The view taken in this book has been that the people of the Pacific, through selective adaptation and genetic drift, have to a large extent been physically shaped by their environment. This view contrasts with those that interpret the variety in terms of ancestral strains and racial types and the mixing of these. In the light of more than a century of evolutionary biology the persistence of these latter views may seem, to some, unnecessary.

In Near Oceania the variety of human biology, whether expressed openly in the phenotype or covertly in the genome, is well known. There should be nothing surprising in this finding. No other part of the world so lends itself to the prospect of human variation as does the expanse of this microcosm of small and large islands. Nowhere else on the globe have the processes of adaptation and drift had such opportunity. Here also are the small populations that provide ‘great opportunities for a genetic revolution … It would not surprise me if under these circumstances new species could arise in a period measured only in thousands or even hundreds of years’ (Mayr 1970: 349). What is being suggested here of course is nothing like speciation, but only significant phenotypic change within a species.

For Homo sapiens, this region, where land erratically meets water, is effectively a species boundary, and at such boundaries organisms are placed under environmental stress. Here phenotypic and genotypic variability of organisms tends to be high, and ‘from the molecular to the biogeographic levels of organization, stressful environmental conditions underlie much evolutionary change’ (Parsons 1991: 1).