Cranio-morphometric and aDNA corroboration of the Austronesian dispersal model in ancient Island Southeast Asia: Support from Gua Harimau, Indonesia

Matsumura, Hirofumi, Shinoda, Ken-ichi, Shimanjuntak, Truman, Oktaviana, Adhi Agus, Noerwidi, Sofwan, Sofian, Harry Octavianus, Prastiningtyas, Dyah, Nguyen, Lan Cuong, Kakuda, Tsuneo, Kanzawa-Kiriyama, Hideaki, Adachi, Noboru, Hung, Hsiao-Chun, Fan, Xuechun, Wu, Xiujie, Willis, Anna, and Oxenham, Marc F. (2018) Cranio-morphometric and aDNA corroboration of the Austronesian dispersal model in ancient Island Southeast Asia: Support from Gua Harimau, Indonesia. PLoS ONE, 13 (6). e0198689.

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Abstract

The Austronesian language is spread from Madagascar in the west, Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) in the east (e.g. the Philippines and Indonesian archipelagoes) and throughout the Pacific, as far east as Easter Island. While it seems clear that the remote ancestors of Austronesian speakers originated in Southern China, and migrated to Taiwan with the development of rice farming by c. 5500 BP and onto the northern Philippines by c. 4000 BP (the Austronesian Dispersal Hypothesis or ADH), we know very little about the origins and emergence of Austronesian speakers in the Indonesian Archipelago. Using a combination of cranial morphometric and ancient mtDNA analyses on a new dataset from Gua Hairmau, that spans the pre-Neolithic through to Metal Period (5712-5591cal BP to 1864-1719 cal BP), we rigorously test the validity of the ADH in ISEA. A morphometric analysis of 23 adult male crania, using 16 of Martin's standard measurements, was carried out with results compared to an East and Southeast Asian dataset of 30 sample populations spanning the Late Pleistocene through to Metal Period, in addition to 39 modern samples from East and Southeast Asia, near Oceania and Australia. Further, 20 samples were analyzed for ancient mtDNA and assigned to identified haplogroups. We demonstrate that the archaeological human remains from Gua Harimau cave, Sumatra, Indonesia provide clear evidence for at least two (cranio-morphometrically defined) and perhaps even three (in the context of the ancient mtDNA results) distinct populations from two separate time periods. The results of these analyses provide substantive support for the ADH model in explaining the origins and population history of ISEA peoples.

Item ID: 54601
Item Type: Article (Research - C1)
ISSN: 1932-6203
Copyright Information: © 2018 Matsumura et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funders: Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS), Australian Research Council (ARC)
Projects and Grants: JSPS KAKENHI Grant 23247040, JSPS KAKENHI Grant 16H02527, ARC Grant FT 120100299, ARC Grant DP150104458
Date Deposited: 18 Jul 2018 07:58
FoR Codes: 43 HISTORY, HERITAGE AND ARCHAEOLOGY > 4301 Archaeology > 430101 Archaeological science @ 50%
43 HISTORY, HERITAGE AND ARCHAEOLOGY > 4301 Archaeology > 430102 Archaeology of Asia, Africa and the Americas @ 50%
SEO Codes: 95 CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING > 9505 Understanding Past Societies > 950502 Understanding Asias Past @ 100%
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