New DNA Evidence Confirms Pre-Colonial Contact Between Easter Island And South America

Mysterious Universe

Are you the adventurous type?  Do you consider backpacking up the side of a mountain to be a fun pastime?  How about kayaking along a raging river with nothing more than some plastic and nylon between you and a close meeting with jagged rocks?  If you’re like me, your answer to the above is a resounding no, but lots of people consider those activities to be the height of recreation.

I wonder though, how many of those people would be as enthusiastic about embarking on a voyage across more than three thousand kilometers of open-ocean in a vessel only a bit larger than a canoe.  I’d bet a good number of those intrepid adventure seekers would rather stay home.  I know I would.

There are some people, or, there were some people, who would call us pansies for our reticence.  Those people are the Rapa Nui of the famed Easter Island.  We’ve known for some time that the Rapa Nui were master sailors; their ancestors set out from Southeast Asia, travelling throughout Micronesia and the Polynesian archipelago, expanding their territory well across the Pacific.  They eventually reached what is pretty much the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, settling on the Hawaiian Islands, and of course, Easter Island, around the same time that the Byzantine Empire began to fall, and the unified Kingdom of England rose out of the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

This was also at a time when the great Mesoamerican societies, like the Maya were in turmoil and facing collapse, and the Peruvian/Bolivian cultures, Chimu and Tiahuanaco, were just beginning to flourish along the west coast of South America.

At that time, about 1,000 CE, Easter Island became home to the most adventurous peoples of the Polynesian migration.  They had travelled father than any of their ancestors – perhaps father than any other people on earth at the time – island hopping and sailing more than 14,000 kilometers.  You would think, after travelling that distance and settling an island paradise like Rapa Nui, they might have traded in their sails and oars for sandy beaches and drinks with little umbrellas in them (they had those, right?), but no, recent research suggests that they didn’t stop there.

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Reposted with permission