Early Migrations: The Negritos
The history of Earth’s population is extremely complex. In the farthest reaches of Oceania, the migrations of the ancestors of the Aborigines and Papuans were not the first. The ancestors of the Negritos populated parts of New Guinea and present-day Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines between 70,000 and 50,000 BC. These lands formed a single landmass known as Sunda.
The First Settlement: The Aborigines
The ancestors of the Aborigines were the first to populate the then-deserted Oceania. They came from Southeast Asia and crossed the inlets on rafts, populating New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania (which were once united as a single continent) from 45,000 BC to 40,000 BC.
The Aborigines quickly spread across Australia in five millennia, but mostly settled along the coast. They arrived in several waves, which explains the ethnic and cultural differences. As nomadic hunter-gatherers, they traded beads, coral, and obsidian across the continent. Their rituals helped perpetuate the world created by their ancestors, with particular significance given to each landscape (the Dreamtime). Wars were rare, often replaced by bewitchment ceremonies or large gatherings known as corroborees.
The Second Settlement: The Papuans
The second settlement of Oceania was by the ancestors of the Papuans. These peoples also came from Southeast Asia and arrived in New Guinea and the Bismarck Islands at the same time as the Aborigines. Unlike the Aborigines, they did not migrate to Australia when it was still united with New Guinea, nor did they cross the maritime strait separating them from Australia after 10,000 BC.
In New Guinea, the Papuans likely assimilated the remaining Aborigines and maintained contact with Australia through mixed-race populations of the Torres Strait islands. The first traces of taro cultivation and horticulture appeared around 9,000 BC, alongside pig breeding and the introduction of dogs. The arrival of Austronesians to the region likely introduced these animals, although their presence could predate their arrival.
Almost all Papuans became sedentary horticulturists and hunters, preferring to settle in highlands with fertile soils rather than the coastal regions bordered by mangroves. The societies of New Guinea were known for being warlike.
The Process of Settlement
The settlement of the Earth should not be viewed as a series of expeditions. Rather, it was a gradual process, with generations expanding their territories over time. The main driver of this expansion was the pressure on resources due to the small populations of hunter-gatherers who required vast territories. The settlement of the Pacific archipelagos by the Austronesians, which we will explore next, followed the same demographic constraints.
However, maritime exploration differed from land expansion. From time to time, the Austronesians ventured out onto the ocean with no certainty of reaching a distant land or returning to their point of departure. The numerous voyages across the seas are now lost to time, their fates remaining unknown.
The Third Settlement: The Austronesians
The third major settlement was that of the Austronesians, whose descendants now inhabit the archipelagos of intertropical Oceania and the Malay populations of the Philippines and Indonesia. As expert navigators, the Austronesians set out from Taiwan and the Philippines, reaching the Pacific Northwest (the Marianas, Carolines, Marshalls, and Gilberts) between 3000 BC and the early centuries AD. Today, we refer to this area as Micronesia.
At the same time, other Austronesian groups settled in the Indonesian islands. However, the question arises: why didn’t the Austronesians, starting from the Indonesian islands, migrate further to Australia? While small groups of Austronesians did land on the northern coasts of Australia, they were absorbed by the indigenous Aboriginal populations, leaving only traces of their passage in the form of wild dogs, the dingoes, which the Aborigines sometimes domesticated.
