Scientists at the University of Auckland have completed a human language study that traces the settlement of the South Pacific to its origins on the island of Taiwan.Using a computer to analyze 400 Austronesian languages spread across the Pacific islands, the historical trace and progress of how prehistoric cultures settled these locations can be determined. They found the ancestors of modern Austronesians originated in Taiwan about 5200 years ago, entered the Philippines about a thousand years later and from there rapidly expanded throughout Polynesia as far as Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. After another pause of roughly a thousand years, settlement expanded again to areas as far away as Hawaii and Easter Island.
The "family tree" of Pacific languages was constructed by a comparative analysis of simple vocabulary such as words for animals, numbers, colors and simple verbs. The Austronesian group is one of the largest families of languages in the world, containing more than 1200 languages spread across the Pacific.
These results were published in a recent edition of Science.
Source: ScienceDaily
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