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The broad arc of islands north of Australia that extends from Indonesia east towards the central Pacific is home to a set of human populations whose concentration of diversity is unequaled elsewhere. Approximately 20% of the worlds languages are spoken here, and the biological and genetic heterogeneity among the groups is extraordinary. Anthropologist W.W. Howells once declared diversity in the region so Protean as to defy analysis. However, this book can now claim considerable success in describing and understanding the origins of the genetic and linguistic variation there. In order to cut through this biological knot, the authors have applied a comprehensive battery of genetic analyses to an intensively sampled set of populations, and have subjected these and complementary linguistic data to a variety of phylogenetic analyses. This has revealed a number of heretofore unknown ancient Pleistocene genetic variants that are only found in these island populations, and has also identified the genetic footprints of more recent migrants from Southeast Asia who were the ancestors of the Polynesians. The book lays out the very complex structure of the variation within and among the islands in this relatively small region, and a number of explanatory models are tested to see which best account for the observed pattern of genetic variation here. The results suggest that a number of commonly used models of evolutionary divergence are overly simple in their assumptions, and that often human diversity has accumulated in very complex ways.
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Genes, Language, and Culture History in the Southwest Pacific HUMAN EVOLUTION SERIES SERIES EDITORS Russell L. Ciochon, The University of Iowa Bernard A. Wood, George Washington University EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Leslie Aiello, University College, London Alison Brooks, George Washington University Fred Grine, State University of New York, Stony Brook Andrew Hill, Yale University David Pilbeam, Harvard University Yoel Rak, Tel-Aviv University Mary Ellen Ruvolo, Harvard University Henry Schwarcz, McMaster University African Biogeography, Climate Change, and Human Evolution Edited by Timothy G. Bromage and Friedemann Schrenk Meat-Eating and Human Evolution Edited by Craig B. Stanford and Henry T. Bunn The Skull of Australopithecus afarensis William H. Kimbel, Yoel Rak, and Donald C. Johanson Early Modern Human Evolution in Central Europe: The People of Dolni Vˇestonice and Pavlov Edited by Erik Trinkaus and Jiˇrí Svoboda Evolution of the Human Diet: The Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable Edited by Peter S. Ungar Genes, Language, and Culture History in the Southwest Pacific Edited by Jonathan Scott Friedlaender Genes, Language, and Culture History in the Southwest Pacific EDITED BY Jonathan Scott Friedlaender 1 2007 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2007 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Genes, language,