via The National, 03 December 2021: The Austronesian-speaking peoples and their dispersal across Southeast Asia from a Papua New Guinea perspective.
WE know from archeological evidence that humans have lived in what is today Papua New Guinea for more than 50,000 years and, given the isolation of the region, we can assume that most of the languages spoken here are descended from whatever languages those first settlers spoke. These languages do not show any connections to languages outside of Melanesia.
But there is a minority of languages that show clear similarities with languages outside Melanesia, with languages spoken as far north as Taiwan, as far west as Madagascar in Africa, as far south as New Zealand, and as far east as Easter Island and Hawai?i. We call these languages “Austronesian”, from the Latin word for “southern” (“austro”) and the Greek word for “islands” (“nesos”).Comparative language and DNA studies have shown that these languages represent one of humanity’s greatest migrations, starting around five thousand years ago in Taiwan and ending about 800 years ago, when Maoris reached New Zealand. As they slowly moved south into what is today the Philippines, some Austronesians went southwest to what is today Malaysia and western Indonesia and from there to Madagascar off the coast of Africa, while others went southeast, reaching the north coast of New Guinea around three or four thousand years ago and from there to the Bismarck Archipelago and out into the Pacific, bringing the first people ever to live on the Polynesian islands.
