3000 BCE to 1000 CE · Africanspan
The people who settled Polynesia carried taro and yam
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Speakers of Malayo-Polynesian languages moved out through the Philippines, then across almost all of what is now Indonesia and along the northern coasts of New Guinea, bringing East Asian crops with them, rice above all. In New Guinea they met the peoples already there and took up their plants: taro, breadfruit, yam and sugarcane, several of them from an independent centre of agricultural invention on that island. From about 1500 BCE the Oceanic subgroup began a further scattering eastward that ran for twenty five centuries and put the first farmers, and often the first people of any kind, on islands across Micronesia and Polynesia. Rice stayed behind. The crops that fed the Pacific voyages were the tropical ones picked up by exchange in New Guinea. Polynesian society was built on Papuan plants, much as Egypt was built on cultural foundations that came up the Nile. Borrowing across a linguistic boundary is the thread running through the most distant achievements of the ancient world.
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