About Ancestors

Abstract

ABSTRACT Though regularly studied as different academic domains, Asian and Oceanian studies are deeply intertwined not only through longstanding political, economic, immigrant – and colonial – ties, but by questions about common ancestry. From popular commercial DNA testing to historical studies in linguistics, folklore, archaeology, biological anthropology, and sophisticated genome sequencing, deep histories of Oceanian Islander peoples have long been tied to ‘origin’ traditions and reconstructions of lineages from the Asian mainland, notably through the Austronesian diaspora. From 19th-century linguistic theories and Lapita sites, to 20th-century ABO blood groupings and contemporary mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA assays, scholars have proposed at times conflicting interpretations of Oceania’s possible Asian human heritage. These analyses have themselves been consistently challenged by Indigenous genealogical traditions such as Māori whakapapa and Islander assertions of origins based on ancestral and localized narratives decolonized of Western scientific practices.