Humans have been journeying for thousands of years, arriving in new lands in migratory waves. “All humans are ultimately Africans because our last common ancestor lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago,” said Dr Jiao.
In that sense, regardless of ethnicity, we are all descendants of migrants.
Common roots
ZIYING'S BRUSH
In the remote past, Tanshishan was home to the ancestors of the Malays and Polynesians.
THE late 19th and early 20th centuries were a peak immigration period for old Malaya when the forefathers of most Malaysians of Chinese descent came to the country seeking refuge from dire circumstances in their native land.
The Indians and other minorities too, have their own poignant stories. All these immigrants suffered unspeakable hardships and made immeasurable contributions to their adopted land.
For a long time, it was posited that the early ancestors of the Malays migrated south from what is now China’s Yunnan province. That there might yet be an additional source, also in China, of the peoples of archipelagic South-East Asia is perhaps less well-known, but is now widely accepted by anthropologists who consider coastal south-eastern China the original homeland of the Austronesians, a grouping which, of course, includes the Malays.
Songxia: The ancestors of the Austronesians may have left long ago, but some coastal Fujianese still rely on the sea for their livelihoodUpon migration to Taiwan, these littoral people who were intrepid sea-farers dispersed throughout Oceania (Samoa, Hawaii, etc) as well as South-East Asia, eventually reaching the Malay Peninsula 2,500 years ago (Lost Maritime Cultures, Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu). Evidently the progenies of these peripatetic Austronesians became an integral part of modern Malaysia’s majority population.
Just an hour and a half from my grandfather’s village in Fujian and barely 20 minutes from the provincial capital Fuzhou is an archaeologically significant 5,000-year-old Austronesian site named Tanshishan, reportedly the most scrutinised in the region.
I first heard of it from Dr Tianlong Jiao of Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, whose research on Austronesians brings him frequently to Fujian which, he says, is one of the most important places for studying their origins.
A few months later, on a routine trip to my ancestral village, I visited the pre-historic location with Dr Jiao. A brand new museum comprising three separate buildings housing half a dozen galleries, as well as shops, restaurants and educational and multimedia facilities now sits on the 30,000sqm Tanshishan (Pond Rock Hill) site.
The busts of two proto-Austronesians - a male and a female modelled on excavated skulls - greet the visitor in the main building’s foyer. The female is strong-featured and full-lipped, appearing remarkably Polynesian (at least to my eyes), while the male looked much like the natives of Sabah and Sarawak.
The foyer leads to a gallery showcasing stone tools, cooking vessels and containers of thin ceramic.
“Some of these are as fine as 2.5mm,” said museum director Lin Gongwu, adding that they share similarities with artefacts found in Taiwan, which implies a pattern of cultural exchange and migration.
In the gallery on daily life, reconstructions of the early inhabitants show individuals perhaps 1.5m tall. As expected of littoral peoples, fish and shellfish were their dietary mainstay, supplemented by rice.
After our museum visit, Lin invited us to a lunch of local fare at a home-style eating place. Fresh seafood was the main feature, with steamed crabs, oyster omelette, fish, clams, shellfish and finally, a pot of soup with sweet, tender mussels easily 7cm or 8cm long. Looking at the spread before us, it occurred to me that we were eating the very same food that the Austronesians might have consumed four to five millennia ago, and probably at the very same spot.
When we arrived at Tanshishan, Lin and his team were in a flurry of last-minute preparations for the museum’s opening on June 14 and not all the exhibits were ready. The facility is completed now and I am told it is impressive.
Dr Jiao tells me there are a number of other locations in coastal Fujian where researchers are conducting studies on vanished nautical cultures. What is clear is that over the centuries and for whatever reasons, these populations left their homeland and eventually found new abodes across the seas, including in present-day Malaysia.
Humans have been journeying for thousands of years, arriving in new lands in migratory waves. “All humans are ultimately Africans because our last common ancestor lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago,” said Dr Jiao.
In that sense, regardless of ethnicity, we are all descendants of migrants.
Ziying can be reached at ziyingster@gmail.com
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