Lanyu (Orchid Island) lies off the eastern coast of southern Taiwan, about 90 km south-east of Taitung. There are nowadays about two thousand Yami (now called Tao) people inhabiting on the 45.7 square-kilometer island. Like the other indigenous peoples of Taiwan, the Yami people speak the Austronesian language. Based on the linguistic similarities and their own legends it is believed that the Yami people reached Lanyu by way of the Batanes Island, which lies in the Bashi Channel midway between southern Taiwan and the northern Philippine island of Luzon. But current archaeological data have shown that this point of view presumably needs to be reconsidered. It has been suggested by many scholars that the jar burials, which have been found several on the coast of Lanyu and dated around 1200 B.P., may represent the Yami people’s ancestral tradition of burial practice originating from the islands of Batanes. This suggestion is made mainly because of that jar burials were found both on Batanes and Lanyu and their forms are basically similar to each other. In recent years, however, more and more prehistoric jar burials were found in Taiwan, especially on its east coast. For example, the jar burials were unearthed from the Huagangshan site of the Hualien County and the Wanshan site of the Yilan County. The forms and practices of these jar burials are similar to those found on Lanyu and Batanes, but their dates are apparently earlier. Therefore, there is an alternative possibility that the jar burial tradition on both Lanyu and Batanes may have eventually originated from Taiwan. This possibility may be further supported by the accumulating archaeological information on Lanyu. So far, three prehistoric cultures have been identified from the artifacts collected by different archaeologists on Lanyu. They have been labeled as “the Yami Culture”, the “Peinan Culture” and the “Fine Corded Ware Culture”. Although no concrete stratigraphic relationship among these ‘cultures’ were found, the styles and forms of some of the potsherds and stone tools found on Lanyu are undoubtedly identical to those found at the sites of Fine corded Ware Culture, Peinana Culture and Huagangshan Culture of the east coast of Taiwan. It is postulated based on the current archaeological evidence that we can not completely rule out the possibility that the modern Yami People came from the Batanes Islands, but we can not neglect the possibility that the east coast of Taiwan was probably a common homeland for the ancient inhabitants of both Batanes and Lanyu, who were totally or partially the ancestors of the modern Yami people. In addition to the archaeological evidence, two other lines of clues are worth to be mentioned: 1. Although some of the Yami legends indicate the islands of Batanes were the places from where their ancestors came, still others, on the contrary, tend to point out a Lanyu local origin. 2. The results of the recent analyses on the HLA system of the indigenous people of Batanes, Lanyu and Taiwan have shown that some hypotypes of the Yami people can be seen among the indigenous people of Taiwan, but not of Batanes. In conclusion, based on current available evidence and the related clues, we can be aware of that the island group of batan is by no means the sole place from where the ancestors of the Yami people originate. The peopling of Lanyu would have involved a long time and a complex process. In order to clarify this question, we need to explore more evidence and to carry out further research.