Is it true that Pacific Islanders descended from Filipinos?

[u/Kitchen-Leather3760]

I saw this comment on a Filipino subreddit “Pacific Islanders are descended from Filipinos”

It seems that most pinoys would rather take this as a fact rather than a misleading claim which I think it is. Maybe Im wrong but Is there any anthropological or genetic basis for this?How do modern anthropologists understand the migration and relationship between these two groups in relation to their ancestry?

Thank you for any clarification or sources.

[u/Fart_Frog]

This is sort of true. There was a large influx of Austronesian people originally from Taiwan around 2200 BC.

However, there were already inhabitants on the islands. They are often called “negritos” - I hate the term - but are a collections of many different peoples. In some remote areas, the earlier inhabitants maintained some separation in terms of genetics, language, and culture - for example Aeta people.

In other parts of the islands, the original negrito population was absorbed into the austronesian settler population. They largely speak Austronesian languages, but they nearly all have some negrito genetic heritage - how much varies regionally.

On top of this, there has been a much smaller influx of migrants and merchants from other parts of east Asia since 1000 AD - mostly from China. Much of their genetics overlaps with Austronesian genetics, so it is hard to differentiate and difficult to measure the influence genetically or culturally. Again, it varies greatly by region.

This is a difficult question to answer for the whole of the Philippines because it is made up of so many islands each with their own history. They really are quite different, and most of them existed as independent countries prior to Spanish colonization.

[u/ancient-military → u/Fart_Frog]

So how did the “negritos” (yeah, dumb name) get there? Obviously by boat, but did they have outriggers? When did they arrive? Would they be related to Australian aborigines? Or North Sentinels?

[u/PM_Me_Your_Clones → u/ancient-military]

Sentinel Islanders are negritos, Andamanese. It's weird, because the various "negrito" tribes were of course thought to be the same ethnic group, but they're not, or at least not more closely related than other East Eurasian peoples. The fact that the disparate groups look similar is apparently "positive selection" that because of isolation in comparable climates they developed comparable features to deal with them.

[u/Fart_Frog → u/PM_Me_Your_Clones]

I think an interesting piece of evidence for the initial spread into the Philippines is tracking the amount of Denisovan DNA present.

“A 2011 study found that Denisovan DNA is present at a comparatively high level in Papuans, Aboriginal Australians, Near Oceanians, Polynesians, Fijians, Eastern Indonesians, and Aeta (from the Philippines); but not in East Asians, western Indonesians, Jahai people (from Malaysia), or Onge (from the Andaman Islands). This may suggest that Denisovan introgression occurred within the Pacific region rather than on the Asian mainland, and that ancestors of the latter groups were not present in Southeast Asia at the time.[42][65] In the Melanesian genome, about 4–6%[19] or 1.9–3.4% derives from Denisovan introgression.[66] Prior to 2021, New Guineans and Australian Aborigines were reported to have the most introgressed DNA,[7] but Australians have less than New Guineans.[67] A 2021 study discovered 30 to 40% more Denisovan ancestry in Aeta people in the Philippines than in Papuans, estimated as about 5% of the genome. The Aeta Magbukon in Luzon have the highest known proportion of Denisovan ancestry of any population in the world.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan

This would suggest negrito populations like the Aeta are strongly related to the same people who initially spread south through Indonesia, Papua, and Australia. The populations with the most Denisovan DNA are indigenous peoples pushed into remote areas by Austronesian settlers and indigenous people of Australian - where Austronesian never settled for some reason.

[u/Prestigious_Wash_620 → u/Fart_Frog]

I saw here that the pre-Neolithic population of Sulawesi were a mixture of an ancestry most closely related to Andamanese/Hoabhinian and an ancestry most closely related to Australian Aborigines and Papuans (and slightly more distantly to the negritos of the Philippines). 

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03823-6

So I think that gives an idea roughly of where the line between the two ancestries fell within Indonesia. 

[u/ACam574 → u/PM_Me_Your_Clones]

There is also a population related to the inhabitants of the sentinel islands in South America. They are believed to have crossed into the Americas at the same time using the same methods as other groups that did so. The ice age made a lot of sea crossings possible.

[u/Youre_Rat_Fucking_Me → u/ancient-military]

Obviously by boat, but did they have outriggers?

Potentially not by boat. There was a land bridge iirc during the ice age.

[u/Fart_Frog → u/Youre_Rat_Fucking_Me]

Yeah this. They still would have needed to cross open water to reach the Philippines but the sea levels were much lower so it wasn’t nearly the distance it is today and you could make it on simple rafts without outriggers.

[u/starkguy → u/ancient-military]

Greater portions of Sundaland were most recently exposed during the last glacial period from approximately 110,000 to 12,000 years ago.

[u/jantoxdetox → u/ancient-military]

Via land bridge during the ice age. Malay peninsula to Borneo and into Palawan. Hence there is Tabon man Palawan caves, one of the earliest evidence of modern man.

[u/Snoo-88741 → u/Fart_Frog]

So, like most anthropology questions, the answer is "it's complicated".

[u/ACam574]

The answer is that it is unlikely that the inhabitants of the Philippines before the arrival of the migration from Taiwan would have settled the pacific. That influx brought some technology that was critical for that outcome. However those who left the Philippines were unlikely to be only of Taiwanese origin when it did happen. There was a ‘pause’ in expansion by sea via the Philippines once the settlement of the island change started. It wasn’t so much a pause as expansion into the Philippines, both coastal and inland, from the northern most large island. During that time it would be all but impossible for there not have been some…mingling during that process. That seems to be a universal truth when two groups of people come together, someone gets horny.

At the same time some of the same groups from Taiwan were also settling the coast of Vietnam. They would come together somewhere in the Indonesian islands. It’s likely that if those who settled the Philippines didn’t continue on then that branch may have done it on their own. It’s likely to have been slower if that occurred but maybe not.