Abstract
Austronesian languages is one of the largest language families in the world including more than 1200 languages, and the current population of its speakers is about 400 million. The geographical distribution of the Austronesian languages is north to Taiwan, south to New Zealand, east to Easter Island off the west coast of Peru, and west to Madagascar near the east coast of Africa, covering about one-third of the vast waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The Austronesian languages, which possess systematic evolutionary relationships with each other and have many common characteristics in culture, may have a common origin and the time span of their dispersal should not be too long. However, ”where was their homeland?” and ”why and how did they disperse from their homeland?” are always important questions need to be answered in the human history of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In recent years, many linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists and even molecular biologists have attempted to explore these questions and have raised different theories to argue. In the arguments, the role of Taiwan and the linguistic, archaeological and genetic data from Taiwan have always been of great concern. This is not only because of its geographical location between the Asian mainland and the Pacific, but also the possible links between the prehistoric cultures and the living Austronesian inhabitants in Taiwan. This paper attempts to examine some new archaeological data found in Taiwan and its surrounding areas and to rethink the questions on the origin and dispersal of the Austronesian-speaking peoples. The conclusions are that the ancestors of the Austronesian-speaking peoples may have inhabited on the coastal areas between southern Fujian and northern Vietnam, and through multiple, instead of one, navigation routes across the South China Sea, they dispersed into the Philippines and other Southeast Asian islands.