Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderMaritime migration fact

Starting from Taiwan more than 4,000 years ago, seafarers speaking languages of the Austronesian family settled the islands of South-East Asia and much of the Pacific, as far as Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, and to the west reached Madagascar.

Austronesian expansion

MigrationOceanLanguageCultureTechnology

The story behind the card

Most linguists, archaeologists and geneticists agree that the expansion started in Taiwan and reached the Philippines by around 2000 BC, though the newcomers mixed extensively with people already living in the islands. Sailing outrigger canoes, boats steadied by a float on one side, they carried taro, yams, pigs, dogs and chickens. From about 3,300 years ago a distinctive stamped pottery called Lapita marks their spread into the western Pacific. Navigating by stars, ocean swells and birds, Polynesian voyagers later reached Hawaii, Easter Island and finally New Zealand, around AD 1250 to 1300. About 1,500 years ago others crossed the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, which is why Malagasy is most closely related to a language of Borneo.

Türkçe oku
Avustronezya dil ailesinden dilleri konuşan denizciler, 4.000 yılı aşkın bir süre önce Tayvan'dan yola çıkarak Güneydoğu Asya adalarına ve Pasifik'in büyük bölümüne yerleşti. Hawaii, Yeni Zelanda ve Paskalya Adası'na kadar ilerlediler, batıda da Madagaskar'a ulaştılar.

Dilbilimcilerin, arkeologların ve genetikçilerin çoğu, bu yayılmanın Tayvan'da başladığı ve MÖ 2000 dolaylarında Filipinler'e ulaştığı görüşünde; ancak yeni gelenler adalarda zaten yaşayan halklarla yoğun biçimde karıştı. Bir yanlarındaki yüzdürücüyle dengelenen kanolarla yol alan bu denizciler yanlarında taro, yam, domuz, köpek ve tavuk taşıdı. Yaklaşık 3.300 yıl öncesinden itibaren Lapita adı verilen, damga desenli kendine özgü bir çömlek türü, batı Pasifik'e yayılışlarının izini sürmeyi sağlar. Yıldızlardan, okyanus dalgalarından ve kuşlardan yön bulan Polinezyalı denizciler daha sonra Hawaii'ye, Paskalya Adası'na ve en son, MS 1250–1300 dolaylarında Yeni Zelanda'ya ulaştı. Yaklaşık 1.500 yıl önce ise başka bir grup Hint Okyanusu'nu aşıp Madagaskar'a vardı; Malgaşçanın en yakın akrabasının Borneo'da konuşulan bir dil olmasının nedeni budur.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Austronesian expansion
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderMigration

Polynesian navigators crossed thousands of kilometres of open Pacific without compass, charts or instruments. They steered by rising and setting stars, the sun, ocean swells and seabirds, and kept track of speed and direction in their heads.

By the 1970s the old skills had almost disappeared, and some scholars argued that the Pacific islands had been settled by canoes drifting there by chance. The Polynesian Voyaging Society set out to test this with the help of Mau Piailug, a master navigator from the small island of Satawal in Micronesia, where a closely related tradition survived. In 1976 he guided the double-hulled canoe Hōkūleʻa about 4,000 kilometres from Hawaii to Tahiti without any instruments. The voyage showed that deliberate long-distance navigation was possible. Piailug went on to teach Hawaiian navigators, among them Nainoa Thompson, and traditional wayfinding has since been revived across the Pacific.

Polynesian wayfindingRead card
WonderMigration

Over several thousand years, Bantu-speaking farming peoples spread from the highlands between today's Cameroon and Nigeria across most of central, eastern and southern Africa. Hundreds of related Bantu languages, including Swahili, Zulu, Shona and Kikuyu, are spoken there today.

Historians once pictured a single great 'Bantu migration'. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence now points to a slower spread along many routes, roughly between 4000 BC and AD 500, with Bantu speakers reaching what is now South Africa by about AD 300. The German linguist Wilhelm Bleek coined the name Bantu in 1862 from the word for 'people' shared by many of these languages. Farming, herding and iron-working spread in different mixes from region to region, and everywhere the newcomers mixed with the people already living there. The click sounds of Zulu and Xhosa, for example, were borrowed from the Khoisan languages spoken earlier in southern Africa.

Bantu migrationsRead card
WonderTrade

For more than two thousand years, Indian Ocean trade ran on the monsoon winds, which reverse with the seasons. Timing their voyages to them, merchants linked East Africa, Arabia, India, South-East Asia and China through a chain of busy ports.

In the northern Indian Ocean the monsoon blows from the south-west in summer and from the north-east in winter, so a ship could sail out on one season's wind and home on the next. A Greek sailing guide from the first century AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, already describes this trade between Egypt, Arabia, East Africa and India. Arab and Persian dhows (wooden sailing ships), Indian and Malay vessels, and later Chinese fleets used the same system; Admiral Zheng He's expeditions reached East Africa in the early 1400s. Ports such as Kilwa, Calicut and Malacca grew rich on spices, cotton cloth, porcelain and gold, and Islam, Swahili culture and many words travelled the same routes.

Indian Ocean tradeRead card
DriveDesign

Isotype is a way of showing social and economic data with rows of small repeated pictures, so that people can understand it across languages and levels of schooling. It was developed in 1920s Vienna by Otto Neurath, Marie Reidemeister (later Marie Neurath) and the graphic artist Gerd Arntz.

Isotype stands for International System of Typographic Picture Education. Otto Neurath developed it in 1920s Vienna at the Social and Economic Museum, aiming to let ordinary readers, including people with little schooling, compare social and economic data at a glance. Its central rule was to never resize a single icon to show a bigger quantity; instead, a larger number was shown by repeating the same small icon more times, so a reader could count as well as compare. After Austria's political turmoil forced Neurath to flee in 1934, he continued the project first in the Netherlands and later in England. The approach's descendants are visible today in transport maps, road signs and the small repeated icons used in modern infographics.

Isotype picture languageRead card
WonderTechnology

A hyperlink lets one document open into another, turning web reading into a network of chosen paths.

In 1945 the American engineer Vannevar Bush imagined a desk-sized machine he called the Memex, which would let a reader join pages of microfilm into personal 'trails', long before computers could do anything like it. Ted Nelson, who read Bush's essay, is credited with coining the term 'link' in the mid-1960s at the start of his Project Xanadu, and in 1968 Douglas Engelbart's team showed working links between pieces of text on a real computer in a famous live demonstration. Tim Berners-Lee, working at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, joined the idea to the internet: he proposed the World Wide Web in 1989, and in 1991 pages written in his HTML language began linking to one another, so a decades-old idea became something anyone with a browser could click.

CERN / Web historyRead card
Next card in the archiveDuring the Great Migration, from the 1910s to the 1970s, roughly six million Black Americans left the U.S. South for cities in the North, Midwest and West, reshaping work, politics, music and family life.Read next →