Noted Australian academic Peter Bellwood yesterday backed his theory that the Austronesian-speaking peoples across the Asia-Pacific region originated from Taiwan with the results of new research.
In a lecture at the National Museum of Prehistory in Taitung, Professor Bellwood, the director of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University, said archeological evidence indicated that ancestors of today's Austronesian-speaking peoples, numbering about 300 million, dispersed from Taiwan to the Pacific Rim.
Bellwood said that he had collected new evidence for the theory during recent fieldwork in the Batan Islands, the northernmost part of the Philippines, and the Yer Bac prehistoric site in northern Vietnam, where he found pieces of penannular jade rings and earthenware related to the people who lived in prehistoric Taiwan.
Bellwood said that jade was not produced in most of the Austronesian-speaking areas except for Taiwan.
Bellwood also said that the pieces of penannular jade rings found in Batan and Yer Bac were similar to the ones found in Hualien.
In addition, he said that the earthenware discovered in the Philippines had similar patterns to pieces found in Hualien and Taitung, which date back 3,500 to 4,700 years.
Bellwood also said that the Austronesian-speaking peoples began to emigrate south to the Philippines about 4,000 years ago, then to Vietnam and throughout Polynesia.
Some local academics disputed the theory, arguing that evidence of pieces of jade rings and pottery was "too weak."
They adding that such relics were not necessarily things that Austronesian-speaking people used in the past.
They said the relics could have been brought to those areas by traders in later years, and that more evidence was needed to make these claims.
Professor Geoffrey Chambers of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, said that Maori and other Polynesian peoples had "island-hopped" from Taiwan through the Philippines and Indonesia to West Polynesia.
From there, he said, they traveled to the islands of East Polynesia and then to the southwest, eventually settling in New Zealand.
Taiwan's Aborigines belong to what is called the Austronesian language group, which probably underwent the widest physical dispersion of a single language family prior to the European colonial expansion.
The dispersion reached from Madagascar off the east coast of Africa to Easter Island in the east, and from Taiwan, Vietnam and Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the south.
The government currently divides Taiwan's Aborigines into 12 major ethnolinguistic groups and 10 pingpu (highly assimilated or extinct) groups.
While large elements of Aboriginal languages and cultures have survived, most of the native languages of the pingpu people, who mostly lived in the western plains, have died out.
Anthropologists are not sure what caused Taiwan's earliest people to die out or disappear, but efforts to seek evidence of the original populations using anthropological, linguistic and historical methods are continuing.
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