In the last and most far-reaching prehistoric human migration, Austronesian genes and languages spread across the Pacific and Indian oceans, from Madagascar to Hawaii.

Recently, geneticists discovered a large genetic discontinuity - equivalent to the Himalayas or the Sahara - in the middle of a continuous chain of islands that form the southern arc of the Indonesian archipelago, near the geographic centre of the Austronesian world.

DNA also suggests that the Austronesian voyagers were originally a matrilineal society, but today there are only a few surviving matrilineal communities.

So what happened out there? Edward Lorenz' model of a "butterfly effect" famously maps a route to chaos. Did a butterfly effect change the destiny of the Austronesian voyagers?

About Steve Lansing
Steve Lansing is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute; a professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, with a joint appointment in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and a senior fellow at Stockholm Resilience Centre.

His recent research has to do with the long-term dynamics of coupled social-ecological systems, focusing on two topics. The first has to do with emergent properties of  Balinese water temple networks. Currently he is assisting the Government of Indonesia to create a new UNESCO World Heritage site to help preserve the temple networks. 

The second project is a comparative study of social structure, ecology, kinship, language change and the evolution of disease resistance in 69 villages on 14 Indonesian islands.

His most  recent book is "Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali". The paperback will be published by Princeton mid 2012.

The seminar is open to all interested and free of charge. No registration needed.