A Maritime Route Brought First Farmers to Mainland Southeast Asia

Abstract

The domestication of rice first took place in the Yangtze River Valley. It is argued that the expansion of farming communities to the south reached mainland Southeast Asia starting in the late third millennium BC. The conjunction of new archaeological and bioanthropogical information, and the re-examination of older reports, is beginning to shed light on the southward expansion of Neolithic rice farmers. The existing evidence suggests that a maritime expansion took place, originating in the lower Yangtze and spreading south along the coast of Fujian to Lingnan and then into Southeast Asia. This shift brought farmers into a wide range of new habitats long densely inhabited by indigenous hunter-gatherers. Three key sites document this maritime expansion in Southeast Asia. Man Bac is located in Bac Bo, the Red River area of Northern Vietnam; An Son is one of several sites in the Dong Nai Valley of Southern Vietnam; and Khok Phanom Di is located on the former estuary of the Bang Pakong River in Central Thailand, where a new analysis of cranial and dental variables has linked the inhabitants to the migrating farmers. Yet the population’s adaptation to a marine estuarine habitat made rice cultivation marginal at best, and the new settlers turned instead to hunting and gathering, even as they continued to maintain a fully Neolithic material culture.