The peopling of the Pacific

The peopling of the Pacific continues to draw intense interest from the public and scientific communities alike. Voyagers by anthropologist Nicholas Thomas combines insights gleaned from historical documents, archaeology, geochronology, and ethnographic fieldwork into an eloquent review of this fascinating historical phenomenon. In the book's introduction, Thomas asks an important question: “What is it to be an Islander”? Those unfamiliar with the region tend to group the Pacific's various peoples together. However, a great deal of physical and cultural diversity exists across the different island communities. Unfortunately, early attempts to acknowledge these variations normalized stereotypes that persist today and have led, in some cases, to systemic racism. Early European explorers clearly had no idea what to expect when they arrived in the Pacific in the 1500s, reveals Thomas. Many were surprised to find that Pacific Islanders were capable boatbuilders and sailors, able to build sturdy watercraft and navigate large expanses of open ocean by following the stars. Historical records written by Europeans passing through the region during this period indicate that many assumed that Pacific Islanders lived in small, isolated communities. Indigenous communities, however, were often “linked through kinship, ceremony, and exchange networks, as well as through relations of contest and hostility.” For hundreds of thousands of years, humans had largely lived on the expansive landmasses that made up Earth's continents. To reach the Pacific islands, early peoples would have had to embrace a seafaring lifestyle. “What motivated those who embarked on these voyages constitutes one of the major enigmas of human history,” notes Thomas. Climate change, dietary and/or sociopolitical stressors, the inclination to travel for travel's sake, and a series of “accidental voyages” have all been put forth as potential causes, although the last of these has lost favor among experts. Another possible explanation may simply be that “Austronesian cultures seem to have privileged the ‘founders’ of particular communities.” The spread of the Lapita culture, an ancient people believed to represent a common ancestor of many modern Pacific societies, receives a great deal of attention, and Thomas does a very nice job of synthesizing research conducted across various fields, including groundbreaking work performed by specialists in Pacific archaeology. Together with a plethora of archaeological and linguistic evidence, his own ethnographic observations of Taiwanese villagers, including the fact that many bore “wrist and arm tattoos that were strikingly similar” to those observed in other Polynesian cultures, support the hypothesis that Pacific Islanders likely originated in Taiwan. Voyagers discusses a number of recent discoveries from the Pacific region, including the Homo luzonensis fossils found in Callao Cave on the island of Luzon in the Philippines ([ 1 ][1]) as well as the cave art discovered in Leang Bulu' Sipong Cave in Sulawesi ([ 2 ][2]). The first of these important discoveries is a good example of our growing appreciation for the diversity of hominins once present in the region, and the second reveals that, contrary to prior assumptions, cave art in the Pacific region appears around the same time as—and in some cases even predates—similar findings from Western Europe. An important point raised throughout the volume is that scholarship on the peopling of the Pacific has been a highly “cross-cultural business from its very beginnings.” There have been, for example, many well-known instances in which indigenous Pacific Islander researchers have contributed data that have proven critical to settling academic debates, and Thomas spends a great deal of time detailing the contributions of the well-known Māori scholar Te Rangihiroa. Training Pacific Islanders to investigate questions related to their own origin and diversity will be critical for current and future generations of scholars. Thomas should be commended for his engaging writing style, which regularly had me looking forward to turning the page. I would not be surprised if, after reading this masterpiece, many readers are compelled to take up voyaging themselves. 1. [↵][3]1. M. Aubert et al ., Nature 576, 442 (2019). [OpenUrl][4][CrossRef][5][PubMed][6] 2. [↵][7]1. A. Brumm et al ., Sci. Adv. 7, eabd4648 (2021). 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