Alexander

While hunting for Web Based resources for you on your post here

> What do you mean? The Solomon Islands? Other parts of this region
> were not populated yet, AFAIK. Could you give any references please.

I found the following

Human settlement of Sahul (Australia and New Guinea, joined when sea
levels were lower) in the Pleistocene almost certainly involved
repeated, purposeful water crossings of some distance. It is perhaps
no surprise, therefore, that people had crossed the Vitiaz Strait to
the Bismarck and Solomon Islands by 35 000 years ago; scattered
evidence reveals tantalising glimpses of their lives. The early
Holocene saw changes in settlement and foraging patterns: in the New
Guinea Highlands there is evidence for very early agriculture, while
the lowlands and islands saw innovations in arboriculture and shell-
working. Malaria may have played a key role in limiting population
growth in the region.

http://dannyreviews.com/h/Road_Winds.html.

Golson,J. (1971c) The remarkable history of Indo-Pacific man:
missing chapters from every world prehistory. Fifth David Rivett
Memorial Lecture of the CSIRO, Canberra

Kirch,P.V. and P.H.Rosendahl (1973) Archaeological investigation
of Anuta. In D.E. Yen and J. Gordon (eds) Anuta: a Polynesian outlier
in the Solomon Islands, pp.25108. Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop
Museum, Department of Anthropology. Pacific Anthropological Records
No.21

Deal with some of this

The easiest to access is from Steve Wickler's "The Prehistory of
Buka: A Stepping Stone Island in the Northern Solomons" Terra
Australis series No 16. a joint publication of the Department of
Archaeology and Natural History, RSPAS and the Centre for
Archaeological Research.

"The earliest occupational evidence dates to 29,000 BP at the Kilu
cave site. The rich faunal assemblage at this site includes endemic
rats which are now extinct. Starch residues and raphides from aroids
found on stone tools from the basal site deposit provide the earliest
direct evidence for the use of root crops in the World."

The starch residues and raphides from aroids were found by the
Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) of
Australia - the country's leading research organisation - and relate
to chemicals known from domesticated taro - which was not endemic to
the Solomon Islands and had to have been introduced from outside the
islands.

Thus suggests that the cultivation of root crops in fact occurred in
the Sahul region long before any evidence of grain farming in the
Middle East (previously hailed as the beginnings of agriculture).
This fact suggests

1. a mechanism for the widespread nature of Indo-Pacific languages
(Andaman, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Solomons)

2. a mechanism whereby very early Sahul cultivars (eg breadfruit,
sugar cane, sago, Musa australis bananas, a variety of swamp taro and
possibly domesticated coconuts) could have been taken from Papua New
Guinea back into Indonesia, there to be spread by later Austronesian
settlement some of them from Madagascar to Easter Island)

Hope this helps

Regards

John