Listening audioscript

Number 3, Page 304
[ mp3 134]
 
Listen to the lecture and take notes in the space provided for you below. 
(Professor):
Polynesians are the people who inhabit the islands that are scattered 
over 70 million square miles of Pacific Ocean in an enormous triangle 
from New Zealand in the southwest, Easter Island in the southeast, and 
Hawaii in the north. Until recently, evidence was pointing toward a rather 
clear picture of where the Polynesian people originally came from. The 
traditional theory claims that the people whose descendants became the 
Polynesians left the island of Taiwan some 4,000 years ago and spread 
to the islands east of Australia by around 1000 BCE. It was at this time 
that the islands of Western Polynesia were reached by the first settlers. 
The theory, called the “Lapita Only” hypothesis, says that only these 
people, the Lapita people, then spread out to all of the Polynesian 
islands. 
 
 
This theory is based on linguistic and archaeological evidence and some 
further DNA evidence. Linguists, who study language, can compare 
words in the Polynesian family of languages, such as Hawaiian or 
Tahitian and look for similarities in Southeast Asian languages and 
thereby follow these languages back in time to their origin. Similarities in 

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LPREP IBT 3 E AudioScript 
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the languages indicate that the earliest form of the Polynesian languages 
originated in Taiwan. 
Now, the archaeological evidence includes a style of ancient pottery 
called Lapita. Thus, we call the people who created this pottery, the 
Lapita as well. These ceramic pots and bowls, with their beautifully 
detailed designs, were among the first archaeological evidence 
discovered on the islands of Western Polynesia, where the great 
colonization began. This would indicate that the Lapita people who 
created the pottery were the first to make their home on the islands. 
OK, so here’s where some new genetic evidence conflicts with the 
traditional theory. We can use mitochondrial DNA, called mtDNA, to trace 
the origin of a people’s DNA back in time to different populations. The 
mtDNA evidence indicates that people first arrived on the islands east of 
Australia some five to six thousand years ago not from the island of 
Taiwan at all, but from the mainland of southeastern Asia. This new 
evidence does not ignore or cancel out the linguistic and archaeological 
evidence for the theory, but it does make it clear that the long accepted 
theory is going to have to be altered to include the new genetic evidence.