A study of ancient DNA has shed light on the epic journeys that led to the settlement of the Pacific by humans.
The region was one of the last on Earth to be permanently settled by humans who used canoes to traverse hundreds of miles of open ocean.
Two different studies tracked changes over time in the genetic make-up of people inhabiting Vanuatu - regarded as a gateway to the rest of the Pacific.
The work appears in Nature Ecology & Evolution and Current Biology.
Prof David Reich, from Harvard Medical School, said the region had a "tremendous" range of human diversity, adding that Vanuatu itself had an "extraordinary diversity of languages" in a relatively small area. The number of languages spoken in the tiny island state is thought to number more than 130, though several are endangered with just a small number of speakers.
Prof Reich, who is lead author of the study in Current Biology, added that Vanuatu was a "gateway to the remote Pacific islands... through that region of Vanuatu and neighbouring islands, people spread all over the Pacific"
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