Near Oceania and Remote Oceania
Near Oceania and Remote Oceania are the parts of Oceania that are distinct based on geology, flora, fauna, and prehistoric human settlement. The distinction between the two was first suggested by Pawley & Green and was further elaborated on in Green.
Near Oceania includes the Bismarck Archipelago, the island of New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands archipelago, with Australia also occasionally included. It features greater biodiversity, due to the islands and atolls being closer to each other. Remote Oceania, which is more widely spread out across the Pacific Ocean, includes the rest of Melanesia and the islands of Polynesia and Micronesia.
Etymology
The terms Near Oceania and Remote Oceania were proposed by anthropologists Roger Curtis Green and Andrew Pawley in 1973. By their definition, Near Oceania consists of the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, with the exception of the Santa Cruz Islands. They are designed to dispel the outdated categories of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia; Near Oceania cuts right across the old category of Melanesia, which has shown to be not a useful category in respect to the geography, culture, language and human history of the region. The old categories have been in use since they were proposed by French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville in the mid-19th century. Though the push of some people in academia has been to replace the categories with Green's terms since the early 1990s, the old categories are still used in science, popular culture and general usage.Prehistory
Near Oceania
When the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace explored Nusantara, he drew attention to fundamental biological differences between the Australia-New Guinea region and Southeast Asia. The boundary between the Asian and Australian faunal regions consists of a zone of smaller islands bearing the name of Wallacea, in honor of the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection. Wallace speculated that the key to understanding these differences would lie in "now-submerged lands, uniting islands to continents".At several intervals during the Pleistocene, the sea surface was 130 metres below the current sea level, joining the Aru Islands, New Guinea, Tasmania, and some smaller islands to the Australian mainland. Biogeographers referred to this enlarged Greater Australian continent as "Sahul" or "Meganesia". West of Wallacea, the vast Sunda Shelf was also exposed as dry land, greatly extending the Southeast Asian mainland to include the Greater Sunda Islands of Sundaland. However, the islands of Wallacea always remained an island world, imposing a barrier to the dispersal of terrestrial vertebrates, including early hominids.
To the north and east of New Guinea, the islands of Near Oceania were likewise never connected to Sahul by dry land, for deep-water trenches also separate these from the Australian continental shelf.
Human colonization of this region was most likely effected during the interval between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, although some researchers hypothesized possible earlier dates. Regardless, even during the period when the sea level was at its lowest, there were always significant open-water gaps between the islands of Wallacea, and therefore, the arrival of humans into Sahul necessitated over-water transport. This was also the case of the expansion of humans beyond New Guinea into the archipelagoes of Near Oceania.
According to Spriggs :