
Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia - longdefeat
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/03/how-polynesia-came-to-be-inhabited-is-still-one-of-the-worlds-great-mysteries/
======
dreamcompiler
Deceptive title. The science around this issue was settled definitively in
1976 and multiple lines of evidence have only strengthened the story since
then. It's no longer even remotely mysterious: People built boats and sailed
eastward from Asia and navigated without instruments. Thor Heyerdahl was wrong
and Captain Cook was right.

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-
institution/how-v...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-
institution/how-voyage-kon-tiki-misled-world-about-navigating-
pacific-180952478/)

~~~
technotony
And presumably if there remains any debate about this we could settle it with
a genomic study.

~~~
gerbilly
Genomic studies suggest that the ancestor of the Polynesian people were from a
combination of New Guinea and ancient Taiwan.

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madhadron
The history of westerners having stupid ideas about Polynesia is entertaining,
but we're actually in a place where we know a lot about this. If you want to
know more about it, the two things I would recommend are:

Andrew Crowe, 'Pathway of the Birds', an excellent summary of what we know
about the settling of the islands and how they sailed among them.

The Vaka Tuamako project ([http://vaka.org/](http://vaka.org/)) is working
with a group of islanders who have preserved their voyaging system. The
Hawaiian one was rebuilt after being last, but this one is intact.

~~~
abrowne
That books looks great, thanks!

In case anyone else is interested, I did the research: no cheap used copies
yet. U of Hi Press sells it direct for about the same as Amazon w/ tax:
[https://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/pathway-of-the-birds-
th...](https://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/pathway-of-the-birds-the-voyaging-
achievements-of-maori-and-their-polynesian-ancestors/)

~~~
itwasnoaccident
Pathway of the Birds is evidently published in both New Zealand and Hawaii.
Available through Amazon too.
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41112497-pathway-of-
the-...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41112497-pathway-of-the-birds).
Clear, thoughtful and well illustrated with loads of maps. The full title is
Pathway of the Birds: The Voyaging Achievements of Māori and their Polynesian
Ancestors

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i_feel_great
I took Anthropology 101 at Auckland Uni and was lectured by Doug Sutton.

He suggested the reason they sailed against the prevailing currents is that
when they ran out of food and water without finding land, they let the
currents carry them back to their origin. The other way around is certain
death.

Also that they may have been driven by overpopulation pressures to seek out
new land.

~~~
hinkley
Every bicyclist learns this the first few times out. Some have _very_ strong
opinions about ever doing it again on purpose. My guess is it took almost no
time at all for that to become standard practice.

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lazyjones
Polynesia is a group of islands spread over a large area, but only a few 100
Km apart from each other at most. Why is it so unthinkable that the native
population spread slowly from Indonesia, Australia or New Guinea by exploring
nearby islands and settling there?

~~~
abfar
The first settlers of Madagascar are also Austronesians, came from Borneo
between 350 BC and 550 AD [1]. If you look at a world map you can see just how
far those two islands are.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar)

~~~
BurningFrog
That Madagascar remained unsettled for so long is the most puzzling of all.
It's not that far off from Africa, where humanity came from.

~~~
mmsimanga
Speaking for myself as an African. We can run and jump but swimming is not our
forte.

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nategri
I always like to think that the initial waves of human interstellar
colonization will be a historical rhyme with the Polynesian expansion---a
loose federation of populations separated by distances barely-surmountable by
technology, inexorably drifting toward unique cultural identities.

~~~
pvg
A tub carved out of a log or a big basket has a better shot at getting you to
a nearby island than anything we have offering the remotest possibility of
getting to even the nearest star. There's no technological parallel between
these things, much as we wish there was.

~~~
marktangotango
Nuclear pulse propulsion can theoretically reach .1c. Forty years to Alpha
Centauri. One could argue it’s a matter of engineering and motivation, not
known physics.

~~~
simonh
It's just not sustainable though. Who is going to build a 10 million ton
vehicle to deliver a 400 ton payload? It's the Apollo model of space travel.
It might be a lot more feasible with longer journeys, but is a transit time of
a dozen or more generations really going to be attractive?

There are considerable barriers. Just because you can put a number on
something doesn't make it practical. To put it another way, what distance
between stars would you say would make it impractical to spread between them
via colonisation? Where would you put the threshold?

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simonsays2
Strap two canoes together, pop up a sail, you have a catamaran. Ever been on
one in open ocean? Smoother sailing than a keel boat and no seasick. Follow
stars and birds and currents. Not magic.

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tabtab
Simple: Mononesia-1 met Mononesia-2.

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geoburke
I've often wondered the same about Staten Island.

~~~
pvg
Same way, free ferries.

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trevyn
“...the western world has been puzzled by how the vast Pacific could have been
navigated relying only on the stars.”

Strap your undesirables to rafts and push ‘em out to sea? I don’t see why
there has to be intentional “navigation” to end up inhabiting a place.

~~~
ceejayoz
Or just folks getting lost.

That's basically how the plants and animals got to these places.

Some colonization was likely intentional. Some was probably accidental, too.

~~~
EdwardDiego
Accidental colonisation? They accidentally transported their livestock and
staple fruits with them too? They accidentally sent several waves of
colonisation to new islands?

~~~
Taniwha
well, not a lot of livestock - they did have dogs

~~~
darkpuma
Cook often gets credit for introducing pigs, but my understanding is that this
is now discredited.

> _Pigs (Sus scrofa) have played an important cultural role in Hawaii since
> Polynesians first introduced them in approximately AD 1200. Additional
> varieties of pigs were introduced following Captain Cook 's arrival in
> Hawaii in 1778 and it has been suggested that the current pig population may
> descend primarily, or even exclusively, from European pigs. Although
> populations of feral pigs today are an important source of recreational
> hunting on all of the major islands, they also negatively impact native
> plants and animals. As a result, understanding the origins of these feral
> pig populations has significant ramifications for discussions concerning
> conservation management, identity and cultural continuity on the islands.
> Here, we analysed a neutral mitochondrial marker and a functional nuclear
> coat colour marker in 57 feral Hawaiian pigs. Through the identification of
> a new mutation in the MC1R gene that results in black coloration, we
> demonstrate that Hawaiian feral pigs are mostly the descendants of those
> originally introduced during Polynesian settlement, though there is evidence
> for some admixture. As such, extant Hawaiian pigs represent a unique
> historical lineage that is not exclusively descended from feral pigs of
> European origin._

[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.160...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.160304)

Apparently they also brought along chickens.

~~~
itwasnoaccident
A similar route of introduction can be shown for Pacific chickens and Pacific
rats, both of which were introduced to most Polynesian islands in pre-European
times. The full inventory of pre-European tropical crops in Polynesia alone
runs to almost 50 species. A lot of this is covered in _Pathway of the Birds_.

------
blunte
Sometimes the aliens don't drop people off where they picked the up from.

