The Canoe Is the People

By about 50,000 years ago people had migrated from SE Asia to Australia and Papua New Guinea. Many thousands of years ago, the sea was much lower than today. A lot of the world’s water was frozen in glaciers GLOSSARY glaciers - large area of slow-moving ice on the continents GLOSSARY continents - large area of continuous land . The earth’s climate became warmer around 17,000 to 18,000 years ago, and again between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago. The ice slowly melted, and the new Water covered the lowlands. This created new islands. People whose homes and gardens were flooded had to move and begin a new way of life. Some went inland. But, about 6,000 years ago, the ancestors of today’s Pacific Islanders began voyaging to previously uninhabited islands to the south and east. By 3,000 years ago they became canoe people who travelled and traded between islands as far away as the central Pacific.

Through time, some islands rose and some fell due to underwater earthquakes and sea level adjustments. Today, people tell accounts of big floods and about islands being formed – sometimes fished up. These stories could be about what happened thousands of years ago.

Linguists GLOSSARY linguists - people who study languages and archaeologists GLOSSARY archaeologists - people who study ancient living places and artifacts (objects made by people) are beginning to learn where and how people lived through the flooding times, and why they moved: to find new homes, to trade, to fish, to visit relatives, to find a wife or husband, and even to escape a fight or attack another island. To learn when people were in a place, archaeologists date objects that people used by measuring the age of radiocarbon in them. Human bones can be tested for genetic makeup that reveals their ancestory. use radiocarbon dating GLOSSARY radiocarbon dating - measuring the rate of decay of radioactive carbon in objects to work out their age on objects that they find there, and DNA.

Peopling of the Pacific