It remains to sum up the implications of the linguistic evidence
reviewed here for reconstructing the prehistory of the Pacific.
- The distribution of subgroups suggests that POc developed as a distinctive
speech tradition following a movement of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian speakers from the
Bird’s Head of New Guinea to a region further east in northwest Melanesia. It is
possible that the movement was in the first instance to the Sarmi Coast and/or the
Jayapura regions immediately east of the Bird’s Head. However, the most probable
dispersal point for all Oceanic subgroups east of Irian Jaya is in the Bismarck
Archipelago, where several high-order subgroups are contiguous.
- After a period of unified development (probably not more than a few centuries)
in northwest Melanesia POc speakers spread rapidly over most of Island Melanesia and
into West Polynesia and Micronesia. If we accept the connection between the fairly
well-dated spread of Lapita culture and the spread of Oceanic, the initial dispersal
across Island Melanesia took place in the second half of the second millennium BC.
At about the same time, Oceanic speakers may have begun to settle on islands close
to the New Guinea mainland around the Huon Peninsula. Settlement of the north coast
of the mainland and the Huon Gulf may have been somewhat later. Following settlement
of the Southeast Papuan region, speakers of a Papuan Tip language moved westwards
along the south coast of Papua. This last movement can be correlated with the
appearance of a pottery-bearing culture in the Central Province around 2000 years
ago.
- Partial reconstruction of various POc terminologies denoting domains and
categories of social structure and material culture is possible. These
reconstructions show, very clearly, that POc speakers preserved fairly completely
the Proto-Malayo-Polynesian and Proto-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian terminologies for
many cultural domains, e.g. the canoe complex, marine life and fishing techniques,
cultivated plants, and kinship. At least five Proto-Malayo-Polynesian pottery terms were retained. However, POc speakers evidently did not preserve terms
for rice culture.
- Some Oceanic communities have retained much more of the total POc lexicon than
others. If we measure cultural conservatism in terms of the degree of retention of
terminologies for various specific domains of technology and social structure, there
is (not surprisingly) a fairly high correlation between linguistic and cultural
conservatism.