Tiglath-Pileser I of Assyria conquers Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean, defeating Babylon and exacting tribute from the Phoenician city-states.

The Aramaeans take Babylon after his death and destroy Assyrian power, driving the Canaanites south.

Asharid-apal-Ekur, King of Assyria from 1076 BCE, had succeeded his father, Tiglath-Pileser I, and is succeeded by a brother, Ashur-bel-kala, in 1074 BCE.

The fragmentation of power in Egypt has allowed the Nubians to regain autonomy and to establish a new kingdom, Kush, centered at Napata.

Ramesses XI dies in about 1077 BCE, ending the Twentieth Dynasty.

He is succeeded by Smendes I, who founds the Twenty-first Dynasty.

The High Priest of Amun at Thebes, capital of Ancient Egypt, has by 1075 BCE become powerful enough to limit the power of the pharaoh over Upper Egypt.

This is the beginning of the Third Intermediate Period (1070 BC-664 BCE).

Eriba-Adad II, King of Assyria from 1056 to 1054 BCE, had succeeded his father, Ashur-bel-kala, but reigns for only two years before the throne is usurped by his uncle, Shamshi-Adad IV.

Little is known of his reign beyond this.

Ashur-bel-kala, the son of Tiglath-Pileser I, had succeeded to the throne of Assyria after the brief reign of his brother, Asharid-apal-Ekur, in 1074, after reigning for eighteen years, he is succeeded by his son, Eriba-Adad II, in 1056.

World population in 1000 BCE is about fifty million.

People from Melanesia and Micronesia migrate toward the Polynesian triangle, a region of the Pacific Ocean with three island groups at its corners: Hawaii, Easter Island (Rapa Nui), and New Zealand.

It is often used as a simple way to define Polynesia.

At the center is Tahiti with Samoa to the west.

The Polynesian people, by ancestry, are considered to be a subset of the sea-migrating Austronesian people and the tracing of Polynesian languages places their prehistoric origins in the Malay Archipelago.

There are three theories regarding the spread of humans across the Pacific to Polynesia.

These are outlined well by Kayser et al. (2000) and are as follows:

• Express Train model: A recent (circa three thousand years ago) expansion out of Southeast Asia, predominantly Taiwan, via Melanesia but with little genetic admixture between those migrating and the existing native population, reaching western Polynesian islands around two thousand years ago.

The majority of current genetic, linguistic, and archaeological data supports this theory.

• Entangled Bank model: Supposes a long history of cultural and genetic interactions among southeast Asians, Melanesians, and already-established Polynesians.

• Slow Boat model: Similar to the express-train model but with a longer hiatus in Melanesia along with admixture, both genetically, culturally and linguistically with the local population.

This is supported by the Y-chromosome data of Kayser et al. (2000), which shows that all three haplotypes of Polynesian Y chromosomes can be traced back to Melanesia.

Speakers of Austronesian languages spread throughout the islands of Southeast Asia between circa 3000 and 1000 BCE.

These people, according to linguistic and archaeological evidence, originated from aborigines in Taiwan as tribes whose natives were thought to have arrived through South China at the beginning of the eighth millennium to the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia.

The archaeological record shows well-defined traces of this expansion, which allow the path it took to be followed and dated with a degree of certainty.

It is thought that roughly thirty-five hundred years ago, the Lapita culture appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago, northwest Melanesia.

This culture is argued to have either been developed there or, more likely, to have spread from China/Taiwan.

The most eastern site for Lapita archaeological remains recovered so far through archaeology in Samoa is at Mulifanua on Upolu.

The Mulifanua site, where four thousand two hundred and eighty-eight pottery shards have been found and studied, has a true age of circa three thousand years BP, based on carbon-14 dating.

Within a mere three or four centuries between 1300 and 900 BCE, the Lapita culture spread six thousand kilometers further to the east from the Bismarck Archipelago, until it reached as far as Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, which were populated around two thousand years ago.

In this region, the distinctive Polynesian culture will develop, sharing common traits in language, customs, and society.

The Proto Malays, who have a more diverse origin than their Negrito or Semang predecessors, are settled in Malaysia by 1000 BCE.

Although they show some connections with other inhabitants in Maritime Southeast Asia, some also have an ancestry in Indochina around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, about twenty thousand years ago.

Anthropologists support the notion that the Proto-Malays originated from what is today Yunnan, China.

This was followed by an early-Holocene dispersal through the Malay Peninsula into the Malay Archipelago.

The Mon people of Thailand and southern Burma, one of the earliest distinct groups to occupy Burma, moving into the area as early as 1500 BCE or possibly earlier, apparently make large stone funerary monuments that are ornamented with figures. (These monuments may be connected with a megalithic culture extending westward beyond India and southern Arabia through Malaysia and Indonesia.)