Even when living on the same land, Polynesians and Melanesians appear to have kept to themselves for the most part. Archaeological sites support this claim. They show that both groups were utilizing different parts of the ecology. Melanesians, for example, "tended to gather and hunt, and farm taro inland," he said, while the Polynesians "fished and gathered shells and birds." Initially, the Melanesians did not have very sophisticated seafaring capabilities. Friedlaender thinks they might have arrived around 50,000 years ago on the islands they now dominate by "using simple rafts or hanging onto logs." Because they tended to stay on their island homes, each Melanesian group developed its own language and habits, which explains the rich cultural diversity seen there today. The Polynesians, on the other hand, "had quite advanced sailing outrigger canoes, and they knew how to look for signs of new islands over the horizons, such as birds flying from a particular direction and logs floating ashore from a particular direction." Patrick Kirch, a UC Berkeley professor of anthropology and integrative biology, said the new study "is truly a major accomplishment in the field of Pacific anthropology." "The Friedlaender et al. paper now puts the true complexity of human genetic variation in Near Oceania [the New Guinea and Bismarck Archipelago part of Melanesia] into a larger picture including not only the rest of Oceania but, indeed, a world-wild perspective to show that the historical patterns previously detected from archaeological and linguistic analyses are also closely mirrored in the genetic data," Kirch said. The research is one of several new massive studies that seek to answer questions about human relations using genetics. Papers on Native Americans and Indians came out recently, and a big genetic study on Africa is currently in the works.
Jennifer Viegas' blog: Born Animal |
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