Current theory

The cradle of the Polynesian ancestors, per the current data of archaeology, linguistics, botany and science (DNA) , has to be searched along the coastal cultures of the southeast Chinese continent, particularly around Fujian. These men made fabrics by beating bark, manufactured ceramics, and had canoes with outriggers. 

They learned how to domesticate many plants and animals which accompanied them during their millennia migrations. They were familiar with an increasingly maritime and insular world, considering the ocean, not like an obstacle on the margin of the continental  world, but like a whole universe to share. Whereas everywhere else, the discoveries were done by foot, on dry  land or, more rarely, crossing deltas and venturing along the coast, here the ocean was a means of subsistence, displacement, discovery and life. 

Throughout this ocean venture from west to east, the generations of navigators, who were certainly sailors but also fishermen, hunters, farmer s , war r ior s , craf t smen, artists … populated many of the Pacific islands. 

They progressed during the following millennia through an increasingly insular universe, and penetrated the Western Pacific more than 4,000 years ago. The study of  their vocabulary teaches us that the taro, yam, sugar cane, pig, dog, chicken … belong to their universe to which the breadfruit tree, the coconut, the banana tree are gradually added. 

Current work from archaeologists on the emergence of these Austronesian people, is locatable in the  beginning of our millennium, in particular by ceramics known as Lapita, possibly in a locality to the north of the Solomon, around Bismarck, the islands of Admiralty, and northeast of Papua New Guinea, where, towards 2,500 B.C., the different cultural populations cohabited. In this area, multiple contacts and  exchanges took place, leading to the installation of the Lapita cultural complex; this will extend from Melanesia to Western Polynesia. Today the Pacific is often subdivided into three large cultural surfaces (Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia); however, linguistically and archaeologically, only the Polynesians can be identified as a unified group: “only in Polynesia do we find an affiliation coherent, significant of a settlement and a culture sharing a common history.”

“Returning to China, Retracing the Route and Revisiting the Philosophers”, US-CHINA REVIEW Spring 2017 Vol. XLI, No.2.