The Many Ways of Being Human

7.1

The Austronesian Expansion

A pottery shard barely bigger than a thumbnail carries a pattern pressed into wet clay with a toothed comb, and the same pattern turns up across some 4,500 kilometers of open water, from the Bismarck Archipelago to Tonga and Samoa. Lapita pottery stands at the start of the largest settlement area in the world, made by sailors with no metal and no compass.