Language and Race: the Pacific edition

 It is obvious that on a personal-level language and DNA have very little to do with each other.  My boss and his wife have two small children.  Both are Chinese, but their children are acquiring English perfectly (with a Cincinnati accent too, it goes without saying).  And yet, when the scale changes to macro-levels, and when we start talking about events "long ago and far away" nobody seems to remember this important disjuncture.

Case in point: the controversy over Austronesian and the Polynesians.  Here there are two different sources of information that are crashing into each other.  The linguistic research reveals that the languages of the Pacific (known as part of the Austronesian language family) originated in Taiwan and spread to the south and east.  Reconstructing pacific island languages is uncontroversial to the point of being included in nearly every Historical Linguistics text book.

As it turns out DNA studies fail to agree with this picture.  A recent study suggests that populations came from different places and had complex interactions.  For example Micronesians are not closely related to their Melanesian neighbors. This is rather threatening to theories that the people of the Pacific followed the same route as the languages of the Pacific.

But now we have the anthropological cart in front of the horse.  By that logic, future linguists might say that  Latin America was peopled by a massive influx of Spainards.  The alternative theory, that a relatively small amount of people could spread their language over nearly two continents, does seem a little absurd.  Truth being what it is relative to fiction and all.

Couldn't the material culture and language of the Pacific region not have arrived via Taiwan, erasing other cultures and languages?  It seems as if history has set a precedent for this before.