Austronesian peoples

The Austronesian peoples are the many peoples who speak Austronesian languages, spread across Taiwan, maritime Southeast Asia, parts of the Southeast Asian mainland, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia and Madagascar. Their ancestors, setting out from Taiwan in a great seaborne migration from around 3000 BCE, became the first people known to cross long stretches of open ocean. Before the colonial era of the sixteenth century, their language family was the most widespread on earth, reaching from Easter Island to Madagascar.

Most scholars place the homeland of the Austronesian languages in Taiwan and the nearby Penghu Islands. The early Austronesians are thought to descend from Neolithic farming peoples of the coast of southern China, who crossed to Taiwan at some point between about 10,000 and 4000 BCE. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence links them most closely to the rice-growing cultures of the lower Yangtze and the south-east Chinese coast. A minority of scholars, including Stephen Oppenheimer and Wilhelm Solheim, have argued instead for an origin in Island Southeast Asia, the "Out of Sundaland" hypothesis, but whole-genome studies have supported the prevailing "Out of Taiwan" model.

From about 3000 to 1500 BCE Austronesians moved south from Taiwan, reaching the Batanes Islands of the northern Philippines by around 2200 BCE. They then spread through the Philippines, Borneo and Sulawesi, and on to Sumatra and the coasts of southern Vietnam. Around 1500 BCE or earlier they sailed to the Mariana Islands, the first known settlement of Remote Oceania. The Lapita culture carried the migration along the coasts of New Guinea, where they met Papuan peoples, to the Solomon Islands by 1200 BCE and to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga by around 900 to 800 BCE. After a long pause, a new surge of voyaging reached Tahiti and the Marquesas by about 700 CE, Hawaii by 900, Rapa Nui by 1000 and New Zealand, homeland of the Māori, by about 1200. Westward, after long trading contacts with South Asia and Africa, settlers from the region of Borneo and Sulawesi reached Madagascar, perhaps between the fifth and seventh centuries CE.

Austronesians built hulls by the "lashed-lug" method, fitting planks edge to edge and tying them through protruding lugs without nails, and they developed catamarans and outrigger canoes driven by triangular crab-claw sails woven from pandanus leaves. The open-sea crossing from the Philippines to the Marianas is thought to be the longest ocean voyage of its time. These techniques later made possible the Polynesian voyaging that, for a few centuries, linked distant island groups in both directions.

Beyond language, Austronesian societies share many traditions: tattooing, stilt houses, jade carving, wetland farming and particular rock-art motifs. Their migrations carried rice, bananas, coconuts, breadfruit, yams, taro and paper mulberry, as well as chickens, pigs and dogs. Traditional religions honoured ancestral and nature spirits as well as gods, and many such beliefs survived within later faiths.

From the early first millennium CE, the peoples of maritime Southeast Asia traded with India and China. Rulers adopted Indian models of kingship, creating states such as Champa, Srivijaya, Mataram and Majapahit, and Hinduism and Buddhism became the main religions between the fifth and fifteenth centuries. Islam, probably brought by Arab traders by the tenth century, was dominant across the Malay archipelago by the sixteenth. The Pacific islands kept their own religions.

About 386 million people, nearly 5 per cent of humanity, speak one of some 1,257 Austronesian languages. The largest include Malay, in its Indonesian standard spoken by well over 200 million people, as well as Javanese and Tagalog. Austronesians make up most of the population of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, East Timor, Madagascar and the Pacific island nations, and include the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan, the Malays, the Cham of Vietnam and Cambodia, and Polynesians from Hawaii to New Zealand.

Our maps label the Austronesian world "Austronesians" on the 3000, 2000, 1500, 1000, 700, 500 and 400 BCE maps, covering parts of today's Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. The outline is approximate and does not track the migration's spread into the Pacific.