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Near Oceania is the part of Oceania that features greater biodiversity, due to the islands and atolls being closer to each other. The distinction of Near Oceania and Remote Oceania was first suggested by Pawley & Green (1973)[1] and was further elaborated on in Green (1991).[2] The distinction is based on geology, flora and fauna. Near Oceania was also settled by humans at an earlier time than Remote Oceania was. Near Oceania includes theBismarck Archipelago, the island ofNew Guinea, and theSolomon Islands (excludingTemotu Province). Sometimes, Australia is also included in Near Oceania.
The great nineteenth-century naturalistAlfred Russel Wallace exploredNusantara, drawing attention to fundamental biological differences between theAustralia-New Guinea region and Southeast Asia. The boundary between the Asian and Australian faunal regions consists of a zone of smaller islands bearing the name ofWallacea, in honor of the co-discoverer of the theory ofnatural selection.
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 thePleistocene, the sea surface was 130 metres below the current sea level. At these times, theAru Islands,New Guinea,Tasmania, and some smaller islands were joined to theAustralian mainland. Biogeographers call this enlarged Greater Australian continentSahul (Ballard, 1993) orMeganesia. West of Wallacea, the vastSunda Shelf was also exposed as dry land, greatly extending the Southeast Asian mainland to include theGreater Sunda Islands ofSundaland. However, the islands of Wallacea (primarilySulawesi,Ambon,Ceram,Halmahera, and theLesser Sunda Islands) always remained an island world, imposing a barrier to the dispersal of terrestrialvertebrates, including earlyhominids.
To the north and east of New Guinea, the islands of Near Oceania (theBismarck Archipelago and the Solomons) were likewise never connected to Sahul by dry land, for deep-water trenches also separate these from the Australiancontinental 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 terms Near Oceania andRemote Oceania were proposed by anthropologistsRoger Curtis Green and Andrew Pawley in 1973. By their definition, Near Oceania consists of the Bismarck Archipelago, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, with the exception of theSanta Cruz Islands.[3] They are designed to dispel the outdated categories ofMelanesia,Micronesia, andPolynesia; Near Oceania cuts right across the old category of Melanesia, which has shown to be not a useful category[4] 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 explorerJules Dumont d'Urville in the mid-19th century. Though the push of some people[who?] 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.
