Only some 3500 years ago people began to colonize the South Pacific archipelagos of Oceania. An international team of researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena now analyzed for the first time, the genomes of the first settlers who lived on the island chains Tonga and Vanuatu 3100-2500 years ago. The results, published today in Nature contradict common assumptions about the colonization of the region and point to another large and previously unknown migration wave from Melanesia.
ancient individuals carried no trace of ancestry from people who settled Papua New Guinea