page_title: Melanesia
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Melanesia / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Blond Vanuatu boy
context_page_description: Melanesia is a subregion of Oceania extending from New Guinea island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean to the Arafura Sea, and eastward to Tonga.
  The region includes the four independent countries of Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, as well as the French special collectivity of New Caledonia, and parts of Indonesia – particularly Western New Guinea. Most of the region is in the Southern Hemisphere, with only a few small northwestern islands of Western New Guinea lying in the Northern Hemisphere.
  The name Melanesia was first used by Jules Dumont d'Urville in 1832 to denote an ethnic and geographical grouping of islands whose inhabitants he thought were distinct from those of Micronesia and Polynesia.
context_section_description: The people of Melanesia have a distinctive ancestry. Along with the aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, the Southern Dispersal theory indicates they emigrated from Africa between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago and dispersed along the southern edge of Asia. The limit of this ancient migration was Sahul, the continent formed when Australia and New Guinea were united by a land bridge as a result of low sea levels.  The first migration into Sahul came over 40,000 years ago.  A further expansion into the eastern islands of Melanesia came much later, probably between 4000 and 3000 BC.
  Particularly along the north coast of New Guinea and in the islands north and east of New Guinea, the Austronesian people, who had migrated into the area somewhat more than 3,000 years ago, came into contact with these pre-existing populations of Papuan-speaking peoples. In the late 20th century, some scholars theorized a long period of interaction, which resulted in many complex changes in genetics, languages, and culture among the peoples.
  This Polynesian theory, however, is somewhat contradicted by the findings of a genetic study published by Temple University in 2008. It found that neither Polynesians nor Micronesians have much genetic relation to Melanesians. It appeared that, having developed their sailing outrigger canoes, the ancestors of the Polynesians migrated from East Asia, moved through the Melanesian area quickly on their way, and kept going to eastern areas, where they settled. They left little genetic evidence in Melanesia and "only intermixed to a very modest degree with the indigenous populations there". Nevertheless, the study still found a small Austronesian genetic signature (below 20%) in some of the Melanesian groups who speak Austronesian languages, and which was entirely absent in Papuan-speaking groups.
caption: A Melanesian child from Vanuatu
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