Austronesian people

According to Peter Belwood, the Austronesian people originated from the Taiwan region and the southern coast of China, the phenomenal process of colonization that occurred possibly caused by one of the Taiwanese-Austronesian communities, perhaps from the southeast who moved to the south, namely the Philippines. Finally they moved through the Philippine Islands. which continued to move southwest, through Kalimantan and then Sumatra and Java, bypassing the Malay Peninsula, eastern Vietnam and Cambodia. The second migration from the Philippines moved to the south, namely Sulawesi. The causes of migration of the Austronesian people are indeed very complex and in many prehistoric cases the causes of population migration can no longer be clearly identified for many reasons.

The possible reason is the demographic factor, because the ancestors of the Austronesian people were farmers, so the Austronesian people expanded into areas where the demographics allowed them to develop agriculture, so they moved to areas where the indigenous people of the area still used hunting and gathering methods.

The success in building settlements may have been due to demographic factors as the agricultural economy moved completely to hunter-gatherer areas. The agricultural economy of mainland New Guinea may provide clear evidence of why there are settlements there that appear to have been abandoned for over a thousand years thereafter.

The evidence from comparative linguistics and archeology as evidence for the historical origin and distribution of the Austronesian people is so overwhelming in general that most research in other disciplines has moved to ask more specific questions. These questions relate to the transformations that occurred as a result of this Austronesian spread, both internal developments in individual Austronesian cultures and developments resulting from contacts between Austronesian groups and with other populations and cultures. Neither biology, language nor Austronesian culture have been static over the past 5000 years.