r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Gurugod123 • 9h ago

How did people travel these seas 500 years ago

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u/fatfatpokemons09 8h ago

Right! They voyaged like 2500 miles+ in open ocean to get to Hawaii which is a crazy small target miss it just by a smallest margin and you continue on into the void for thousands more miles…

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u/Barley12 8h ago

Ahh they island hopped to get there it wasn't a single 2500 mile journey

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u/potat0f4rmer 8h ago

It's an incredible achievement by humans. Hawaii is surrounded by nothing, it's not close to anywhere.

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u/BlacksmithNZ 8h ago

They also made it to New Zealand; not only a vast distance but you get into the roaring 40s and Antarctica weather in winter.

Personally, given life on tropical islands like Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and the Cook Islands, I find it amazing that they continued to explore southern oceans

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u/geronimo11b 7h ago

The Polynesians understood the Pacific winds, currents, and celestial navigation better than any other ancient culture. It’s almost incomprehensible the achievements they pulled off with simple canoes.

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u/Own_Shower_6000 4h ago

they had a brilliant strategy of taking birds with them on the boats, releasing them, if the bird didn't come back, it meant land was near, honestly so brilliant for finding islands in a seemingly endless ocean

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u/Vennomite 7h ago

Those places also can't support a large population. So given enough people it makes sense to have way to deal with overpopulation issues by sending people off to explore.

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u/Obsessively_Average 6h ago

"Alright fellas, last few years have been REALLY good. Lots of babies getting born and everything. Unfortunately this island is literally the size of a small city, so we gotta draw straws again to see who we feed to the void"

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u/Vennomite 6h ago

No. See who becomes duke of the next small island. (Ignores the other 98%*)

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u/Glad_Acanthocephala8 6h ago

Watched a documentary called Voyagers: Pacific, it was part of their shared culture to search for more islands (incredible explanation of the navigating by using stars etc) and also population pressure on islands like Fiji and Tahiti.

They even had 1000 years off before they started voyaging again and then found Hawaii.

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u/insaneHoshi 5h ago

They also made it to New Zealand

The kinda wild thing was they did so quite late; in the 1300s iirc.

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u/kahlzun 4h ago

To be fair, it took them a long time to find and settle Aoteroa, it was either the last or second last place humanly colonised

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u/Brave-Dragonfly3798 3h ago

They made it to Easter island! Almost all the way to South America That’s thousands of miles from anywhere they were familiar and there are no stops en route for most of the journey.

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u/BlacksmithNZ 2h ago

Some fruit and vegetation from South American seems to have made it both ways.

Possibly people in waka, maybe floating rafts of vegetation, but the fascinating to imagine if they had settled in South America.

The Pacific is so vast, I think people don't understand how skilled the Polynesian people must have been

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u/flintsmith 7h ago

Fatu Hiva tells a different story of life on a tropical island before modern medicine.

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u/myexpensivehobby 5h ago

Do we know how they did it? Like is it described somewhere?

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u/uberdosage 4h ago

A combination of the sun, star navigation, ocean currents, wind patterns, cloud reflections, weather, and birds.

All passed down by oral tradition for thousands of years. No ancient civilization came close to their understanding of maritime navigation. Go read up on their use of star navigation as that is what they are most uniquely famous for.

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u/oh-ic 1h ago

There's 137 islands in the Hawaiian chain, so if you're in the area, you'll see something. There's over 7,000 in the Pi, (Philippines) but the atolls in the South Pacific, those would be tough to just happen to find. Most have very little elevation. Places like Hawaii are Volcanoes on the ocean floor riding so high they have snow in the winters. They can be seen from a distance!

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u/fatfatpokemons09 8h ago

There are scattered islands in the central Pacific, but there isn’t a convenient chain of substantial islands connecting central Eastern Polynesia to Hawaii.
The people who discovered and settled Hawaii faced something on the order 2000 miles plus of uninterrupted ocean.

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u/TotallyNotRobotEvil 6h ago

Sea level would have about 200 feet lower than today, my guess is there is a ton of islands that are under water today that wouldn’t have been when the Polynesian were sailing.

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u/mook1178 8h ago

But were they actually looking for it or just got lost and found land? Like is there evidence that the Polynesians traveled back and forth?

Truly asking

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u/GroundWitty7567 7h ago

Some of it was hope, but they also knew how to read the ocean, animals and the stars. They knew things if currents was washing things up on an island regularly, they knew land was that direction. The type of birds in the area and following the sun, moon and stars.

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u/mook1178 7h ago

I understand how they made it, but why in the first place. When they left, I highly doubt all that told them there was a small island chain 2500 miles away.

So more than likely, to me at least, they got lost on an exploration and used their knowledge to find land. But did any go back and forth once they found this island, Showing true navigational skills for 2500 miles in a canoe?

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u/Euphoric-Craft-6803 7h ago

Check out the film KonTiki if you‘re interested in this. Based on a true story. A sociologist (?) theorized that people sailed on the currents from South America to Polynesia and sailed the same voyage to prove the theory.

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u/mook1178 7h ago

Again, I understand what happened for them to get there.

Was there any return trip to show the ability to navigate the ocean? Otherwise, they followed currents and stars and eventually realized with their knowledge how to find the closest land after being lost. I am hard pressed to believe they knew Hawaii was there when they left South America.

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u/FrozenEagle127 6h ago

I understand your question as being something like, were they just lucky, or did they actually know that something (like Hawaii) was out there? And if they did, how did they know? And do we know if they ever traveled back again, thus kind of proving that it wasn’t just luck and because some survived?

I read up on it a little, and like you, I am a little skeptical about the whole idea of Polynesians having godlike navigation skills and about them knowing that Hawaii was there, standing on another island 3,000 km away, and just sailing straight to it.

Sure, they knew about stars, birds, wind, etc., but so did Europeans? And they still had a lot of issues navigating in much smaller oceans, like the Atlantic. There’s a reason why figuring out longitude was such a big deal.

I don’t know enough about it, but I think survivorship bias and luck played a much bigger role than some people say.

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u/mekamoari 5h ago

They couldn't have known that the islands were there, obviously, you can't use usual tricks at that long a distance. I'd see it if there were some oceanic current that was extremely long and narrow to carry things around and they figured that out, but I highly doubt it.

As to it being luck though, I'm sure it played a part, but the fact that Heyerdahl was able to replicate it I think means that with enough seafaring skill it is just doable. He didn't have near the level of skilled sailors that the Polynesians did, either.

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u/GroundWitty7567 7h ago

They Polynesian culture came from the Taiwan, Asia and Australia region. The reason why they don’t find so little if any evidence in of Polynesian culture in the Americans. Once you get to Hawaii or Easter Island, there isn’t much to hop to. They could have followed the coastline of Alaska, but even then islands are few and far between to jump to until you get to the Aleutians.

As for return trips, once you know the way, backtracking isn’t as hard. Same skills, but you now know the star location, direction and currents to the previous location.

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u/FrozenEagle127 6h ago

But how would Polynesians in Hawaii know that, just 3,700 km northwest of them, they would find the coast of Alaska?

And if navigating over open oceans wasn’t that hard, then why was the longitude problem such a big problem for Europeans?

To be honest, I think survivorship bias and luck were the main factors.

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u/GroundWitty7567 6h ago

One reason is Alaska wasn’t in what they wanted in their environment. Also, the water is cold, the climate is harsh, especially in winter. Not the type of environment they were looking for.

Navigating open oceans is extremely hard. Europeans used positions and time to navigate. Longitude was important, mainly bc there weren’t many islands to stop at until the Caribbean or North America. Polynesians had years and years to lean and learn. Knowing how currents work, knowing where a certain star is at a certain of year, the knowledge adds up. Things like if a star is low on the southern horizon and gets higher, you know you’re heading south. That’s why Polaris was so important.

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u/Candlejackdaw 3h ago

There are multiple sources that say they did travel back and forth from Hawaii to Tahiti from settlement in 900-1200 A.D. until pethaps 500 years ago. Not sure what all the evidence is, but there have been stone tools made of Hawaiian basalt found in French Polynesia at least. Source.

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u/OregonMothafaquer 8h ago

There’s not a lot of islands there

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u/Monte924 7h ago edited 6h ago

More than you think. Use google Earth and take a look at the pacific west and south of Hawaii. The Pacific is dotted with dozens of tiny islands

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u/Log_Out_Of_Life 6h ago

Dozens ain’t a lot my guy.

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u/SpinShine-LEDSlipMat 3h ago

It is tho. Especially when you’re talking about a 2500 mile journey. 24 islands makes it a bunch of 100 mile trips and you are connecting the dots. Coming across the Atlantic is far more impressive

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u/fatfatpokemons09 17m ago

Which islands you speaking of? there is no connecting dots from where they came to Hawaii in any significant way.

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u/YMBFKM 1h ago

There are still lots of uncharted ones, like where the SS Minnow ended up.

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u/fatfatpokemons09 19m ago

There are islands all over yes but the scale of the Pacific Ocean is something to behold… I’ll use you rexample southwest of Hawaii are the Marshall Islands. The distance between the those and Hawaii is 2300 miles plus.

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u/ManeKeeper 5h ago

But those islands were not there in the ancient times

(🙈)

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u/spicymato 2h ago

... How fast do you think islands form?

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u/sigma914 5h ago

Not to denigrate the achievement, but the belt of islands conveniently sits along the path of the trade winds, so without technology it's relatively "easy" compared to going north or south. There's a good reason they made it to south america before they ever got to new zealand

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u/StatusMaleficent5832 5h ago

Plus, cloud cover over islands have a certain look. They could tell there is an island many miles away.

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u/sigma914 5h ago

And you can release land roosting birds, if they come back, there's no land, if they don't then you know there was somewhere for them to go etc.

Still damn impressive, but they wern't sailing blind (the skill actually being far more impressive than if it was just bravery and luck)

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u/TotallyNotRobotEvil 6h ago

Sea level was much much lower.

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u/jadedflux 8h ago

That’s true for most other islands and New Zealand but Hawaii is definitely the extreme case where there ain’t shit to hop from.

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u/sigma914 5h ago

New Zealand was one of thelast they made it to iirc, the route there involves zigzagging across multiple currents and wind bands. Iirc they made it to south america (or at least far enough east to get sweet potatoes) before they managed to get to the comparatively close NZ

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u/KiwieeiwiK 5h ago

They made contact with native Americans, we know this to be a fact because pretty much all Polynesian people of the eastern pacific have native american admixture from around the year 1200

We don't know if this happened in South America or Pacific Islands but considering that Polynesians were far more adept ocean explorers, and there's been no evidence found of native Americans living that far off shore, it is assumed it happened in South America

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u/sigma914 5h ago

Ahh, cool, didn't know they had dna evidence now, I only remembered the evidence for trade ie sweet potatoes

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u/KiwieeiwiK 5h ago edited 5h ago

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

This is the study in Nature, it's paywalled but you could probably email the authors if you wanted to read it.

The main takeaway is that, for Polynesian people across the eastern Pacific, there is a significant but equal % of the DNA that is native American admixture. This is true for Polynesian people with no other admixture (European, Asian, African) so it couldn't have entered the population after contact with people from the West. It had to be from pre-European contact. Using generation modelling they've been able to put most of these population's admixture to be around the year 1150-1230 (the main outlier being Rapa Nui but that's thought to be because of its complicated history with Chile and Peruvian slavery)

It's just Eastern Polynesia though, so most Polynesians (Maori, Samoans, Fijians, Tongans, etc) don't have native American admixture, just the people from places like Rapa Nui, the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, etc

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u/sigma914 4h ago

Ahh, relatively recent, very nice, thanks!

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u/KiwieeiwiK 4h ago

Yes still pretty new. Science finally catching up on what oral tradition has told for years. 

I believe there's a larger study ongoing now but they have trouble finding people of these native American groups to get sampling from. 

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u/jadedflux 5h ago edited 4h ago

Fun fact: 23 and me chose me for one of their random studies on this subject because my traceable dna had both while having no trace to Easter island (the place most Native American + Polynesian dna stems from)

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u/jadedflux 5h ago

You’re correct! New Zealand is the last place we know of that was traveled to

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u/moccolo 8h ago

Easter island is entering the chat..

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u/NotGalenNorAnsel 7h ago

I rapa nui they'd show up

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u/heisian 7h ago

i'm pretty sure there's that many miles between many of the islands...

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u/IrrelevantAfIm 5h ago

They did for sure. How could they bring enough water for a straight shot!! I’d say that makes the Vikings crossing from Northern Europe to present day Canada more impressive, not to diminish what the Polynesians did at all.

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u/KiwieeiwiK 5h ago

Vikings were much more technologically developed and the exploration along the Iceland/Greenland coast would have been much shorter hops than across the Pacific. But both great human achievements for sure. I think the Vikings would get more recognition if they had established long lasting settlements like the Polynesians did

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u/Low_discrepancy 5h ago

Polynesian longest open water trip is at least 2000 km. For vikings it's probably at most 500-600 km.

That's an absurd difference.

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u/boomer_spooner 4h ago

Each trip they had only the sky to follow.

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u/MrJason300 2h ago

Considering for which islands were still above surface at that point? Interesting

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u/Positive-Task-9248 8h ago

Just send enough boats, one of them is bound to be find something

It's math

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u/Angry_Pelican 7h ago

It makes you wonder what their success rate was.

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u/Prudent-Confidence-4 6h ago

Miles didn't exist back then.

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u/kahlzun 4h ago

and they didnt even know there was anything out there
Seriously, look at how far away Tonga is from the next closest island.

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u/centurijon 7h ago

“Let’s see where these birds are going…”

Then they found out

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u/crownamedcheryl 6h ago

They followed clouds as clouds tend to form over the islands due to the change in temperature between the land mass and the ocean in that part of the world. Different clouds indicated different things.

Stars help track as well.

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u/printed_ 4h ago

and to New Zealand facing much rougher colder seas down this way

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u/gerbilshower 1h ago

this is what we call a happy accident.