The world’s earliest seafarers who set out to colonise remote Pacific islands nearly 3,000 years ago were a matrilocal society with communities organised around the female lineage, analysis of ancient DNA suggests.
The research, based on genetic sequencing of 164 ancient individuals from 2,800 to 300 years ago, suggested that some of the earliest inhabitants of islands in Oceania had population structures in which women almost always remained in their communities after marriage, while men left their mother’s community to live with that of their wife. This pattern is strikingly different from that of patrilocal societies, which appeared to be the norm in ancient populations in Europe and Africa….
[I]t wasn’t until after 3,500 years ago that people, probably living in what is now Taiwan, developed long-distance canoes and ventured out into open ocean, arriving in Remote Oceania. This expansion included the region called Micronesia – about 2,000 small islands north of the equator including Guam, the Marshall Islands, the Caroline Islands, Palau, and the Northern Mariana Islands….
The latest findings, published in the journal Science, involved a genome-wide analysis of 164 ancient individuals from five islands dated to 2,800 to 300 years ago and 112 modern individuals. When separate populations remain isolated over time – on islands, for instance – their genomes drift apart. This effect was seen in the ancient Micronesians, but the genetic drift was significantly greater in the mitochondrial DNA, part of the genome that is passed on only down the female line. This strongly suggests that women were not moving across communities as much as men.
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