Taiwan find may throw light on Pacific settlers
TAIWAN: Taiwanese archaeologists working on an islet off China have
unearthed the remains of a Stone Age male who may provide clues about
ancient people who eventually dispersed throughout the entire Pacific.
The man, who was about 35 when he died nearly eight thousand years
ago, may be a remote relative of Taiwan's aborigines who today make up
about two percent of the island's population, according to the head of
the team, Chen Chung-yu.
"Judging from the way the body was buried, it could be a person from
what we now call the Austronesia language family," said Chen, a research
fellow at Taiwan's Academia Sinica institute. Taiwan's aborigines belong
to the same language family, as do the people who migrated across the
Pacific as far as Eastern Island off the coast of Chile in prehistoric
times.
Chen and his team of three excavated the remains -- a nearly complete
skeleton -- on Liang Island, a tiny Taiwanese-controlled islet 30
kilometers (19 miles) off China's southeastern Fujian province, in
December.
The burial site had emerged purely by chance, as the Taiwanese
military was digging up the soil to prepare for the construction of a
road on the 1.4-kilometre (0.9-mile island). AFP
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