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the Indonesian archipelago. The presence of the Austronesians is known from the
archaeological evidence. Austronesians brought with them new cultural practices and
technologies and these came into contact with the Papuans. The most striking evidence
of their impact however is the present day wide spread of Austronesian languages
which are found throughout the area, essentially replacing Papuan languages except
for areas in the east. The present day dominance of Austronesian languages suggests
to early researchers that the arrival of the Austronesians resulted in the replacement or
displacement of Papuans.
The migratory model for the Austronesian expansion is often described as the “express
train” model, because of the pace and extent of the expansion from Taiwan to Polynesia
with almost no admixture happening to the Austronesian population during the journey.
However, genetic studies have provided evidence that makes the Austronesian
“express train” model implausible. The migration of Austronesian-speaking people is not
likely to have happened in a single wave. Their expansion was not as fast as expected, and
neither was it a continuous journey but, rather, sporadic, as groups settled for some time,
and then at some point continued their migration. Most of the genetic studies support
a slower expansion, where these Austronesian migrants produced sex-biased admixtures
between Asian ancestor migrants with the Melanesian populations who were in contact
with populations of Polynesian origin.
By using data from the Pan-Asian Human Genome Organisation (HUGO) database along
with several mainland Southeast Asia populations, Jinam et al. (2012) built on the Southeast
Asia study of evolution history and proposed their “early train” model. They added some
Austronesian language family groups such as Bidayuh, Selatar, Jehai, and Temuan to the
autosomal genetic marker analysis conducted earlier and found very high frequencies of
the mtDNA haplogroup in the Bidayuh, Selatar, and Temuan populations. These came from
mainland Asia around 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. Interestingly, “Out of Taiwan” markers
such as B41a and M7c3c had a very low presence in those three populations. In addition,
markers like Y2, D5, M7b3, F3, and F4 which follow the Austronesian distribution pattern out
from Taiwan were not found (Underhill and Kivisild, 2007). This could be due to the influence
of women from populations already present at that time and not because of replacement.
Furthermore, it was found that the haplogroup markers from part of Indochina and
southern China such as M21a, N9a6, N21, N22, and F1a’c made up approximately 60%
of the mtDNA derivatives. None of these haplogroups were found in populations from
Taiwan and the haplogroup ages were estimated to be around 30,000 to 10,000 years ago
putting them in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene era. The results of our research

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