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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it a buried lede here that the Native American DNA implies they reached South America well before Columbus?

Or someone from South America reached them. That finding got its due attention a few years ago https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2

It's been pretty suspected for awhile due to the presence of sweet potatoes in Polynesia. This, however, gives a range of years for when that contact occurred, and that's big.

However, the ecocide theory of Rapa Nui has been so popular that, in some ways, finding evidence that that simply did not occur is bigger news.

Hmm, native Americans were in America before Columbus? Crazy

Let's not be flippant about something GP didn't actually say.

The Polynesian people aren't native Americans; as far as we can tell all native Americans came to the continents via the Beringa land bridge in the last glacial maximum[0][1]. However, as others mentioned there have been multiple reasons to believe that Polynesians and native Americans had contact, and this would be more genomic evidence pointing to that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Indians

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

Isn't this fairly well known already?

I can't answer your question, but on a meta level I would suggest to use "well established" instead, since that is less ambiguous about referring to scientists or other domain experts agreeing on something for various reasons.

"Well known" could also be intended to mean that something has become common knowledge among the general public, which I don't think applies here.

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