ofthe SAME TREE

Less well known is a theory advanced by Wilhelm Solheim over a number
of years. This ambitious conception incorporates the story of the Austronesian
speakers into a wider network of “Nusantao” communities. Instead
of positing a monodirectional Austronesian movement, Solheim proposes a
multidirectional flow from the different “lobes” that formed the Nusantao network.
He believes that the Nusantao “homeland” (calculated simply in terms
of the earliest dates known for the existence of a group) is in the Early Central
Lobe in eastern coastal Vietnam and dates it to c. 8000 BCE, much earlier than
Bellwood’s reconstruction for the ancestors of the Austronesian speakers. He
suggests that in c. 5000 BCE the people in the Late Central Lobe involved in
this network began moving by water and developed a trade communication
network. It was these maritime trading people who developed Austronesian
as a lingua franca from pre- and proto-Austronesian to facilitate communication
among the communities forming this network. As the Nu santao network
expanded out of Taiwan, it was Malayo-Polynesian languages rather than
Austronesian that developed with it. Solheim emphasizes that the expansion
of Malayo-Polynesian was not the result of migrations but of the interaction
occurring within the network. He also emphasizes the important role of maritime
people in the dispersal of the Nusantao community. 15
In discussing these two major theories regarding the antecedents of the
Malayu, it is important to stress that “Austronesian” and “Nusantao” are not
synonymous. The former is linguistic, the latter cultural, and neither refers to
a genetic group. Solheim, however, uses a gene marker identified among the
Southeast Asians but not found in China as an argument for rejecting the view
that the origin of the Austronesian speakers is in southern China. He believes
that ancestors of the Southeast Asians had been living in the region since 5500
BP, after the retreat of flood waters following the end of the Ice Age some eight
thousand years ago. Solheim also disagrees with linguists regarding the route
taken by the Austronesian speakers from southern China to Taiwan, the Philippines,
and then down to Southeast Asia and out into the Pacific. Instead,
he suggests that a trade language in the form of Austronesian developed in
coastal south China, northern Vietnam, Taiwan, and northeast Luzon, and
evolved through ongoing contact among the Nusantao communities. The
notion of interacting communities moving in multiple directions allows for
local variations and adaptations to specific geographic conditions. 16
Although Solheim’s dates are generally regarded as being too early, the
appeal of his model is the idea that the spread of a culture, including a lingua
franca, evolved as a by-product of the trade and communications network
of a large number of different communities in a widely dispersed area. In
the historical period the Malayu language and culture were developed and
sustained in very much the same fashion. Linguistic reconstruction of the
Malayu Antecedents 21