Taiwan find may throw light on Pacific settlers

Taiwanese archaeologists working on an islet off China have unearthed the remains of a Stone Age male who may provide clues about ancient people who eventually dispersed throughout the entire Pacific.

This photo, taken last December and provided by Chen Chung-yu, shows a complete skeleton of a stone age male his archaeological research team had unearthed from a tiny Taiwan-controlled Liang island off China.

The man, who was about 35 when he died nearly eight thousand years ago, may be a remote relative of Taiwan's aborigines who today make up about two percent of the island's population, according to the head of the team, Chen Chung-yu.

"Judging from the way the body was buried, it could be a person from what we now call the Austronesia language family," said Chen, a research fellow at Taiwan's Academia Sinica institute.

Taiwan's aborigines belong to the same language family, as do the people who migrated across the Pacific as far as Eastern Island off the coast of Chile in prehistoric times.

Chen and his team of three excavated the remains -- a nearly complete skeleton -- on Liang Island, a tiny Taiwanese-controlled islet 30 kilometers (19 miles) off China's southeastern Fujian province, in December.

The burial site had emerged purely by chance, as the Taiwanese military was digging up the soil to prepare for the construction of a road on the 1.4-kilometre (0.9-mile island).
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