Prehistory of Taiwan

The earliest evidence of human habitation dates back 20,000 to 30,000 years, when lower sea levels exposed the Taiwan Strait as a land bridge.

[1][2] The island is separated from the coast of Fujian to the west by the Taiwan Strait, which is 130 km (81 mi) wide at its narrowest point.

[3] Taiwan is a tilted fault block, with rugged longitudinal mountain ranges making up most of the eastern two-thirds of the island.

As a result, the floor of the Taiwan Strait was exposed as a broad land bridge that was crossed by mainland fauna until the beginning of the Holocene 10,000 years ago.

[6] The Ryukyu Islands to the northeast of Taiwan were settled during marine isotope stage (MIS) 3, which ended around 30,000 years ago.

[8][9] The oldest known artifacts are chipped-pebble tools of the Changbin culture (長濱文化), found at cave sites on the southeast coast of the island.

[16] Soares et al. caution against overemphasizing a single sample, and maintain that a constant molecular clock implies an earlier date (and more southerly origin) for Haplogroup E remains more likely.

[17] Between 4000 and 3000 BC, the Dapenkeng culture (named after a site in Taipei county) abruptly appeared and quickly spread around the coast of the island, as well as Penghu.

Dapenkeng sites are relatively homogeneous, characterized by pottery impressed with cord marks, pecked pebbles, highly polished stone adzes and thin points of greenish slate.

[21] In the following millennium, these technologies appeared on the northern coast of the Philippine island of Luzon (250 km south of Taiwan), where they, and presumably Austronesian languages, were adopted by the local population.

This migration created a branch of Austronesian, the Malayo-Polynesian languages, which have since dispersed across a huge area from Madagascar to Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand.

[25] Archaeological evidence of prehistoric cultures dating back 4500 years before present was found in Nangang Village, Cimei, Penghu in 1983.

However, Philippine craftsmen continued to work jade from Taiwan until around 1000 AD, producing lingling-o pendants and other ornaments, which have been found throughout southeast Asia.

At first these were trade goods, but by around AD 400 wrought iron was being produced locally using bloomeries, a technology possibly introduced from the Philippines.

Grave goods buried with the dead also provide concrete evidence of complex trade linkages and intercultural exchange.