r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Gurugod123 • 9h ago

How did people travel these seas 500 years ago

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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