Toward the end of 2015, a team of researchers from Taiwan and Chile gained the attention of the international scientific community when they presented evidence bolstering the theory that Taiwan is the ancestral homeland of the Austronesian peoples. Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, their findings constitute strong biogeographical evidence in support of the “out of Taiwan” hypothesis. This theory posits that Austronesian-speaking peoples expanded outward from the southeastern shores of continental Asia to Taiwan and then on to Southeast Asia, the islands of Oceania, including New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific islands, and eventually Madagascar off the east coast of Africa.
The team was led by Chung Kuo-fang (鍾國芳), who is now a research fellow in the Biodiversity Research Center at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s foremost scientific institution. When the article was published, he was an associate professor in the School of Forestry and Resource Conservation at National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei.
There are about 400 million people of Austronesian descent residing in the broad area that ranges from Taiwan in the north to Madagascar in the west and Chile’s Easter Island in the east. Chung notes that, given the diversity and widespread distribution of their interconnected languages, which number around 1,200, Austronesian peoples and their many distinct cultures are an intriguing topic for multidisciplinary studies.
The paper mulberry research team, comprising scientists from Taiwan and Chile, was led by Chung Kuo-fang, right. (Photo courtesy of Chung Kuo-fang)
In the 1970s, Australian archaeologist Peter Bellwood, utilizing data from archaeological, linguistic and biological fields, pointed to Taiwan as the ancestral homeland of the Austronesian-speaking peoples, with a more distant origin in southern China. “There might be a genealogical connection with today’s Fujian, Guangdong and Guangxi regions back to around 8,000 years ago,” Chung says. “However, we don’t know if modern Austronesian language families are related to the tongues spoken by the ancient peoples from those regions.”
American linguist Robert Blust’s comparative studies offer more evidence for the “out of Taiwan” model, Chung notes. Blust divides Austronesian languages into 10 branches, nine of which can be found only in Taiwan. The 10th branch encompasses every other Austronesian dialect, each of which falls under the umbrella of the Malayo-Polynesian language family. The presence of all but one linguistic group, Chung says, “offers crucial, direct evidence that Taiwan is the homeland of Austronesian peoples.”
Although there are alternative models suggesting that the origins of Austronesian-speaking peoples lie in northern Indochina or other Southeast Asian regions, Taiwan is considered by most experts to be the primary dispersal point of the Neolithic era Austronesian migration. About 5,000 years ago, Chung explains, probably due to population growth outstripping the amount of available arable land, people began migrating from Taiwan to today’s northern Philippines. They then moved on to the Indonesian archipelago before eventually settling most of Oceania.
Citing American scientist Jared Diamond’s article in the journal Nature published in 2000, Chung refers to the rapid expansion of Austronesian peoples as “Taiwan’s gift to the world.” However, he points out that with various competing hypotheses for the Austronesian dispersal, “we need more evidence to gain a firm understanding of the whole picture.”
Chung has been working on this complex issue by examining matters beyond archaeology, human genetics and linguistics. Adopting an ethnobotanical approach, he chose to study the phylogeographic structure of paper mulberry trees, a common plant species in Taiwan and across the various subregions of Oceania.
Phylogeography looks at the historical processes responsible for the geographic distributions of various species by studying their population genetics. Specifically, Chung chose to study the DNA sequences of 604 paper mulberry samples, including 19 historical herbarium specimens stored in U.S. and European institutions. Chung and his Taiwanese team, with the help of Chilean researchers, gathered samples from nations and territories in Asia and Oceania, including Taiwan, mainland China, Hawaii, Japan, New Guinea, the Philippines, Sulawesi, Tonga and Vietnam. The team’s findings revealed a tight genealogical link between paper mulberry populations in southern Taiwan and the islands of Oceania, strongly indicating that Taiwan is the origin of Pacific paper mulberry trees. This conclusion is in line with the “out of Taiwan” hypothesis for Austronesian expansion, Chung says.
A large piece of decorated bark cloth made on the Polynesian island of Tonga (Photo courtesy of Chung Kuo-fang)
He points out the close connection between the paper mulberry’s distribution and human migratory patterns. In Taiwan, the scientist notes, the marked population differentiation of paper mulberry trees in the northern, eastern and southern parts of the island implies the plant’s limited capacity for propagation through seed dispersal and essentially rules out natural transoceanic spread. For centuries, paper mulberry trees have been propagated clonally, through cuttings or root shoots, as a material for making varieties of paper and cloth. Notably, “the plant is dioecious and its presence in Oceania is predominantly female,” the scientist says, “suggesting a random choice or a preference for female trees at the time when the plant was brought outside of its native land.” Dioecious plant species have male and female varieties.
The origins of Chung’s research project can be traced to a phone call he received while sitting in his office at NTU in March 2008. The call came from Chang Chi-shan (張至善), an assistant researcher at the National Museum of Prehistory (NMP) in southeastern Taiwan’s Taitung City who had worked with Chung on several research projects. In 2002, after a railway station construction project unearthed a large number of ancient artifacts from the indigenous Puyuma culture, the NMP was established near the archaeological site. In 2008, Japanese researcher Yoshichika Iwasa made a donation to the museum of more than 20,000 artifacts and documents that he collected during his decades of fieldwork in Austronesian-speaking societies in parts of the South Pacific. Chang helped sort his museum’s new collection, which includes many bark cloth items. He called Chung, a respected ethnobotanist, to discuss the economic, social and cultural significance of the bark cloth. Often referred to as tapa, the name given to bark cloth by the inhabitants of Tahiti in French Polynesia, the substance is made from paper mulberry trees and can be found throughout Austronesian-speaking societies.
The nonwoven fabric of tapa is made by peeling off the inner bark of paper mulberry trees and pounding the pieces into a textile-like form. The earliest known evidence of tapa production comes from stone beaters, the tools used to pound the bark, excavated in southern China’s Guangxi region that date back approximately 8,000 years. Similar tools dated to slightly later periods have also been found in Taiwan, Indochina and other Southeast Asian regions.
Chung points out that, despite a sharp decline in the use of bark cloth due to the development of modern textiles, tapa retains its cultural significance at major rituals in several Pacific island nations such as Tonga, Fiji and Samoa, and the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Recently in Taiwan, a revival in traditional tapa making has helped rejuvenate interest in local aboriginal cultures, he notes. Chung cites a tapa dress worn by pop diva Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) at a fashion show in Taipei last year. The dress was created by an artisan and a designer from the indigenous Rukai and Paiwan tribes, respectively.
In his introduction to the book Felting Bark to Make Cloth, published by the NMP in 2011 and one of the first Chinese-language books devoted to tapa studies, Chang points to modern uses of the substance and its societal implications. “Tapa research could prove significant in fields such as biology, phylogeography, archaeology and anthropology,” he writes. “Further study can help clarify the relationship between Austronesian peoples and tapa culture.”
Through the genetic message preserved in a common plant, the research results from Chung’s team give further credence to the theory that identifies Taiwan as the source of the great Austronesian expansion. “I’ll go deeper into the research to find out more about prehistoric Taiwan’s role in Austronesian migrations,” Chung says, pointing toward an even more precise model of the “out of Taiwan” hypothesis.
Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw