But mixed with Melanesians

Jan 21, 2008 08:48 GMT  ·  By
Maori performing Haka, the war dance. Maori represent the Indigenous Polynesian population of New Zealand
   Maori performing Haka, the war dance. Maori represent the Indigenous Polynesian population of New Zealand

What's behind the racial mix we call Polynesians and Micronesians (and think about from Hawaiians to Maori)? A new research carried out by a team led by Jonathan Friedlaender points that the race of the Pacific islanders could be the result of East Asians who quickly island-hopped through Melanesia (New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and nearby archipelagos of Vanuatu and Fiji), inhabited by the so-called Black Asians.

The new DNA analyses published in the journal "PLoS Genetics" reveals that two modern-day groups of Polynesians carry little DNA linking to the Melanesians. What DNA reveals more specifically is that the Polynesians descend from East Asians and aboriginal Taiwanese migrating through the area.

"They left very few genes behind. And they incorporated very few genes from the people in this region of Near Oceania, [although] they stayed for three or four hundred years before moving on to explore the central Pacific islands, where they became Polynesians and Micronesians", Friedlaender, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, told National Geographic News.

The research also stressed the fact that Melanesians possess a huge genetic diversity, the result of tens of thousands of years of relative isolation, dotted by small migrations from Asia.

"There's more population divergence in these islands than you see across all of Europe. You can really tell by the way people look, and now genetically, what island they are from", said Friedlaender.

"It's what you'd expect over a long time period like that. You see the same complexity in languages. New Guinea alone has something like 900 languages in its interior. That's probably the highest density of language differential per square mile in the world", said archaeologist Patrick Kirch of the University of California, Berkeley.

Melanesia could have been colonized about 45,000-40,000 years ago first by ancestors of the Australian Aborigines, on their way towards Australia. Then, 30,000 ago, a second wave of Black Asians coming from Southeastern Asia arrived in the area, and their type is what now forms most of the Melanesian population. All this happened in a time when the Neanderthals still roamed Europe.

Due to the rise of the sea level, the end of the Ice Age isolated people in this area to a degree rare around the world. But 3,000 and 3,500 years ago, a new flow arrived: the Mongoloid Proto-Polynesians (Lapita). DNA, pottery styles, and the Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) languages pointed to their roots in Taiwan and East Asia. The new study supports an "express train" theory: Lapita colonized offshore islands and coastal areas with less Melanesian population.

"Maybe they were scared of going inland. There was continuous feuding in this area, and it may have been a pretty [dangerous] thing to go inland", he said.

But others support to the "slow boat" theory: Polynesians had Melanesian blood in their ancestry. Lapita pottery underwent specific changes in Melanesia. In Vanuatu, Solomon, Fiji and coastal New Guinea, all spoken languages are Malayo-Polynesian. Crops from Melanesia were spread by Lapita far into the Pacific, while Lapita introduced the pig, the dog and the chicken in Melanesia.

"The genetic data may show that Polynesians and Micronesians are a mix of Taiwanese aborigines, East Asians, and Melanesians. I certainly don't think the data refute a slow-boat model", geneticist Spencer Wells, a National Geographic Society explorer-in-residence and director of the society's Genographic Project, told National Geographic News.

"The mitochondrial DNA evidence-which is passed down from females-tends to support the express-train theory. But the Y-chromosome, or male, evidence supports a slow-boat process. This suggests something interesting is going on, perhaps with different male and female migration patterns, which we see in other regions of the world", he said.