Given current views of Polynesian expansion (see sidebar, p. 1346), many researchers now think it likely that Polynesians reached South America by about 1200 C.E., after the settlement of Easter Island Easter Island is a Chilean island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. Easter Island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapa Nui people. In 19…Easter Island
How long did it take South Americans to reach Polynesia?
More than 800 years ago, Indigenous people in South America traversed more than 7,000 kilometers of open sea to reach eastern Polynesia, a new study suggests. There, the South Americans mated with Polynesian inhabitants during the initial period of discovery and settlement of those remote islands, researchers say.
Did ancient Polynesians interbreed with South Americans?
Reuters WASHINGTON – New genetic research shows that there was mingling between ancient native peoples from Polynesia and South America, revealing a single episode of interbreeding roughly 800 years ago after an epic transoceanic journey.
Where did the Polynesians settle?
Polynesia comprised islands diffused throughout a triangular area with sides of four thousand miles. The area from the Hawaiian Islands in the north, to Easter Island in the east and to New Zealand in the south were all settled by Polynesians.
Did Polynesians and Native Americans meet 800 years ago?
A provocative new study argues Polynesians and Native Americans made contact some 800 years ago. That date would place their first meeting before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and before the settlement of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), which has been suggested as the site of such an initial encounter.
Where did Polynesian settlers come from?
But a new study in The American Journal of Human Genetics reports that Polynesians began migrating thousands of years earlier, not from Taiwan, but from mainland Southeast Asia.
Do South Americans have Polynesian DNA?
And while South American DNA is found in Polynesia, no Polynesian DNA is found in South America.
Where did Polynesians first settle?
TongaPolynesian culture developed at the eastern edge of this region (i.e., in Samoa and Tonga). --Around 300 B.C. or earlier, seafarers from Samoa and Tonga discovered and settled islands to the east – the Cook Islands, Tahiti-nui, Tuamotus, and Hiva (Marquesas Islands).
Did the Polynesians discover North and South America?
It turns out that it was not Columbus or the Norse — or any Europeans at all — who first rediscovered the Americas. It was actually the Polynesians.
Where did people from South America originate from?
Equally controversial is the origin of South America's Indians. Most anthropologists believe that they are descended from people who migrated to North America from Asia at least 16,500 years ago and possibly earlier, having crossed the Bering Strait separating northeastern Asia and northwestern North America.
Do natives come from South America?
"Native Americans truly did originate in the Americas, as a genetically and culturally distinctive group. They are absolutely indigenous to this continent," Raff says.
Who are Polynesians descendants of?
Abstract. The human settlement of the Pacific Islands represents one of the most recent major migration events of mankind. Polynesians originated in Asia according to linguistic evidence or in Melanesia according to archaeological evidence.
Who came first Tonga or Samoa?
Early period Characteristics of the Samoan language indicate that the settlers probably came from Tonga. Local pottery manufacturing ceased by about ad 200, by which time Samoa had become central to much of the settlement of eastern Polynesia.
What race is Polynesian?
Polynesians are part of the Austronesian-speakers who migrated from Taiwan and crossed to the Pacific through the Philippines, eastern Indonesia, New Guinea, and Melanesia. Analysis of the Polynesian DNA has shown that the Polynesian people are closely related to East Asians, Micronesians, and Taiwanese Aborigines.
Did Native Americans and Polynesians meet?
A provocative new study argues Polynesians and Native Americans made contact some 800 years ago. That date would place their first meeting before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and before the settlement of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), which has been suggested as the site of such an initial encounter.
Are Pacific Islanders Native American?
This raises the puzzling question: are Pacific Islanders indigenous? The NACC has not historically served Pacific Islander students, since Pacific Islanders are not Native Americans. Native Americans are peoples indigenous only to the mainland United States, excluding both Alaska Natives and Hawaiians.
Who are Polynesians descendants of?
The direct ancestors of the Polynesians were the Neolithic Lapita culture, which emerged in Island Melanesia and Micronesia at around 1500 BC from a convergence of migration waves of Austronesians originating from both Island Southeast Asia to the west and an earlier Austronesian migration to Micronesia to the north.
What race is Polynesian?
Polynesians are part of the Austronesian-speakers who migrated from Taiwan and crossed to the Pacific through the Philippines, eastern Indonesia, New Guinea, and Melanesia. Analysis of the Polynesian DNA has shown that the Polynesian people are closely related to East Asians, Micronesians, and Taiwanese Aborigines.
Are Pacific Islanders Indigenous?
In fact, 8 out of 10 Pacific Islanders in the country are Indigenous to the US-colonized territories, according to a report by a White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. These US-colonized islands are scattered across the Pacific Ocean's three regions — Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia.
Are Filipinos Pacific Islanders?
Is the Philippines part of Southeast Asia, Oceania or the Pacific Islands? Officially, of course, Filipinos are categorized as Asians and the Philippines as part of Southeast Asia. But describing Filipinos as Pacific Islanders isn't necessarily wrong either.
How many kilometers did the Indigenous people of South America travel to reach Polynesia?
By Bruce Bower. July 8, 2020 at 11:00 am. More than 800 years ago, Indigenous people in South America traversed more than 7,000 kilometers of open sea to reach eastern Polynesia, a new study suggests.
How long ago did the Polynesians travel?
Some scientists have previously suggested that Polynesians traveled to and from South America, bringing the sweet potato to eastern Polynesia more than 800 years ago ( SN: 4/12/18) and possibly chickens to the Americas more than 600 years ago ( SN: 6/5/07 ). Ancient Polynesians’ “tremendous navigation skills” would have made possible round trips ...
Where did the DNA of Rapa Nui come from?
Genetic data included 166 Rapa Nui inhabitants and 188 individuals from other Pacific island s. All DNA came from present-day people except for samples from four individuals, each from a different site in the Americas. Those ancient individuals lived between around 500 and 7,400 years ago.
When did Asians travel east?
But most scholars at that time assumed Asians had voyaged east as early as around 3,500 years ago to relatively close-by western Polynesia, eventually populating eastern Polynesia by around 1,000 years ago without having any contacts with people from South America.
Who discovered Rapa Nui?
Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl’ s 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition tested his idea that South American seafarers settled the Pacific islands, including Rapa Nui, showing that it was possible to drift by wooden raft from about 129 kilometers off Peru’s coast to Polynesia. But most scholars at that time assumed Asians had voyaged east as early as ...
Did Polynesians travel to South America?
Those ancestors then could have carried that crop and South American DNA to a majority of eastern Polynesian islands, he says. Some scientists have previously suggested that Polynesians traveled to and from South America, bringing the sweet potato to eastern Polynesia more than 800 years ago ( SN: 4/12/18) and possibly chickens to the Americas more than 600 years ago ( SN: 6/5/07 ).
When did the Polynesians settle in the Pacific?
The ancestors of the Polynesians, the Lapita people, set out from Taiwan and settled Remote Oceania between 1100-900 BCE, although there is evidence of Lapita settlements in the Bismarck Archipelago as early as 2000 BCE.
Why was the wayfinding skills of the Polynesian people important to the question of purposeful human settlement of?
Crucial to the question of purposeful human settlement of the Pacific is the wayfinding skills of the Polynesian people because their navigational techniques allowed them to cross a vast ocean using little more than memory.
Where did the waka sail from?
In 2018 CE, a young crew sailed a double-hulled voyaging waka from Aotearoa to Norfolk Island, off the east coast of Australia. Although they met with high ocean swells and unfavourable winds, the voyage was intended to teach young people the art of navigating by the stars and reconnecting with ancestral traditions. Polynesian navigation will have a modern renaissance through education and reconnection.
How did the Polynesians learn to navigate?
The Polynesians knew the language of the stars. They had a highly developed navigation system that involved not only observation of the stars as they rose and crossed the night sky, but the memorisation of entire sky charts. Throughout the Pacific, island navigators taught young men the skills acquired over generations. Navigational knowledge was a closely guarded secret within a navigator family, and education started at an early age. In Kiribati, for example, lessons were taught in the maneaba (meeting house) where rafters and beams were sectioned off to correspond to a segment of the night sky. The position of each star at sunrise and sunset and the star paths between islands were etched into memory. Stones and shells were placed on mats or in the sand to teach star-lore. Karakia (prayer) and oral stories contained references to navigation instructions. Te Ika-roa, for example, meant the Milky Way; Atua-tahi is Canopus; Tawera is Venus the morning star; Meremere is Venus the evening star. The following are navigational instructions from Kupe:
What did the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands use to sail?
The inhabitants of the Pacific islands had been voyaging across vast expanses of ocean water sailing in double canoes or outriggers using nothing more than their knowledge of the stars and observations of sea and wind patterns to guide them.
Who is Kupe in Maori?
In traditional Maori oral history, Kupe is a legendary figure and explorer of the Pacific Ocean ( Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa) who set off from Hawaiiki in c. 1300 CE in a waka (canoe) to discover what lay over the horizon. Hawaiiki is the ancestral homeland of Maori and is thought to be in the East Polynesian islands.
When did humans first move to the Pacific?
By at least 10,000 years ago, humans had migrated to most of the habitable lands that could be reached on foot. What remained was the last frontier – the myriad islands of the Pacific Ocean that required boat technology and navigational methods be developed that were capable of long-range ocean voyaging. Near Oceania, which consists of mainland New Guinea and its surrounding islands, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Admiralty Islands, and the Solomon Islands was settled in an out-of- Africa migration c. 50,000 years ago during the Pleistocene period. These first settlers of the Pacific are the ancestors of Melanesians and Australian Aboriginals. The small distances between the islands in Near Oceania meant that people could island-hop using rudimentary ocean-going craft.
When was Polynesia settled?
The western part of Polynesia was settled between 3000 and 1000 BC by people from Taiwan via the Philippines as well as parts of New Guinea. Eastern Polynesia was settled beginning around 900 AD as Polynesian voyagers began to set out from Tonga and Samoa and other islands of western Polynesia to settle the Hawaiian Islands, New Zealand, ...
When did Polynesians meet South Americans?
However, a study in 2020 has suggested that the date for Polynesians meeting South Americans should be pushed back even further, to around 1150 AD. The nature of those genetic links and the location for that first contact also differs from previous beliefs. As Ed Whelan writes:
Why did the Polynesians come to America?
The Polynesians may have come to South America to trade with the natives, and as a result may have ended up also bringing home South American brides.
What was the last region of Oceania to be settled by humans?
Oceania was the last region to be settled by humans and the last part of Oceania to be settled by humans was Polynesia. Polynesians are famous for their voyages to remote islands in distant parts of the Pacific. Using outrigger canoes, they founded a society across islands stretching in a triangle from the Hawaiian Islands to Easter Island to New Zealand. That society was reasonably well-connected by trade, language, culture, and religion, despite its distribution over such a large area.
What is a Wa'a Kaulua?
Top Image: A Wa'a Kaulua (double canoe) of Hawaiian Nobility of the 18th Century . Polynesia was inhabited by skilled seafarers. Source: Herb Kawainui Kāne
Is there a gap in the language evolution of Polynesian languages?
This suggests some degree of intermarriage between Polynesians and other Austronesian groups as well as non-Austronesian groups. Another possible line of evidence for this hypothesis comes from the fact that there is a gap in the language evolution of Polynesian Austronesian languages.
Where did the Polynesians originate?
One major question today is where did the Polynesians originally come from? Several theories have been proposed over the years, but one which is gaining ground is that the Polynesians originated from Taiwan, parts of Papua New Guinea, and Southeast Asia.
When did Polynesia and South America interbreed?
WASHINGTON – New genetic research shows that there was mingling between ancient native peoples from Polynesia and South America, revealing a single episode of interbreeding roughly 800 years ago after an epic transoceanic journey. The question of such contact – long hypothesized in part based on the enduring presence in Polynesia ...
Which islands in French Polynesia have DNA?
People from four island sites in French Polynesia – Mangareva and the Pallisers in the Tuamotu archipelago and Fatu Hiva and Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands – bore DNA indicative of interbreeding with South Americans most closely related to present-day indigenous Colombians at around 1200 AD.
Where did sweet potatoes come from?
This contact explains the mystery of how the sweet potato arrived in Polynesia centuries before European sailors. Ioannidis noted that the sweet potato’s name in many Polynesian languages – kumara – resembles its name in some native Andes languages.
What is Rapa Nui?
People from Chile’s Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, also had South American ancestry, some from modern Chilean immigrants and some from the same ancient intermingling as the other islands.
Where is the oldest archaeological site in Polynesia?
The most eastern site for Lapita archaeological remains recovered so far is at Mulifanua on Upolu. The Mulifanua site, where 4,288 pottery shards have been found and studied, has a "true" age of c. 1000 BCE based on radiocarbon dating and is the oldest site yet discovered in Polynesia.
What are the islands in Polynesia?
Most Polynesian islands and archipelagos, including the Hawaiian Islands and Samoa , are composed of volcanic islands built by hotspots (volcanoes). The other land masses in Polynesia — New Zealand, Norfolk Island, and Ouvéa, the Polynesian outlier near New Caledonia - are the unsubmerged portions of the largely sunken continent of Zealandia .
What is the Polynesian triangle?
Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the Polynesian Triangle, although some islands inhabited by Polynesian people are situated outside the Polynesian Triangle. Geographically, the Polynesian Triangle is drawn by connecting the points of Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island.
How were leaders chosen in Polynesia?
Unlike Melanesia, leaders were chosen in Polynesia based on their hereditary bloodline. Samoa, however, had another system of government that combines elements of heredity and real-world skills to choose leaders. This system is called Fa'amatai. According to Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, "On Tahiti, for example, the 35,000 Polynesians living there at the time of European discovery were divided between high-status persons with full access to food and other resources, and low-status persons with limited access."
How did the navigators of Eastern Polynesia use their senses?
Navigators traveled to small inhabited islands using only their own senses and knowledge passed by oral tradition from navigator to apprentice. In order to locate directions at various times of day and year, navigators in Eastern Polynesia memorized important facts: the motion of specific stars, and where they would rise on the horizon of the ocean; weather; times of travel; wildlife species (which congregate at particular positions); directions of swells on the ocean, and how the crew would feel their motion; colors of the sea and sky, especially how clouds would cluster at the locations of some islands; and angles for approaching harbors.
What is the name of the island in the Pacific Ocean?
Polynesia ( UK: / ˌpɒlɪˈniːziə /, US: /- ˈniːʒə /; from Ancient Greek: πολύς polys "many" and Ancient Greek: νῆσος nēsos "island") ( Tongan: Faka-Polinisia; Māori: Porinihia; Hawaiian: Polenekia; Fijian: Kai-Polinesia; Samoan: Polenisia; Cook Islands Māori: Porinetia; Tahitian: Pōrīnetia; Tuvaluan: Polenisia; Tokelauan: Polenihia) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of more than 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are called Polynesians. They have many things in common, including language relatedness, cultural practices, and traditional beliefs. In centuries past, they had a strong shared tradition of sailing and using stars to navigate at night. The largest country in Polynesia is New Zealand .
Where did sweet potatoes come from?
The sweet potato, called kūmara in Māori and kumar in Quechua, is native to the Americas and was widespread in Polynesia when Europeans first reached the Pacific. Remains of the plant in the Cook Islands have been radiocarbon-dated to 1000, and the present scholarly consensus is that it was brought to central Polynesia c. 700 by Polynesians who had traveled to South America and back, from where it spread across the region. Some genetic evidence suggests that sweet potatoes may have reached Polynesia via seeds at least 100,000 years ago, pre-dating human arrival; however, this hypothesis fails to account for the similarity of names.
Where do Polynesians have genetic roots?
Genetic analysis appears to prove that Polynesians have genetic roots tracing back to diverse regions across the Pacific and the Americas, denoting the mixed origin of the population. (Ruben Ramos-Mendoza / Nature)
Did the Polynesians travel west?
This research raises the question of whether the Polynesians, who were amazing navigators, reached the coast of Latin America or did South Americans travelled west. Ioannidis states that “I favor the Polynesian theory since we know that the Polynesians were intentionally exploring the ocean and discovering some of the most distant Pacific islands around exactly the time of contact”, reports the Jerusalem Post . This argument suggests that the ancestors of modern-day Pacific Islanders visited coastal Ecuador or Columbia. It is possible that “a group of Polynesian people voyaged to northern South America and returned together with some Native American individuals, or with Native American admixture,” explain the researchers in Nature.
Did Rapa Nui have a genetic signature?
An earlier 2014 study had found that some inhabitants of Rapa Nui had genes that were inherited from indigenous South Americans . However, the latest study decided to collect samples from seventeen Pacific island communities and fifteen Native American populations from the Pacific coast of South America to detect any genetic signatures to demonstrate historic contacts with Latin America. The National Geographic quotes Andrés Moreno-Estrada, a Mexican geneticist, as saying that “previous studies have been only focusing on the possibility of [Rapa Nui] being the point of contact” and his team wanted to explore other possibilities.
Did South America and Polynesia have a relationship?
However, evidence has emerged that appears to prove that there were some pre-Columbian contacts between South America and Polynesia. Scientists found that the sweet potatoes found on many Pacific Islands originated on the continent of America. They then made their way across Polynesia roughly a millennium ago. The National Geographic reports that “the Polynesian name for the root vegetable— kuumala —resembles its names in the Andean Quechua language: kumara and cumal .” On the other hand, the birdman competition that used to take place on Rapa Nui, another name for Easter Island, has similarities to cultic practices from South America. These similarities persuaded a team of geneticists to examine if there was any genetic link between the two populations separated by thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean .
Did Contact First Occur on Easter Island?
It appears that Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, itself was not the initial point of contact between the two populations. This is surprising because Rapa Nua is far closer to South America. However, “That’s where the winds and currents will take you if you’re drifting,” explains one of the study’s lead authors, Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford University, in the Smithsonian. It is possible that they were cast ashore on Fata Hiva where they either met Polynesians who already lived there or who arrived after them.
When did the voyages between Polynesia and the Americas occur?
Researchers, published in Nature, sampled genes of modern peoples living across the Pacific and along the South American coast and the results suggest that voyages between eastern Polynesia and the Americas happened around the year 1200, resulting in a mixture of those populations in the remote South Marquesas archipelago.
When did Polynesians and Native Americans first meet?
A provocative new study argues Polynesians and Native Americans made contact some 800 years ago. That date would place their first meeting before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas and before the settlement of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), which has been suggested as the site of such an initial encounter.
How did Native Americans reach the Pacific?
If Native Americans had reached these remote islands by around 1200 they likely did so by following the prevailing currents and winds. In 1947, explorer Thor Heyerdahl famously demonstrated that it was possible to travel the Pacific by drifting on winds and currents on a raft when his famed Kon-Tiki journeyed more than 4,300 miles from South America to Raroia Atoll. Those islands lie in the same region that the genetic study suggests as the likely point of contact between Polynesian and Native American peoples.
How did Polynesians travel?
Launching one of history’s great eras of exploration, Polynesians journeyed by canoe across the vast Pacific Ocean. During several centuries of voyaging to the east they found and settled the tiny islands scattered across 16 million square miles from New Zealand to Hawaii, reaching the most distant, like Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and the Marquesas, by perhaps 1200 A.D., They left no written history to chronicle these voyages, but scientists have retraced the trips using various lines of evidence. Striking similarities in languages exist across widely separated island groups, for example, and the remains of structures and stones offer clues to who erected them. Even the spread of foodstuffs like the sweet potato —of American origin but found across the Pacific and nowhere else—could offer evidence of the skills and nerve by which people eventually populated the Pacific (though some scientists suggest that the sweet potato was dispersed naturally .)
What skills did the Polynesians use to reach the Americas?
There’s little doubt that the Polynesians—gifted mariners who used the night sky, the sun, birds, clouds, and the reading of ocean swells—had the oceanic skills necessary to reach the Americas. As Ioannidis notes, we know they reached Easter Island.
What is the artist's impression of Polynesian individual with genetic roots tracing back to diverse regions across?
Artist's impression of Polynesian individual with genetic roots tracing back to diverse regions across the Pacific and the Americas, denoting the mixed origin of the population. Ruben Ramos-Mendoza
What is the mystery behind Easter Island?
The new study’s genetic results also offer clues to possibly unraveling the history behind Easter Island (Rapa Nui), whose inhabitants erected the famed Moai monoliths before their civilization collapsed.
Ancient Voyaging & Settlement of The Pacific
Accidental Or Intentional Migration?
- The geographic area in Remote Oceania called the Polynesian triangle encompasses Aotearoa, Hawaii, and Easter Island as its corners and includes more than 1,000 islands. Between some of the islands in this triangle, there are distances of more than 1,000 kilometres (621 miles). Northern Vanuatu to Fiji, for example, is more than 800 kilometres (497 miles), and it would hav…
Indigenous Navigation Techniques
- Unfortunately, most of the traditional Polynesian navigation knowledge has been lost for several reasons: 1. most European explorers were sceptical of indigenous seafaring skills, and this was rooted in the deep sense of technological superiority of the Western narrative of the time. 2. indigenous navigational knowledge was an oral tradition. It was not recorded systematically, an…
Stars, Seas, Winds, Birds
- The Polynesians knew the language of the stars. They had a highly developed navigation system that involved not only observation of the stars as they rose and crossed the night sky, but the memorisation of entire sky charts. Throughout the Pacific, island navigators taught young men the skills acquired over generations. Navigational knowledge was a closely guarded secret withi…
Voyaging Canoes & Sails
- Polynesians mariners developed the double-hulled canoe (also called a catamaran). Some of their voyaging canoes were longer than Cook's Endeavour, which was approximately 30 metres (98 feet), although the average length for the canoes was 15.2-22.8 metres (50-75 feet). Canoes with an outrigger on one side were favoured in Micronesia (western Pacific region). The carrying cap…
Preserving Indigenous Knowledge
- There has been recent effort to better understand and preserve the remarkable feats of seamanship that enabled Polynesians to steer their craft with accuracy across the vast expanse of the Pacific. In 1985 CE, a 22-metre (72 feet) voyaging waka christened Hawaikinui was built. Its twin-hull was constructed from two insect-resistant New Zealand totara trees, and the waka suc…