Reddit reviews Tangata Whenua: A History

OK, I'm not a qualified genealogist or an anthropologist, so I don't really feel comfortable getting into a serious academic debate about this, and I'm willing to concede that you might know more about this topic than I do, but I went and dug up that book anyway and had a look at the first few chapters that discuss the migration out of Asia.

I'll quote you a part of the relevant passage of the book (which, incidentally, I very much recommend if you're interested in this topic), which concludes the part where the authors discuss the evidence for different theories about where the Lapita and later Polynesian peoples originally came from:

>It is difficult to predict how the complex debate about human migration and language dispersal will conclude, but imagining that a largely Taiwanese population emarked on a long journey toward destinations that could not have been known is manifestly teleological. No such linear, Taiwanese, migration into the Pacific is apparent, and even genetic markers thought to have close associations with Austronesian language dispersal are proportionately more common in western than eastern islands of Southeast Asia. Neolithic populations with agricultural economies lived in island Southeast Asia long before southward movement from Taiwan. They came from multiple mainland sources, and were continually mobile in any direction, depending on local opportunity.

>Rather than thinking of Polynesian origins in Taiwan, it is more realistic to regard them as the result of a conjunction of Asian and Pacific genetic contributions, material culture assemblages, and economic commodities and strategies that coalesced in or around the Bismark Islands about 3,500 years ago.