Many hypotheses pertaining to the problem of the Austronesian origin have been proposed by archaeologists, ethnologists and linguists. Most of them, however, tend to believe that the Austronesians, who nowadays live in the vast area of the Pacific and indian Oceansand was the coastal regions of Southeastearn China. The major problem arises when we cometo ask why the ancestral Austronesians expanded from their homeland into distant islands ofSoutheast Asia and the Pacific. So far, many explanations have been proposed, but no oneseems to be sound enough. In this paper, I was in an attempt to put the problem in a newlight by taking advantage of the increasing archaeological evidence from the regions of southern Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong and Taiwan. My view is that the maritime expansion of theancestral Austronesians was presumably initiated by a strong tendency toward the adaptationof coastal environments developed at about 7, 000 years ago.
