Near Oceania

Near Oceania or Near Melanesia is the part of Oceania settled 35,000 years ago, comprising western Island Melanesia: the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands archipelago. Some definitions include Australia and New Guinea. Compare Remote Oceania.

The great nineteenth-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace explored what is now Indonesia, drawing attention to fundamental biological differences between the Australia-New Guinea region and Southeast Asia. The boundary between the Asian and Australian faunal regions consists of a zone of smaller islands bearing the name of Wallacea, in honor of the great co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection.

Wallace speculated that the key to understanding these differences would lie in "now-submerged lands, uniting islands to continents" (1895). We now know that at several intervals during the , the sea surface was 130 metres below the current sea level. At these times New Guinea, Tasmania, the Aru Islands, and some smaller islands were joined to the Australian mainland. Biogeographers call this enlarged Greater Australian continent Sahul (Ballard, 1993) or Meganesia. West of Wallacea, the vast Sunda Shelf was also exposed as dry land, greatly extending the Southeast Asian mainland to include the Greater Sunda Islands of Sundaland. However, the islands of Wallacea (primarily Sulawesi, Ambon, Ceram, Halmahera and the Lesser Sundas) always remained an island world, imposing a barrier to the dispersal of terrestrial vertebrates, including early hominids.

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