History of Austronesian

The first Austronesian speakers are believed to have originated on the island of Taiwan following the migration of a group, or groups, of Pre-Austronesian speaking peoples from continental Asia approximately 10,000-6000 B.C. Due to a lengthy split from the Pre-Austronesian populations, the Proto-Austronesian language and cultures emerged on Taiwan (Blust,1988).
Beginning around 5000-2500 B.C., the large scale Austronesian expansion began. Population growth primarily fueled this expansion. A society that gives prestige and a higher status to the descendants of a community's founder added more incentive to settle new lands.
These first settlers landed in northern Luzon in the Philippines. Over the next thousand years up until 1500 B.C., their descendants started to spread south to the rest of the Philippine islands, Celebes (modern-day Sulawesi), northern Borneo, Moluccas (modern-day Maluku), and Java.
The settlers in Moluccas sailed eastward and began to spread to the islands of Melanesia and Micronesia between 1200 B.C. and 500 B.C. repectively. Those that spread westward reached Sumatra, the Malay peninsula and southern Vietnam by 500 B.C.
The oceanic Austronesians had discovered Remote Polynesia by 1000 B.C and settled its three extremities Hawaii by 400 A.D. New Zealand by 1300 A.D. and Easter Island by 300 A.D. In the Indian Ocean they reached Madagascar.
Trade with India and China flourished within the first millennia A.D., which allowed the creation of Indianized states. Muslim traders began arriving during the 10th century and brought with them Islam as well as the sultanates.
Europeans in search of spices later colonized most of Austronesia, starting from the 16th century, with British and Portuguese colonization of Malaysia, Portuguese and the Dutch colonization of Indonesia and East Timor, and the Spanish colonization and, later, the American governance of the Philippines. Meanwhile, the British, Germans, French, Americans, and Japanese began establishing spheres of influence within the Pacific Islands during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Japanese later invaded during World War II. The latter half of the 20th century initiated independence of modern day Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and many of the Pacific Island nations.
Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines enjoyed a high rate of economic growth during the authoritarian rule of Suharto and Marcos that were later established years after the independence of Indonesia and the Philippines. Due to political and economic pressures from within and outside the countries at the time, stagnation resulted for a short period. Marcos' regime was toppled in 1986 and Suharto's rule ended in 1998 and the economies of the two countries are finally recovering but problems and challenges remain.
The Asian financial crisis in the mid-to-late 1990s largely devastated the economies of the Austronesian nations in Southeast Asia. Most economic indicators are back to pre-crisis levels as of 2006.
The Sumatra-Andaman earthquake hit Indonesia in 2004, killing 130,000 individuals there and producing a worldwide total of 230,000 casualties; it also displaced at least a million people.