Tracking Austronesian expansion into the Pacific via the paper mulberry plant

Abstract

One of the strategies the ancestors of Pacific peoples used for successful settlement of the islands of the Pacific Ocean was the concept of transported landscapes (1). Pacific peoples carried their culturally and economically important plants and animals in their colonizing canoes and introduced these species to the islands they settled, which were relatively impoverished in terms of terrestrial resources. It has been demonstrated that phylogeographic analyses of these plants and animals can serve as proxies for reconstructing the pathways of colonizing canoes, and thus trace the movement of Pacific peoples and identify their likely origins. This “commensal approach” to tracking the movement of prehistoric Pacific peoples has to date focused primarily on the animals transported by Pacific colonists, including the Pacific rat (2, 3), pigs (4), and chickens (5). In PNAS, Chang et al. (6) now present genetic analyses of one of the important plant species carried into and across the Pacific in colonizing canoes, with their study of the paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera).

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