Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia | Hacker News Reader

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

spectator.co.uk

69 pointslongdefeat54 comments

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...

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

Wouldn't be surprised if Cavalli-Sforza had done it already.

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

It was shocking to learn Guam was settled 4,000 years ago by the Chamorro people who built boats and seemingly sailed 2,000+ miles from Southeast Asia.

Discussed here a few days earlier:

The Voyage of the Kon-Tiki Misled the World About Navigating the Pacific (2014) (smithsonianmag.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19352806

The full title is Pathway of the Birds: The Voyaging Achievements of Māori and their Polynesian Ancestors. The book shows - among other things - how tens of millions of shearwaters on migration to their nesting sites in spring point to the whereabouts of islands.

That really is misleading. Ok, we changed the title above to that of the book being reviewed.

That 2014 article is much better. Interesting that it was discussed here so recently (as vram22 points out).

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/) 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.

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...

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-.... 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

Also this is a great resource:

https://www.amazon.ca/Vaka-Moana-Voyages-Ancestors-Settlemen...

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.

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.

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?

New Zealand/Aotearoa was settled by people from the Marquesas Islands, as was Hawaii. Hawaii is "1313 miles from Midway Island, 1337 miles to Christmas Island, and 2395 miles from San Francisco." to quote Quora.

The closest useful island to New Zealand is the Raoul Island in the Kermadecs (which was settled by Polynesians from New Zealand).

I encourage you to look at Google Maps and understand the scale of the Pacific. https://www.google.co.nz/maps/place/Marquesas+Islands,+Frenc...

> Hawaii is 1313 miles from Midway Island

Close-up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papahānaumokuākea_Marine_Natio...

Clearly easy to navigate due to many small islands / reefs.

> The closest useful island to New Zealand is the Raoul Island in the Kermadecs (which was settled by Polynesians from New Zealand).

980 Km distance or so, less than e.g. Iceland from the rest of Europe. Where is the mystery?

What I'd like to know is how these atolls and islands looked a few 1000 years ago, with lower sea levels (what is the rough estimate, 3 meters per millennium?).

Most of the small south Pacific islands were first settled in the past 1000-2000 years, and even some major ones like Hawaii and New Zealand. Sea levels haven't changed much at all in the past 3000 years. Certainly nothing approaching even one meter over that time.

...That's not at all in the direction of the Marquesas. Look south.

The Aborigines of Australia migrated separately from the Austronesian people who colonized Indonesia, coastal New Guinea, the Philippines, Madagascar, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.

Does this map reflect current research? https://images.theconversation.com/files/107932/original/ima...

I can't tell what article this map is associated with. But it appears to be a summary of when various places on earth were first settled by each homo. Australia was first settled by the Aborigines about 50k years ago, entering via Southeast Asia. Much later, New Zealand was first settled by the Maori 800 years ago, entering via Taiwan, Southeast Asia (after the Aborigines' ancestors), and the Pacific Islands, though these migrations aren't shown on this very simple map.

The current DNA evidence points to the aboriginal people of Taiwan as being the likely source of the original polynesians, likely they spread across the northern Pacific, as far as the Americas, then back again to New Zealand arriving around 900AD (the last major inhabitable place on earth to be discovered by humans)

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

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.

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

The out of Africa theory has been overblown by the media. There are many other bits of evidence that point to other origins...

If you read Wikipedia article

> The first archaeological evidence for human foraging on Madagascar may have occurred as much as 10,000 years ago.[10] Human settlement of Madagascar occurred between 350 BC and 550 AD by Austronesian peoples, arriving on outrigger canoes from Borneo

People lived in Madagascar 10 0000 years before arrival of proto-Malays.

Recommended resource on the use of DNA to track migration patterns out of Africa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journey_of_Man

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.

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.

The GP's point wasn't that there is a technological parallel in the process, but that there would be a sociological parallel in the result.

a loose federation of populations separated by distances barely-surmountable by technology

There is no obvious, analogous path to this happening with interstellar travel, even if you stipulate a civilization that has a strong interest and incentive in navigating and exploiting solar system space.

Not yet.

Nearest stars are only a few light years away. The journey might span a few generations. The raft will be a self-sufficient colony that converts onboard matter via fission or fusion to energy, and that energy into every other necessity for sustaining life.

It'll first start out as a proof of concept, only traveling around the local planets. Just like seafaring was first just a fishing thing near the coast. Maybe they try their hand at colonizing Titan first

Then one day, some group will decide to risk it and push off into space. Their distant ancestors will arrive at a suitable planet, and decide to give it a whirl.

All of this is just fun to think about, but just like the settlers of Polynesia 1,000 years ago, it's not unfathomable that 1,000 years into the future, we would have the means to engineer something like this. If we don't annihilate ourselves first.

That's the historical rhyme.

Nearest stars are only a few light years away.

There isn't anything 'only' about it and it's what makes something like the development of ocean navigation structurally completely different. You can swim to an island a mile out and the most isolated island is about 2000 times more distant. Every bit of technology incrementally developed to cover that distance is useful in its own right. Every use of the technology comes with a chance of serendipitous discovery.

Proxima Centauri is 100k+ times more distant than Mars. No asteroid belt miner is going to get blown off course and end up on Sirius. Nobody is going to build the 0.3 ly range ship because it might be good for taking tourists to a mindfulness retreat on Pluto.

It rhymes like pickle rhymes with motorcycle. You have to really believe it.

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.

At 0.1c, that 40 years will just whip by for the travelers themselves. To them, it will only seem like ... 39.8 years (doh!) No help there.

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?

Already ready:

http://www.openminds.tv/hawaii-ufo-landing-pad/28480

Build it and they will come (?)

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.

Simple: Mononesia-1 met Mononesia-2.

I've often wondered the same about Staten Island.

Same way, free ferries.

“...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.

Right. If you're exploring, who cares what direction. From what I understand, though, they used the prevailing wind and wave directions to navigate based on knowledge passed down over the generations.

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.

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

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

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...

Apparently they also brought along chickens.

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.

Someone accidentally discovered island A. Goes back for livestock and fruits. Gets lost and ends up in island B. Rinse, repeat.

In this case, they were doing repeated voyages and running trade routes across these masses of ocean. It wasn't undesirables. The second major settling of Hawai'i, for example, was by Tahitians who took over and maintained strong ties to Tahiti for quite a while before they went into a period of isolation.

Building a raft, even a crappy one, not even sea-worthy, is a significant investment just to strap someone to it.

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

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