants of Austronesians and acquired their languages through language shift, but this is believed to have happened only in a few instances, since the Austronesian expansion was too rapid for language shifts to have occurred fast enough. In parts of Island Melanesia, migrations and paternal admixture from Papuan groups after the Austronesian expansion also resulted in gradual population turnover. These secondary migrations were incremental and happened gradually enough that the culture and language of these groups remained Austronesian, even though in modern times, they are genetically more Papuan. In the vast majority of cases, the language and material culture of Austronesian-speaking groups descend directly through generational continuity, especially in islands that were previously uninhabited.
Serious research into the Austronesian languages and its speakers has been ongoing since the 19th century. Modern scholarship on Austronesian dispersion models is generally credited to two influential papers in the late 20th century: The Colonization of the Pacific: A Genetic Trail and The Austronesian Dispersal and the Origin of Languages. The topic is particularly interesting to scientists for the remarkably unique characteristics of the Austronesian speakers: their extent, diversity, and rapid dispersal.
Regardless, certain disagreements still exist among researchers with regards to chronology, origin, dispersal, adaptations to the island environments, interactions with preexisting populations in areas they settled, and cultural developments over time. The mainstream accepted hypothesis is the "Out of Taiwan" model first proposed by Peter Bellwood. But there are multiple rival models that create a sort of "pseudo-competition" among their supporters due to narrow focus on data from limited geographic areas or disciplines. The most notable of which is the "Out of Sundaland" model.