Posted on 06/04/2007 5:58:20 PM PDT by blam
Polynesians beat Columbus to the Americas
22:00 04 June 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Emma Young
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Prehistoric Polynesians beat Europeans to the Americas, according to a new analysis of chicken bones.
The work provides the first firm evidence that ancient Polynesians voyaged as far as South America, and also strongly suggests that they were responsible for the introduction of chickens to the continent - a question that has been hotly debated for more than 30 years.
Chilean archaeologists working at the site of El Arenal-1, on the Arauco Peninsula in south-central Chile, discovered what they thought might be the first prehistoric chicken bones unearthed in the Americas. They asked Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and colleagues to investigate.
The group carbon-dated the bones and their DNA was analysed. The 50 chicken bones from at least five individual birds date from between 1321 and 1407 - 100 years or more before the arrival of Europeans.
Two-week journey
However, this date range does coincide with dates for the colonization of the easternmost islands of Polynesia, including Pitcairn and Easter Island.
And when the El Arenal chicken DNA was compared with chicken DNA from archaeological sites in Polynesia, the researchers found an identical match with prehistoric samples from Tonga and American Samoa, and a near identical match from Easter Island.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Kon Tiki, Aku Aku, Thor Heryrdahl, etc.
The polynesians, the vikings, the chinese, the atlantians, the celts? The only ones who count are the ones who made a go of it....namely the indians.
ML/NJ
Casino licenses for everybody who might have gotten here before Columbus!
Good policy; probably protected them from diseases for which they had no immunity. I guess you CAN choose your neighbors after all.
DNA studies have found no evidence South American Indians settled Polynesia thus proving Heyrdahl's theories of the settlement of Polynesia from South America incorrect.
Interesting lesson though - because of the spectacular nature of his voyage, his flamboyance, etc. people haven't really noticed the key fact he was wrong, and some nerds in labs with DNA who aren't interesting were right.
ROFL!
And the Vikings beat them anyway, also if the peace loving polys met them, there would have been village ruins.
Still the quote from Civilization 2 “Viking Scientists unlock the secrets of the Manhattan project” sends chills down my spine.
[snip]
Somebody got corn to the Americas or they got it to the Middle East.
“Now when Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt, Jacob said unto his sons,Why do ye look one upon another? And he said, Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt: get you down thither, and buy for us from thence; that we may live, and not die.”—Genesis 42:1, 2.
She needs to do some sailing in the Pacific, you don’t turn around and go home in the slug boats they had back then. Even modern sailing boats of today with GPS have a tough go to windward.
Seems obvious to me. Lose a war and run away. Their mission: simple survival.
Wars are endemic in more primitive societies. An excellent book on the subject is: War Before Civilization.
“Now when Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt ...
"Corn" in England (where the KJV was translated) used to mean wheat.
Corn was the word the English used to use for grains. And the new world had maize, which English settlers called corn. So the “corn” in the Bible, which by the way is not the language the Bible was first written in, was not what we call corn today.
Drinking water - haven’t some shipwrecked people survived a long time on the flesh of fish? And nets full of green coconuts might come in handy. Anyway, if you could sail 100 miles a day (and it’s possible to sail 200) you could cross 2000 miles of ocean in three weeks. The Polynesians had some massive canoes, room for lots of coconuts. Finding the dots in the ocean is a whole other problem.
See the book The Last Navigator for some info on how the Polynesians did it.
Mrs VS
I will buy this theory. That might mean that they were here before those that claim they arrived by the land bridge first. In other words the native Americans stole the land from the polynesians. Nah who would have thought LOL
The Chumash plank canoe, or tomolo, held up to a dozen people — and may hold a clue to pre-Columbian contact between Polynesia and the New World. (Photo courtesy Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.)
"Scholars swim in choppy waters Did Polynesians visit Southern California many centuries ago? The evidence — some fishhooks, a boat design, and a few words in common — is limited. But to some those clues are tantalizing, even persuasive."
It's more than you think. Look Here:
"The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old. They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas."
"Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are described as long and narrow, very unlike those of modern Native Americans."
Nope. The theory is that there was peripheral contact only 100 or 200 years before Columbus. Before that Polynesians hadn’t reached the eastern Pacific.
It's not unfair to suggest that the Europeans have had a fair degree of success too.
Until we left the door open.
I was only referring to pre-columbus days.
Thor was correct that such voyages were possible. He was incorrect about the direction.
I’ll see if I can post the photos later.
The word “corn” in the Bible means “grain”, wheat etc. Look it up, it is not the corn we think of.
logical enough...
another arg is that colonization in the South Pacific accomplished 2 goals:
1. reduce conflict within the settlement.
2. reduce drain on limited resources.
I think Diamond’s “Collapse” mentions something on these lines. Either way, run for your life or voyage out to find new resources. In any event people were travelling more than we have imagined/
You see what happens when you try to interpret a book literally, that has undergone many translations.
Only in America does “corn” mean specifically maize, once called “Indian corn”.
please see post #30.
Thanks,
More info on the Hokuleia experiment.
http://www.k12.hi.us/~waianaeh/PolyVoyage/ealahoku/hokuleia/hokuleia.htm
I saw an article a while back, sorry no reference, about an abacus found in South America, made of native South American wood and so forth, and dated to around 1200 AD, that was basically identical to Chinese ones of the same time, in terms of style, number of rows of beads, and so on. The implication was that trading ships from China had probably made it to the west coast of South America around that time.
It is written in China that 250,000 'took to the sea' at the collapse of the Shang Dynasty.
Google "Japanese" "pottery" "Meggers" and "Ecuador" and see what you get.
"Her most crucial discovery to date is the relationship between the people of Ecuador and the people of Japan. She noticed that fragments of pottery from Japan were appearing in Ecuador, and theorized that the Japanese had traded trans-Pacifically."
“Life boat” navigation uses a lot of the methods early islanders used as their primary navigation including wave reflection, bird and plant identification to name a few.
80’ feet at the water line, nice to be making way (just popped into my head so I typed it)
“DNA studies have found no evidence South American Indians settled Polynesia thus proving Heyrdahl’s theories of the settlement of Polynesia from South America incorrect.”
Agreed. But in the bigger picture, he demonstrated the possibility of long distance ocean travel, previously not considered.
bump for later reading.
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