Foraging economies existed in Island Southeast Asia, including Borneo and the Philippines, long before the spread of Austronesian-speaking peoples. On this point, the archaeological record is clear. But, with the arrival of the Austronesians, the nature of these economies was almost certainly transformed. Foragers were enveloped with agriculturalists and others in networks of symbiotic exchange. One consequence of this envelopment may well have been an expansion of foraging itself, now by Austronesian-speaking peoples, into a variety of previously unexploited or little utilized ecosystems, including possibly the ever-wet rainforest. More likely, rainforest foraging was already practised, but was intensified by trade and made more effective as a result of contact with settled, technically advanced agricultural populations.

Another expansion was almost certainly into the coastal foreshores and sheltered offshore waters and reefs. Here, however, the development of an early foraging tradition is still largely conjectural. While maritime technologies clearly played a part in the spread of the Austronesians, whether boat-nomadic groups were involved or not is far less certain. More probably, as Bellwood suggests, maritime specializations developed out of the process of expansion itself. And as Urry argues, the geography of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago itself would have been a powerful stimulus to such a development. What we do know is that, by the time of European penetration, maritime foragers were already widely dispersed throughout much of Island Southeast Asia, some of them, like the Sama-Bajau, phenomenally so. How long the ancestral traditions to these historical forms of boat nomadism may have been present is uncertain, although evidence for the Sama-Bajau suggests that scattered groups of sea nomads may have emerged by as much as 1000 years ago, perhaps earlier. Whatever the case, maritime boat people contributed in a major way to later Austronesian history, particularly to the early development of maritime trading states and to the networks of communication and long-distance commerce on which these states were founded.