How did people settle the world's largest ocean?

Austronesian-speaking peoples carried languages, crops and voyaging traditions from Taiwan and Island Southeast Asia to Madagascar and the farthest islands of the Pacific. Not a miracle of accidental drift, but a history reconstructed from languages, potsherds, genomes and experimental voyaging.

About 6 min3000 BCE – 1300 CE8 cited sources

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What you will follow

This guided story moves the same world map through 13 sourced scenes. It begins at the opening rather than dropping you into an unexplained year.

How to read the map: The map uses discrete, approximate border snapshots. A narrated year may use the closest available snapshot, and schematic arrows show relationships rather than precise routes.

Related subjects on the map

Sources used by this story

Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
Peter Bellwood, First Islanders: Prehistory and Human Migration in Island Southeast Asia (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
Janet M. Wilmshurst et al., 'High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia', PNAS 108, no. 5 (2011): 1815-1820.
K. Alexander Adelaar, 'Towards an integrated theory about the Indonesian migrations to Madagascar', in Ancient Human Migrations, ed. Peter N. Peregrine et al. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2009).
Ben Finney, Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey through Polynesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
David Lewis, We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific, 2nd ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1994).
Alexander G. Ioannidis et al., 'Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement', Nature 583 (2020): 572-577.
Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island (New York: Free Press, 2011).