When ANU researchers stumbled upon skeletal remains at the oldest known cemetery of the Pacific Island Lapita culture, they did not expect it to solve a centuries-long debate.
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One decade and several DNA analyses later, remains have lead them to discover that Vanuatu and Tonga's first people arrived 3000 years ago from Taiwan and northern Philippines.
The findings turned a theory into evidence, while disproving other assumptions including that the inhabitants travelled from nearby Australia, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, which had been inhabited for up to 50,000 years.
"La Pita sites have been found over the last 50 years from islands like Papua New Guinea right across to Tonga and all the places in between," Dr Stuart Bedford from the ANU School of School of Culture, History and Language said.
"But the question was where these people were from and for so long we never found the skeletal remains, despite there being hundreds of these sites. It was remarkable that we even found the cemetery."
Dr Bedford and fellow researchers first found the remains in 2006, but it took years before methods for excavating and analysing skeletal remains improved enough to solve the mystery.
"Two years ago we tried again to send samples off to specialists and we now have three samples that indicate that the founding populations in Vanuatu and similarly a single sample from Tonga that match up to East-Asian DNA," Dr Bedford said.
"It is a wonderful discovery since debates relating to the origins of Pacific Islanders have been on-going literally for centuries and particularly those relating to Lapita peoples, those who first colonised islands from Vanuatu across to Tonga. It is the first step in really understanding the colonisation of the pacific."
Professor Spriggs of the ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology said the people of Vanuatu travelled from Asia and past places where people were already living before finding Vanuatu.
"Only some time later did they intermarry with Papuan peoples to produce the genetic mix we see today in Vanuatu, and indeed across the Pacific," Professor Spriggs said.
"Today all Pacific Islanders are a mixture of these Asian and Papuan populations. The differences are simply in the percentages."
The DNA samples - analysed by researchers at Harvard Medical School, University College Dublin, and the Max Planck institute for the Science of Human History - revealed the same group of people became the first inhabitants of Tonga slightly later.
