The Austronesian expansion

June 14, 2011

JESUS T. PERALTA, Ph.D.

There are two major hypotheses defining the Neolithic Age Austronesian
movement: the “out of Taiwan or South China” theory by the language-oriented
Peter Bellwood; and ‘Island Origin” theory by the Southeast Asian specialist, the
archaeologist, Wilhelm Solheim; and another by Stephen Oppenheimer. There are
other variations that will not be discussed here.

Ever since Sapir (1968) proposed that the chronology of the distribution of
languages can be traced from the area of greatest linguistic variety to that of the least,
linguists have accepted this position in using this analysis to determine the origin and
direction of movements of people, despite dissenting analysis that a language may
appear to be more distantly related than it actually is due to the variability of language
contact (Peiros, 1998). Bellwood (1995) contends that the ancestors of the
Austronesian speakers spread from Yunnan in the south Chinese mainland and that as
early as 6,000 BC a fishing gardening culture existed on the south coast of China,
exploiting the waters off the straits of Taiwan, where eventually between 4,000 and
3,000 BC they finally crossed the straits and settled on the island. Linguistic evidence
suggests that these people spoke an Austronesian language that is purportedly related
to the Tai-Kadai family of languages that is spoken Southeast Asia, specifically in Laos,
northeastern Myanmar and Thailand – regions flanking the Mekong River.

At about 2,500 BC one group of these Austronesian speakers sailed south to the
northern island of Luzon in the Philippines and settled there, bringing with them the
same set of artifacts and subsistence technology from Taiwan. Through to 1,500 BC the
group spread through the Philippine archipelago southwards, on to Sulawesi, the
Moluccas, northern Borneo and eastern Java. From the Halmahera of the Moluccas one
branch proceeded east by 1,600 BC to colonize eastern Melanesia by 1,200 BC. By 0
AD the expansion continued on to Polynesia and to the Easter Islands by 500 AD.
Finally the movement culminated by reaching New Zealand about 1,300 AD. Another
wave of these Austronesian speakers moved through Borneo, Java, and Sumatra to the
coasts of the Malay Peninsula and southern Vietnam by about 500 BC and from there
they traversed the Bay of Bengal, through to Sri Lanka and even southern India with its
final expansion to Madagascar by 500 AD.

In effect what Bellwood contends is that all the ascendants of Southeast Asians
and the peoples of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean passed through the Philippines in
waves of migration from 2,500 BC to 500 AD from Taiwan. Peter Bellwood’s Out-of-
Taiwan (OOT) hypothesis is based largely on linguistics, hewing very close to Robert
Blust’s model of the history of the Austronesian language family and adding to it
archeological data. This model suggests that Between 4500 BCE and 4000 BCE,
developments in agricultural technology in the Yunnan Plateau in China created
pressures which drove certain peoples to migrate to Taiwan. These people either
already had or began to develop a unique language of their own, now referred to as
Proto-Austronesian. By around 3000 BCE, these groups started differentiating into three
or four distinct subcultures, and by 2500 to 1500 BC, one of these groups began
migrating southwards towards the Philippines and Indonesia, reaching as far as Borneo
and the Moluccas by 1500 BCE, forming new cultural groupings and developing unique
languages.

By 1500 BC, some of these groups started migrating west, reaching as far as
Madagascar around the first millennium CE. Others migrated east, settling as far as
Easter Island by the mid-13th century CE, giving the Austronesian language group the
distinction of being the most widely distributed language groups in the world at that time,
in terms of the geographical span of the homelands of its languages. According to this
theory, the peoples of the Philippines are the descendants of those cultures who
remained on the Philippine islands when others moved first southwards, then eastward
and westward.

Wilhelm Solheim (2000), on the other hand, asserts the “Island Origin”
hypothesis (also known as the Nusantao Maritime Trading and Communication west
Africa and Madagascar Network (MNTCN), utilizing archaeological data instead of the
historical linguistic evidence used by Bellwood, posits a completely different picture and
direction. Solheim proposed a more elegant complex network of reciprocal regional
cultural interchanges in the Asia-Pacific region during the Neolithic Age from 8,000 to
500 BC, undertaken by both Austronesian and non-Austronesian speakers. With
Solheim the spread there were four geographic “lobes”: central, northern, eastern and
western. The central lobe ramified into two phases: the “Early Central Lobe” and the
“Late Central Lobe”. Solheim poses the origin of the NMTCN in eastern coastal Vietnam
in the Early Central lobe at about 9.000 BC.

The network covers all of the Pacific Ocean, the coastal areas of China Sea and
Japan, the coastal areas of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean as far as
Madagascar, and Island Southeast Asia and the coast al areas of Mainland Southeast
Asia. Beginning about 5000 BC, it expanded from Easter island Southeast Asia, it
expanded to the north through the Philippines to Taiwan and the coastal South China,
then north along the coast of China to western and south Korea, and finally to Kyushu in
Japan.

At about 5,000 BC, he suggested a northward spread of people toward the Late
Central Lobe through island Southeast Asia that included the Philippines. South China
and Taiwan, were the staging area of the Austronesian language family and the Malayo
Polynesian group. Between 4,000 and 3,000 BC the spread of population through
northern Luzon toward Micronesian, then formed the Early Eastern Lobe, developing
the Malayo Polynesian languages. The NMTCN continued its cultural expansion
through Malaysia before 2,000 BC, along the coast of India to West Africa and
Madagascar. There was a further movement east to the Easter Island.
Solheim proposed that “Pre-Austronesian” culture began in the Bismarck Islands off
Papua New Guinea about 13,000 to 10,000 BP., with networks established with Indo
China and South China, where contact was made with Hoabinhian culture.

Oxford University School of Anthropology, Dr. Stephen Oppenheimer has his

own point of view: those population dispersals came earlier, from within the region and
probably resulted from flooding. In his book Eden in the East: The Drowned Continent of
Southeast Asia, when he suggested the migrations came from within ISEA and resulted
from flooding in the region.

Dr Oppenheimer said: ‘One of my main predictions in the book was that three
major floods following the Ice Age forced the inhabitants to escape in boats and flee to
less flood-prone regions. By examining mitochondrial DNA from their descendants in
Southeast Asia and the Pacific, we now have strong evidence to support the flooding
theory and this is possibly why Southeast Asia has a richer store of flood myths, more
than any other region in the world.’
Dr Oppenheimer’s book, based on multidisciplinary evidence, writes about the effects of
the drowning of a huge ancient continent called ‘Sundaland’ (that extended the Asian
landmass as far as Borneo and Java). This happened during the period 15,000 to 7,000
years ago following the last Ice Age. He outlines how rising sea levels in three massive
pulses caused flooding and the submergence of the Sunda Continent, creating the Java
and South China Seas and the thousands of islands that make up Indonesia and the
Philippines today.

DISTINCTION
Differing in the origins of people, the basic conflict between Bellwood and Solheim is
that the formulation of the former is a lineal expansion based on soft historical linguistic
interpretation equating language movement with population movements, while
Solheim’s theory has a more complex structure involving overlapping reciprocal
relationships of population nodes based on hard archaeological data that can validated
in a number of ways including radiometric evidence. Bellwood posits directional
movement but with no causal explanation. He merely assumed population movement
but did not show why the movement came about in the first place. Solheim implies
causality for population movement with the implication of the rising sea level at the end
of the last ice age.

Oppenheimer’s hypothesis hews closer to Solheim, emphasizing the effect of the

flooding of the Sunda land as the critical factor in population movement during that time.

It is notable that the Austronesian family of languages appears to be associated largely

with maritime environments and spoken by people with mobile technologies that require
naval capabilities that facilitated inter-cultural contact and exchanges. It is notable too,
without regarding chronology, is that Taiwan is at the northern periphery whereas Island
Southeast Asia is at the center of the dispersal.
DEMOGRAPHIC PRESSURES FOR MOVEMENT CAUSALITY

The Austronesian diaspora is co-eval with the inundation of the continental shelf of the
post-glacial mainland Asia, including the Sundaland, when the sea level rose between
8,000 and 4,000 BC after the final fragmentation of the Scandinavian ice sheet.
Sundaland itself was dry land from about 23,750 BC to at least 15,250 BC. The rise in
global seawater caused the submergence of the Southeastern Peninsula between
15,000 and 3,000 BC. The waters from the melting ice of the last Ice Age flooded huge
expanses of land equivalent to twice the size of the subcontinent of India (including
Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, with the South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and
the Java Sea as the connecting parts) exerting pressures on the various humongous
populations there that caused them to move from different nodes at different times.

The inundated land about Formosa and the island itself (included sunken tracts
of the Pacific coastline and linked China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) is nowhere close
to that of the inundated land of the post-glacial southeastern coast of Asia. The
relatively smaller population of such an area cannot possibly exert enough demographic
pressure to cause and maintain an exodus that included the Indian Ocean, coastal
Southeast Asia, Island Southeast Asia, and the Pacific world from 4,000 BC to 500 AD.
It is notable that Taiwan simply was not able even to re-introduce Austronesian
languages to mainland China, being as it was less culturally mature than the latter. How
much more mature is it at that time compared with the hydraulic societies along the
Mekong River and the Indian gulf to be the wellspring of the Austronesian family of
languages.

The Austronesian language expansion is a Neolithic Age phenomenon that can

be associated to the rise of the sea level after the last glacial period. Neolithic culture,
however, it is variable as cultures go such that the definition of the Neolithic boundary in
different parts of Southeast mainland and Island Southeast Asia varied because of
historical and cultural parameters. These boundaries are not specific points in time, but
constitute a range in time defined by the appearance of artifactual indices. This
dispersal becomes blurred at the onset of the Metal Age, when population multi-lineal
movements crisscrossed in their paths, and unilineal ones, no matter how short,
becomes indistinctive. To sweepingly ascribe everything traditionally ethnographic to
the Austronesian language movement is untenable since this will proscribe independent
invention or adaptation.

THE YUNNAN POINT OF ORIGIN

Bellwood suggests Yunnan province of China as the point of departure for the ancestors
of the Austronesian speakers to move north overland to cross the strait and on to
Taiwan. Travel north through colder climes and rugged terrain would have been
prohibitive. There is, however, a much more feasible alternative to population
movement from Yunnan – an easier travel by water via the Mekong River, moving
south. Mekong River, approximately 4180 km in length, originates from Tibet and runs
through the Yunnan province of China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and South
Vietnam. The migration of Proto-Malays who were mariners traveled by boat during the
Neolithic times, and was traced by Anthropologists, along the Mekong River from
Yunnan to the South China Sea, and settling down eventually in specific places. The
early inhabitants of Yunnan were the ancestors of rice-eating peoples of Southeast
Asia. Their practice of cultivating rice spread throughout the entire region. The native
name of the Mekong River peoples’ home in Yunnan is Xishuangbanna literally
meaning “twelve thousand rice fields”. The greatest varieties of domestic rice are found
in the monsoonal rain zone extending from eastern India through Southeast Asia,
northern Vietnam and Southern China (The Yunan province of China is actually
Southeast Asian and was integrated into China much later), which supports the
contention that Southeast Asia is the center of rice cultivation. Migrant peoples from
South China or perhaps North Vietnam brought wet rice cultivation into the Philippines
during the 2nd millennium BC (Huke, et al, 1990). The earliest evidence for rice in the
Philippines is from the Manga Site in Cagayan Valley with a date of between 2610-2130
BC.

Genetic studies

A 2008 genetic study showed no evidence of a large-scale Taiwanese migration into the
Philippine Islands. A study by Leeds University and published in Molecular Biology and
Evolution, showed that mitochondrial DNA lineages have been evolving within Island
Southeast Asia (ISEA) since modern humans arrived approximately 50,000 years
ago. The DNA lineages show population dispersals at the same time as sea level rises
and also show migrations into Taiwan, east out to New Guinea and the Pacific, and
west to the Southeast Asian mainland – within the last 10,000 years.

Richards (Phylogenetic Analysis of Human Mitochondrial Genomes of two Major

Haplogroups in Austronesian-speaking Populations”) states against the “Out of Taiwan”
model of the Austronesian language movement that “The phylogeny of complete
sequences of two major Austronesian-speaking populations’ specific clades of
mitochondrial DNA, haplogroup E and B4a1, contradicts the consensus view.
Haplogroup E presents much deeper private subclades in ISEA (Island Southeast Asia).
This suggests an ancestry there and a subsequent movement of people into Taiwan,
probably motivated by the sea level rising at the end of the last ice age. The geographic
origin of B4a1 branch is unclear, but its most frequent sub-branch, present only in
eastern ISEA and the Pacific and defined by “Polynesian motifs’ dates to around 7500
years predating the hypothetical “Out of Taiwan” movement 4000 years ago.”

Martin Richards, the first Professor of Archaeogenetics at Leeds University, who led the
interdisciplinary research team, said: ‘I think the study results are going to be a big
surprise for many archaeologists and linguists, on whose studies conventional migration
theories are based. These population expansions had nothing to do with agriculture,
but were most likely to have been driven by climate change, in particular global
warming and the resulting sea-level rises at the end of the Ice Age between 15,000
to 7,000 years ago.’
The inundation of Sundaland actually favors a northward direction of migrations of
populations, rather than a southerly direction back to the axis of the flooded disaster
area. Agricultural development is more conducive to the settling down of populations
rather than going into a diaspora, since the stability of subsistence supplies is more
conducive to nucleation of settlements than a motivation to move out from the areas of
development. It is expected that a pre-Neolithic culture, like a foraging society during
the Paleolithic period, is the kind of population that will be more mobile than a Neolithic
one. The only type of an agricultural society that will move is that engaged in a
swiddening type of culture, which is however, limited to a cyclical and circuitous kind of
movement and not a lineal one as proposed by Bellwood and the associated linguists.

Biological Issue

The biological Austronesian people is distinguished by Harry Widianto from the

Austronesian speaking populations by referring to them as southern Mongolids that
flourished in the Southeast Asian region – different from the northern Mongolids of
China and Japan. Howells (1973), identified similarities between Polynesian and
Micronesian specimens with phenotype characteristics of Southern Mongolid, and he
concluded that the inhabitants of these areas in the region are the descendants of
Southern Mongolids and not of Northern Mongolids. (Widianto, undated)

Philippine Neolithic

Bellwood (et al, 2004) states that prior to 3700 BP (1750 BC), there is no evidence of
any human population in Batanes, and that it was only after this period (3700-2700 BP)
that there were prolific evidences of Neolithic settlement from Eastern Taiwan (contrary
to what he stated earlier that 2,500 BC one group of these Austronesian speakers
sailed south to the northern island of Luzon in the Philippines and settled there, bringing
with them the same set of artifacts and subsistence technology from Taiwan. This
period is well into the end of the Late Neolithic Age of the Philippines, if indeed the
Austronesian Neolithic coursed through this country. In fact he concludes in the same
paper that the “Austronesian ocean crossing technology, that eventually allowed the
settlement of Polynesia, occurred well to the south of northern Philippines”
(underscoring mine).

There is a series of Carbon-14 dates that defines the Neolithic boundary of the
Philippines. Two of the earliest are from both the northern and southern parts of the
country. The earliest is 7830 +- 170 BC from the Laurente Cave, Penablanca, Cagayan
province showing the earliest presence of pottery in the Philippines; and the other is
6650 +- 180 BC in the Bolobok Cave of Sanga-sanga, Tawi-tawi where red-slipped
pottery was first reported. There at least forty (40+) other Neolithic dates on record, with
the youngest being 2070+- 90, from the Arku Cave in Penablanca. Cagayan province.
A simulation model of Philippine Neolithic based on the indices of blade tools, pottery,
edge-ground tools, oval adzes and rectangular adzes, suggests that except for
rectangular adzes that appeared about 2000 BC, all the other indices appeared more or
less almost simultaneously in time at about 6000 BC, as if it were a complex already
developed suddenly introduced into the country. Countries like Myanmar, Malaysia and
Thailand, ranged approximately more than 10,000 BC to well into the Christian era,
suggesting a long and gradual development of Neolithic technology. Only Indonesia
approximates the Philippines, although behind a bit later, in ranging from about 6000
BC to the Christian era. It appears from this that island Southeast Asia seemed to have
lagged behind Mainland Southeast Asia in terms of Neolithic development, suggesting a
technological movement from the mainland to island Southeast Asia.

This being the case, the 1750 BC influx from Taiwan to the Batanes is very late in
Neolithic progression of the Philippines since the Neolithic Carbon 14 dates listed above
indicate a time dimension earlier in the south, Batanes, being much later. The data
indicate earlier movements from the south during the Neolithic times rather than from
the direction of Taiwan. The data from mainland Southeast Asia is even more revealing.
The Neolithic boundary in Thailand, for instance, took place as early as 10,000 BC, as it
is in the rest of mainland and Island Southeast Asia. The 4000 BC “out of Formosa”
hypothesis is much too late and becomes untenable in this light.

Kurushio current

“Migration by boat from Taiwan southward, statistically speaking, is very improbable

because of the Northward current, Kurushio current, and going downwards is only
probable at only certain parts of the year. The odds of migrating downwards is very
farfetched considering, five thousand years ago, sail tacking was not yet developed. It is
improbable to go from Taiwan to the Philippines because one will just end up going to
Japan from Taiwan. It is curious, in fact, that with this facility afforded by the Kurushio
current, Austronesian is not associated with the Japanese. There is no land bridge
between Taiwan and the Philippine at the end of the last ice age. And so crossing by
land bridge from Taiwan to the Philippines is out of the question.”

Transhumant Marine Oriented Populations

Apropos to the discussion, attention may be called to the existence of mobile population
nodes particular to Southeast Asia that exercises a pre-agricultural or food foraging
strategy of subsistence that speak Austronesian forms of languages. Being referred to
are the strand and coastal people with a marine orientation, principally living in boats.
The spread of the peoples after the Pleistocene Epoch was facilitated by the rising level
of the sea. This is further enhanced by the development of boating technology.
Subsequent modes of adaptation by these migrant peoples oriented many groups to
terrestrial life ways farther up from the coastlines; while some others remained in
different degrees of marine orientation. The latter are mobile communities that are
strand or coastal food foragers who rely on fishing, hunting of sea mammals, turtles,
collection of sea cucumbers, mollusks, and crustaceans. The early mention of their
origin is the first millennium AD although their subsistence technology goes farther back
in time. The present Sama Dilaut of southwestern Philippines is one of these groups
that remained culturally immersed in life with the sea linked with other Southeast Asian
“sea gypsies,” such as the Orang Laut (“ocean people”) of Indonesia’s Riau Islands and
parts of Malaysia’s coast, the Moken or Urak Lawoi of Thailand and the Salon of
Myanmar (Burma) in the Andaman Sea; Urak Lawoi on the west coast of Thailand and
Malaysian; the Orang Suku Laut of Sumatra and nearby islands – all practicing a type of
water adaptation found nowhere else in the world.

Much have been written about these “boat people” or “sea gypsies” that are scattered
along the seaboards of island and mainland Southeast Asia, precisely in the region
inundated by the rising sea level after the Ices Age. The early typologies of their boat
construction are ascribed to Neolithic technology. These marine orientated populations
were most probably created at the onset of the Neolithic Age when the Sunda land was
inundated by the rising sea level. They are endemic to the region. Instead of moving out
of the region, they stayed and adapted to the flooded region of their former habitat. The
point of dispersal and radiation is Southeast Asia. The mobility of the boat people can
be ascribed to their marine orientation and the facility with which they move about in
boats. The central point of dispersal, too, of the Austronesian languages is Southeast
Asia.

The marine adaptation of these people can be exemplified by Kurais (1975) who
encapsulates the Sama of the Philippines’ way of life as “musay magusaha” which is to
earn a living implying a journey by boat. Several types of boats have been associated
with the Sama that give an insight into the precision of their adaptation to marine
life: adjong, sappit, hawi, lepa, parangkang, buggoh (buggoh jungalan, Bugoh-buggoh,
and buggoh) pelang, dapang, dapang-dapang, bagya, belamput, garay, jungkong,
damas, lunday, biral, kumpit, bettu, peddas, birok, zingnging, jalampah, adjong, gulita,
boggoh. Mentioned too are the prahu, garay (panco or penjajap) andsalisipan (vinta,
barato or kakap).

Notable is the complexity of the boat technology of the group especially with reference
to specific types that denote the pinpointed mode of adaptation to the various regions of
habitation. These are highly mobile populations. However, more notable is that these
populations nodes, hewing closer to the Solheim hypothesis of the Austronesian
language dispersal, are transhumant – they engage in cyclical movement in Southeast
Asia through seasons in circular and recurring patterns, and not in a lineal north to
south dispersal with a central point of origin. So, too, their widespread food foraging
subsistence technology cannot be explained by the agricultural causality of the OOT
hypothesis.

Concluding Statements
Closer to the reality of the Neolithic Age is the dispersal of populations caused by the
inundation of Sunda land by the rising sea level with its attendant technologies like
agriculture, pottery, weaving, polished stone adzes and blade tools, in sporadic
movements, some linear, others nodal, some in stasis, depending on the environmental
circumstances relevant to specific cultural groups. The various hypotheses (Bellwood,
Solheim, Oppenheimer, et al.) are facets or parts of simultaneously occurring realities
which are reflections of particular foci or perspectives. Each facet explains the realities
of a part, though not necessarily the whole. The movements of populations cannot be
ascribed to a single causality because of the imperatives imposed by socio-cultural and
physical environments, especially by the fact that human populations continually adapt
to changes depending on the relevance of any of these through the time. The dispersal
of Austronesian-speaking populations is so extensive and vast, not only in terms of area
but also of other factors as people, culture, environment, subsistence technologies,
adaptation and such, so that it is not possible to ascribe the movements to a single
sweeping cause as the “Out of Taiwan” hypothesis.

The fatal flaw in this hypothesis is that it confuses distribution of language with
distribution of people. Language can not explain the distribution of people but it might be
able to explain the distribution of language. Language is cultural and is learned. People
are biological, and biology is not learned, but people learn culture, including language.
Language can move without populations moving, although it can move with
populations. A language can be learned without the population moving at all. This
is the reason people can be multi-lingual. People can move independently of language.
Because language is cultural, people can choose what language to carry when they
move. The Filipino are English speaking people, but certainly, the Philippine population
is not English, and the English people have not moved into the Philippines.
 The First “Filipinos”
 
Many historians and scientists believe that the first inhabitants of the Philippine islands
emerged during the Pleistocene period. There are two theories on where the inhabitants
(first Filipinos) came from namely: Beyer’s “Migration Theory” and Jocano’s “Evolution
Theory”. Noted social scientist Henry Otley Beyer believes that Filipinos descended from
different groups that came from Southeast Asia in successive waves of migration. Each
group had a distinct culture, with it’s own customs and traditions. While Jocano believes
that Asians, including Filipinos are the result of a lengthy process of evolution and
migration.
 

Migration Theory
 
The first migrants were what Beyer caked the “Dawnmen” (or “cavemen” because they lived
in caves.). The Dawnmen resembled Java Man, Peking Man, and other Asian Home sapiens
who existed about 250,000 years ago. They did not have any knowledge of agriculture, and
lived by hunting and fishing. It was precisely in search of food that they came to the
Philippines by way of the land bridges that connected the Philippines and Indonesia. Owing
perhaps to their migratory nature, they eventually left the Philippines for destinations
unknown.
 
The second group of migrants was composed of dark-skinned pygmies called “Aetas’ or
“Negritoes”. About 30,000 years ago, they crossed the land bridged from Malaya, Borneo,
and Australia until they reached Palawan, Mindoro and Mindanao. They were pygmies who
went around practically naked and were good at hunting, fishing and food gathering. They
used spears and small flint stones weapons.
 
The Aetas were already in the Philippines when the land bridges disappeared due to the
thinning of the ice glaciers and the subsequent increase in seawater level. This natural
events “forced” them to remain in the country and become its first permanent inhabitants.
 
Because of the disappearance of the land bridges, the third wave of migrants was
necessarily skilled in seafaring. These were the Indonesians, who came to the islands in
boats. They were more advanced than the Aetas in that: they had tools made out of stone
and steel, which enabled them to build sturdier houses: they engaged in farming and
mining, and used materials made of brass; they wore clothing and other body ornaments.
 
Last to migrate to the Philippines, according to Beyer, were Malays. They were believed to
have come from Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and the Malay Peninsula more than 2,000 years
ago. Like the Indonesians, they also traveled in boats.
 
The Malays were brown-skinned and of medium height, with straight black hair and flat
noses. Their technology was said to be more advanced than that of their predecessors. They
engaged in pottery, weaving, jewelry making and metal smelting, and introduced the
irrigation system in rice planting.
 
Jocano’s Theory
 
Renowned Filipino anthropologist Felipe Landa Jocano disputes Beyer’s belief that Filipinos
descended from Negritoes and Malays who migrated to the Philippines thousands of years
ago. According to Jocano, it is difficult to prove that Negritoes were the first inhabitants of
this country. The only thing that can positively concluded from fossil evidence, he says is
that the first men who came to the Philippines also went to New Guinea, Java, Borneo, and
Australia.
 
In 1962, a skullcap and a portion of a jaw-presumed to be a human origin-were found in
the Tabon Caves of Palawan by archaeologist Robert Fox and Manuel Santiago, who both
worked for the National Museum. Carbon dating placed their age at 21,000 to 22,000 years.
This proves, Jocano argues, that man came earlier to the Philippines than to the Malay
Peninsula; therefore, the first inhabitants of our islands could not have come from the
region. The “Tabon Man” is said to resemble Java Man and Peking Man. He gathered fruits,
leaves and plants for his food. He hunted with weapons made of stone. Although further
research is still being done on his life and culture, evidence shows that he was already
capable of using his brain in order to survive and keep himself safe.
 
Instead of the Migration Theory, Jocano advances the Evolution Theory, as a better
explanation of how our country was first inhabited by human beings, Jocano believes that
the first people of Southeast Asia were products of a long process of evolution and
migration. His research indicates that they shared more or less the same culture, beliefs,
practices an even similar tools and implements. These people eventually went their separate
ways; some migrated to the Philippines, the others to New Guinea, Java and Borneo. Proof,
Jocano says, can be found in the fossils discovered in different parts of Southeast Asia, as
well as the recorded migrations of other peoples from the Asian mainland when history
began to unfold. Continue to Spanish Expeditions to the Philippines. Also see "About the
Philippines".