Liangdao Man and Austronesian origins

The discovery of Liangdao Man, a skeleton C-14 dated to c. 6000 BCE, under a shell mound in Liang Island north of the Taiwan strait, and the sequencing by Ko et al. (2014) of its mitochondrial DNA, have brought new light on Austronesian origins. Liangdao man’s mtDNA belongs to a very early form of haplogroup E, which is exclusively Austronesian and well represented in Taiwan in two forms: E1 and E2.

In JCL 43.1A (2015), Paul Li discusses the “implications for the pre-Austronesian homeland” of the discovery of Liangdao man. Li’s assumptions are these: on the ground of morphological arguments in Reid (1994), he accepts the view that Austronesian and Austroasiatic are sister branches of ‘Austric’. A critique of these morphological arguments can be found in Kaufman (2013). Li also accepts the arguments of Norman and Mei (1976) for an Austroasiatic presence on the southeast China coast. See however Sagart (2008) for a critique of their lexical arguments. Based on these assumptions Li supposes that unitary Austric was spoken on the southeast China coast and that Liangdao man spoke Austric (‘an Austric’, p. 228).

Li correctly reports the finding by Ko et al. that Liangdao Man’s mtDNA is the ancestral form of all Formosan E1 haplotypes. He is silent, however, on the origin of Haplogroup E: according to Ko et al., haplogroup E developed out of haplogroup M9 on the southeast China coast near Fuzhou c. 8,136–10,933 years ago. As to haplogroup M9 itself, it gave rise to another daughter on the mainland: M9a, which is found among Chinese, Tibetan and other Sino-Tibetan-speaking groups. This directly support of the Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian theory (Sagart 2005), as Ko et al. note:

At around the time when haplogroup E developed from M9 in the population that later carried it into Taiwan, the surrounding regions gave rise to M9a* lineages that are now carried by Sinitic speakers. Thus, the Han, Liangdao Man, and Formosan haplogroup M9a/E lineages can be traced to an ancestral M9 mtDNA lineage (Figure 3). Additionally, the Tibetans have a high frequency of M9a lineages that is shown to have coalesced during the Neolithic and there is a hypothesized linguistic link between Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian languages.

Human genetics, then, do not confirm the Austric claim: rather, Austronesian E Haplogroup’s most direct sister is the Sino-Tibetan M9a haplogroup, which points to Sino-Tibetan as Austronesian’s next of kin. A pre-Austronesian homeland located in north China will also explain the northern Chinese look of early Austronesian agriculture: two of the main Austronesian cereals—foxtail millet, broomcorn millet—originate in northern China, and are unknown archaeologically in the Yangtze Valley and south of it. A third cereal: rice, was under monoculture in the Yangtze Valley, but was also exploited in the north together with foxtail and broomcorn at very early dates, for instance at Yuezhuang in northwestern Shandong c. 6000 BCE or Tanghu in Henan c. 5700 BCE.