Increases in population size are associated with the adoption of Neolithic agricultural practices in many areas of the world, but rapid population growth within the Dingsishan cultural group of southern China pre-dated the arrival of rice and millet farming in this area. In this article, the authors identify starch grains from taros (Colocasia) and yams (Dioscorea) in dental calculus and on food-processing tools from the Dingsishan sites of Huiyaotian and Liyupo (c. 9030–6741 BP). They conclude that the harvesting and processing of these dietary staples supported an Early Holocene population increase in southern East Asia, before the spread of rice and millet farming.

The most westerly Pacific island chain, running from Taiwan southwards through the Philippines, has long been central in debates about the origins and early migrations of Austronesian-speaking peoples from the Asian mainland into the islands of Southeast Asia and Oceania. Focusing on the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon in the Philippines, the authors combine new and published radiocarbon dates to underpin a revised culture-historical synthesis. The results speak to the initial contacts and long-term relationships between Indigenous hunter-gatherers and immigrant Neolithic farmers, and the question of how the early speakers of Malayo-Polynesian languages spread into and through the Philippines.

Archaeobotanical studies tend to concentrate on the evidence for specialised agricultural food production, with less attention directed towards the use of plant foods within hunter-gatherer contexts. Here, the authors present evidence for the exploitation of Canarium nuts from four late hunter-gatherer sites in southern China. Canarium nuts contributed to the inhabitants’ diets from as early as 9000 cal BP. They also identify new uses of Canarium, c. 4500–4400 cal BP, as ritual offerings in the context of the introduction of rice and millet farming. The results are examined in the context of Canarium use across the wider Asia-Pacific region.

Around 5000 BC, affluent village communities emerged along the South China Coast. Although traditionally regarded as ancestors of Austronesian migrants, whose farming economies expanded into the Asia-Pacific region, the new synthesis presented here shows that these coastal groups actually lived as hunter-gatherers and fishers, with evidence of socio-cultural complexity. Around c. 3000–2500 BC, this ‘first layer’ of hunter-gatherers witnessed the arrival of a ‘second layer’, associated with rice farming and Austronesian assemblages. This new synthesis positions global coastlines as centres of socio-economic and political complexity, long-distance contact and technological advancement.

Taiwan presents a puzzling anomaly in the development and expansion of Southand Southeast Asian trade routes. The lack of historical records from theisland emphasises the value of archaeology for understanding theestablishment of trade and the transmission of people, ideas and knowledge.Recent research focusing on newly excavated sites such as Jiuxianglan showsthat the Metal Age in Taiwan began around 400 BC, much earlier than waspreviously thought. Furthermore, it seems that early trade predominantlyprioritised links to the south, and not, curiously, with Mainland China tothe immediate west as had traditionally been supposed.

The Neolithic of Taiwan represents the first stage in the expansion of Austronesian-speaking peoples through the Pacific. Settlement and burial evidence from the Tapenkeng (TKP) or Dabenkeng culture demonstrates the development of the early Taiwanese Neolithic over a period of almost 2000 years, from its origin in the pre-TPK of the Pearl River Delta and south-eastern coastal China. The first TPK communities of Taiwan pursued a mixed coastal foraging and horticultural lifestyle, but by the late TPK rice and millet farming were practised with extensive villages and large settlements. The broad-spectrum subsistence diversity of the Taiwanese Neolithic was an important factor in facilitating the subsequent expansion of Austronesian-speaking peoples to the Philippines and beyond.

The authors summarise the latest evidence for the introduction of rice cultivation into northern China, and show that it most probably began there in the early seventh millennium BC as a result of influence or migration from the Yangtze Valley.

The authors present new research on social and economic developments in southern China in the Early Holocene, ninth to fifth millennia BC. The ‘Neolithic package’ doesn't really work for this fascinating chapter of the human experience, where pottery, social aggregation, animal domestication and rice cultivation all arrive at different places and times. The authors define the role of the ‘pottery-using foragers’, sophisticated hunter-gatherers who left shell or fish middens in caves and dunes. These colonising non-farmers shared numerous cultural attributes with rice cultivators on the Yangtze, their parallel contemporaries over more than 5000 years. Some agriculturalists became hunter-foragers in turn when they expanded onto less fertile soils. No simple linear transition then, but the practice of ingenious strategies, adaptations and links in a big varied land.

The authors compare pottery assemblages in the Marianas and the Philippines to claim endorsement for a first human expansion into the open Pacific around 1500 BC. The Marianas are separated from the Philippines by 2300km of open sea, so they are proposing an epic pioneering voyage of men and women, with presumably some cultivated plants but apparently no animals. How did they manage this unprecedented journey?

The authors give us a newly documented account of the dissemination of agriculture, and rice cultivation in particular, into southern China and beyond. From the central and eastern Yangtze it spread in two prongs – east to Guangdong, Taiwan and island Southeast Asia and south to Guangxi and Vietnam.

The crystallinity of the hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon (μc-Si:H) film was known to influence the solar cell efficiency greatly. Also hydrogen was found to play a critical role in controlling the crystallinity. Instead of employing conventional plasma deposition techniques, this work focused on using catalytic chemical vapor deposition (Cat-CVD) to study the effect of hydrogen dilution and the filament-to-substrate distance on the crystallinity, deposition rate, microstructure factor and electrical property of the μc-Si:H film. We found that the substrate material and structure can affect the crystallinity of the μc-Si:H film and the incubation effect. Comparing bare glass, TCO-coated glass, a-Si:H-coated glass and μc-Si:H-coated glass, the microcrystalline phase grows the fastest onto μc-Si:H surface, but the slowest onto a-Si:H surface. Surprisingly, the template effect lasted for more than a thousand atomic layers of silicon.

New research into the Neolithic of Island Southeast Asia is broadening the old models and making them more diverse, more human – more like history: people and animals can move through the islands in a multitude of ways. The domestic pig is an important tracker of Neolithic people and practice into the Pacific, and the authors address the controversial matter of whether domestic pigs first reached the islands of Southeast Asia from China via Taiwan or from the neighbouring Vietnamese peninsula. The DNA trajectory read from modern pigs favours Vietnam, but the authors have found well stratified domestic pig in the Philippines dated to c. 4000 BP and associated with cultural material of Taiwan. Thus the perils of relying only on DNA – but are these alternative or additional stories?