Humans first began colonizing the Pacific more than 40.000 years ago. Beginning in the far west on the main island of New Guinea and the islands of the Bismark Archipelago, these first pioneers progressed as far as the end of the Solomon chain, across "Near oceania", along a route of mostly inter visible islands. Remarkably, there was no further eastward movement into a region now known as "Remote Oceania", for more than 35.000 years. Once it did begin some 3000 years ago, however, it seems to have been a rapid phenomenon which saw people colonize eastwards, across many uninhabited archipelagoes, as far as Tonga and Samoa over a period of several hundred years. The expansion has been associated with Austronesian language speakers, today called the Lapita People, who carried with them horticultural plants, domestic animals, and a distinctive suite of material culture, the most well known of which is the dentate stamped pottery. the earliest evidence for these people is found in the Bismark archipelago but their origins are thought to be further west in Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Lapita was the founding culture and it retained strong connections right across the region. In November 2010 the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris has hosted the first international Lapita Exhibition which shines further light on this remarkable chapter of human exploration and colonization which began more than three millennia ago.