Nahhh- There was land/islands inbetwixt Australia and South America that sunk by earthquake and tsunami. Ditto for Hawaii.
India, Southeast Asia and Australia appear to have been populated by coast and island skipping out of Africa according to their own research.
Otherwise Polynesians would have kept on doing this cross-ocean journeying for centuries `til recent now but there is no evidence of early European explorers encountering sea-going rafts kon-tiki style.
But there is evidence of Eskimos reaching the British Isles by kayak via iceberg, Iceland and Greenland coastal skipping. Polynesians apparently didn`t go 8,000 miles across empty ocean with a boatload of pigs and people.- Another moonbat ridiculous supposition.
As for the Eskimos, there is a feat of travel by a similar group. The
Saqqaq, from
Greenland; their closest living relatives are the Chukchis,
people who live at the easternmost tip of Siberia!.
Nothing is moonbat, except the idea of limiting man in his endeavor to travel and explore.
"Nahhh- There was land/islands inbetwixt Australia and South America that sunk by earthquake and tsunami. Ditto for Hawaii.... Otherwise Polynesians would have kept on doing this cross-ocean journeying for centuries `til recent now but there is no evidence of early European explorers encountering sea-going rafts kon-tiki style." As far as I am aware, the current conventional thinking on the subject is that the populating by humans of Polynesia, Hawaii and South America happened much, much more recently than any possible land bridge could have existed (except the Bering land bridge from Asia to Alaska). (Australia is a different story.) So I don't know how Polynesia could have been reached by its first inhabitants except by seacraft. I am not saying this to be disagreeable - I am just curious what you are suggesting.
There was land/islands inbetwixt Australia and South America that sunk by earthquake and tsunami.
Uh, no. I've read only one tale (Vincent Gaddis) of a lost island in the Pacific, it supposedly sank (earthquake, or tsunami, or eruption), and used to lie due west from northern Ecuador, or maybe it was the Isthmus, and that one (assuming it's a true tale) went under in the 18th c. There are good solid reasons to regard the tale as a really compelling work of short fiction though.
A quick look at the map of the subsurface Pacific shows a number of seamounts, none of which are close to the the surface today, but at one time all of them were above the former sealevel of the Pacific. They are also not close enough for "coast-hugging", a practice that is largely a modern invention of landlubbers, the same origin IOW as the foolish claim that until Columbus, everyone thought the world was flat. Those seamounts sometimes occur in a bunch, but even when the oceans were hundreds of feet lower (and that was long before the Polynesians arrived) the Pacific was mostly a blank, featureless expanse.
The navigation abilities and traditions of the Polynesians survived into the 20th century sufficiently long enough to be documented and studied, and probably linger here and there to this day, but for the most part died out a generation or so ago. Maritime peoples throughout history and geography relied on fishing, and navigated by sun and stars in order to seek their prey.
The kon-tiki raft built by Heyerdahl mimicked some South American traditions. The Easter Islanders themselves had (maybe still have) origin stories involving non-human ancestors such as whales, but I very much doubt that anyone seriously believes those. Their ancestors had a period of internecine warfare (mostly nocturnal) after the collapse of the statue-builders, and hid in caves, during which time they lost much of their former culture.