ANU archaeologist Peter Bellwood wins International Cosmos prize

The Japanese award is presented by the Expo'90 Foundation to honour research that has made a significant contribution to the harmonious coexistence of nature and mankind.

Winning the award places Professor Bellwood in illustrious company - previous winners include Sir David Attenborough (2000) and anthropologist Jane Goodall (2017).

The Australian National University based professor has been a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH) since 1983.

He is a world-leading researcher into the history of human populations in Southeast Asia and the Pacific region and also studies the multiple origins of farming across the world over the past 10,000 years.

Born in England, his lifelong commitment to the field started at Cambridge University in the 1960s.

Ancient travellers

As an undergraduate student, Professor Bellwood became interested in the migration of Anglo Saxons from their homelands in northern Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands. He took a particular interest in how they spread their culture throughout Britain after the end of the Roman Empire.

He then became fixated on the migrations of the ancestors of modern day Polynesians, tracing their migration from South East Asian islands and formation of Polynesian culture.

He has also traced the migration tracks of people who speak Austronesian languages (Austronesians being the larger language family that includes Polynesians) from southern China and Taiwan, spreading throughout the South East and Pacific.

"The Polynesians are famous because they migrated so far, some of them travelled as far as South America," Professor Bellwood said.

"A small number of Austronesians travelled quite extensively, eventually spreading more than half way around the world, from Madagascar to Easter Island."

Another key area of interest for Peter is the connections between early migration and the spread of language families.

"If you look at the world, you see human populations around the world who are similar to each other....we've got many languages that are related."

The Neolithic revolution

Peter said shifts from hunter gatherer societies to agricultural societies (the Neolithic revolution) began about 12,000 years ago, with the oldest example being in the Middle East.

He said Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and Jericho in Palestine featured evidence of elaborate stone architecture, built around 11,000 years ago.

"Those structures are the earliest evidence we have of large-scale cooperation to construct monuments. What those monuments were for, nobody will ever know, but they certainly built them."

He said this shift from hunter gatherer to agricultural societies began after the end of the last ice age. Climatic conditions following the ice age allowed for domestication of cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, maize, wheat and rice. These major species still provide the bulk of the world's food today. They all originated in Asia except maize, which originated in Mexico.

"People developed food production with domesticated plants and animals in different parts of the world....in Africa, the Americas, China," he said.

"I think it was the agriculture that allowed for population growth amongst early populations of farmers."

"We know from their skeletons and from ethnographic and historical data, that these people had large family sizes."

He has also closely studied the adaptation of humans to island environments, beginning with the arrival of homo erectus in Java around 1.3 million years ago.

Peter is the first Australian to win the award since it was launched in 1993 and was selected from a field of 171 nominees across 31 countries.