Chapter 1
Introducing First Islanders

The islands of Southeast Asia – Sumatra to the Moluccas, Taiwan to Timor (Figure 1.1) – present prehistorians with a unique opportunity to study some of the earliest recorded interactions between humanity and the oceans. This region has witnessed some remarkable changes in geographical configuration throughout the past 1.5 million years, throughout both an extinct hominin and an extant Homo sapiens presence. Land bridges have alternated with coastal submergence and tectonic activity has created some of the greatest volcanic eruptions in earth history, together with very rapid rates of crustal movement. An amazingly diverse variety of tropical wildlife (including humans!) has passed to and fro, some across land bridges and some across one of the most significant biogeographical divides on earth, which many of us know as the “Wallace Line.” This delineates the western edge of the Wallacea region of biogeographers, which extends from Borneo and Bali across to the continental shelf of New Guinea and Australia. Because of its multiple sea passages, Wallacea has always separated the Asian and Australian continents, ensuring that cattle and pigs never met kangaroos and wombats until humans started to interfere with their natural distributions.

Figure 1.1 The basic geography and definition (shaded area) of Island Southeast Asia in its regional setting.

Source: base map by Multimedia Services, ANU; details added by the author.

In terms of ocean travel, hominins reached the island of Flores across at least two sea passages around 1 million years ago, or perhaps before. Modern human ancestors crossed multiple sea passages to reach Australia and New Guinea at least 50,000 years ago. Within the past 5000 years these islands have fueled the genesis of the greatest maritime migration in human prehistory, that of the Austronesian‐speaking peoples, who made absolutely incredible canoe voyages to reach places such as Guam, Madagascar, Easter Island, New Zealand, Hawai‘i, and even South America. These voyages occurred over a period of more than 4000 years, dating between 3000 BCE and 1250 CE if we begin in Neolithic Taiwan and end with the Maori settlement of New Zealand, but the sheer achievement demands great respect from all humanity and indeed was the main attraction that persuaded me to migrate from England to New Zealand in 1967, in order to study Polynesian origins and archaeology (Bellwood 1978a, 1978b, 1987).

During my career as an archaeologist, I have to admit that I have always found the ancestries and migrations of human populations, whether still living, or extinct and deep in the past, to be amongst the most interesting aspects of human prehistory. This book, therefore, presents a multidisciplinary reconstruction of the biological and cultural migrations of the inhabitants of Island Southeast Asia during the past 1.5 million years, finishing on the eve of the early historical Indic and Islamic kingdoms and religions between 500 and 1500 CE. With its focus on migration, this book links with my three other recent Wiley‐Blackwell books – First Farmers (2005), First Migrants (2013), and The Global Prehistory of Human Migration (ed. 2015). For First Islanders the geographical canvas is far smaller, although I must on occasion extend my investigations as far away as the Yangzi Valley, Mainland Southeast Asia, Australia, and the islands of Oceania in order to put everything into its proper perspective.

I have also traveled a great deal in Island Southeast Asia during my career, as no doubt will have many readers of this book, and one fundamental observation never ceases to interest me. The seasoned traveler in Island Southeast Asia will be impressed by the panoply of ancient Hindu and Buddhist temples in Java, by the cultural achievements of Hinduism in Bali, by the modern vibrancy of Islam in most regions of Indonesia and Malaysia, and by the extensive influence of Christianity in the Philippines and parts of eastern Indonesia. These cultural and religious traditions were, and still are, very different in many ways from those of prehistoric times. They were external to Southeast Asia in origin, and even if the outsider religions sometimes became admixed with indigenous beliefs they still reflected the penetration of Southeast Asia by the cultural and religious interests of far‐away societies. With this in mind, it is remarkable to me that the modern Island Southeast Asian peoples themselves, in their biology and languages, are entirely indigenous and have been so since long before the age of international trade and empires. These people do not speak languages derived from Sanskrit, Arabic, Spanish, or Dutch, and have never done so, despite a borrowing of large numbers of often specialized vocabulary items from these external linguistic sources. They carry indigenous DNA, apart from some minor immigration of genes, mostly on the male side, during historical times.

Anyone who has read Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism (1986) will realize why this situation exists. The indigenous populations of Island Southeast Asia were already numerous and densely settled 2000 years ago, living in a tropical landscape that was unsuitable for more westerly Eurasian settlers with their Fertile Crescent domesticated crops and animals. They were also protected by a suite of diseases that literally stopped many would‐be invaders from temperate lands dead in their tracks. Unlike their less fortunate cousins in the heavily colonized regions of the Americas and Australasia, Island Southeast Asians lived sufficiently close to the teeming populations of Eurasia to be only lightly affected by the diseases of immigrants, to which they had reasonable levels of immunity. Instead, their own tropical diseases often turned the tables in the other direction, as any visit to an early European cemetery in the region will probably reveal.

In other words, the peoples of Island Southeast Asia, in terms of biological and linguistic genesis, were essentially in existence almost as they are now by at least 2000 years ago. Since that time there has been a great deal of population admixture over the whole of Island Southeast Asia, as is to be expected given the lively history of the region in trade, commerce, and sea‐borne interaction. But were we to travel with a time machine across the region in 500 BCE, the faces that would hopefully smile at us as we landed on each island would look essentially much as they do today.

This Book

The predecessor of this book, entitled Prehistory of the Indo‐Malaysian Archipelago, was first published in 1985 by Academic Press in Sydney. A revised edition was published in 1997 by the University of Hawai‘i Press in Honolulu, and translated into Bahasa Indonesia as Prasejarah Kepulauan Indo‐Malaysia by PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama in Jakarta in 2000. In 2007, the ANU E Press (now ANU Press) republished the revised edition as a third edition, but with only a new preface – the remainder of the text was reprinted exactly as it was in 1997. This third edition remains in print, available for free download at http://press.anu.edu.au/titles/prehistory‐of‐the‐indo‐malaysian‐archipelago/, and it continues to reflect the state of knowledge about the region in the mid‐1990s. What you are about to read here is a new book that builds upon the foundation of Prehistory of the Indo‐Malaysian Archipelago, rewritten and updated with a new title and a new chapter organization.

Why a new book? The answer is basically that Prehistory of the Indo‐Malaysian Archipelago is now out of date and simple revision of the existing structure is no longer sufficient. The time has come for a new perspective, not just from me, but also from a number of my colleagues who specialize in areas of research that are becoming ever more complex and prolific, such that a single individual can no longer keep on top of absolutely everything. For instance, here are some important aspects of Island Southeast Asian prehistory that have undergone fundamental change in terms of both data and interpretation since the text of the second edition of Prehistory of the Indo‐Malaysian Archipelago was submitted to the publisher in 1995:

1. The Pleistocene biogeography of Island Southeast Asia is better understood now than 20 years ago, especially in terms of the glacial–postglacial fluctuations in sea level, temperature, and rainfall during the past 100,000 years. Much new research has, of course, been driven by the current world concern with the dangers posed by the El Niño climatic phenomenon and by anthropogenic global warming.
2. As far as new discoveries in the Southeast Asian fossil record are concerned, we can point to the 2003 and 2016 publications of the bones of a new hominin species from Flores island in eastern Indonesia, the tiny Homo floresiensis, as well as to other small archaic hominin remains dating from almost 70,000 years ago from northern Luzon in the Philippines. There have also been considerable strides in the craniometric analysis and absolute dating of many early modern human (Homo sapiens) remains from Late Pleistocene contexts.
3. It is now generally agreed by geneticists, biological anthropologists, and archaeologists alike that ancestral Homo sapiens did not evolve “multiregionally” all over the Old...