Reconsidering Austronesian Homeland and Dispersal Models using Genetic and Morphological Signatures of Domestic Animals

农业的发明和在世界各地的传播是人类历史上最重要的事件之一，它继续塑造我们今天的存在。理解这一过程是理解人类文明的关键之一，然而，尽管经过了数十年的研究，关于它为什么、在哪里和如何发生以及它对人类的早期影响的基本问题仍然没有答案。早期家畜及其野生祖先的骨骼通常在考古遗址中发现，它们为许多问题提供了重要线索。新的科学技术，包括使用遗传学和对这些古老骨骼形状的统计分析，开始为驯化过程本身的生物学提供独特的见解，以及随着农民进入新的地区，追踪其传播的新方法。早期农民最重要的旅行之一是首先从东亚大陆进入东南亚岛屿，然后进入太平洋。这一运动传统上被认为是由一个语言上相关的群体开始的，称为南岛语族。对语言、陶器和人类肠道细菌的研究表明，台湾的农民开始向南迁移，到达菲律宾，然后继续前往新几内亚岛。从那里，一个被称为拉皮塔的文化独特的群体向东进入太平洋。这些人是波利尼西亚人的祖先，他们在地球上最偏远的岛屿上殖民。当农民迁移时，他们不仅带走了农具和植物，还带走了家畜。当我们调查整个东南亚岛屿的考古猪的遗传特征时，我们期望证据表明猪到达太平洋的路线与人类相似。毕竟，猪不可能游过公海到达西波利尼西亚群岛。然而，我们的发现有力地表明，与拉皮塔扩张有关的猪并不像人们所认为的那样来自台湾，而是起源于越南，然后沿着苏门答腊岛和爪哇岛沿着旅行，最后到达新几内亚。台湾外模式的核心假设是，农业包装的所有单个元素都起源于台湾，每个元素都应该讲述同样的故事。猪的数据和人类的证据之间的矛盾意味着太平洋殖民的故事比以前想象的要复杂得多。通过增加和扩展我们以前在猪身上的工作，包括狗和鸡，我们计划解开这些复杂性。我们将从两个不同的角度开始研究整个地区的考古遗迹。通过采用新开发的技术来量化形状变化（称为几何形态测量学），我们将能够识别诊断特征，这将使我们能够确定所检查样本的祖先的起源。此外，我们将从考古材料中提取DNA，并将基因序列与全球数据库进行比较。这些技术的结合不仅可以从同一标本中获得两种不同的数据，而且可以比较每种数据的证据，并通过时间空间追踪签名。我们还将收集和分析来自整个地区的现代猪，狗和鸡样本，以确定它们的遗传多样性。这项研究的这一要素将使我们能够提出有关现代和古代标本之间关系的问题，以及不同的家养动物之间杂交的程度。总的来说，我们的目标是重建早期农民迁移到太平洋的详细地图，使我们能够获得一系列长期存在的问题的答案，并深入了解农业，人类迁移和文明的起源。

The invention and spread of farming around the world was one of the most important events in human history, and it continues to shape our existence today. Understanding this process is one of the keys to understanding human civilization, yet despite decades of study, fundamental questions regarding why, where and how it occurred, and what were its early consequences for humankind remain unanswered. The bones of early domestic animals and their wild ancestors are commonly found at archaeological sites and they hold important clues to many of these questions. New scientific techniques including the use of genetics and statistical analyses of the shapes of these ancient bones are beginning to provide unique insights into the biology of the domestication process itself, as well as new ways of tracking its spread as farmers moved into new areas. One of the most momentous journeys made by early farmers was firstly from mainland East Asia into Island Southeast Asia, and then into the Pacific. This movement is traditionally thought to have begun by a linguistically related group known as the Austronesians. Evidence from studies of languages, pottery, and human gut bacteria suggest that farmers in Taiwan began heading south, reaching the Philippines before continuing on towards the island of New Guinea. From there, a culturally distinct group known as Lapita headed east into the Pacific. These were the ancestors of the Polynesians who went onto colonize the most remote islands on Earth. When farmers migrate, they take with them not just their agricultural tools and their plants, but also their domestic animals as well. When we investigated the genetic signatures of archaeological pigs throughout Island Southeast Asia, we expected the evidence to show that the route pigs took to reach the Pacific mirrored that of the humans. After all, pigs could not have swum across the open ocean to reach the islands of West Polynesia. What we found, however, strongly suggested that the pigs associated with the Lapita expansion did not come from Taiwan, as the people seem to have, but originated instead in Vietnam, then travelling along the islands of Sumatra and Java before reaching New Guinea. The assumption at the heart of the Out-of-Taiwan model holds that all of the individual elements of the farming package first originated in Taiwan, and that each of the elements should tell the same story. The contradiction between the pig data and the human evidence implies that the story of the Pacific colonization was a great deal more complex than previously imagined. By adding to and extending our previous work on pigs to include dogs and chickens, we plan to unravel these complexities. We will start by examining archaeological remains from sites across the region from two different perspectives. By employing newly developed techniques to quantify shape changes (called geometric morphometrics), we will be able to identify diagnostic signatures that will enable us to pinpoint the origins of the ancestors of the examined sample. In addition, we will extract DNA from the archaeological material and compare the genetic sequences with a global database. The combination of these techniques will also us not only to acquire two different kinds of data from the same specimen, but also to compare the evidence from each and trace the signatures through time space. We will also collect and analyze modern pig, dog, and chicken samples from throughout the region to ascertain their genetic diversity. This element of the study will enable us to ask questions about the relationships between modern and ancient specimens, and the degree of hybridization between different waves of incoming domestic animals. Overall we aim to reconstruct a detailed map of the migration of early farmers into the Pacific, allowing us to obtain answers to a series of longstanding questions, and insights into the origins of agriculture, human migration, and civilization.