Austronesian seaborne expansion out of Taiwan
- Date
- c. 3000 BCE
- Category
- Exploration & colonisation
- Region
- Taiwan & Island Southeast Asia
- Era
- Ancient Civilizations
- Significance
Beginning around 3000 BCE, Neolithic farming communities speaking early Austronesian languages set out from Taiwan in one of history's most far-reaching maritime migrations.
Equipped with red-slipped pottery, polished stone adzes, domesticated pigs and dogs, and the cultivation of rice and millet, they crossed the Bashi Channel and reached the Batanes Islands of the northern Philippines by about 2200 BCE, then spread south and east through Island Southeast Asia. Their decisive technological advantage was the outrigger canoe, whose lateral float made narrow-hulled sailing vessels stable enough to survive open-ocean swells; combined with the crab-claw sail and later the double-hulled catamaran, it opened the Indo-Pacific to systematic colonisation. Over the following millennia this expansion carried Austronesian peoples, languages, and crops across roughly half the circumference of the globe, from Madagascar in the west to the remote islands of the Pacific. It laid the demographic and cultural foundation for the later Lapita and Polynesian settlement of Oceania and remains one of the defining episodes in the human peopling of the planet.
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Related exploration & colonisation events
- First Settlement of the Mariana Islands and Entry into Remote Oceaniac. 1500 BCE
- Lapita voyagers settle Tonga and Samoa: first peopling of Remote Oceaniac. 900 BCE
- Foundation of Carthage by colonists from Tyre814 BCE (traditional)
- Dmanisi: the earliest well-dated humans in Eurasiac. 1.8 million years ago
- Pre-Clovis America: Monte Verde and the Pacific coastal routec. 16,000–14,500 years ago
- Settlement of Sahul: human occupation of Australia at Madjedbebec. 65,000 years ago
Further reading
The wider story
China: A History
Sweeping, readable single-volume narrative of China from its beginnings to today.
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