Vanuatu cemetery findings show links to Polynesian history

Transcript

Findings from an ancient cemetery in Vanuatu have been linked to Polynesian ancestry.

A team of more than 100 people from around the world has been analysing material from the excavation of what is the oldest cemetery ever found in the Pacific.

Professor Mathew Spriggs is the co-director of the project, which also involved reconstructing models from skeletal remains.

He told Indira Moala they are trying to paint a picture of that community of Lapita people.

MATHEW SPRIGGS: We think it's between 3000 and 2900 years ago which is also when, that's the period of time we think people first reached Vanuatu. We're just trying to piece together the whole story of who these people are because this is the oldest cemetery that's been found so far in the Pacific Islands. It really is a very important site.

INDIRA MOALA: From the remains you found, are there any direct links between the Lapita people and polynesian genetics?

MS: Yes, we think that the people who are buried at the cemetery are of the same kind of people who, within perhaps a generation or less, reached as far as Tonga and Samoa via Fiji to become the first Polynesians. So we do think that the people we have here are ancestral in many ways to Polynesians as they're also ancestral to people in Vanuatu.

IM: Professor Hailey Buckley from New Zealand who was part of your analysis team, she's been able to find out some interesting things about these people such as their diet. Can you tell us more about that?

MS: Yeah we found some very interesting things about these people. One is that they were extremely unhealthy and some of the problems they had are actual medical problems that you never see again in the Pacific until modern times. And we think that, what it is, is that they turn up in the place and then there's lots of seafood and things like that to eat but they haven't got their crops established. So they had a very unbalanced diet and they suffered from a whole range of problems such as Scurvy... and also they suffered probably from Gout and a whole range of diseases which are often seen as diseases which occur when people change their diet to a sort of Western style diet from a polynesian root crop-and-bananas-and-breadfruit type diet. So their health status is very odd and not seen again in the Pacific because they are the real first generation of people to reach islands that never had people before and didn't have all of these plants.  

IM: Dr. Susan Hayes from the University of Western Australia, used a computer program to create the faces of four Lapita adults from the skulls that you found. Can you tell us about these faces? Were the features anything like the faces of melanesians or polynesians today?

MS: Yeah, it's always very hard because people in Melanesia tend to have sort of frizzy hair whereas most polynesian people sort of have rather straight hair. We got no idea what the hair of these people was like. So I find it myself a bit difficult to place them. But certainly, one of the reconstructions looks just like the sister of my wife (laughs). Yes, that's the kind of picture we have from there.

IM: And sir, just to be sure..is your wife polynesian or melanesian?

MS: (laughs) She's from Pentecost Island in Vanuatu so she's a ni-vanuatu! And yeah, the reconstruction by Susan Hayes, one of them looks just like her sister!