Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Toalea

And now, rather 5200 BC, Bessé. She was Toalean, from the southwest peninsula of Sulawesi; 6000 BC - AD 500. They were a forest-and-river people who didn't seashore.

Half her genes are shared with Aborigines. But only half - and that's important, so where Daily Mail says Toalean foragers were the earliest inhabitants of Sahul this is a mistake.

The people on that peninsula now are Polynesians, basically, from Taiwan. They'd arrived 1500 BC so, I gather, elsewhere in Sulawesi, before finally overrunning the southwest two millennia later. Although there's talk of the Toála in AD 1905 from whom the ancients are named.

Of interest: Bessé herself, in that other half, also took on some Asian ancestry, which - again - didn't get further than Sulawesi. I wonder if it is Hòabìnhian.

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