David Reich

The same sort of parallel thing in another part of the world is what you see in remote Oceania in the southwest Pacific.

So if you look at Vanuatu, which is the islands, some of the first islands that people got about 3,000 years ago in the Southwest Pacific, so moving to this other part of the world, if you look at New Guinea and Australia, people are there almost a little bit after 50,000 years ago.

People are in the Solomon Islands and the Bismarck Archipelago to the east of New Guinea maybe 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, and they stop in the Pacific as all these fertile islands

places that are good places for people to live.

It's completely empty of people until 3,000 years ago.

Suddenly, these people from Taiwan go through the Philippines, they skirt the edge of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, and they get to Vanuatu and Fiji and Tonga and New Caledonia and Samoa.

about 3,000 years ago, super rapidly in the guise of something called the Lapita Cultural Complex.

And if you look at the DNA of the people from this, they're almost entirely East Asian in ancestry.

They look like early Taiwanese people.

And today, people in Vanuatu in Fiji and Tonga in New Caledonia have only 10% of this DNA.

So something else happened afterward.

The first people are almost entirely East Asian via Taiwan and the Philippines.

And then you look at later DNA from the same part, and 2,500 years ago, 500 years after the initial arrival, there's mass movement in a male-driven way from New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago into Vanuatu of Papuans, people...

with overwhelmingly Papuan ancestry from New Guinea coming into Vanuatu, and that's the origin of the ancestry that's overwhelmingly there in Vanuatu and New Caledonia today.

So there's a two-step process.

The initial step, which is East Asian ancestry and these people who invented outrigger canoe technology and long-distance sailing, and then the technology becomes adopted

by Papuans who are using this culture for the next few hundred years.

We can see them trading back and forth between the Bismarck Archipelago and Vanuatu.

By the end, this culture is carried out by Papuan ancestry, and males from this group then spread into Caledonia and take local females.

But the ancestry is flipped from the way that people have this cognitive bias that it should be.