HUDDERSFIELD, ENGLAND—It had been thought that Austronesian languages spread “Out of Taiwan” and throughout Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Madagascar, and the islands of the Pacific with a migrating population some 4,000 years ago. But Martin Richards of the University of Huddersfield and his colleagues conducted a large-scale genetic study, and they have found that Pacific Islanders’ mitochondrial DNA was present in Island Southeast Asia much earlier. They also found that the expansion from Taiwan accounts for only about 20 percent of the population in the region. Richards and his team suggest that rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age some 11,500 years ago transformed the landscape of the region and made migration possible. They also think that populations expanded from Indonesia to Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands some 8,000 years ago. Austronesian languages, which can be traced to Taiwan, may have been associated with a new religion or philosophy, or perhaps the Taiwanese migrants constituted an elite group that others emulated. For more, go to "Settling Southeast Asia."
