The first colonists of the remote Pacific Ocean appear abruptly in the archaeological record. The evidence presently supports the view that they were associated with a cultural entity called Lapita, which originated somewhere between Island Southeast Asia, coastal New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, a region formed by a continuous corridor of often intervisible islands. Evidently this had become a ‘voyaging nursery’ for learning sea-going skills in the sense that the same easy conditions that allowed Pleistocene settlement provided a navigational cradle for Lapita and its peers. There had been more than 25,000 years in which to mess about in boats, although very little of it shows in the archaeological record until it was already well developed. Whoever the first Oceanic settlers were, the essential point is that they had learned how to deep-sea sail and survive, and when they first ventured offshore under predictable circumstances of wind and weather, they left a very substantial safety screen behind to which they could return if need be. The methods implied by this event are becoming clearer, but the motives or impetus are still a matter for conjecture.

There is no obvious navigational factor that recommends one part of the corridor above another as a point of origin. While more difficult voyages were necessary to reach Manus and the Solomon Islands from the Bismarck Archipelago, equally long ones could be found in Island Southeast Asia. Further, communications are something that could hardly have originated in one place, by definition. Rather, we would expect shifting fields of contact to develop and a range of different participants to be involved.