Peter Bellwood

The Austronesians : Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Anthropology; Archeology; Social life; Customs; History; Asia; Madagascar; Islands of the pacific

New evidence for a 67,000-year-old human presence at Callao Cave, Luzon, Philippines

Documentation of early human migrations through Island Southeast Asia and Wallacea en route to Australia has always been problematic due to a lack of well-dated human skeletal remains. The best known modern humans are from Niah Cave in Borneo (40-42ka), and from Tabon Cave on the island of Palawan, southwest Philippines (47+/-11ka). The discovery of Homo floresiensis on the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia has also highlighted the possibilities of identifying new hominin species on islands in the region. Here, we report the discovery of a human third metatarsal from Callao Cave in northern Luzon. Direct dating of the specimen using U-series ablation has provided a minimum age estimate of 66.7+/-1ka, making it the oldest known human fossil in the Philippines. Its morphological features, as well as size and shape characteristics, indicate that the Callao metatarsal definitely belongs to the genus Homo. Morphometric analysis of the Callao metatarsal indicates that it has a gracile structure, close to that observed in other small-bodied Homo sapiens. Interestingly, the Callao metatarsal also falls within the morphological and size ranges of Homo habilis and H. floresiensis. Identifying whether the metatarsal represents the earliest record of H. sapiens so far recorded anywhere east of Wallaces Line requires further archaeological research, but its presence on the isolated island of Luzon over 65,000 years ago further demonstrates the abilities of humans to make open ocean crossings in the Late Pleistocene.

Symbiosis, Instability, and the Origins and Spread of Agriculture: A New Model [and Comments and Reply]

Section 1 presents evidence that domestication and agriculture are evolutionary phenomena. They may be found in the relationships of many animals with plants. Domestication is the result of coevolved mutualisms between animals and plants. All domesticated plants show characteristics that are evidence of this mutualist relationship. Section 2 is a brief presentation of a model for the origin and spread of agriculture. Agricultural techniques transcend the environmental limitations placed upon the continued development of the human-plant mutualism. First highly mutualistic societies and then agricultural societies, because of greater potential cultural fecundity, come to dominate any given geographical area. This higher potential fecundity is based upon increases in the carrying capacity brought about by the domesticated plant. Agriculture also introduces new instabilities into the productivity of domesticated plants. Recurrent periods of stress, the result of agricultural techniques and plants, bring about the spread of agricultural societies by forcing a subset of the population to emigrate. Agricultural practices maximizing instability in productivity will have the highest rates of dispersal. Thus a positive selection for instability in productivity has characterized agricultural systems from their very origin.

The first settlement of Remote Oceania: the Philippines to the Marianas

The authors compare pottery assemblages in the Marianas and the Philippines to claim endorsement for a first human expansion into the open Pacific around 1500 BC. The Marianas are separated from the Philippines by 2300km of open sea, so they are proposing an epic pioneering voyage of men and women, with presumably some cultivated plants but apparently no animals. How did they manage this unprecedented journey?

‘Lapita colonists leave boats unburned!’ The question of Lapita links with Island Southeast Asia

‘Not another trendy and incomprehensible title,’ some will sigh. No, the title means what it states, albeit with metaphorical flourish. The Lapita cultural complex of Melanesia and western Polynesia, an entity beloved of a generation of Pacific prehistorians and ever a hot source of debate, can now be shown to have retained at least some links with contemporary populations far to the west of its known distribution. This is significant, not least because some scholars identify the immediate source zone for Lapita as having existed somewhere in the islands of Southeast Asia. At the same time, the obsidian quarried by Lapita artisans from Talasea on the Melanesian island of New Britain can be shown to have been among the most far-traded commodities of the Neolithic world.

Shell Artefact Production at 32,000-28,000 BP in Island Southeast Asia: Thinking across Media?

The evolution of anatomical and behavioural modernity in Homo sapiens has been one of the key focus areas in both archaeology and palaeoanthropology since their inception. Traditionally, interpretations have drawn mainly on evidence from the many large and well‐known sites in Europe, but archaeological research in Africa and the Levant is increasingly altering and elaborating upon our understanding of later human evolution. Despite the presence of a number of important early modern human and other hominin sites in Southeast Asia, evidence from this region has not contributed to the global picture in any significant way. Indeed, the acknowledged simplicity of lithic assemblages has led generations of scholars to assume that Southeast Asia was far from the cutting edge of behavioural evolution. Comparison of sophisticated shell tools from levels dated to 32,000–28,000 b.p. in eastern Indonesia with lithic artefacts recovered from the same levels and an assessment of raw‐material procurement suggest that using lithic technologies as markers of behavioural complexity may be misleading in a Southeast Asian context and, indeed, may be hampering our efforts to assess behavioural complexity in global and comparative frameworks.

The Batanes archaeological project and the Out of Taiwan hypothesis for Austronesian dispersal

This paper summarises the archaeological results of the Batanes fieldwork undertaken between 2002 and 2005 by teams from the Australian National University, the National Museum of the Philippines, and the University of the Phiiippines. The evidence is believed to support a Neolithic settlement of the Batanes from Taiwan before 4000 BP, followed by continuing contacts, lasting until at least 1300 BP, that involved a movement of slate and nephrite from Taiwan (possibly via Ludao and Lanyu Islands) to Batan and Itbayat. Evidence that initial Neolithic settlement of the Batanes came from the south, via Luzon, is not indicated in the assemblages so far excavated.

Holocene Population History in the Pacific Region as a Model for Worldwide Food Producer Dispersals

Pacific prehistory (excluding Australia) since 3000 BC reflects the impacts of two source regions for food production: China from the Yangzi southward (including Taiwan) and the western Pacific (especially the New Guinea Highlands). The linguistic (Austronesian, Trans–New Guinea), bioanthropological/human genetic, and Neolithic archaeological records each carry signals of expansion from these two source regions. A combined consideration of the multiregional results within all three disciplines (archaeology, linguistics, and biology) offers a historical perspective that will never be obtained from one discipline or one region alone. The fundamental process of human behavior involved in such expansion—population dispersal linked to increases in human population size—is significant for explaining the early spreads of food production and language families in many parts of the world. This article is concerned mainly with the archaeological record for the expansion of early food producers, Austronesian languages, and Neolithic technologies through Taiwan into the northern Philippines as an early stage in what was to become the greatest dispersal of an ethnolinguistic population in world history before AD 1500.

The expansions of farming societies and the role of the Neolithic Demographic Transition

The hypothesis of the Neolithic demographic transition (NDT) postulates that sharp increases in birthrates occurred as populations in different parts of the world adopted sedentary lifestyles and food storage, reduced their birth intervals, and came to depend increasingly on food production as opposed to foraging. For a period after these regional transitions to food production occurred, birth rates and absolute population numbers increased dramatically, at least in those areas (Europe, Middle East, North Africa, North America, Southeast Asia) so far subjected to cemetery analysis. This chapter discusses some general issues connected with early farmer expansion and presents archaeological and cemetery data relevant for an evaluation of the NDT hypothesis from East and Southeast Asia.

Ancient jades map 3,000 years of prehistoric exchange in Southeast Asia

We have used electron probe microanalysis to examine Southeast Asian nephrite (jade) artifacts, many archeologically excavated, dating from 3000 B.C. through the first millennium A.D. The research has revealed the existence of one of the most extensive sea-based trade networks of a single geological material in the prehistoric world. Green nephrite from a source in eastern Taiwan was used to make two very specific forms of ear pendant that were distributed, between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D., through the Philippines, East Malaysia, southern Vietnam, and peninsular Thailand, forming a 3,000-km-diameter halo around the southern and eastern coastlines of the South China Sea. Other Taiwan nephrite artifacts, especially beads and bracelets, were distributed earlier during Neolithic times throughout Taiwan and from Taiwan into the Philippines.