Voyage of Going: beyond the blue line 2
A
One feels a certain sympathy for Captain James Cook on the day in 1778 that he "discovered" Hawaii. Then on his third expedition to the Pacific, the British navigator had explored scores of islands across the breadth of the a, from lush New Zealand to the lonely wastes of Easter Island. This latest voyage had taken him thousands of miles north from the Society Islands to an archipelago so remote that even the old Polynesians back on Tahiti knew nothing about it. Imagine Cook's surpri, then, when the natives of Hawaii came paddling out in their canoes and greeted him in a familiar tongue, one he had heard on virtually every mote of inhabited land he had visited. Marveling at the ubiquity of this Pacific language and culture, he later wondered in his journal: "How shall we account for this Nation spreading it lf so far over this Vast ocean?"
B
Answers have been slow in coming. But now a startling archaeological find on the island of Éfaté, in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, has revealed an ancient afaring people, the distant ancestors of today's Polynesians, taking their first steps into the unknown. The discoveries there have also opened a window S1254401 Checkboxes & Related Question Types True / Fal / NG List of Headings Summary Paragraph Matching Matching Multiple Choices Passage Backgrounds S1. 周次古代航海家（地理类） into the shadowy world of tho early voyagers. At the same time, other pieces of this human puzzle are turning up in unlikely places. Climate data gleaned from slow-growing corals around the Pacific and from diments in alpine lakes in South America may help explain how, more than a thousand years later, a cond wave of afarers beat their way across the entire Pacific.
C
威严的近义词"What we have is a first- or cond-generation site containing the graves of some of the Pacific's first explorers," says Spriggs, professor of archaeology at the Australian National
描写梅花University and co-leader of an international team excavating the site. It came to light only by luck. A backhoe operator, digging up topsoil on the grounds of a derelict coconut plantation, scraped open a grave - the first of dozens in a burial ground some 3,000 years old. It is the oldest cemetery ever found in the Pacific islands, and it harbors the bones of an ancient people archaeologists call the Lapita, a label that derives from a beach in New Caledonia where a landmark cache of their pottery was found in the 1950s. They were daring blue-water adventurers who roved the a not just as explorers but also as pioneers, bringing along everything they would need to build new lives - their families and livestock, taro edlings and stone tools.
D
Within the span of a few centuries the Lapita stretched the boundaries of their world from the jungle-clad volcanoes of Papua New Guinea to the loneliest coral outliers of Tonga, at least 2,000 miles eastward in the Pacific. Along the way they explored millions of square miles of unknown a, discovering and colonizing scores of tropical islands never before en by human eyes: Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa.
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E
What little is known or surmid about them has been pieced together from fragments of pottery, animal bones, obsidian flakes, and such oblique sources as comparative linguistics and geochemistry. Although their voyages can be traced back to the northern islands of Papua New Guinea, their language - variants of which are still spoken across the Pacific - came from Taiwan. And their peculiar style of pottery decoration, created by pressing a carved stamp into the clay, probably had its roots in the northern Philippines. With the discovery of the Lapita cemetery on Éfaté, the volume of data available to rearchers has expanded dramatically. The bones of at least 62 individuals have been uncovered so far - including old men, young women, even babies - and more skeletons are known to be in the ground. Archaeologists were also thrilled to discover six complete Lapita pots; before this, only four had ever been found. Other discoveries included a burial urn with modeled birds arranged on the rim as though peering down at the human bones aled inside. It's an important find, Spriggs says, for it conclusively identifies the remains as Lapita. "It would be hard for anyone to argue that the aren't Lapita when yo
u have human bones enshrined inside what is unmistakably a Lapita urn."
F
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企业资信证明Several lines of evidence also undergird Spriggs's conclusion that this was a community of pioneers making their first voyages into the remote reaches of Oceania. For one thing, the radiocarbon dating of bones and charcoal places them early in the Lapita expansion. For another, the chemical makeup of the obsidian flakes littering the site indicates that the rock wasn't local; instead it was imported from a large island in Papua New Guinea's Bismarck Archipelago, the springboard for the Lapita's thrust into the Pacific. A particularly intriguing clue comes from chemical tests on the teeth of veral skeletons. DNA tead from the ancient bones may also help answer one of the most puzzling questions in Pacific anthropology: Did all Pacific islanders spring from one source or many? Was there only one outward migration from a single point in Asia, or veral from different points? "This reprents the best opportunity we've had yet," says Spriggs, "to find out who the Lapita actually were, where they came from, and who their clost descendants are today."
