4,000-year-old rock painting in Indonesia offers clues to one of humanity’s greatest migrations

Shimona Kealy Some 4,200 years ago, people started to leave what is now Taiwan to migrate to the thousands of islands to the south, spanning as far west as Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean and as far east as Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the eastern Pacific Ocean. We can trace this migration through the way language spread, creating the largest-scale language dispersal in prehistory. But what exactly drove these people to make these distant and dangerous voyages? Our discovery of a…