Some 5,000 years ago, the ancestors of today's Southeast Asians began a journey that would become one of the greatest series of human migrations of the world. They came from what is now southern China, traveled south toward Taiwan, and then entered the Philippines through its northernmost edge, Batanes. They populated the archipelago for more than a thousand years, and then... from here travel west toward Madagascar in Africa and east toward Easter Island near South America.
Linguists call them the Austronesian speaking peoples. Speakers of a family of languages heard in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and many other islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The first Austronesian speaking Filipinos who arrived here about 4,000 years ago from Taiwan through the Batanes and northern Luzon almost certainly came here by boat.
The Philippines represented the entry of these populations into the tropical part of the world. And when they arrived here, they also had to develop their methods of crossing sea, building canoes. The Austronesian-speaking peoples were also expert seafarers and boat builders. The Austronesians developed the technology to navigate and cross the open seas to distant islands. They invented the outrigger canoe as well as the precursor of today's catamaran.
The double-hulled sailing canoe. It is very likely that in the Philippines, the early Austronesians began to use outriggers and also sails for sailing their canoes over very large distances because of course, once you go through the Philippines into the western Pacific, The distances between the islands become larger and larger and the technology has to improve particularly for getting to places such as Polynesia where islands can very often be many thousands of kilometers apart. Textbooks used to say that the ancestors of today's Filipinos crossed land bridges to reach the Philippines. But evidence shows that they actually came by boat from southern China through Taiwan. Linguists say the sophisticated seafaring culture was instrumental in the spread of Austronesian languages during the Neolithic era.
Austronesians colonized the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific and imposed the language on their subjects. Today, there are about 1,200 languages considered part of the Austronesian family, spoken by 300. 50 million people, boats, and the sea played a central role in the beliefs of Austronesian-speaking people. A burial jar from the Neolithic era found in the Manunggul Cave in Palawan has for a cover the figure of a boatman transporting the dead to the afterlife. It shows how the sea dominated life and death. Austronesian-speaking peoples had their own belief system long before they learned about Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, or Western thought.
This common belief system showed even in their architecture. Traditional homes of Austronesian-speaking peoples reflect Southeast Asian concepts of the upper world, underworld, and the earthly realm. Filipino, Indonesian, and Malaysian houses had spaces below for animals, rooms in the middle for humans, and shrines for ancestor worship in lofts above.
Speakers of Austronesian languages also share other cultural traits that indicate a common origin and history, evident despite the geographical distances. One of these is the weaving of cloth using the backstrap loom where one end is tied to a tree or post and the other is strapped to the weaver's back. Weaving in this manner is believed to have been practiced by Austronesian ancestors.
Colorful, backstrap woven material are a common sight among indigenous communities in parts of the world populated by Austronesian speaking peoples. Also a common cultural trait is the chewing of beetle knot quills. Still practiced in parts of Southeast Asia. Among Austronesian speaking peoples, there are common words for betel nut quids which are chewed with lime and result in the reddening of teeth. And we have been researching the ancestry of these people, partly through the linguistic evidence, also through the archaeological evidence in the form of many of these objects here, stone adzes, bark cloth beaters, shell ornaments, also of course genetic evidence about the ancestry of the people themselves.
So this is like a gigantic river running through time and space and the Philippine population is a part of it. Filipinos belong with their neighbours as part of this Austronesian speaking population with a shared prehistory during the last 5000 years. Because they had boats and could travel, of course they also carried out trade.
They carried their ornaments and objects from one island to another. And we know that the early Austronesian speaking Filipinos were bringing nephrite jade artifacts from Taiwan and they were spreading them through the islands. These are things like nephrite bracelets and earrings.
Peter Bellwood led a team of archaeologists who found in Batanes what is believed to be a jade workshop that existed at least 3,000 years ago. The team unearthed fragments of what were believed to be parts of tools and materials used in making jade on a limestone mesa called Anaro in Ipayat Island. There was a major expansion of trade in the period when Indian and Chinese contact was beginning to be made with the islands of Southeast Asia.
And at this time, people were making the little jade earrings with the pointed projections that archaeologists call Linglingos. Linglingos are circular ornaments common among various peoples in Southeast Asia. such as the igurots of the Cordillera region. A type of ling-ling-o that protrudes on three sides was found in Palawan and is similar to those found on Sarawak in Malaysia, as well as Vietnam and even Taiwan. The Lingling O is concrete proof of the common culture of Austronesian-speaking peoples that flourished in Southeast Asia some 5,000 years ago.
Austronesian languages were believed to be the most widespread family of languages during the 1500s when Ferdinand Magellan came to the Philippines. Today, hundreds of millions across the vast part of the globe speak a variation of an Austronesian language. Historians and archaeologists say that the Philippines played an important role in the spread of Austronesian languages. It also showed that culture and commerce prospered between the Philippines and its neighbors at least five millennia ago.
I think the most important thing for Filipinos to understand is that they are part of a shared cultural heritage, which is not just the Philippines, but the peoples of Indonesia. ...of central Vietnam, Madagascar, which is off the east coast of Africa, the native peoples of Taiwan to the north, and virtually all of the Pacific Islands. This heritage is very important because it means that many of the peoples of Southeast Asia share a common cultural and linguistic ancestry and I hope that that knowledge will enable them all to understand each other much better in the years to come.