They also share domesticated plants and animals that were carried along with the migrations, including rice, bananas, coconuts, breadfruit, Dioscorea yams, taro, paper mulberry, chickens, pigs, and dogs.

[47][64][65][66] In 1899, the Austrian linguist and ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt coined the term "Austronesian" (German: austronesisch, from Latin auster, "south wind"; and Greek νῆσος, "island") to refer to the language family.

[45][70] Despite these objections, the general consensus is that the archeological, cultural, genetic, and especially linguistic evidence all separately indicate varying degrees of shared ancestry among Austronesian-speaking peoples that justifies their treatment as a "phylogenetic unit".

[76] In parts of Island Melanesia, migrations and paternal admixture from Papuan groups after the Austronesian expansion (estimated to have started at around 500 BCE) also resulted in gradual population turnover.

[45][47][48] Additionally, modern-era migration has brought Austronesian-speaking people to the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, mainland Europe, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Hong Kong, Macau, and West Asian countries.

In 2009, Roger Blench compiled an expanded map of Austronesia that encompassed these claims based on a variety of evidence, such as historical accounts, loanwords, introduced plants and animals, genetics, archeological sites, and material culture.

[100] Island Southeast Asia was settled by modern humans in the Paleolithic following coastal migration routes, presumably starting before 70,000 BP from Africa, long before the development of Austronesian cultures.

Remains of stone tools and marine shells in Liang Sarru, Salibabu Island, North Sulawesi, dated to 32,000–35,000 years ago, is possible evidence for the longest sea voyage by Paleolithic humans ever recorded.

[111] Mahdi (2016) further asserts that Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *tau-mata ("person")[note 2] is derived from a composite protoform *Cau ma-qata, combining "Tau" and "Qata" and indicative of the mixing of the two ancestral population types in these regions.

They display typical Austronesian technological hallmarks, including tooth removal, teeth blackening, jade carving, tattooing, stilt houses, advanced boatbuilding, aquaculture, wetland agriculture, and the domestication of dogs, pigs, and chickens.

[134][135][136][137] Under that view, there was an east–west genetic alignment, resulting from a rice-based population expansion, in the southern part of East Asia: Austroasiatic-Kra-Dai-Austronesian, with unrelated Sino-Tibetan occupying a more northerly tier.

Aside from linguistic evidence, Roger Blench has also noted cultural similarities between the two groups, like facial tattooing, tooth removal or ablation, teeth blackening, snake (or dragon) cults, and the multiple-tongued jaw harps shared by the indigenous Taiwanese and Kra-Dai-speakers.

[citation needed] According to Juha Janhunen and Ann Kumar, Austronesians may have also settled parts of southern Japan, especially on the islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, and influenced or created the Japanese hierarchical society.

The sound correspondences between Old Chinese and Proto-Austronesian can also be explained as a result of the Longshan interaction sphere, when pre-Austronesians from the Yangtze region came into regular contact with Proto-Sinitic speakers in the Shandong Peninsula, around the 4th to 3rd millennia BCE.

[157]: 610–611  An Austronesian group, originally from the Makassar Strait region around Kalimantan and Sulawesi,[158][159] eventually settled Madagascar, either directly from Southeast Asia or from preexisting mixed Austronesian-Bantu populations from East Africa.

For various reasons, they have proposed that the homelands of Austronesians were within Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), particularly in the Sundaland landmass drowned during the end of the Last Glacial Period by rising sea levels.

In contrast, more distant outlying descendant populations in Micronesia, Polynesia, Madagascar, and the Comoros retained the double-hull and the single-outrigger canoe types, but the technology for double outriggers never reached them (although it exists in western Melanesia).

[180][181] The acquisition of catamaran and outrigger technology by non-Austronesian peoples in Sri Lanka and southern India is due to the result of very early Austronesian contact with the region, including the Maldives and the Laccadive Islands, estimated to have occurred around 1000 to 600 BCE and onwards.

They can also be reconstructed linguistically from shared terms for architectural elements, like ridge poles, thatch, rafters, house posts, hearths, notched log ladders, storage racks, public buildings, and so on.

They propose significant Neolithic contact between the people of southern Japan and Austronesians or pre-Austronesians that occurred prior to the spread of Han Chinese cultural influence to the islands.

[199] O'Connor et al. (2015) proposes that APT developed during the initial rapid southward Austronesian expansion, and not before, possibly as a response to the communication challenges brought about by the new maritime mode of living.

Along with AES, these material symbols and associated rituals and technologies may have been manifestations of "powerful ideologies" spread by Austronesian settlers that were central to the "Neolithization" and rapid assimilation of the various non-Austronesian indigenous populations of ISEA and Melanesia.

[199] In western Micronesia (Palau, Yap, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands), rock art primarily consists of paintings on high cave ceilings and sea-facing cliffs.

On Tonga and Samoa, the existing rock art sites consist mostly of engravings with motifs including curvilinear shapes, human figures, "jellyfish", turtles, birds, and footprints.

They show the archetypal Polynesian motifs of turtles, faces, cup-like depressions (cupules), stick-like human figures, boats, fish, curvilinear shapes, and concentric circles.

Mythologies vary by culture and geographical location but share common basic aspects, such as ancestor worship, animism, shamanism, and the belief in a spirit world and powerful deities.

The literate ruling classes of the Rapa Nui people (including the royal family and the religious caste) and the majority of the island's population were kidnapped or killed in the slave raids.

[260][261][262][57] Moodley et al. (2009) identified two distinct populations of the gut bacteria Helicobacter pylori that accompanied human migrations into Island Southeast Asia and Oceania, called hpSahul and hspMāori.

[264] A study about the ancestral composition of modern ethnic groups in the Philippines from 2021 similarly suggests that distinctive Ancient East-Eurasian ancestry originated in Mainland Southeast Asia at ~50,000 BCE and expanded through multiple migration waves southwards and northwards, respectively.

[141][289][290][169] These early contacts resulted in the introduction of Austronesian crops and material culture to South Asia,[289] including betel nut chewing, coconuts, sandalwood, domesticated bananas,[289][141] sugarcane,[291] cloves, and nutmeg.