Austronesian Expansion

The Austronesian expansion was a long sequence of maritime migrations that carried Austronesian-speaking peoples and their outrigger canoe technology from a homeland on the island of Taiwan, beginning around 3000 BCE, southward through the Philippines and Indonesia and eventually across most of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Voyagers reached island Southeast Asia by roughly the second millennium BCE, then pushed on to settle the remote islands of the Pacific, including the Mariana Islands and Melanesia and, over succeeding centuries, the far-flung archipelagos of Polynesia, with Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island among the last major landfalls, generally dated to the first and early second millennium CE. A separate westward branch of the same expansion crossed the Indian Ocean to settle Madagascar off the coast of East Africa, likely by the early centuries of the first millennium CE, making Austronesian by some measures the most geographically widespread language family in the world prior to the era of European colonial expansion. The expansion is documented through comparative linguistics, the distributed archaeology of Lapita and related pottery traditions, and increasingly through ancient DNA studies of Pacific and Malagasy populations.