Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement | Hacker News Reader

Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement

nature.com

74 pointsThevet25 comments

Yesterday’s HN thread on the NYTimes article covering the same Nature paper - Polynesian DNA suggests epic voyage to South America 800 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23771756

> 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.

"contact event"

About as understated as 2 faint lines crossing on graph paper lol

I'd be highly unsurprised that Polynesians and pre-Columbus Americans met, it's about the same distance from the Marquesas to Hawaii as from Easter Island to Chile, and it's 1.5x further from the Marquesas to New Zealand.

While the paper is about the admixture predating settlement of Rapanui, it's quite possible it was known of beforehand.

> it's about the same distance

Distance does not matter at sea so much as prevailing conditions (winds, current) and available marine technology..

The author of Pathway of the Birds¹ thinks it was possible.

1: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/pathway-of-the-birds-the-vo...

I would not be surprised if this genetic research sheds light on other contacts we didn't think possible. To name a few:

-Egypt/Africa in trade contact with South America (cocaine was found in mummies, still controversial as to how it got there).

-The Rumor that Chinese fleets made it to the west coast of the US (Chinese rock anchors found off the CA coast)

-The fact that Vikings made it further and further south of Greenland then we realized.

-The rumor that Maori DNA has been found in South America

-The legend King Madac, a Welsh king, making it to North America and that certain native tribes could speak Welsh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...

> The Rumor that Chinese fleets made it to the west coast of the US (Chinese rock anchors found off the CA coast)

At least for this particular one, it seems more likely it was chinese laborers from 100+ years ago that fished in the area.

What I have never seen mention of but I assume took place was near constant contact between Asia and the Americas across the bearing straight. You can literally see land across it. It’s close enough you can paddle across it in a day, and there is a set of islands in the middle to rest on.

It is also possible that a fisherman from South America got stuck in ocean currents and went to Easter island instead. This is simpler than making it to South America and then back to Easter island. There are ocean currents in the SE Pacific that can take a boat from the shore into deep in the Pacific.

If there was an Easter Island seafarer that went from Easter island to South America and back, then they would have a very good standing in the community. His guests would leave a bigger genetic mark in the community.

The paper resolves the controversy with the Easter Island (Rapa Nui) population. After colonization, the population from Chile mixed with the population from Rapa Nui. This paper conclusively shows that a 1200 AD (i.e. pre-colonization) event occurred on one of the eastern Polynesian islands before Polynesians settled Easter Island. The "hub" island radiation starts in the natural east-to-west currents. The Rapa Nui admixture is from Chile but the pre-colonization admixture is from Columbia and it is found throughout eastern Polynesia along with the South American sweet potato.

It is not known whether Polynesians sailed to Columbia/Ecuador and back or if South American natives sailed to Polynesia. A fisherman blown off course doesn't fit with the spread of the sweet potato and gourds, but who knows. The there-and-back-again narrative fits the Polynesian practice of exploring upwind/up-current and allowing the wind/current to help you get back. I use the same safety technique when canoeing and diving.

This last is worth expanding on. Mauricio Obregon in "Beyond the Edge of the Sea" says that the usual way of exploration on the high sea, seeking an island that may or may not be there, is to wait for a wind contrary to the prevailing wind. Then, if you don't find one, the wind will soon turn and carry you home.

This is similar to the Kon-Tiki theory that Thor Heyerdahl popularized, but has since been heavily criticized. Largely it implies that these people weren’t capable or skilled enough to make these voyages, that it happened by accident, and certainly has some racist undertones dismissing native Polynesian people’s knowledge and skills.

I spent some time as a teenager on a cultural exchange with a group of native Hawaiians and vividly remember being brought on some of their double hulled canoes and got to hear their master navigators explain a lot of their navigation techniques. It’s pretty mind blowing. I also remember a Hawaiian anthropologist talking about how a colleague in Central America had found some very old cave paintings depicting what seemed to be Haleakala.

It seems not at all surprising to me that ancient Polynesians were able to travel to the Americas.

I've heard this described as why would they have stopped exploring and colonizing. So it makes a lot of sense that they would have continued looking for any habitable island or land.

On the other side of the pacific, Hawaiian oral stories have some indication that they reached Central America from the islands. Referring to the place they found as a land of frogs.

If this is possible, is it possible that people got to the Americas by sea routes as opposed to crossing the Bering strait?

It is well supported at this point that, in addition to the Bering land bridge, the ancestors of many Native Americans followed a coastal sea route from northeast Asia to the Americas.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-humans-cam...

It's possible, but in addition to the Bering strait, not instead. The Bering was crossed as many as 19,000 years ago, and some theorize an earlier wave of > 40,000 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas#Chr...

The claims for more recent trans-oceanic contact across the Pacific are about much more recent times, mostly the last 1000 years (which is when eastern Polynesia was settled), and none are widely accepted except for continuing traffic with Siberia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...

With the vast spans of time involved, mostly pre-literate cultures in both South America and Polynesia, and the loss of both historical knowledge and genetic diversity following European conquest, it's very hard to argue that there definitely wasn't some more recent contact; but it does not seem to have left strong genetic or linguistic signatures.

Paywalled. No matter, http://sci-hub/10.1038/s41586-020-2487-2

My limited understanding is that the genomics community thinks the authors are full of it. Given that the lead author is Ioannidis, I'm sure that's the case.

Nature is peer reviewed right? Who in the genomics community is saying that this is BS?

No comment about the paper itself, but note that the first author is Alexander Ioannidis, not the John Ioannidis of Covid infamy.

Your sole contribution to this discourse is to bad talk someone while providing absolutely no evidence? I have no dog in this fight. I have no idea how solid the article is. But that’s why I’m not trashing it.

Totally different person. Same last name. Probably not related.

Anthropologists just make shit up, because it's how you get published and it's hard to disprove and truth be told people like stories real or not.

These DNA tests are mathematically provable so it's much harder to make stuff up, this shouldn't be so much in the fakeish sciences like biology or worse, this should be more bounded. Where have you read this?

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