Oceania is a geographical region with disputed borders but generally encompasses Australia, New Guinea, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.[Note 1]
The prehistoric peopling of Oceania took place through two major expansion movements. The first occurred between 50 and 70,000 years ago and brought Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers from continental Asia to populate Insulindia, then nearby Oceania, i.e. New Guinea, Australia, and certain Melanesian islands.
The second wave is more recent, starting around 6,000 years ago. Farmers and navigators from Taiwan, speaking Austronesian languages, populated Insulinde, i.e. the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. From the eastern islands of Indonesia, these Austronesian navigators made their way, from 1500 BC onwards, to New Guinea and Melanesia, then to the islands of distant Oceania. They were the first to reach Micronesia and Polynesia. Tonga, in western Polynesia, was first settled around 3,300 years ago. Perhaps a millennium ago, they even reached South America. Finally, Austronesians speaking Barito languages, who may have started from Borneo further west, reached the African island of Madagascar 1,500 years ago, making it the fourth major Austronesian island in linguistic terms.
All along the way, the populations of the first and, above all, second waves of settlement mixed to a considerable extent, both culturally and genetically. If we focus on these two major waves of modern human settlement, this does not rule out intermediate colonization: the Pama-Nyungan wave in Australia from south of Sulawesi (Toalian culture), and the Trans-Neo-Guinean wave in New Guinea.
The question of the origin of the Oceanians has been one of the major themes of Oceanic research since the 19th century. Today, thanks to archaeology, linguistics, ethnolinguistics, ethnobotany, and genetics, we have a more or less coherent answer to this question, but many points remain unresolved.
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