This Week in SCIENCE, Volume 323, Issue 5913, dated January 23 2009, has an interesting article on the population of South East Asia in prehistorc times.
Monitoring Human Migrations
Among the most dramatic of human expansions is the prehistoric colonization of the islands scattered across the Pacific Ocean (see the Perspective by Renfrew). Two competing scenarios attempt to explain this astonishing migration: The pulse-pause scenario posits a Taiwanese origin of the Austronesian language complex between 5000 to 6000 years ago, while the slow boat scenario suggests an origin in Island South/East Asia 13,000 to 17,000 years ago. Gray et al. (p. 479) apply phylogenetic techniques to 210 basic vocabulary words (animals, kinship terms, simple verbs, colors, and numbers) from 400 Austronesian languages to show that the language family has a root in Taiwan, some ~5000 years ago, followed by languages of the Philippines, Borneo/Sulawesi, Central Malayo-Polynesia, and South Halmahera/West New Guinea, and reflects the origin and path of the migration predicted under the pulse-pause scenario. In a separate approach to migration research, Moodley et al. (p. 527) turned the ubiquitous occurrence of a human pathogen to good use. Helicobacter pylori is a bacterium that specifically colonizes the human stomach, where it occurs in about half the population who do not have access to modern medicines. Because H. pylori is so specific to humans, it has spread around the world and diverged genetically alongside its host since people emerged from Africa. The discovery of the Sahul strain of the bacterium indicates that humans spread from Taiwan in two waves. The first wave spread across the exposed land bridges of what is now the Indonesian Archipelago into New Guinea and Australia. A second wave carrying the Maori strain of the bacterium traveled within humans via the Philippines into Polynesia and New Zealand.
This article is available
here Paul
