| Abstract: |
This chapter addresses the biological history of population migration across Southeast Asia based on craniometric analysis using pertinent archaeological skeletal materials. The first migration, of anatomically and behaviorally modern Homo sapiens ancestral to the living Australo‐Papuan populations, witnessed the Paleolithic settlement of many regions of Island Southeast Asia, together with New Guinea, the Bismarck and Solomon Islands, and Australia. Debates over the population history of Southeast Asia have generally revolved around the issue of whether the pre‐Neolithic inhabitants were of a different biological lineage from the Neolithic and post‐Neolithic populations, including present‐day ones. The relevant skeletal material is discussed in more detail in the following invited contribution by Hirofumi Matsumura and his colleagues, who focus for their mid‐Holocene data on pre‐Neolithic cemetery populations from sites in southern China, northern Vietnam, and Peninsular Malaysia.
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