History Files
 

Help the History Files

Contributed: £101

Target: £760

2023
Totals slider
2023

The History Files is a non-profit site. It is only able to support such a vast and ever-growing collection of information with your help. Last year's donation plea failed to meet its target so this year your help is needed more than ever. Please make a donation so that the work can continue. Your help is hugely appreciated.

Far East Kingdoms

Early Cultures

 

Neolithic Oceania
c.9650 BC - AD 1512

The continent (or otherwise) of Oceania starts where South-East Asia ends, although its territory is somewhat debatable. Broadly it encompasses Australasia (Australia, New Zealand, and some minor islands), Melanesia (incorporating islands between New Guinea and Tonga), Micronesia (incorporating thousands of islands which stretch up to Japan's Bonin Islands), and Polynesia (including Hawaii, Easter Island, everything to the east of New Zealand).

Once anatomically modern humans in the form of Homo sapiens reached Asia, and specifically South Asia, between about 70,000-60,000 BC, small groups either remained in what is now India from their earliest point of arrival after leaving the Near East, or migrated along the coastlines to reach South-East Asia, Oceania, and East Asia by about 60,000 BC.

The start of Palaeolithic Oceania marks the arrival of modern humans in this region, although it can also be extended to cover the existence of older human types. To all intents and purposes this period segues into Neolithic Oceania without a full-blown Mesolithic in the way of Europe. The Papua New Guinea highlands show evidence of dry farming from about 9000 BC, and this is a local emergence, one which is not connected to the emergence of Neolithic Farmer cultures in the Near East.

The occupation of Oceania has been carried out in stages, some of them remarkably recent. Micronesia has a history of settlement by successive waves of arrivals, but with a very recent starting date which is yet to be pinned down but which almost certainly does not predate about 3000 BC.

The many islands of Polynesia are home to the Polynesian people, a sub-group of the Austronesians, originally East Asians who occupied Taiwan and then the coastal areas of South-East Asia before becoming seafarers of some repute from about 3000 BC. By then Palaeolithic Oceania had already long since transitioned to Neolithic Oceania.

Bradshaw rock art, Australia

(Information by John De Cleene & Peter Kessler, and the John De Cleene Archive, with additional information from First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, Peter Bellwood (Second Ed, Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), from The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Peter Bellwood, James J Fox, & David Tryon (ANU Press, 2006), from National Geographic Atlas of the World, 10th Ed (National Geographic Society, 2015), and from External Links: Archaeobotany: Plant Domestication, Chris Stevens & Leilani Lucas (Reference Module in Social Sciences, 2023, available via Science Direct), and Early humans Lived in PNG highlands 50,000 years ago (Reuters), and Was Papua New Guinea an Early Agriculture Pioneer, John Roach (National Geographic Society, 23 June 2003, and available via the Web Archive).)

c.9650 BC

It can be said that is this the crossover period between Palaeolithic Oceania and Neolithic Oceania, apparently without a defined Mesolithic period in-between (the same transition is largely true of the Near East, but dating for Oceania is notoriously difficult to pin down, largely due to a lack of archaeological exploration and the massive reduction in exposed land masses).

Perth's coastline, Australia
Indigenous Australians maintained an oral tradition which could recall the later stages of post-ice age sea-level rise, with those sea levels not fully balancing out until about 5000 BC

c.6000 BC

With global water levels continuing to rise following the ending of the most recent ice age, the Sahul landmass of Australasia is gradually submerged along its lower levels. The land bridge between it and the South-East Asian Sunda landmass disappears under the water after modern humans have already long since inhabited the palaeo-continent. Now New Guinea is separated from Australia (Tasmania is separated around 4000 BC).

c.1000 BC

Seafaring Polynesians and Micronesians first inhabit Nauru. The people ultimately divide into twelve tribes which live peacefully together. Nauruans call their island Naoero, which will eventually become 'Nauru' with Europeans who struggled to pronounce it in its native form.

A wave of Malays from Indonesia also settle Palau around now. They are followed by Melanesians from New Guinea, then Philippine natives, and finally Polynesians from other parts of Micronesia.

The island of Nauru in Oceania
Nauru today is an island republic, a raised fossilised coral atoll, lying four thousand kilometres to the north-east of Sydney, with a total land area of twenty-one square kilometres and a population of thirteen thousand

c.30 BC - AD 50

Excavations on the island of Majuro within what today are the Marshall Islands in Micronesia indicate that early Micronesians who have been influenced by Lapita culture first settle the islands. Until European colonisation takes place, the islands remain a collection of separate chiefdoms, many of which still exist today.

c.600 - 1200

Polynesian descendants of the Samoans manage to reach the then-wooded Easter Island in this period, perhaps via the Pitcairn Islands. There they become known as the Rapanui, with their language bearing the same name. A few tens arrive at first, according to legend, landing at Anakena in the north of the island.

Legend states that Rarotongans visit or colonise a large number of Pacific islands, including the Hawaiian islands, the New Hebrides (now known as Vanuatu), and Easter Island.

Easter Island moai heads
The massive heads and torsos on Easter Island dot the landscape like stone sentinels, standing guard over the isle's treeless, grassy expanse

Ancestors of the Māori-Rarotongans first settle in Fiji. According to legend Tu-nui is a high chief who lives in western Fiji. He is the great-great-grandson of Apakura, the famous ancestor of the Māori-Rarotongans who once had lived in Tonga.

c.1200 - 1300

New Zealand becomes the last major habitable land mass to be settled by anatomically modern humans when Polynesians arrive in the Cook Islands, having canoed there from Rarotonga.

The Polynesians became the ancestors of the Māori, who are not known by that name until the arrival of Europeans. The people who will one day become the Māori spread around the New Zealand islands, dividing themselves into tribes and sub-tribes.

Ngai Tahu
The Ngāi Tahu people made New Zealand's South Island their home around eight hundred years ago, although it took them until 1996 to be recognised by the European settlers as a political entity

c.1512

The highly-extended Neolithic period in Oceania can be said to end with the first sighting by Europeans of land in the region. In this year António de Abreu and Francisco Serrão spot the Maluku Islands (or Spice Islands), the generally-agreed intersection between South-East Asia and Oceania.

Native inhabitants who have been there anything between half a millennium and many tens of millennia (in Australasia especially) now witness the creation of colonial intrusions, notably in the form of 'Colonial Australia', the Cook Islands, 'Colonial Fiji', New Guinea, 'Colonial New Zealand', and Van Dieman's Land, amongst others.

 
Images and text copyright © all contributors mentioned on this page. An original king list page for the History Files.