Ping...
i just knew that chiang had kicked them off the island!
just kidding!
do not wet your panties.
So where did the "first" woman live? Do the scientist know?
Some clock.
bump!
So much for the late Thor Heyerdahl's theories. Too bad, I liked them.
Anyone care to explain this reasoning? "No Y chromosome link has been found between the early residents of the island of Formosa and the Polynesians, which could suggest early Oceanic societies organized around wives and mothers."
GGG ping
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"No Y chromosome link has been found between the early residents of the island of Formosa and the Polynesians, which could suggest early Oceanic societies organized around wives and mothers, the researchers, who included a team at Estonian Biocenterin Tartu, Estonia, said."
No, what is says is, mtDNA isn't a reliable way to study anything. But even within that paradigm, what it says is, the men who differentiated the societies were from elsewhere in one or both places.
Potential new cooking trend: Thai-Poly fusion.
Uh Oh. The Chinese will now demand all of Polynesia as part of One China policy.
Hmmm. You really think the Chicoms want to fight the Samoans for Taiwan?
Mostly entertaining speculation, but some good pics here and discussion of Lapita pottery and the Melanesians and Polynesians.
http://users.on.net/~mkfenn/page6.htm
(There is also a page1, etc., on the topic; page6 has the pic of bearded man on Lapita pottery.)
Now if we REALLY wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the ChiCom's lust for global power, we would generate a liddle news item about how all the Indonesian peoples were originally from Taiwan, even mainland China itself.
Yeah, I want to see Beijing inform the biggest Muslim population on the planet that they must be "reunited" with Communist China.
Well, it makes for a nice daydream, anyway. ;)
July 14 2005 at 09:52AM
Suva - Archaeologists think they have unearthed the first human settlement on the South Pacific island of Fiji, a find believed to be about 3 000 years old, the researchers said on Thursday.
The archaeologists found 16 human skeletons at a burial site at Bourewa, on the south-west of the main island of Viti Levu, said Patrick Nunn, professor of geography at the University of the South Pacific, located in the Fiji capital, Suva.
He said abundant evident at the site suggested that Bourewa was the first human settlement on the 340-island archipelago.
Pottery deliberately buried with or underneath the human remains was of the so-called Lapita style and dated from around 1050 BC, he noted.
'This represents an extraordinarily long ocean journey by the people that carried it' Nunn said the Lapita pottery fragments bear designs typical of the early Lapita period of about 1250 BC in Papua New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands to north-west of Fiji.
Since it was unusual to find such designs on Lapita pottery in Fiji, the suggestions was that the Bourewa settlers were probably a new settlement from the Santa Cruz island group in Solomon Islands chain rather than from another part of Fiji.
The finding throws into question a popular local myth that modern Fijians first landed on the west side of Viti Levu after voyaging from Africa's Tanganyika region, which borders modern-day Tanzania.
Nunn said an unexpected find in the burial site was a piece of obsidian almost certainly from a mine on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea.
"It was carried at least 4 500 kilometres to Bourewa, probably as a talisman. This represents an extraordinarily long ocean journey by the people that carried it," he said.
Obsidian is formed by molten volcanic lava coming in contact with water. Obsidian was used by ancient people as a cutting tool, for weapons, and for ceremonial purposes. It is sometimes found by archaeologists in excavations. - Sapa-AP