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CIVILIZATIONS before 1000 BCE
Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia 
Hunter-gatherers had been in Southeast Asia at least since 8000 BCE, some of them the ancestors of today's Australian aborigines. Mixing with these people were newcomers, and some of them, in addition to hunting and gathering, using tools of stone and wood, began growing crops to supplement their supply of food. Perhaps like others who began growing food they were responding to increases in their numbers. At least some among them responded to this growth in numbers by choosing to migrate in their dugout canoes to nearby uninhabited islands.
People in small boats had sailed from China to Taiwan as early as 4000 BCE. In the 2000s, people in small boats had begun populating islands in the Philippines. It was around 2000 BCE, give or take a century or two, that people who were ancestral to today's Malays began migrating across the ocean from the Asian mainland to what are called Indonesian islands, bringing with them the cultivation of rice and domesticated animals. Around this time a people called Mon migrated across land, from central Asia over mountain passes, to the southern tip of Burma, where they began growing rice. And it was around 2000 BCE that people left the Mulucca Islands (now a part of Indonesia) and migrated to uninhabited islands farther east, north of Australia.
Across generations, a chain of migrations of people with chickens, dogs and pigs occurred from islands north of Australia. The migrations were eastward, with the seafaring made easier by predictable monsoon and trade winds. Around the year 1800, dark-skinned migrants in magnificent little boats reached islands of Micronesia, some 1500 miles south of Japan and west of the Philippines. By around 1300 BCE, people from Micronesia had sailed southeast into Melanesia, including the Solomon and Fiji islands. From around 1200 BCE, brown-skinned people began migrating into Polynesia -- to the Tonga and Samoan islands. These people were a mix of black and Asian, and perhaps the proto-white that made up the Ainu of Japan. They were animists like other pre-civilized peoples. And by 1200 BCE they and the Micronesians and Melanesians had pottery, breadfruit, the coconut, sugar cane and taro, all originally from Asia.
READER COMMENT (NOV. 2008): I think you need to do a bit more research. Aboriginal Australia was a thriving conglomeration of sophisticated nations with a highly complex culture. It is generally considered to be the oldest culture on earth, having populated the continent and its islands for an estimated 60,000 -- 100,000 years BCE.
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Copyright © 1998 by Frank E. Smitha. reserved.