WAVE MIGRATION THEORY (H.
Otley Beyer)
The first, and most widely known theory of the prehistoric peopling of the Philippines is that of H.
Otley Beyer, founder of the Anthropology Department of the University of the Philippines.
According to Dr. Beyer, the ancestors of the Filipinos came to the islands first via land bridges
which would occur during times when the sea level was low, and then later in seagoing vessels
such as the balangay. Thus he differentiated these ancestors as arriving in different "waves of
migration", as follows:
1. "Dawn Man", a cave-man type who was similar to Java man, Peking Man, and other Asian homo
sapiens of 250,000 years ago.
2. The aboriginal pygmy group, the Negritos, who arrived between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago.
3. The sea-faring tool-using Indonesian group who arrived about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago and were
the first immigrants to reach the Philippines by sea.
4. The seafaring, more civilized Malays who brought the Iron age culture and were the real
colonizers and dominant cultural group in the pre-Hispanic Philippines.
Beyer's theory, while still popular among lay Filipinos, has been generally been disputed by
anthropologists and historians. Reasons for doubting it are founded on Beyer's use of 19th century
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scientific methods of progressive evolution and migratory diffusion as the basis for his hypothesis.
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These methods have since been proven to be too simple and unreliable to explain the prehistoric
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peopling of the Philippines.
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Objections to the Land Bridges Theory
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In February 1976, Fritjof Voss, a German scientist who studied the geology of the Philippines,
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questioned the validity of the theory of land bridges. He maintained that the Philippines was never
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part of mainland Asia. He claimed that it arose from the bottom of the sea and, as the thin Pacific
crust moved below it, continued to rise. It continues to rise today. The country lies along great
Earth faults that extend to deep submarine trenches. The resulting violent earthquakes caused
what is now the land masses forming the Philippines to rise to the surface of the sea. Dr. Voss also
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pointed out that when scientific studies were done on the Earth's crust from 1964 to 1967, it was
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discovered that the 35-kilometer- thick crust underneath China does not reach the Philippines.
Thus, the latter could not have been a land bridge to the Asian mainland. The matter of who the
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first settlers were has not been really resolved. This is being disputed by anthropologists, as well as
Professor H. Otley Beyer, who claims that the first inhabitants of the Philippines came from the
Malay Peninsula. The Malays now constitute the largest portion of the populace and what Filipinos
now have is an Austronesian culture.
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Philippine historian William Henry Scott has pointed out that Palawan and the Calamianes Islands
are separated from Borneo by water nowhere deeper than 100 meters, that south of a line drawn
between Saigon and Brunei does the depth of the South China Sea nowhere exceeds 100 meters,
and that the Strait of Malacca reaches 50 meters only at one point. Scott also asserts that the Sulu
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Archipelago is not the peak of a submerged mountain range connecting Mindanao and Borneo, but
the exposed edge of three small ridges produced by tectonic tilting of the sea bottom in recent
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geologic times. According to Scott, it is clear that Palawan and the Calamianes do not stand on a
submerged land bridge, but were once a hornlike protuberance on the shoulder of a continent
whose southern shoreline used to be the present islands of Java and Borneo. Mindoro and the
Calamianes are separated by a channel more than 500 meters deep.
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AUSTRONESIAN EXPANSION
Out of Taiwan Hypothesis (Peter Bellwood)
The popular contemporary alternative to Beyer's model is Peter Bellwood’s Out-of-Taiwan (OOT)
hypothesis, which is based largely on linguistics, hewing very close to Robert Blust’s model of the
history of the Austronesian language family, and supplementing it with archeological data.
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This model suggests that Between 4500 BC and 4000 BC, developments in agricultural technology
in the Yunnan Plateau in China create pressures which drive certain peoples to migrate to Taiwan.
These people either already have or newly develop a unique language of their own, now referred to
as Proto-Austronesian.
By around 3000 BC, these groups have started differentiating into three or four distinct
subcultures, and by 2500 to 1500 BC, one of these groups starts migrating southwards towards the
Philippines and Indonesia, reaching as far as Borneo and the Mulluccas by 1500 BC, forming new
cultural groupings and developing unique languages as they go.
By 1500 BC, some of these groups start migrating east, reaching as far as Madagascar around the
first millennium AD. Others migrate west, settling as far as Easter Island by the mid-thirteenth
century AD, giving the Austronesian language group the distinction of being one of the widest
distributed language groups in the world, in terms of the geographical span of the homelands of its
languages.
According to this theory, the peoples of the Philippines are the descendants of those cultures who
remained on the Philippine islands when others moved first southwards, then eastward and
westward.
Nusantao Maritime Trading and Communication Network (Wilhelm Solheim)
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Wilhelm Solheim's concept of the Nusantao Maritime Trading and Communication Network
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(NMTCN), while not strictly a theory regarding the biological ancestors of modern Southeast Asians,
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does suggest that the patterns of cultural diffusion throughout the Asia-Pacific region are not what
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would be expected if such cultures were to be explained by simple migration. Where Bellwood
based his analysis primarily on linguistic analysis, Solheim's approach was based on artifact
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findings. On the basis of a careful analysis of artifacts, he suggests the existence of a trade and
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communication network that first spread in the Asia-Pacific region during its Neolithic age (c.8,000
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to 500 BC). According to Solheim's NMTCN theory, this trade network, consisting of both
Austronesian and non-Austronesian seafaring peoples, was responsible for the spread of cultural
patterns throughout the Asia-Pacific region, not the simple migration proposed by the Out-of-Taiwan
hypothesis. Solheim 2006
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Solheim came up with four geographical divisions delineating the spread of the NMTCN over time,
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calling these geographical divisions "lobes." Specifically, these were the central, northern, eastern
and western lobes.
The central lobe was further divided into two smaller lobes reflecting phases of cultural spread: the
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Early Central Lobe and the Late Central Lobe. Instead of Austronesian peoples originating from
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Taiwan, Solheim placed the origins of the early NMTCN peoples in the "Early Central Lobe," which
was in eastern coastal Vietnam, at around 9,000 BC.
He then suggests the spread of peoples around 5,000 BC towards the "Late central lobe", including
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the Philippines,via island Southeast Asia, rather than from the north as the Taiwan theory suggests.
Thus, from the Point of view of the Philippine peoples, the NMTCN is also referred to as the Island
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Origin Theory.
This "late central lobe" included southern China and Taiwan, which became "the area where
Austronesian became the original language family and Malayo-Polynesian developed." In about
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4,000 to 3,000 BC, these peoples continued spreading east through Northern Luzon to Micronesia
to form the Early Eastern Lobe, carrying the Malayo-Polynesian languages with them. These
languages would become part of the culture spread by the NMTCN in its expansions Malaysia and
western towards Malaysia before 2000 BC, continuing along coastal India and Sri Lanka up to the
western coast of Africa and Madagascar; and over time, further eastward towards its easternmost
borders at Easter Island. Thus, as in the case of Bellwood's theory, the Austronesian languages
spread eastward and westward from the area around the Philippines. Aside from the matter of the
origination of peoples, the difference between the two theories is that Bellwood's theory suggests a
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linear expansion, while Solheim's suggests something more akin to concentric circles, all
overlapping in the geographical area of the late central lobe which includes the Philippines.
Core Population Theory (F. Landa Jocano)
Another alternative model is that asserted by anthropologist F. Landa Jocano of the University of
the Philippines, who in 2001 contended that what fossil evidence of ancient men show is that they
not only migrated to the Philippines, but also to New Guinea, Borneo, and Australia. In reference to
Beyer's wave model, he points out that there is no definitive way to determine what the race to
which the fossils belonged, and that all that is sure is that the discovery of Tabon Man proves that
the Philippines was inhabited as early as 21,000 or 22,000 years ago. If this is true, the first
inhabitants of the Philippines would not have come from the Malay Peninsula. Instead, Jocano
postulates that the present Filipinos are products of the long process of evolution and movement of
people. He also adds that this is also true of Indonesians and Malaysians, with none among the
three peoples being the dominant carrier of culture. In fact, he suggests that the ancient men who
populated Southeast Asia cannot be categorized under any of these three groups. He thus further
suggests that it is not correct to attribute the Filipino culture as being Malayan in orientation.
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