The Austronesian expansion

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The dispersal that carried one language family across roughly half the circumference of the planet, in a sequence that linguistics reconstructed and archaeology then dated. The conventional outline begins with movement out of Taiwan into the northern Philippines around the third millennium BCE, spreads through island Southeast Asia, and then divides: westward across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar in the first millennium CE, and eastward into the Pacific, where the Lapita cultural complex marks the entry into Remote Oceania — Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa — in the later second millennium BCE. Eastern Polynesia was settled much later, and the last major landmass reached was Aotearoa New Zealand, around the thirteenth century CE. What makes this the strongest case in comparative linguistics is that two independent records agree in order: the branching structure of the family, derived purely from sound correspondences among modern languages, predicts a settlement sequence, and the radiocarbon chronology of pottery, houses and domesticates recovers substantially the same sequence. The dates come from archaeology; the order comes from the languages.