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Near Oceania andRemote Oceania are the parts ofOceania that are distinct based on geology, flora, fauna, and prehistoric human settlement. The distinction between the two was first suggested by Pawley & Green (1973)[1] and was further elaborated on in Green (1991).[2]
Near Oceania includes theBismarck Archipelago, the island ofNew Guinea, and theSolomon Islands archipelago, withAustralia also occasionally included. It features greater biodiversity, due to the islands and atolls being closer to each other. Remote Oceania, which is more widely spread out across thePacific Ocean, includes the rest ofMelanesia (theSanta Cruz Islands,Vanuatu,Fiji andNew Caledonia) and the islands ofPolynesia andMicronesia.
The terms Near Oceania and Remote 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New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, with the exception of theSanta Cruz Islands.[3] They are designed to dispel the outdated categories ofMelanesia,Micronesia, andPolynesia; Near Oceania cuts right across the old category of Melanesia, which has shown to be not a useful category[4]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.
When the naturalistAlfred Russel Wallace exploredNusantara, he drew 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).
At several intervals during thePleistocene, the sea surface was 130 metres below the current sea level, joining theAru Islands,New Guinea,Tasmania, and some smaller islands to theAustralian mainland. Biogeographers referred to this enlarged Greater Australian continent as "Sahul" (Ballard, 1993) or "Meganesia". 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.
Human colonization of this region was most likely effected during the interval between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, although some researchers hypothesized possible earlier dates. Regardless, even during the period when the sea level was at its lowest, 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.
According to Spriggs (1997):
The islands of Remote Oceania were not settled until around the12th century BC, when seafaring navigators of the AustronesianLapita culture settled in the region.[5] Paleogenetic analyses indicated that the original settlers of the islands originated from Neolithic populations inTaiwan and the northernPhilippines, corresponding to the earlyexpansion of Austronesian peoples. Many contemporary populations of western Remote Oceania nonetheless have a strong Papuan ancestry linked to a second expansion that began around the1st millennium BC.[6][7]
