Polynesian DNA suggests epic voyage to South America 800 years ago | Hacker News Reader

Polynesian DNA suggests epic voyage to South America 800 years ago

nytimes.com

193 pointsdigital5596 comments

It's also possible that Polynesians visited North America. The Chumash people had relatively sophisticated canoes called tomols which have planks that are sewn together, which was a technique unique to them in North America, but has been seen in Polynesian and South American boat construction.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fo...

http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=24433

> Archaeologist Terry Jones of California Polytechnic State University acknowledges that the Malibu Lagoon Chumash could have encountered Polynesian master navigators, who gave their tomol building skills to the Chumash.

> Among North American Indians, only the Chumash, and later the neighboring Gabrielino, built sewn-plank canoes. In the Western Hemisphere, this technology is otherwise known only from the coast of Chile and among Pacific Islanders. The tomols were able to carry large loads for long distances which could allowed for navigation across the Pacific.

I can't seem to find information on whether there's a confirmed Polynesian genetic connection to the Chumash. Probably unlikely, but I've always found the idea interesting.

It seems conceivable, although probably unlikely, they might have learned the technique from Polynesian flotsam.

Some Polynesian canoe(s) drifting shore in California seems the simpler theory.

True. That, too, is an interesting hypothesis.

The simpler theory is simultaneous invention.

Little hard to prove either though.

We do have a lot of tar washing up on the beach around here, which is a needed to make a Chumash canoe. Available resources determines what you can make, too.

The amount of stuff that drifted and washed up on BC, WA, OR beaches after the 2011 tsunami was quite varied. It's not entirely impossible that some canoes went adrift and later ended up on Pacific Northwest beaches...

Something slightly related, but mostly of a tangential interest:

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

The Maori population also having descended from the Pacific Island Polynesians.

Moari polynesian

Fascinating trivia: Madagascar was populated by the Polynesians

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Madagascar#A_common...

No, it was people from Sunda Islands (now Indonesia) who are also austronesians.

Traders from Chile are another option.

It’s possible, but imagine you find a decrepit alien structure on the shoreline. You’ve never encountered it before. Do you think this broken down structure is going to easily give you answers? Do you think you’ll be able to recreate its building techniques without guidance to build a fully working one (even though this one may be incomplete)? I think this scenario is less likely than being trained by a fellow human. Unfortunately, unless there is evidence of genetic admixture it may remain uncertain.

Highly recommend reading the book Kontiki (or watch the movie) for the incredible story of Thor Heyerdahl demonstrating that sailing on a raft from South America to Polynesia is possible and a theory that now seems even more likely with the current DNA evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition

David Lewis’s book, We the Navigators, provides an in-depth study of polynesian/melanesian/micronesian boats and navigation methods and is the best source I have found on the subject

I don't know how else people think maori's got their kumara but im keen to hear it.

The DNA evidence suggests the opposite, in fact.

Many lines of evidence, linguistic, genetic, cultural suggest that polynesia was colonized west to east, probably originating in ancient Taiwan.

Heyerdahl pulled of an impressive feat, but his raft was a real dogs breakfast compared to a voyaging canoe or flying proa.

Doesn't the DNA evidence now suggest both? The article says that polynesian populations show a DNA connection with the Americas (especially around Columbia) from sometime around 1200. It would seem that the polynesians sailed from West to East until they either hit the American continents or peoples from the American continents came out and met them. Or both.

The article also suggests some think it might just be the effect of their most recent common ancestor in Asia somewhere, and not from any kind of transplant.

The American continents are kind of hard to miss. After sailing east from tiny island to tiny island, it is kind of hard to believe that they didn’t run into the continents at some point while looking for new islands.

Maybe, maybe not. Easter island is one of the most isolated islands in the world and is also one of the easternmost islands in the Pacific. It's still a long way to go to get to South America from there. Maybe a few family units arrived and then forgot about boat building and navigation for a few generations because the islands land resources were so plentiful. I think something similar happened to native people on Tasmania - they took a boat to get there, but forgot how to build boats eventually and so were stuck on their island without the ability to go to mainland Australia.

It's my understanding that serious anthropologists have little but laughter and disdain for Heyerdahl. Perhaps because his methodology was less than exactly scientific, but also due to a number of later spurious claims he made with no evidence.

While that is true, a whole lot of anthropologists when he went on his first expeditions also laughed at the idea of pre-European contact across the pacific, and whether or not he was right about who visited who the evidence that his claim that there was pre-European contact was true keeps piling up.

Of course he certainly went too far with respect to many of his claims, but he's not the only one with egg on their face in that respect.

This is a super interesting read! In my previous conversations with Prof. Fehren-Schmitz he was highly skeptical of any Pre-Columbian contact based on his findings in [1]. He says the issue is pretty strongly politicized, because there's a modern Polynesian immigrant community in Peru that would "benefit" if admixture is found, while the Polynesians in Polynesia are a lot more skeptical due to nationalist tendencies. I might be getting this backward, not completely sure, but his point was basically that it's super hard to study this specific issue because of the surprising amount of politicization there is surrounding it.

[1] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(...

There is one thing I don't understand for these epic journeys, whether it's trans Pacific/Atlantic, the Bering straight etc, what was the motivation to risk your life? Unless there was some kind of local conflict why would you risk the move given there was relatively unlimited resources at source destinations at the time comparef to population. What makes the first person decide I'm going to sail past the horizon and everything we know and risk my life, it boggles my mind.

There weren't unlimited resources. Each of the Pacific islands (except to some extent the large ones like Hawaii, which was settled late) got to carrying capacity pretty quickly after settlement, and populations were balanced through some variety of ritual warfare, cannibalism, infanticide, and starvation.

Plus, it doesn't take everyone doing it. It only takes a couple families in a couple boats, each generation, to hop across the whole ocean.

Part of the answer I think is that we often underestimate the level of sophistication of people who lived a very long time ago. Polynesians were expert navigators, they had a lot of knowledge of things like wind patterns, currents, birds, the positions of the sun and stars... and knew how to use those to orient themselves at sea. Long voyages were probably dangerous, but they may well have had the means to turn back and return home in case they didn't find land. This article is really interesting:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation

Maybe discovering far away lands was to them meaningful for exactly the same reasons that it was later for the European explorers who rediscovered their islands...

Though rogue waves are infrequent I wonder if their vessels were able to navigate them or do those vessels have the same issue as a small fishing boat does?

> Part of the answer I think is that we often underestimate the level of sophistication of people who lived a very long time ago.

I couldn't agree more.

> Tupaia was born at Ha'amanino Harbour on Ra'iatea around 1725 and became a leading ariori priest for the Taputapuatea marae. Tupaia was trained in the fare-'ai-ra'a-'upu, or schools of learning, about the origin of the cosmos, genealogies, the calendar, proverbs and histories. He was also taught how to be a star navigator. His memorized knowledge included island lists, including their size, reef and harbor locations, whether they were inhabited, and if so, the name of the chief and any food produced there. More importantly, his memory would include the bearing of each island, the time to get there, and the succession of stars and islands to follow to get there. These islands included the Society Islands, the Austral Islands, the Cook Islands, plus Samoa, Tonga, Tokelau and Fiji.[1]

> when asked for details of the region Tupaia drew a chart showing all 130 islands within a 2,000 miles (3,200 km) radius and was able to name 74 of them

> The chart he drew for James Cook in August 1769 shows interconnected voyaging routes ranging from Rotuma west of Samoa, via Samoa and Tonga, the southern Cook Islands and the Austral Group, Mangareva and Pitcairn all the way to Rapa Nui. A second major composite route leads from Tahiti through the Tuamotu Group to the Marquesas Group and on to Oahu in Hawai'i. Tupaia invented a cartographic system for Cook and his men which located a northern bearing from any island he drew in the centre of his Chart (marked by the word 'avatea', this is '[the sun at] noon'). This allowed him to translate his own wayfinding knowledge for island-to-island voyages into the logic and terms of Cook's compass. The Admiralty manuscript of James Cook's journal indicates that Tupaia told Cook that he himself (or his ancestors) travelled to most islands drawn on the Chart excepting only Rotuma (north of Fiji) and Oahu in Hawai'i. [7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupaia_(navigator)

Having dipped my toe in mnemonic techniques, I think part of why we underestimate people of the past, is we have forgotten just how much the human brain is capable of sans external tech.

Yeah, it shocked me the first time I memorized a deck of cards with a memory palace. Plus, imagine how well trained muscle memories became since methods would have hardly changed from generations before.

One of the Polynesian navigational methods I have heard described, was laying down in the bow of the canoe and going into a meditative trace, thereby being able to feel the ocean swell, and infer the location of distant islands by the diffraction pattern of waves. https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/media_colorb...

I wonder how it was even discovered this works

There may have been many reasons, but we do know they were very adept at sailing very long distances. They could identify the direction of land a very long way away (based on cloud formations, wave pattern, sea birds, fish and I am sure other signs).

I have not read any literature about the motivations, but they may have gone a long distance and turned back if they found no land. They were probably explorers with the same human motivations as European explorers, the desire to find out what is out there whatever the cost, and we remember the ones that succeeded, such as Kupe

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

Pacific islands had very limited population caps. It was a necessity to continuously explore that embedded itself in the culture and evolved into surprisingly (to us) good navigation techniques and technology.

Some of those ideas fuel the passion to head out to Mars which has a similar cost/benefit. If we establish there I’m sure a new horizon will appear with some of us driving ourselves towards it.

I highly recommend Michener's Hawaii, which provides one possible reason in the second(?) chapter. The book is fiction, but is a pretty good read. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12658.Hawaii

You start chasing available game in Africa and end up in South America. Seriously, that's our lineage.

In a pre agrarian, pre sheparding society, all you could do is find things to eat since you couldn't create them yourself. Pastoralism made it possible to store the energy from natural resources in the form of animal meat, but that still required grazing your flock and moving to available grass and water. Even one person camping can strip an area of natural resources surprisingly quickly. It wasn't until the development of agriculture that people were able to stay in place long term.

I doubt they considered it risking their lives the way most of us do. The Polynesians were expert seamen and navigators. They knew how to build boats, provision them, navigate by the stars, and find tiny atolls across vast seas. Sure, sailing has inherent danger, but if you're an expert, the risks are not insurmountable. Even today, many people sail across entire oceans alone in tiny 27' sailboats. Some guy just sailed from England to Argentina on one to return home for his dad's birthday when he couldn't get a flight. One man's deadly risk is another man's adventure.

I always keep in mind that before Industrialism, most human lives were lived on the edge of starvation. Violent death and disease was also much more common.

So life was cheap, people had little to lose, and the average person had to take risks we can barely imagine.

The book 'first migrants', which I recommend, covers this topic in detail offering several hypotheses. In particular, the founder myth ran and runs strong in our (H. Sapiens) blood.

| what was the motivation to risk your life

Read up on Bartle Types (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...). I have to assume that the idea of the Explorer type is not limited just to games.

Based on the documentary Moana, maybe there came a time where things were not going well at their current place so they set out looking for a new place.

Or maybe warring peoples invaded from the west, so they picked up and headed east looking for a new home.

Or maybe there was overpopulation on their island so they looked for a new place to spread out.

Or maybe they were just like us and some young guys were thrill seekers/adrenaline junkies/adventurers/etc. and they just wanted to head out to see what they could find.

With homo sapiens, the frequency of "some kind of local conflict" is not to be underestimated.

An epic journey could also be accidental: someone gets blown off course and survives because they had fishing equipment with them.

I don't think there were relatively unlimited resources, many islands were quite heavily settled. Tupaia, for instance, was born on Ra'iatea but had to flee to Tahiti due to conflict. He then went with the Cook expedition and taught them about Polynesian navigation.

It's very possible that some of the longest distance voyages such as the ones that found the corners of the Polynesian triangle in NZ, Easter Island, and Hawaii were triggered by conflicts with the losing group opting to go on an exploratory voyage.

In no particular order:

1. Boredom. Yeah, plenty of food, whatever; what should I do all day, shake coconut trees? BORING!

2. Prestige. Growing a family is not cool. Do you know what’s cool? Finding a new island and coming back a chief.

3. Conflict. Damn, the chief is a pain in the ass, males me shake coconut trees all day. I’m going to get my own island, with hookers and blackjack.

4. Curiosity. I want to see what’s beyond. Maybe I’ll meet the gods, that would be great!

5. Swagger. I am the best sailor in the tribe, the sea is my bitch, and I’ll show you.

6. Duty and tradition. Our culture is defined by expansion, it is my duty to do what our ancestors did.

7. Redemption. I screwed up, my life in this tribe is over, I have nothing to lose trying to start again beyond the sea.

There is some additional physical evidence for this in the form of plants and animals with American origin appearing in the archaeological record in Asia well before 1492. This paper [1] lists around 100 cross-hemispheric species. I'm not an expert on this, but I found the Phaseolus species (lima bean) evidence particularly compelling -- they are species of clear American origin with multiple unambiguous archaeological examples in India from as far back as 1600 BC. It seems hard to explain that without pre-Columbian trans-Pacific contact.

[1] http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp133_precolumbian_vo...

Well seed dispersal via wind and/or currents is relatively common over great distances. Hence flora on far flung islands...

So lucky to just stumble across a domesticated starchy carbohydrate cultivar just washed up on the shore.

It's also notable that the New Zealand kūmara describes the same thing that in Peru is called kumar.

The technology to voyage over the south pacific definitely did not exists in 1600 BCE. So trans pacific human contact is an unlikely explanation. More likely these particular species might have migrated them selfs (e.g. by floating) or with non-human animals (like birds) and later picked up while still alive by human farmers in India.

There is also the possibility of more crossings over the Bering straight. Inuits and proto-inuit cultures have crossed the Bering multiple times. I find it dubious that they never crossed westwards. However, the technological niche which the cultures of the far north have mastered over the centuries have less values in warmer climates so I don’t think much would have been brought from the Americas to as far south as India via the Bering.

Anything crossing the south Pacific from around 500 AD however can definitely be attributed to human crossings as the Polynesian cultures from that time period for sure had the technology for such voyages.

> The technology to voyage over the south pacific definitely did not exists in 1600 BCE.

How do we know that? Archeological evidence of wooden boats from that long ago in the tropics would probably be hard to come by.

You are right, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence, and while there is no evidence of an ocean fairing civilization in the 16th century BCE I will believe the simpler explanation that the reason why American crops were cultivated in India is because seeds were brought by winds, currents, birds or insects, but not humans.

I guess I should have been more careful in may claim that “the technology did not exist”, and should have worded it as: “we have no evidence for such technology existing at that time in human history”.

Without humans involved, it's not as unlikely as you might think. 2 examples:

The Silversword plant found on Haleakala volcano in Hawaii descends from ancestors found in California, presumably transmitted by birds carrying seeds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyroxiphium_sandwicense_su...

Several separate groups of primates that inadvertently rafted to South America on floating storm debris:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/09/world/prehistoric-monkeys-cro...

From the article: "One important staple across Polynesia is the sweet potato, which originated in South America."

I looked into this a while ago. Unfortunately most of the pre contact sweet potato cultivars that were grown in NZ have been lost to time, as larger growing imports were adopted. There may be some original samples in a Japanese seed bank somewhere.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object... https://www.jstor.org/stable/4257220?seq=1

Anyone interested in Polynesian exploration would enjoy learning about Hōkūle‘a: http://www.hokulea.com/voyages/our-story/

So that Norwegian guy[0] who built a raft and floated to Polynesia from Peru was right all along.

Edit: Oh actually it looks like they're claiming the direction of travel went the other way. I can't see the full article, but I wonder how they can distinguish between the two directions.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl

https://sci-hub.st/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-02...

The full article considers both possibilities, and doesn't settle on one of them as more likely.

It looks like they aren't sure which direction the travel might have gone:

"Our earliest estimated date of contact isad 1150 for Fatu Hiva, South Marquesas. This is close to the date estimated by radiocarbon dating for settlement of that island group13, raising the intriguing possibility that, upon their arrival, Polynesian settlers encountered a small, already established, Native American population. It was on the island of Fatu Hiva—the easternmost island in equatorial Polynesia—that Thor Heyerdahl hypothesized that Native American and Polynesian individuals might have contacted one another, based on islanders’ legends stating that their forefathers had come from the east39. The Marquesas lie at the latitude of Ecuador, and wind- and current-based simulations indicate that they are the islands most likely to be reached from South America via the strong east-to-west currents and winds at these equatorial latitudes4,40,41.

We cannot discount an alternative explanation: a group of Polynesian people voyaged to northern South America and returned42 together with some Native American individuals, or with Native American admixture, as speculated in ref. 10. We have dated the contact event to the time when Polynesian explorers were, according to some studies, making their longest-range voyages (the century surrounding ad 1200)—a time when these studies suggest that the Polynesian settlers discovered all remaining island groups in the Pacific, from Hawaii to New Zealand to Rapa Nui13,38,42. The Tuamotu Archipelago, which lies at the centre of the Polynesian islands in which we found a Native American component, is known to have been a Polynesian voyaging hub, and according to simulations it is the second most likely location to be reached when voyaging from South America4. Further population genetics collaborations with these genetically understudied island populations are needed to resolve these alternative hypotheses."

By "single contact event" I think they mean that all the contacts between Polynesia and South America happened around the same time period and stopped thereafter for some reason. So the contact could have been groups going in either (or both) direction around that time period.

Thanks, that's interesting.

Perhaps they lost their wayfinder before the knowledge was sufficiently passed on? [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Piailug

That's an incredibly interesting link. Thanks for sharing!

Posts and comment threads like these are the reason why HN is so damn good

The most likely reason is that they found everything there was to find. This kind of exploration was a speculative search for new places to live, and as the returns diminished there would have been less and less motivation to head into the unknown.

And, presumably, once they hit the American continents and realized they were not uninhabited islands, they would have had no need to continue exploring to the east.

The great book Pathway of the Birds, about Polynesian voyaging, navigation and settlement, mentions the possibility of travel to the South American mainline. I don't remember the details, but the winds and currents support travel east and then north along the coast, then back west further north.

They can't distinguish at this point. I wonder if examining the Y DNA and mitochondrial DNA patterns of the same populations might shed light on the gender breakdown of the genes, which might be something that can be correlated with patterns of gender representation in migrations.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000292970...

Interesting paper, but it seems to suggest that all the Native American Y-DNA on Rapa Nui is explainable by the 19th century Peruvian slave trade, not contact between Polynesians and South Americans centuries earlier.

From the paper [1]:

> Here we analyse genome-wide variation in individuals from islands across Polynesia for signs of Native American admixture, analysing 807 individuals from 17 island populations and 15 Pacific coast Native American groups. We find conclusive evidence for prehistoric contact of Polynesian individuals with Native American individuals (around ad 1200) contemporaneous with the settlement of remote Oceania. Our analyses suggest strongly that a single contact event occurred in eastern Polynesia, before the settlement of Rapa Nui, between Polynesian individuals and a Native American group most closely related to the indigenous inhabitants of present-day Colombia.

Rapa Nui is Easter Island. No surprises on the genetic front but the navigational path sailed holds intriguing possibilities.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2

Isn't the headline wrong then? If the contact occurred in Polynesia, then the "epic voyage" should be from South America to Polynesia.

If you read the article you will see that they aren't sure if there were people going from Polynesia to South America, or from South America to Polynesia. Or it could have been both ways.

For clarification, jeffreyrogers correctly states that the HN headline, based on the NYTimes subtitle "A new genetic study suggests that Polynesians made an epic voyage to^ South America 800 years ago", is wrong. As "irrational" points out, an epic journey did occur but we don't know the direction. To^ shouldn't be in the headline. Neither should "from".

The Polynesians are proven navigators but the natural current from Columbia/Ecuador to eastern Polynesia makes the alternative path quite plausible as demonstrated by Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition.

There's a good book that came out earlier this year about the Polynesian expansion called _Sea People_ by Christina Thompson. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Yes, loved this book too!!

I always liked the Zuni/Japan theory.

https://www.ancientpages.com/2017/12/26/mysterious-zuni-indi...

When I found out about William Bligh I figured these types of things must certainly been possible for a long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bligh

> One explanation: Polynesians came to South America, and then took South Americans onto their boats to voyage back out to sea.

Isn't it easier to assume that both groups reached Easter Island independently and reproduced on the island with each other?

AFAIK there isn't much (if any) evidence of ocean-going vessels in pre-Colombian South America. So probably not.

Not to dismiss your rebuttal (I don’t believe the technology for voyages cross the south Pacific existed in the Americas [south of Greenland] prior to European contact either), but it is also possible that some unlucky fishermen got caught in a storm off the coast, and was unable to return to land. They miraculously managed to survive while being carried with the currents to e.g. Rapa Nui where they were saved by the local population, nurtured back to health, and lived there, had children and then died.

What evidence would we expect to find? I would imagine any wooden boats from that long ago would have long ago disintegrated by water, tropical jungles, tropical fauna, etc. long ago. Lack of proof isn't proof of non-existence.

Oral history, anchor stones, parts or fragments of vessels (carvings from the prow, steering oars, and so on).

In Polynesian culture, an ocean-going vessel was a thing of great mana, having its own name and celebrated in many stories. Relics were revered and carefully preserved.

I don't think Polynesians are unique in this regard.

Great book discussing this topic in the context of human exploration: „Beyond the known“ by Andrew Rader.

There was a thread last week that brought up Graham Hancock.

This is yet another thing that his work speculated some 25 years ago, and I think he did a 4-part BBC documentary that tries to connect parts of the world to a single, ocean-faring civilization due to the construction methods and whatnot used in the archaeological remains we have today.

Of course, he's been dismissed as a crackpot so nevermind that.

The people who concluded Polynesians may have reached South America based on their seafaring abilities are somewhat more likely to be vindicated by this than Hancock's writings about pre Ice Age Atlantis, never mind his writings about the pyramids' connections with civilizations on Mars...

Kind of OT, but it bothers me that the caption of the lead photo mentions Easter Island, but the lead paragraph references Rapa Nui.

Like... why did you create a pointer to an existing variable with a different name, then use them interchangeably? Or something like that.

Fuck no. DNA cannot suggest any fucking voyage, especially in time.

This kind of bullshit is an insult to intelligence and to the very principles of science.

Okay, let's state it differently.

The problem with so called peer-reviewed abstract "sciences" is the same as with theology and any sectarian movement - that reviewers are from the same sect and praise effort instead of refuting nonsense.

If you do logical refutation the whole field might collapse easily and leave reviewers out of luractive jobs and high social status. Precisely what happened to priests - from people next to God to merely funny freaks.

Socially constructed bullshit is what we have instead of science. The principles of science including the one that only which cannot be disproved and experimentally refuted is accepted as a operational approximation to the truth, NOT some fucking current social consensus among some sectarian establishment.

And no, DNA is too far removed from high level population processes to even try to establish a meaningful correlation, leave alone a causation.

Look, I don't entirely disagree. There are often problems with trying to use genetics to talk about the interactions of historical people. However, historical sciences in general don't work that way. The evidence we have generally underdetermines theories and moreover, it's often still useful to use a theory that isn't universal for a more limited application.

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