Seafaring aborigines (other than Tao)

[Zla'od]

Does anyone know of any Formosan tribes that used multi-hulled boats (like the Indonesian pirahu)? The Amis, perhaps, or one of the plains tribes...? I don't mean just today, but at any point in the last few centuries.

[golf]

None in my memory.

[petrarch1603]

During the last ice age it was possible to walk from China to Taiwan. Maybe this is one of the reasons why there are many tribes in the mountains that did not have strong sea-faring cultures.

[cranky laowai]

If Taiwan was, as is now widely believed, the jumping-off point for inhabitation of the Pacific, then at some point the aborigines here had seafaring boats. I have no idea if they were multi-hulled boats. How far back do Polynesian multi-hulled boats go? If the origin of those is obscure, perhaps they originated here.

But in that case we're talking about millennia, not centuries.

[golf]

I believe some tribes of them had but lost their skill fo seafaring because Taiwan is big enough for inland hunting and farming so that they don't need that skill anymore since they arrived in Taiwan. Those are believed originated from Polynesian Islands and/or Philippines because I remember their languages are a bit similar. We called them Southern Islands' Languages 南島語系.

The other parts might have originated from China. I remember some genetic studies show some Taiwanese tribal people have high percentage of overlapping genetic fingerprints matching Sothern Chinese tribal people's.