Saturday, 20 OCT 2012
Today we are at sea, destined to arrive in Sydney tomorrow morning. As we leave the domain of the South Pacific Islands I want to illustrate the characteristic appearance of the natives. The region is divided into three large groups of islands based on the ancestry of the people who first settled them.Micronesia includes the Marshall Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and others approximately located in the northwest zone of Oceania between the equator and the Tropic of Cancer (the northern hemisphere tropic) and between longitude 130 East and 180. We are not visiting any of the Micronesian islands.
Melanesia includes Fiji, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia, as well as the Solomon Islands and others. They were settled by people like those of Borneo and Papua New Guinea. They are very dark-skinned and have facial features more similar to Africans and Australian Aborigines than to Asians.
Polynesia includes Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, and Hawai'i, among others. Polynesians are lighter-skinned, though still quite brown, and have more asiatic facial features. Their ancestors began their long migration from Formosa or the east coast of China some 5000 years ago. Their Lapita pottery first appears on Fiji, but they were evidently displaced by Melanesians.
These origins and distinctions between the three groups of Oceanic peoples is supported by cultural archeology, linguistics, and DNA correlations both through the maternal line (mitochondrial DNA) and through the paternal line (Y-chromosome).
Here are some examples of Melanesians:
Here are some Polynesians from Hawai'i and American Samoa
Posted from Tyler's iPad
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