Near Oceania is the part of

Oceania Oceania (, , ) is a geographical region that includes Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Spanning the Eastern and Western hemispheres, Oceania is estimated to have a land area of and a population of around 44.5 million ...

settled 35,000 years ago, comprising Australia,

New Guinea New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; id, Papua, or , historically ) is the world's second-largest island with an area of . Located in Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torr ...

, and north-western

Island Melanesia Island Melanesia is a subregion of Melanesia in Oceania. It is located east of New Guinea island, from the Bismarck Archipelago to New Caledonia.Steadman, 2006. ''Extinction & biogeography of tropical Pacific birds'' See also Archaeology an ...

: the Bismarck Archipelago and the

Solomon Islands Solomon Islands is an island country consisting of six major islands and over 900 smaller islands in Oceania, to the east of Papua New Guinea and north-west of Vanuatu. It has a land area of , and a population of approx. 700,000. Its capit ...

Prehistory

The great nineteenth-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace explored Nusantara, drawing attention to fundamental biological differences between the Australia-New Guinea region and

Southeast Asia Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical south-eastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of mainlan ...

. The boundary between the Asian and Australian faunal regions consists of a zone of smaller islands bearing the name of

Wallacea Wallacea is a biogeographical designation for a group of mainly Indonesian islands separated by deep-water straits from the Asian and Australian continental shelves. Wallacea includes Sulawesi, the largest island in the group, as well as ...

, in honor of the co-discoverer of the theory of

natural selection Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Cha ...

. Wallace speculated that the key to understanding these differences would lie in "now-submerged lands, uniting islands to continents" (1895). We now know that at several intervals during the

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed in ...

, the sea surface was 130 metres below the current

sea level Mean sea level (MSL, often shortened to sea level) is an average surface level of one or more among Earth's coastal bodies of water from which heights such as elevation may be measured. The global MSL is a type of vertical datuma standardise ...

. At these times New Guinea,

Tasmania ) , nickname = , image_map = Tasmania in Australia.svg , map_caption = Location of Tasmania in AustraliaCoordinates: , subdivision_type = Country , subdi ...

, the

Aru Islands The Aru Islands Regency ( id, Kabupaten Kepulauan Aru) is a group of about 95 low-lying islands in the Maluku Islands of eastern Indonesia. It also forms a regency of Maluku Province, with a land area of . At the 2011 Census the Regency had a ...

, and some smaller islands were joined to the

Australian mainland Mainland Australia is the main landmass of the Australian continent, excluding the Aru Islands, New Guinea, Tasmania, and other Australian offshore islands. The landmass also constitutes the mainland of the territory governed by the Commonwea ...

. Biogeographers call this enlarged Greater Australian continent '' Sahul'' (Ballard, 1993) or ''Meganesia''. West of Wallacea, the vast

Sunda Shelf Geologically, the Sunda Shelf is a south-eastern extension of the continental shelf of Mainland Southeast Asia. Major landmasses on the shelf include the Bali, Borneo, Java, Madura, and Sumatra, as well as their surrounding smaller islands. I ...

was also exposed as dry land, greatly extending the Southeast Asian mainland to include the

Greater Sunda Islands The Greater Sunda Islands ( Indonesian and Malay: ''Kepulauan Sunda Besar'') are four tropical islands situated within Indonesian Archipelago, in the Pacific Ocean. The islands, Borneo, Java, Sulawesi and Sumatra, are internationally recognised ...

of Sundaland. However, the islands of Wallacea (primarily Sulawesi,

Ambon Ambon may refer to: Places * Ambon Island, an island in Indonesia ** Ambon, Maluku, a city on Ambon Island, the capital of Maluku province ** Governorate of Ambon, a colony of the Dutch East India Company from 1605 to 1796 * Ambon, Morbihan, a c ...

, Ceram, Halmahera, and the Lesser Sunda Islands) always remained an island world, imposing a barrier to the dispersal of terrestrial

vertebrate Vertebrates () comprise all animal taxa within the subphylum Vertebrata () (chordates with backbones), including all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Vertebrates represent the overwhelming majority of the phylum Chordata, with c ...

s, including early

hominids The Hominidae (), whose members are known as the great apes or hominids (), are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: '' Pongo'' (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); ''Gorilla'' (the ...

. To the north and east of New Guinea, the islands of Near Oceania (the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomons) were likewise never connected to Sahul by dry land, for deep-water trenches also separate these from the Australian continental shelf. It seems that human colonization of this region was most likely effected during the interval between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, although some researchers would push the possible dates earlier. But the key point is that even when the oceans were at their lowest levels, there were always significant open-water gaps between the islands of Wallacea, and therefore, the arrival of humans into Sahul, necessitated over-water transport. This was also the case of the expansion of humans beyond New Guinea into the archipelagoes of Near Oceania. Herein lies one of the most exciting and intriguing aspects of Pacific prehistory: that we are likely dealing with the earliest purposive voyaging in human history. :''The settlement of Manus — in the

Admiralty Islands The Admiralty Islands are an archipelago group of 18 islands in the Bismarck Archipelago, to the north of New Guinea in the South Pacific Ocean. These are also sometimes called the Manus Islands, after the largest island. These rainforest-co ...

— may represent a real threshold in voyaging ability as it is the only island settled in the

beyond the range of one-way intervisibilty. Voyaging to Manus involved a blind crossing of some 60-90 km in a 200-300 km voyage, when no land would have been visible whether coming from the north coast of Sahul or New Hanover at the northern end of New Ireland. These would have been tense hours or days on board that first voyage and the name of ''Pleistocene Columbus'' who led this crew will never been known. The target arcs for Manus are 15° from New Hanover, 17° from

Mussau Mussau Island is the largest island of St Matthias Islands, Papua New Guinea, at . It is currently part of the New Ireland Province of Papua New Guinea. The island is a noted Biodiversity hotspot with pristine primeval Rainforest Rainforest ...

and 28° from New Guinea.'' (Matthew Spriggs, ''The Island Melanesians'', Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)

History of the term

The terms Remote Oceania and Near Oceania were proposed by anthropologists Roger Green and Andrew Pawley in 1973. By their definition, Near Oceania consists of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands, with the exception of

Santa Cruz Islands The Santa Cruz Islands are a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, part of Temotu Province of the nation of Solomon Islands discovered by the Spaniards. They lie approximately 250 miles (400 km) to the southeast of the Solomon Islands ...

.Green & Pawley, 1973, "Dating the Dispersal of the Oceanic Languages" They are designed to dispel the outdated categories of

Melanesia Melanesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It extends from Indonesia's New Guinea in the west to Fiji in the east, and includes the Arafura Sea. The region includes the four independent countries of Fiji, Va ...

Micronesia Micronesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania, consisting of about 2,000 small islands in the western Pacific Ocean. It has a close shared cultural history with three other island regions: the Philippines to the west, Polynesia to the east, and ...

, and

Polynesia Polynesia () "many" and νῆσος () "island"), to, Polinisia; mi, Porinihia; haw, Polenekia; fj, Polinisia; sm, Polenisia; rar, Porinetia; ty, Pōrīnetia; tvl, Polenisia; tkl, Polenihia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of ...

; Near Oceania cuts right across the old category of Melanesia, which has shown to be not a useful category in respect to the geography, culture, language and human history of the region. The old categories have been in use since they were proposed by French explorer

Jules Dumont d'Urville Jules Sébastien César Dumont d'Urville (; 23 May 1790 – 8 May 1842) was a French explorer and naval officer who explored the south and western Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. As a botanist and cartographer, he gave his nam ...

in the mid- 19th century. Though the push of some people in academia has been to replace the categories with Green's terms since the early 1990s, the old categories are still used in science, popular culture and general usage.

References

{{Oceania topics Regions of Oceania Geography of Melanesia