The first quantitative assessment of radiocarbon chronologies for initial pottery in Island Southeast Asia supports multi-directional Neolithic dispersal.

ABSTRACT: Neolithization, or the Holocene demographic expansion of farming populations, accounts for significant changes in human and animal biology, artifacts, languages, and cultures across the earth. For Island Southeast Asia, the orthodox Out of Taiwan hypothesis proposes that Neolithic expansion originated from Taiwan with populations moving south into Island Southeast Asia, while the Western Route Migration hypothesis suggests the earliest farming populations entered from Mainland Southeast Asia in the west. These hypotheses are also linked to competing explanations of the Austronesian expansion, one of the most significant population dispersals in the ancient world that influenced human and environmental diversity from Madagascar to Easter Island and Hawai'i to New Zealand. The fundamental ar

SUBMITTER: Cochrane EE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8171956 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature