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In the past few decades, argument has focused on whether the Lapita people originated among Neolithic farmers of Taiwan before moving through Melanesia and into Polynesia, or whether the Lapita culture was indigenous to the Bismarck Archipelago. In Auckland, Matisoo-Smith's lab has begun the intricate task of following that trail by trying to extract dna from the bones. Only one other study of ancient dna, collected from a range of younger sites, has ever been done in the region, and it was undertaken, Matisoo-Smith says, when less rigorous protocols produced less reliable results. While her results are still incomplete, Matisoo-Smith says the Teouma bones, along with information from the bones of the pigs, rats and other animals that accompanied them, offer the best chance yet to discover how closely related today's Polynesians and Melanesians are to Lapita people - and find out what the vanished people looked like by comparing their dna with sequences found in modern populations across the region. Trouble is, dna is preserved best in dry and cold conditions, where it can last tens of thousands of years, while the Teouma bones have been subjected to long periods of damaging humidity. "Unfortunately, in the Pacific we're really pushing the boundaries of how well the dna is preserved," says Matisoo-Smith, who will soon send her results to a U.S. lab for replication.
Hands dusty from gently loosening fragile bones with a dental pick, Hallie Buckley works in the Efate heat barefooted and in a T shirt. A biological anthropologist at New Zealand's University of Otago, Buckley specializes in prehistoric health, and the discovery of Teouma seems to her a small miracle: "It just keeps getting better." Hidden within these graves, she hopes, are clues about how the first humans in the region interacted with a pristine environment.
Did they suffer from malaria or other diseases? What did they eat? She's already found telltale signs of degenerative bone disease - evidence of hard physical work. Signs of malaria could reveal whether the Lapita people unknowingly brought the illness with them, while details of their diet will help tackle one of the great puzzles of the Lapita story - did some stay long enough in Melanesia to set up gardens, or were they, as proponents of the "Express Train to Polynesia" theory believe, just passing through on their way east, eating whatever they could forage along the way? "The fact that they were burying people in a cemetery suggests they were here for the long haul," says Buckley. Archaeologists may be eager to determine where these first people came from, but Buckley wants to fossick around inside their lives: "For me it's more interesting to know what they did once they got here."
A major Lapita conference begins this week in Tonga, and Matthew Spriggs expects the audience to be "stunned" by news from Teouma. He won't be surprised to find hundreds more burials there, meaning years of work ahead. In the meantime, the bones from this year's dig, carefully washed and packed, will soon follow Hallie Buckley to the University of Otago in Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand - the last place settled by Polynesians in their sweeping colonization of the Pacific. Now their ancestors are following them there. Even in death, the Lapita people's travels continue.
