Population Turnover in Remote Oceania Shortly After Initial Settlement

Jovialis

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[FONT=&quot]Abstract

Ancient DNA analysis of three individuals dated to ~3000 years before present (BP) from Vanuatu and one ~2600 BP individual from Tonga has revealed that the first inhabitants of Remote Oceania ("First Remote Oceanians") were almost entirely of East Asian ancestry, and thus their ancestors passed New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands with minimal admixture with the Papuan groups they encountered [1]. However, all present-day populations in Near and Remote Oceania harbor 25-100% Papuan ancestry, implying that there must have been at least one later stream of migration eastward from Near Oceania. We generated genome-wide data for 14 ancient individuals from Efate and Epi Islands in Vanuatu ranging from 3,000-150 BP, along with 185 present-day Vanuatu individuals from 18 islands. We show that people of almost entirely Papuan ancestry had arrived in Vanuatu by 2400 BP, an event that coincided with the end of the Lapita cultural period, changes in skeletal morphology, and the cessation of long-distance trade between Near and Remote Oceania [2]. First Remote Oceanian ancestry subsequently increased via admixture but remains at 10-20% in most islands. Through a fine-grained comparison of ancestry profiles in Vanuatu and Polynesia with diverse groups in Near Oceania, we find that Papuan ancestry in Vanuatu is consistent with deriving from the Bismarck Archipelago instead of the geographically closer Solomon Islands. Papuan ancestry in Polynesia also shows connections to the ancestry profiles present in the Bismarck Archipelago but is more similar to Tolai from New Britain and Tutuba from Vanuatu than to the ancient Vanuatu individuals and the great majority of present-day Vanuatu populations. This suggests a third eastward stream of migration from Near to Remote Oceania bringing a different type of Papuan ancestry[/FONT]


https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/02/19/268037
 
Thanks this interests me. I wonder if the Papuans took advantage of a famine.
 
So Lapita were pure East Asian and later settlements were admixed with Papuan?
According to Peter Bellwood the settlers came from Taiwan and learned about crops introduced by Papuans in Borneo/S Indonesia before exploring the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
 
I have once read about the assumption that the Lapite culture came from Proto-Austronesians in Taiwan and possibly mainland southern China. What do the ancient First Remote Oceanian look like most? It's also interesting that the Papuans some centuries later appear to have become very good seafarers like the East Asians from Taiwan/South China that spread Austronesian languages. It's no small feat to colonize and replace the vast majority of the population in Remote Oceania, very far from the Papuan lands. Something that I've wondered several times is why agriculture appeared so early in Papua New Guinea, even earlier than in other regions that eventually also developed more established civilizations, but still Papuans don't seem to have created very expansive and populous civilizations with the same big migration/colonization pulses of other early agricultural peoples (e.g. those of the Middle East, Neolithic China, Bantus etc.). This population turnover and conquest of Remote Oceania may partly betray that belief of mine and clarify the real history, one with more migrations of Papuans to other lands where they could cultivate.
 
imageedit_4922_2888963766.png

Table 1. Details of Ancient Vanuatu Samples Analyzed in this Study

Note: Underlining indicates typical East Asian (First Remote Oceanian) haplogroups, while lack of underlining indicates typical 280 Australo-Papuan haplogroups (the italicized mtDNA haplogroup R is unclassified). The first three samples listed are previously 281 published individuals [1] but with new libraries now added to increase coverage; the other 11 are newly published individuals.

This paper identified mtDNA haplogroup B4a1a and O1a2 as genetic signatures of East Asian ancestry or First Remote Oceanian ancestry. The B4a1a lineage makes up more than 90% of all Polynesian mtDNA haplotypes today and most ancient Vanuatu samples in this study from 3,000 BP to 200 BP carry this haplogroup, too. B4a1a can also be found in Taiwan and it's reasonable to assume that the ancestors of the Vanuatu samples were originally from East Asia. Haplogroup K2b1, a typical Papuan Y-DNA haplogroup, emerged in Vanuatu around 2,400 BP with the arrival of Papuan settlers.
 
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Here's another study that came out today related to the phenomenon of population replacement in Oceania. It's behind a paywall, but here's a link to an article that discusses it:

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-ancie...e=menu&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=item-menu

Abstact

Recent genomic analyses show that the earliest peoples reaching Remote Oceania—associated with Austronesian-speaking Lapita culture—were almost completely East Asian, without detectable Papuan ancestry. However, Papuan-related genetic ancestry is found across present-day Pacific populations, indicating that peoples from Near Oceania have played a significant, but largely unknown, ancestral role. Here, new genome-wide data from 19 ancient South Pacific individuals provide direct evidence of a so-far undescribed Papuan expansion into Remote Oceania starting ~2,500 yr 
BP, far earlier than previously estimated and supporting a model from historical linguistics. New genome-wide data from 27 contemporary ni-Vanuatu demonstrate a subsequent and almost complete replacement of Lapita-Austronesian by Near Oceanian ancestry. Despite this massive demographic change, incoming Papuan languages did not replace Austronesian languages. Population replacement with language continuity is extremely rare—if not unprecedented—in human history. Our analyses show that rather than one large-scale event, the process was incremental and complex, with repeated migrations and sex-biased admixture with peoples from the Bismarck Archipelago.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-018-0498-2
 
Why the assumption that the Papuan migrants arriving in Vanuatu spoke Papuan languages? Austronesian languages arrived in the Bismarck Archipelago around 3400 yr BP, and by 2500 yr BP they had had 900 years to become widespread, including amongst people of largely Papuan ancestry. The original Lapita settlers of Vanuatu probably spoke proto-Fijian-Polynesian, but the diverse Melanesian languages of Vanuatu today are unlikely to be descendants of Proto-Fijian-Polynesian. They were more likely to have arrived from further north with Papuans who were already Austronesian speakers.
 

"New genome-wide data from 27 contemporary ni-Vanuatu demonstrate a subsequent and almost complete replacement of Lapita-Austronesian by Near Oceanian ancestry. Despite this massive demographic change, incoming Papuan languages did not replace Austronesian languages. Population replacement with language continuity is extremely rare—if not unprecedented—in human history."


Yes, so rare it didn't happen in this case. The authors of the article in Nature assumed that there was language continuity in Vanuatu. The quote below from Blust suggests otherwise:

"This disconnect between language affiliation and physical and cultural type perhaps reaches its most extreme expression in Vanuatu, where serial verbs—virtually universal in Papuan languages, but atypical for most of the Austronesian languages—are common, languages have recurrently abandoned an inherited Proto-Oceanic decimal system of counting for quinary or other systems, and various features of material culture are utterly foreign to any Austronesian-speaking group outside Melanesia but are typical of Papuan speakers in the New Guinea area. This finding has led to suggestions that the first population of Vanuatu was Polynesian-like, but was overlaid by a subsequent influx of Papuan-speaking or heavily papuanized Austronesian-speaking people(Donohue & Denham 2008, Blust 2008). Although linguists led the way in inferring a double population history in Vanuatu, this inference has been spectacularly confirmed by the results of recent genetic studies that date the overlay to several centuries after initial settlement, and identify its locus as the island of New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago (Lipson et al. 2018, Posth et al.2018)"
Robert Blust, "The Austonesian Homeland and Dispersal", Annual Review of Linguistics, 2019
 

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