At https://phys.org/news/2023-02-prehistoric-human-migration-southeast-asia.html … stating the obvious, we might say. Sundaland sunk beneath the waves and people migrated. Sundaland must have been occupied by humans but rising sea levels flooded it. The end result was the islands of Indonesia and the Malayan archipelago. This resulted, they claim, in a population surge into the islands, such as Java, Borneo, and Sumatra, even New Guinea, and probably, Australia as well. See map of SE Asia in the Late Glacial Maximum, at the Younger Dryas boundary and at 9000 years ago. Strangely, the rise in sea levels is depicted as gradual. In earlier accounts it all happened rather quickly, around 8500 years ago. See for example, Stephen Oppenheimer, ‘Eden in the East: the drowned continent of SE Asia‘ Phoenix:1998. It’s hard to keep up with the changes in dates, a more and more common occurrence. It would seem the researchers have reduced it from a catastrophic surge into a uniform and gradualist steady rise, in keeping with the mainstream agenda. This is pertinent in this day and age as climate change is supposed to be in the process of gradually warming and therefore the sea levels must also be gradually rising. This hypothesis must also be true as it is assumed the earth has also warmed as it came out of the Ice Age, hence the gradual graph upwards from the LGM to 9000 years ago, the beginning of the Holocene. Hence, it is the consensus. Melting ice creates sea level rise. That requires a gradual process. Anything contradicting that consensus must be wrong – even if it came from field studies rather than hopeful theorising. The elephant in the room of course is that sea levels are not rising. They have been mostly stable since 5000 years ago.
Apart from the use of modelling, trumping actual field data, we can assume the research, in order to get published, had to include a distinct global warming effect, or the authors made sure that the feature was embedded in their article. Perhaps it was rejected and they had to go back to beginnings. Who knows.
The full paper is at https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-04510-0 … but the suggestion is to read it and keep in the back of the mind that gl0bal warming and gradual sea level rise is coincidental to their findings. I can feel an update in the offing. However, the article also involves genetic research using the whole genome. Some 1,000 samples were collected from 59 ethnic groups. In fact, the paper is really about genetic and population dynamics and everything else is superfluous. The seal level bit is not central to the thesis – apart from the idea that people had the time to migrate before the sea overwhelmed their habitat on Sundaland. A sudden and brief, or several sudden and brief episodes of sea level rise, would not alter the genetic conclusions. However, the researchers still managed to get across that there were two periods of rapid sea level rise – which separated peoples across Sundaland. Australian Aborigines were probably already ensconced in that land mass long before Sundaland disappeared beneath the waves.