Sundaland

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Author:Laxman Burdak, IFS (R)
Map of Sunda and Sahul

Sundaland is a biogeographical region of Southeastern Asia which includes the Malay Peninsula on the Asian mainland, as well as the large islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra and their surrounding islands. [1]

Variants

Jat clans

Extent

The area of Sundaland encompasses the Sunda Shelf, a tectonically stable extension of Southeast Asia's continental shelf that was exposed during glacial periods of the last 2 million years.[2][3]

The extent of the Sunda Shelf is approximately equal to the 120 meter isobath.[4] In addition to the Malay Peninsula and the islands of Borneo, Java, and Sumatra, it includes the Java Sea, the Gulf of Thailand, and portions of the South China Sea.[5] In total, the area of Sundaland is approximately 1,800,000 km2,[6][7] The area of exposed land in Sundaland has fluctuated considerably during the past recent 2 million years; the modern land area is approximately half of the maximum extent.[8]

The western and southern borders of Sundaland are clearly marked by the deeper water of the Indian Ocean. The eastern boundary of Sundaland is the Wallace Line, identified by Alfred Russel Wallace as the eastern boundary of the range of Asia's land mammal fauna, and thus the boundary of the Indomalaya and Australasia ecozones. The islands east of the Wallace line are known as Wallacea, a separate biogeographical region that is considered part of Australasia. The Wallace Line corresponds to a deep-water channel that has never been crossed by any land bridges. The northern border of Sundaland is more difficult to define in bathymetric terms; a phytogeographic transition at approximately 9ºN is considered to be the northern boundary.[9]


History

Early Research: The name "Sunda" goes back to antiquity, appearing in Ptolemy's Geography, written around 150 AD.[10] In an 1852 publication, English navigator George Windsor Earl advanced the idea of a "Great Asiatic Bank", based in part on common features of mammals found in Java, Borneo and Sumatra.[11]


The name "Sundaland" for the peninsular shelf was first proposed by Reinout Willem van Bemmelen in his Geography of Indonesia in 1949, based on his research during the war. The ancient drainage systems described by Molengraff were verified and mapped by Tjia in 1980[12] and described in greater detail by Emmel and Curray in 1982 complete with river deltas, floodplains and backswamps.[13][14]

Human migrations

According to the most widely accepted theory, the ancestors of the modern-day Austronesian populations of the Malay archipelago and adjacent regions are believed to have migrated southward, from the East Asia mainland to Taiwan, and then to the rest of Maritime Southeast Asia.

An alternative theory points to the now-submerged Sundaland as the possible cradle of Asian population: thus the "Out of Sundaland" theory. However, this view is an extreme minority view among professional archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists. The Out of Taiwan model (though not necessarily the Express Train Out of Taiwan model) is accepted by the vast majority of professional researchers.

A study from Leeds University and published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, examining mitochondrial DNA lineages, suggested that humans had been occupying the islands of Southeast Asia for a longer period than previously believed. Population dispersals seem to have occurred at the same time as sea levels rose, which may have resulted in migrations from the Philippine Islands to as far north as Taiwan within the last 10,000 years.[15]

The population migrations were most likely to have been driven by climate change — the effects of the drowning of an ancient continent. Rising sea levels in three massive pulses may have caused flooding and the submerging of the Sunda continent, creating the Java and South China Seas and the thousands of islands that make up Indonesia and the Philippines today. The changing sea levels would have caused these humans to move away from their coastal homes and culture, and farther inland throughout southeast Asia. This forced migration would have caused these humans to adapt to the new forest and mountainous environments, developing farms and domestication, and becoming the predecessors to future human populations in these regions.[16]

Genetic similarities were found between populations throughout Asia and an increase in genetic diversity from northern to southern latitudes. Although the Chinese population is very large, it has less variation than the smaller number of individuals living in Southeast Asia, because the Chinese expansion occurred very recently, within only the last 2,000 to 3,000 years.

Oppenheimer locates the origin of the Austronesians in Sundaland and its upper regions.[17]

Genetic research reported in 2008 indicates that the islands which are the remnants of Sundaland were likely populated as early as 50,000 years ago, contrary to a previous hypothesis {Bellwood and Dizon 2005} that they were populated as late as 10,000 years ago from Taiwan.[18]

From the standpoint of historical linguistics, the home of the Austronesian languages is the main island of Taiwan, also known by its unofficial Portuguese name of Formosa; on this island the deepest divisions in Austronesian are found, among the families of the native Formosan languages.

External links

References

  1. ↑ Irwanto, Dhani (29 September 2015). "Sundaland". Atlantis in the Java Sea.
  2. ↑ Phillipps, Quentin; Phillipps, Karen (2016). Phillipps's Field Guide to the Mammals of Borneo and Their Ecology: Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei, and Kalimantan. Princeton, New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-16941-5.
  3. ↑ de Bruyn, Mark; Stelbrink, Björn; Morley, Robert J.; Hall, Robert; Carvalho, Gary R.; Cannon, Charles H.; van den Bergh, Gerrit; Meijaard, Erik; Metcalfe, Ian (1 November 2014). "Borneo and Indochina are Major Evolutionary Hotspots for Southeast Asian Biodiversity". Systematic Biology. 63 (6): 879–901. doi:10.1093/sysbio/syu047. ISSN 1063-5157. PMID 25070971.
  4. ↑ Bird, Michael I.; Taylor, David; Hunt, Chris (1 November 2005). "Palaeoenvironments of insular Southeast Asia during the Last Glacial Period: a savanna corridor in Sundaland?". Quaternary Science Reviews. 24 (20–21): 2228–2242. Bibcode:2005QSRv...24.2228B. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2005.04.004.
  5. ↑ Wang, Pinxian (15 March 1999). "Response of Western Pacific marginal seas to glacial cycles: paleoceanographic and sedimentological features". Marine Geology. 156 (1–4): 5–39. Bibcode:1999MGeol.156....5W. doi:10.1016/S0025-3227(98)00172-8.
  6. ↑ Hanebuth, Till; Stattegger, Karl; Grootes, Pieter M. (2000). "Rapid Flooding of the Sunda Shelf: A Late-Glacial Sea-Level Record". Science. 288 (5468): 1033–1035. Bibcode:2000Sci...288.1033H. doi:10.1126/science.288.5468.1033. JSTOR 3075104.
  7. ↑ Bird, Michael I.; Taylor, David; Hunt, Chris (1 November 2005). "Palaeoenvironments of insular Southeast Asia during the Last Glacial Period: a savanna corridor in Sundaland?". Quaternary Science Reviews. 24 (20–21): 2228–2242. Bibcode:2005QSRv...24.2228B. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2005.04.004.
  8. ↑ Phillipps, Quentin; Phillipps, Karen (2016). Phillipps's Field Guide to the Mammals of Borneo and Their Ecology: Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei, and Kalimantan. Princeton, New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-16941-5.
  9. ↑ Bird, Michael I.; Taylor, David; Hunt, Chris (1 November 2005). "Palaeoenvironments of insular Southeast Asia during the Last Glacial Period: a savanna corridor in Sundaland?". Quaternary Science Reviews. 24 (20–21): 2228–2242. Bibcode:2005QSRv...24.2228B. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2005.04.004.
  10. ↑ Heeren, Arnold Herman Ludwig (1846). The Historical Works of Arnold H.L. Heeren: Politics, intercourse and trade of the Asiatic nations. H.G. Bohn. p. 430.
  11. ↑ Earl, George Windsor (1853). Contributions to the Physical Geography of South-Eastern Asia and Australia ... H. Bailliere. p. 40.
  12. ↑ Tija, H.D. (1980). "The Sunda Shelf, Southeast Asia". Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie. 24: 405–427.
  13. ↑ Moore, Gregory F.; Curray, Joseph R.; Emmel, Frans J. (1982). "Sedimentation in the Sunda Trench and forearc region". Geological Society, London, Special Publications. 10 (1): 245–258. Bibcode:1982GSLSP..10..245M. doi:10.1144/gsl.sp.1982.010.01.16
  14. ↑ The physical geography of Southeast Asia by Avijit Gupta, 2005, ISBN 0-19-924802-8, page 403
  15. ↑ Dr. Martin Richards (2008). "Climate Change and Postglacial Human Dispersals in Southeast Asia". Oxford Journals.
  16. ↑ Higham, C.F.W.; Guangmao, Xie; Qiang, Lin (2015). "The prehistory of a Friction Zone: First farmers and hunters-gatherers in Southeast Asia". Antiquity. 85 (328): 529–543. doi:10.1017/S0003598X00067922.
  17. ↑ Stephen, Oppenheimer (1999). Eden in the East : the drowned continent of Southeast Asia. Phoenix. ISBN 978-0-7538-0679-1. OCLC 45755929.
  18. ↑ University of Leeds (23 May 2008). "New research forces U-turn in population migration theory". EurekAlert
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