ABSTRACT
The origins of Pacific Oceanic populations and cultural heritage necessarily interfaced with the longer-established groups living in the vast region spanning from East Asia all the way across to Australia and New Guinea since at least 50,000 years ago. This diverse and long-term record has been unclear in many respects, but enough information now has become available to characterize the archaeological assemblages of the hunter-gatherer groups who lived in the western Asia-Pacific region since several millennia ago, to outline how those material signatures varied through time and across the region, and to assess how those contexts related with later-aged developments.
