Passive Dispersal versus Strategic Dispersal in Island Colonization by Hominins

Abstract

It has been argued recently that artifacts from islands in the Mediterranean and Island Southeast Asia are representative of deliberate maritime colonization by archaic hominins. This runs contrary to the more usual understanding of seas and oceans as barriers to rather than enablers of dispersal in Homo. This paper advances the debate beyond an impasse between maximalist and minimalist interpretations of these data by suggesting that passive sweepstakes dispersal events may be implicated in the distribution of Homo. Very unlikely in the short term but increasingly likely over evolutionary time, it is argued that the small body of data that has been taken to be indicative of early seagoing could in fact represent the archaeological signature of passive long-distance dispersal by archaic hominins. This allows these data to be built into the standard model of hominin dispersal without abandoning the concept of oceans as, in general, representative of barriers to this process.

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