How Ancient Humans Reached Remote South Pacific Islands | Hacker News Reader

How Ancient Humans Reached Remote South Pacific Islands

nytimes.com

89 pointspcl44 comments

This article is thin on details. But there's a lot of good stuff written about Polynesian navigation technology. I particularly liked the book Vaka Moana, which has an approachable and intelligent description of boats, cultures, navigation techniques, etc. https://www.amazon.com/Vaka-Moana-Voyages-Ancestors-Settleme...

One thing I took away from the book was that Polynesian colonization follows a pattern that looks deliberate. Specifically that they would depart on a voyage against the winds and currents, the hard way, so that they could make a swift return if they couldn't find the destination. Or at least that's what some computer modelling of the spread of Polynesian culture says. That finding is a bit at odds with this NYT article, not sure what that means.

Some other links for this NYT article:

The PNAS page (abstract only, paywall) http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/10/18/1612426113

Another summary with more details https://around.uoregon.edu/content/study-finds-climate-helpe...

Also, testicular navigation was a thing. More sensitive current detection...

I had no clue...

http://www.hawaii-nation.org/gis/8-conclusion.html

Thx!

This explains in more detail how it works: https://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/friends/Technology_of_Oceania.pdf

For tons of academic references on this sort of thing, check out the Journal of Polynesian Studies based out of Auckland University, New Zealand @ http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/

Except the very latest issues it's all online for free, and some fascinating reading. I used a lot of it writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(watercraft)

For example http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/document?wid=4414&page=0 discusses modern trimarans versus traditional craft complete with rigging, photographs and vessel schematics, and http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/document?wid=5567&page=0 provides wind tunnel measurements of the efficacy of traditional rigging.

This is old news. We've known since 1830 that a man named Nephi built a boat, and his father Lehi was given a golden compass ball called the Liahona that directed them from the Arabian Peninsula to South America where they built a massive civilization. After 400-500 years a curious man named Hagoth built another boat and settled Polynesia. It's all documented in the historical tome called the Book of Mormon. [Source: Former Mormon :)]

Your comment absolutely made my day! I just thought I'd point out that the specific geographic locations you mentioned are technically not official doctrine but are personal beliefs held by definitely many members. [Source: Current Mormon who prescribes to alternative theories]

I've always wondered what the process was like for the people who made it to someplace like Rapa Nui (Easter Island), which is a tiny speck in the middle of a vast ocean. Was it some kind of shotgun approach where a lot of expeditions were launched, and a very few hit a target and the others either perished or turned around?

There's a lot of speculation on this. But the colonization ships were not accidents or lost fishing boats; they brought fully stocked large boats with plant seeds and breeding animals. Not to mention a mix of women and men. Most places like Hawai'i were regularly visited for hundreds of years. Rapa Nui is a bit more of an exception.

I've seen it suggested that some of the discoveries may have indeed been accidents . . . the losers in a conflict would be banished from the island, and the lucky ones would find somewhere new to go. The unlucky would perish.

However, Polynesian navigation was quite sophisticated. They followed the stars at night; they could read the ocean to tell where land was; they could follow sea birds to roosting places.

> they could read the ocean to tell where land was; they could follow sea birds to roosting places.

That enlarges your target some, but still... over those kinds of distances, to hit a speck of land like Easter Island seems pretty amazing.

It seems crazy but these people lived their entire lives on small islands and had nothing else to do but master what little information surrounded them.

I've heard stories of Islanders that could detect different types of fish from surface wave patterns.

I get their mastery of the environment they knew. Say, navigating between inhabited islands, or doing long fishing trips, or that kind of thing. What I don't get is how they bumped into stuff like Easter Island for the first time. The clouds mentioned in another comment seem kind of plausible, but even still, it seems pretty amazing.

This isn't as difficult as you think. When you know an area well, you know what species of fish are likely to be around - down to specific habitats like rocky vs sandy coastline, and even particular arrangements of rocks or sand formation. After a while you notice their behaviours and specifically behaviours distinct from other species (e.g. bottom feeding, surface hunting, swimming style etc). So it's more of a combination of inputs that gives you an educated guess as to the fish you can't see, based on what you know about the area as well as fish behaviour. Anecdotally, I have an avid fisher of an uncle (more than one actually...) who is able to tell what species of fish he's hooked before he can even see it.

Also, There were a lot more fish in the sea back then and thus it was easier to live off the land while sailing.

Those guys had to have been absolutely top-notch fishermen, too. I'd have to think drinking water might be a more limiting factor, although some parts of the tropics certainly have daily rains that would likely provide that.

More than anything, I just wonder how they managed to cross thousands of miles of open water and hit relatively tiny targets.

It's hard to imagine these days but back then you could catch so much fish, you could easily retrieve enough fluid (blood) from them that you wouldn't need any rain.

Don't forget that fish eyes are a good source of fresh water too!

Man, I hope I never need this information.

Many oceanic fish also have non trivial amounts potable fluid along their spines.

Islands leave distinctive cloud formations in their wake, sometimes stretching many hundreds of miles. Here's an example from satellite photography: http://m.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?i...

A popular theory is that Polynesian navigators would hone in on these cloud patterns in the sky, treating them as the big arrows in the sky pointing to land that they essentially are.

Another navigation aid was birds. They knew the maximum flight time of certain types of bird, and therefore if you saw that species, you would know you were within a certain radius of land.

"Islands leave distinctive cloud formations in their wake"

Only islands with high peaks, which means most likely, volcanic islands. Which happens to be true for large islands in the pacific. As opposed to purely coral islands which rise just above the sea level.

The volcanic islands tend to form pearl-chains... one making a law from the faultlines, can follow that line

Very true. However, flat, forested islands can reflect a greenish color onto whatever clouds might be above them.

I have always found the history of the population of Madagascar amazing [1]. Who would have guessed that people from Borneo would be the first people to arrive.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Madagascar

The answer was suggested back in 1947 by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-tiki expedition which demonstrated how it was possible to sail the 4,000 miles or more across the Pacific from South America to the Polynesian Islands in a simple raft.

The problem is that the Polynesians appear to have sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific going the other direction. In Heyerdahl's day this was hard to explain because the Polynesians would have had to sail against the prevailing winds and currents. The problem for Heyerdahl's theory is that archaeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence indicates that Polynesia was pretty much settled west to east.

One thing we know now is that it is possible to sail Polynesian voyaging canoes pretty much any direction you want to go, at least over long distances. The Polynesian Voyaging Society has sailed Hōkūleʻa [1][2] all over Polynesia at this point and in fact they've sailed her all the way to the North Atlantic since then.

Back in Kon Tiki's day, the performance of Polynesian voyaging canoes wasn't well understood. They can't tack near as well as a modern sailboat, but they can tack to 45 degrees off the wind. And although it's true that prevailing winds in the South Pacific blow east to west, they still vary quite a lot in their exact direction. This means it's possible to sail to an island east of your starting point in a voyaging canoe even though the prevailing winds and currents are against you. Also it turns out the the prevailing winds can completely change directions during El Niño years, which happen with some frequency, making west to east sailing a lot easier. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokulea

[2] http://www.hokulea.com/

[3] I don't have a good citation for this last paragraph, but it might be from Ben Finney's paper "Anomalous Westerlies, El Niño, and the Colonization of Polynesia", https://www.jstor.org/stable/677659?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

Read the article. Going east to west is not the same as west to east because of the winds.

I thought these settlements were gradual and caused by lack of ocean/much shorter distances to cross due to polar caps capturing much more water in the past.

ie Russia and Alaska were supposedly connected, same for Britain vs Europe mainland, and also South pacific to some extent.

It doesn't explain all cases (ie mentioned easter island, no clue there), but this might have many reasons

The colonization of the Pacific happened very recently in the terms of people spreading around the world: well after the last ice age. According to wikipedia, the first human settlement in Fiji was perhaps 3500 BCE. Hawaii wasn't settled until sometime around 1000 CE. The sea level would have been nearly the same as today and distance between islands would be, for practical purposes, identical.

I have heard/read that changing weather patterns had an effect on the movement of people around the Pacific, making some journeys easier or harder during different periods. Long distance voyaging had essentially ceased again by the time Europeans were exploring the Pacific. Unfortunately, I can't provide a reference.

Long distance voyaging had essentially ceased again by the time Europeans were exploring the Pacific. Unfortunately, I can't provide a reference.

In Polynesia that's mostly true (although Samoa to Tonga is rather far, so depends on what you mean by 'long'). In Hawaii, the home and voyage of the ancestors was a place in legendary history.

In Micronesia though, there are still a few people who can do long-distance voyages.

The "less ocean" trend isn't going to help you go from Toga to Hawaii. There's no land bridge there. It's just more ocean.

So what was the technology?

Navigation, mostly

https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/physical/nav...

How do Polynesians rate on spatial intelligence tests? They were eyeballing star patterns instead of using navigational tools like the Europeans, right? So they were doing the math in their heads.

I don't think it has anything to do with racial differences in specific kinds of intelligence. I really just think it's a matter of practice makes perfect. If your entire culture is based around seafaring then you've created the perfect environment to foster a tradition and cadre of good navigators, and that's what they got.

I didn't see anything in the article or other things on polynesian navigation that indicated they used mathematics. To determine longitude by the sun and stars, an accurate chronometer was still necessary.

The ability to sail a boat up wind. The boats they used, catamarans, have a hard time sailing less than 90 degrees to the wind even today.

Your comment is a little ambiguous--- we've built modern-day catamarans that can definitely sail upwind. I think you're saying that the catamarans that Polynesians have built were never able to go up wind.

The small catamaran I sailed as a teenager had no problem tacking upwind. I don't believe they're inherently any worse at this than a single-hulled craft?

Article should be called:

"How we think ancient humans reached remote ..."

We will never know without having been there, just like the bering straight migration "fact" has now been debunked, to name an example.

It is very disappointing how sbjective and arrogant researchers have become, from astronomers to psychologists, and political scientists at the top.

We don't know many things, we think that is how they work based on what we see, but they never say that and it becomes the master narrative.

Usually, to be generally accepted, hypotheses like in the OP require multiple independent lines of evidence. (E.g., for human migrations, DNA, linguistic traces, and technical artifacts could serve as independent lines.)

Publishing this article in a wide forum like PNAS is the way of asking the community at large for reactions, for or against. If it had been a more narrowly discipline-specific article, it would appear elsewhere, like Oikos or Oecologia.

The only thing that was 'debunked' about the Bering Straight migration was that the first migration took place ~12,000 years ago. Some archaeological evidence indicates that migration took place earlier - which is not incompatible with the BSM theory.

It is, however, incompatible with an orthodox interpretation of it.

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