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Pre-Columbian Polynesian / Native American Contact(s)

Hanslune

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http://www.livescience.com/history/0706 ... icken.html

Which came first–the chicken or the European?

Popular history, and a familiar rhyme about Christopher Columbus, holds that Europeans made contact with the Americas in 1492, with some arguing that the explorer and his crew were the first outsiders to reach the New World.

But chicken bones recently unearthed on the coast of Chile—dating prior to Columbus’ “discovery” of America and resembling the DNA of a fowl species native to Polynesia—may challenge that notion, researchers say.

“Chickens could not have gotten to South America on their own—they had to be taken by humans,” said anthropologist Lisa Matisoo-Smith from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Polynesians made contact with the west coast of South America as much as a century before any Spanish conquistadors, her findings imply.

DNA in bone

The chicken bones were discovered at an archaeological site called El Arenal, on the south coast of Chile, alongside other materials belonging to the indigenous population. While chickens aren’t native to the region, it was believed the local Araucana species found there now was brought to the Americas by Spanish settlers around 1500.

Tests on the bones, however, now indicate the birds arrived well before any European made landfall in South America, Matisoo-Smith and her colleague Alice Storey found.

“We had the chicken bone directly dated by radio carbon. The calibrated date was clearly prior to 1492,” Matisoo-Smith told LiveScience, noting that it could have ranged anywhere from 1304 to 1424. “This also fits with the other dates obtained from the site (on other materials), and it fits with the cultural period of the site.”

Did Polynesians continue eastwards?

DNA extracted from the bones also matched closely with a Polynesian breed of chicken, rather than any chickens found in Europe.

Polynesia was settled by sailors who migrated from mainland Southeast Asia, beginning about 3,000 years ago. They continued gradually eastwards, but were never thought to have journeyed further than Easter Island, about 2,000 miles off the coast of continental Chile.

The chicken DNA suggests at least one group did make the harrowing journey across the remaining stretch of Pacific, Matisoo-Smith said.

“We cannot say exactly which island the voyage came from. The DNA sequence is found in chickens from Tonga, Samoa, Niue, Easter Island and Hawaii,” Matisoo-Smith said. “If we had to guess, we would say it was unlikely to have come from West Polynesia and most likely to have come from Easter Island or some other East Polynesian source that we have not yet sampled.”

The results are detailed in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Kon-Tiki trip in reverse

It might be the most tangible, but this isn’t the first evidence that pre-Columbian voyages from the Pacific to South America were possible.

In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl, the famous Norwegian anthropologist, made the voyage from Peru to Polynesia aboard his Kon-Tiki raft to prove the trip was doable with a rudimentary vessel.

There are more scientific arguments, too, said Matisoo-Smith.

“There is increasing evidence of multiple contacts with the Americas,” she said, “based on linguistic evidence and similarities in fish hook styles.” Physical evidence of human DNA from Polynesia has yet to be found in South America, she added.
 
Rant alert, but findings like this are a good illustration of what it takes for 'mainstream anthropology' to get their collective lips off the crack pipe. It's like "Hello, any of you writing textbooks actually ever been to the Pacific ocean? Flown over it? Looked at a map, even?". So the accepted theory has been that these Polynesian seafarers, who traversed thousands and thousands of miles of rough ocean in canoes, to the point where they populated almost every inhabitable flyspeck in the unimaginably vast Pacific, just stopped there and either never tried to keep going and/or never managed to bump into, y'know, a freaking continent. I'm always happy when tangible evidence arrives to overturn these theorhetical applecarts, but how does an entire field, up until such evidence appears, manage to subscribe to a theory that doesn't even pass the common sense test?
 
Howdy Iopaka3

That is the way science works. Many people suspected that the Polynesians made it all the way but there was no proof they actually did. The theory is based on the available evidence.

You will find speculation on that belief going back a long, long way.

Oh and yes most of the people who write text books actually know something about the subject! LOL

It should be pointed out that the voyage to SA or NA would have been one of the longest they would have undertaken. In both cases the culture and techniques they had developed for survival on islands would have been poorly adapted to mainland living-although they were able to adapt to New Zealand.

The Pollies probably made it to SA and NA and even Australia but the evidence has been lacking or questionable - even the chicken evidence will need confirmation. What needs to be found is a habitation site.

Common sense should never be applied to human history-look at how long it took to invent stirups? Figure out the Greeks were wrong about so many things that are clearly evident, why certain obvious technologies were not used-etc, etc.
 
Kon-Tiki explorer was partly right – Polynesians had South American roots
It is probably the most epic journey ever under taken just to prove a point.
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
2:31PM BST 17 Jun 2011

Thor Heyerdahl clung to Kon-Tiki, his balsa wood raft, for 4,300 miles to show that Polynesia could have been colonised from South America rather than Asia as commonly thought.
But despite achieving his goal – sustaining his 101 day voyage with sharks caught with his bare hands – the Norwegian failed to sway the scientific community.

Now – 64 years later- new research has finally proved the adventurer was at least partly right after all.
A team of scientists have tested the genetic make up of descendants of the original islanders and found it includes DNA that could have only come from native Americans.
That means that some time before the remote islands – including Easter Island – were colonised by Europeans the locals had interbred with people from South America.

The Polynesian islands are some of the most remote in the world – lying thousands of miles west of South America and thousands of miles east of Asia.
The established theory has always been that Polynesia was colonised via Asia around 5,500 years ago.
This has been backed up by archaeology, linguistics and some genetic studies.

But in 1947, Heyerdahl controversially claimed that Easter Island's famous statues were similar to those at Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, and sailed a raft from Peru to French Polynesia to prove it could have been colonised from America.

Now Professor Erik Thorsby of the University of Oslo in Norway has found clear evidence to support elements of Heyerdahl's hypothesis.
In 1971 and 2008 he collected blood samples from Easter Islanders whose ancestors had not interbred with Europeans and other visitors to the island.

Prof Thorsby looked at the genes, which vary greatly from person to person.
Most of the islanders' genes were Polynesian, but a few of them also carried genes only previously found in indigenous American populations.

Prof Thorsby found that in some cases the Polynesian and American genes were shuffled together, the result of a process known "recombination".
This means the American genes would need to be around for a certain amount of time for it to happen.

Prof Thorsby can't put a precise date on it, but says it is likely that Americans reached Easter Island before it was "discovered" by Europeans in 1722.
Prof Thorsby believes there may have been a Kon-Tiki-style voyage from South America to Polynesia.
Alternatively, Polynesians may have travelled east to South America, and then returned.

However, Prof Thorsby said that his new evidence does not confirm Heyerdahl's theory that the islanders were originally all from South America.
The first settlers to Polynesia came from Asia, and they made the biggest contribution to the population, he said.
"Heyerdahl was wrong but not completely," he said.

The work was presented at a Royal Society talk in London and reported in the New Scientist.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scie ... roots.html
 
In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl, the famous Norwegian anthropologist, made the voyage from Peru to Polynesia aboard his Kon-Tiki raft to prove the trip was doable with a rudimentary vessel.

I read his book Kon Tiki earlier this year and was much more impressed that I expected to be. The case is undeniably circumstantial (there's no magic bullet), but the waves of increasing probability come in thick and fast and lead only in one direction.

Regardless of whether one is taken by the speculation, however, it's a cracking adventure story, or a series of stories nestled within stories--all well-told.

I'd prescribe it as bedtime reading: ten pages per night for exotic dreams of the Son of the Sun and his more contemporary devotees.
 
Polynesians in South America is not at all hard for me to accept. To me the theory of precolumbian visits to the Americas is just common sense. What I don't understand is why this is regarded as a fringe or pseudoscience.
 
Thor Heyerdahl's theories about polynesians reaching South America has been debunked once. ...

Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki experiment wasn't designed to demonstrate Polynesians could have inhabited South America, but rather that Polynesian legends claiming the original islanders came from the east may have some merit.

In any case ... New genetic research supports the notion that Native Americans contacted Polynesians (i.e., sailing to Oceania from the east) almost 300 years before Columbus' first voyage.
Native Americans Voyaged to Polynesia in Prehistoric Times, Genetics Suggests

he birth and development of civilisation on the Polynesian islands continues to be a source of fascination for historians, and new evidence shows that Native American visitors may well have been established in the area hundreds of years before European settlers.

After a detailed DNA analysis of the genomes of more than 800 Polynesians and Native Americans, both modern and prehistoric, researchers have found evidence of contact between the two groups as far back as 1200 CE.

The team found signs of genetic admixture that they traced to a single contact event around that time, and it could mean a rethink as to how populations grew and evolved on the islands before European traders and missionaries arrived at the start of the 18th century.

"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," the researchers explain in their paper.

Interestingly, this is the first genetic study to indicate that the initial point of contact for American travellers was not Easter Island (Rapa Nui) – the closest island to South America – but rather one of the eastern Polynesian archipelagos, such as the South Marquesas.

The same idea was previously put forward by Norwegian explorer and anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, who famously made the 8,000-kilometre (5,000-mile) journey from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands, in a traditional wooden Inca raft called the Kon-Tiki, to show it could feasibly be done.

Heyerdahl's voyage was inspired by islander legends, which held that their ancestors came from the east. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-ev...tact-between-native-americans-and-polynesians
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the newly published report on the genetic analysis.

Ioannidis, A.G., Blanco-Portillo, J., Sandoval, K. et al.
Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement.
Nature (2020).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2487-2

Abstract
The possibility of voyaging contact between prehistoric Polynesian and Native American populations has long intrigued researchers. Proponents have pointed to the existence of New World crops, such as the sweet potato and bottle gourd, in the Polynesian archaeological record, but nowhere else outside the pre-Columbian Americas, while critics have argued that these botanical dispersals need not have been human mediated. The Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl controversially suggested that prehistoric South American populations had an important role in the settlement of east Polynesia and particularly of Easter Island (Rapa Nui). Several limited molecular genetic studies have reached opposing conclusions, and the possibility continues to be as hotly contested today as it was when first suggested. 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.

SOURCE: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2
 
This review and discussion of the Ioannidis et al. research provides additional context and comments on the significance of their results.
Native South Americans were early inhabitants of Polynesia

DNA analysis of Polynesians and Native South Americans has revealed an ancient genetic signature that resolves a long-running debate over Polynesian origins and early contacts between the two populations. ...

DNA studies will be necessary to answer some of the remaining questions, and should analyse living populations not included in the authors’ study, as well as DNA extracted from ancient bones. Nevertheless, Ioannidis and colleagues’ core findings have finally solved the mystery about a possible early Native South American physical presence in eastern Polynesia, and that is a great contribution

FULL STORY: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01983-5
 
This reminds me of a speculation I read that said the Moai construction halted because of a war between two different tribes on the island. If tribe A is Polynesian, what's Tribe B?
 
This reminds me of a speculation I read that said the Moai construction halted because of a war between two different tribes on the island. If tribe A is Polynesian, what's Tribe B?
Also Polynesian?
 
I wondered if the following new YouTube upload might be a) of interest and b) of some relevance to this thread, or perhaps more suited to another?

Polynesian Spirituality: Mana, Taboo, Cosmogony, Afterlife, Trickster, Common Deities & Ancestry

 
There's potential evidence of native American/Polynesian contact in the Datura genus of poisonous/psychoactive plants. Basically, the genus is thought to have originated in the Americas, but certain species have been used ritually in Asia and Africa (and possibly Europe) since long before Columbus. There are a few theories about how it spread, one of which is via human contact between South America and Oceania (from where it spread further out to the 'old world').

https://www.researchgate.net/public..._first_millennium_transfer_from_the_New_World
 
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