From 5000 years ago, Island Southeast Asia was progressively colonized by people who spoke languages in the Austronesian family. These people spread southwards through the Philippines and Moluccas and eastwards into the Pacific. They made pottery and fine elbow-hafted and polished adzes. They kept pigs, dogs and chickens, but their chief characteristic was a mastery of the sea and a predisposition to spread from island to island with maritime cultures. By at least 2000 BC, according to comparative reconstructions, their technology must have included the making of pottery, bark cloth, dug-out canoes, mat sails, ropes, fishing gear and anchors. What little evidence we have, based upon the widespread construction methods of Neolithic boats, suggests that they already had a boatbuilding technology based upon lashings, protruding pierced lugs, and a hollowed base for the hull with added planks. At this stage, however, they must have adopted their own unique triangular sail and the outrigger construction. Along the margins of the large Melanesian islands they were not able to replace the local populations as they eventually did in Indonesia. Passing through Melanesia they left a distinctive incised pottery, called Lapita ware (Spriggs 1984, and this volume; Allen and White 1989). From Melanesian coastlands, about 3000 years ago, they colonized onwards to Tonga and Samoa and continued to develop their maritime cultures. By about 2500 years ago they were ready to make even longer sea voyages, with more substantial cargoes, possibly because they had by that time perfected the double canoe. They carried the large and varied cargoes essential for colonization, including dog, chicken, bamboo, banana, sugar cane, taro, yams, plant medicines and poisons, many fruits and tree seeds.

Travelling eastwards against the prevailing winds and currents, the Polynesians reached the Marquesas by about 200 BC. By about AD 500 they had colonized Hawaii and Easter Island, New Zealand by AD 1200, and eventually almost all of the habitable islands of the central and eastern Pacific. The golden age of occupation of new island groups was recorded in the folk memories and myths that were later written down by the earliest missionaries. Moreover, different schools of navigators in recent times kept open communication by sea within their own island groups by knowing the positions of many islands and the take-off points and shortest sea routes from one group of islands to another (Lewis 1972).

The curious fact is that, although the Austronesians carried out of Asia many cultural features of possible origin in central and southern China, such as making bark cloth, tattooing, certain decorative patterns, pottery making, adze styles, domestic pig, dog and chicken, house and granary designs and many useful plants, there is no trace of Chinese boat technology in Austronesian boats, or vice-versa. Similarly, there is little trace of the Pacific boats among the relatives of the Austronesians in Mainland Southeast Asia. This supports the idea that those details of the boat designs that are characteristic of the Austronesians were adopted in the islands at or after the time that they left Mainland Asia. After all, the combination of outrigger and Oceanic triangular sail is not suitable for lakes or rivers. The peculiarities of the single-outrigger canoes of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia very likely had their origin in pre-Austronesian times in what are now Indonesia and the Philippines.