I found an interesting article in the Science News written by Bruce Bower about the Polynesian voyager in the Southsea. Bower wrote earlier already some more intersting article about this. I will put them all in this post.
I can still remember very well, when as a young child, I leafed through the old books of foreign countries and saw a black and white photo, including sketches of these huge, monster stone sculptures from Easter Island. It was impressive. Even if I still see this today, I have to ask myself who were these people who created such sculptures? I don’t know anything else in the South Seas where such stone figures were built? Do you? Admirable. Even today we still don’t know the purpose, the meaning of these statues. I think it’s just terrific, almost terrifying in a way …..
Voyagers migrated to islands sprinkled across a large area of the Pacific within about 500 years
By
Polynesian voyagers settled islands across a vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean within about 500 years, leaving a genetic trail of the routes that the travelers took, scientists say.
Comparisons of present-day Polynesians’ DNA indicate that sea journeys launched from Samoa in western Polynesia headed south and then east, reaching Rarotonga in the Cook Islands by around the year 830. From the mid-1100s to the mid-1300s, people who had traveled farther east to a string of small islands called the Tuamotus fanned out to settle Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, and several other islands separated by thousands of kilometers on Polynesia’s eastern edge. On each of those islands, the Tuamotu travelers built massive stone statues like the ones Easter Island is famed for.
That’s the scenario sketched out in a new study in the Sept. 23 Nature by Stanford University computational biologist Alexander Ioannidis, population geneticist Andrés Moreno-Estrada of the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity in Irapuato, Mexico, and their colleagues.
The new analysis generally aligns with archaeological estimates of human migrations across eastern Polynesia from roughly 900 to 1250. And the study offers an unprecedented look at settlement pathways that zigged and zagged over a distance of more than 5,000 kilometers, the researchers say.
“The colonization of eastern Polynesia was a remarkable event in which a vast area, some one-third of the planet, became inhabited by humans in … a relatively short period of time,” says archaeologist Carl Lipo of Binghamton University in New York, who wasn’t involved in the new research.
Improved radiocarbon dating techniques applied to remains of short-lived plant species unearthed at archaeological sites are also producing a chronology of Polynesian colonization close to that proposed in the genetic study, Lipo says.
In the new investigation, researchers identified DNA segments of exclusively Polynesian origin in 430 present-day individuals from 21 Pacific island populations. Island-specific genetic fingerprints enabled the scientists to reconstruct settlement paths, based on increases in rare gene variants that must have resulted from a small group moving from one island to another and giving rise to a new, larger population with novel DNA twists. Comparisons of shared Polynesian ancestry between pairs of individuals on different islands were used to estimate when settlements occurred.
In an intriguing twist, the DNA evidence “is consistent with the [statue] carving tradition arising once in a single point of common origin, likely the Tuamotu islands,” Moreno-Estrada says. Polynesian ancestry on all the islands with massive statues traces back to the one island in the Tuamotus where the researchers were able to obtain Indigenous peoples’ DNA.
The Tuamotus include nearly 80 islands situated between Tahiti to the west and other islands to the north and east where settlers carved statues. The latter outposts consist of the Marquesas Islands, Mangareva and Rapa Nui. Another late-settled island where inhabitants carved statues, Raivavae, lies southwest of the Tuamotus.
Settlers reached the island of Mataiva in the northern Tuamotus by about 1110, the researchers suggest. Statue makers navigated northward and eastward from Mataiva or perhaps other Tuamotu islands to as far east as Rapa Nui — eventually curving back west before arriving at Raivavae — around the same time as an earlier DNA study suggests eastern Polynesians mated with South Americans (SN: 7/8/20). (It’s not clear whether South Americans crossed the ocean to Polynesia or Polynesians traveled to South America and then returned.)
Pacific trek
Caption: An analysis of 430 present-day individuals is shedding new light on the timings and routes of early Polynesians’ migrations. Modern DNA indicates that voyagers left Samoa and went south and then east, reaching Rarotonga in the Cook Islands by around the year 830. From the mid-1100s to the mid-1300s, people who had traveled to the Tuamotu Islands, located just east of Tahiti, spread out to settle Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, and several other islands separated by thousands of kilometers.
When early Polynesians migrated eastward
Ioannidis and colleagues’ conclusions generally support prior scenarios of Polynesia’s settlement, but some disparities exist between their genetic evidence and earlier archaeological and linguistic findings, writes archaeologist Patrick Kirch of the University of Hawaii at Manoa in a commentary published with the new study.
For instance, the new DNA analysis overlooks extensive contacts that occurred across eastern Polynesian in its early settlement stages, Kirch says. Analyses of closely related eastern Polynesian language dialects and discoveries of stone tools that were transported from one island to another point to substantial travels and trading throughout the region during that time.
Kirch, who has previously suggested that these long-distance contacts in eastern Polynesian influenced stone carving traditions, calls the new proposal that people with a shared ancestry brought stone carving to Rapa Nui and other islands “a provocative hypothesis.”
And there’s still no answer to one major question regarding the settlement of the islands, says molecular anthropologist Lisa Matisoo-Smith of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, who didn’t participate in the new research. No current line of evidence can resolve the mystery of why, after spending nearly 2,000 years on Samoa, Tonga and Fiji, Polynesians began voyaging thousands of kilometers eastward in search of new lands.
Easter Islanders sailed to Americas, DNA suggests
Sea crossings occurred well before European contact, genetics of present-day people indicates
Quarrying stone for Easter Island statues made soil more fertile for farming
Huge carved figures were partially buried at the site for ceremonial purposes, researchers say
Easter Island’s Polynesian society cultivated crops in soil made especially fertile by the quarrying of rock for massive, humanlike statues, a new study suggests.
Soil analyses indicate that weathering of volcanic sediment created by quarrying enriched the slopes of Easter Island’s major rock quarry with phosphorus and other elements crucial for farming. Microscopic plant remains suggest that food grown in the enriched soil included sweet potatoes, bananas, taro, paper mulberry fruit and probably bottle gourd, say anthropological archaeologist Sarah Sherwood and colleagues.
Starting in roughly 1400, Easter Islanders farmed in this way, even as soil quality deteriorated in many parts of the island, also known as Rapa Nui, due to deforestation and possibly drought, the team reports in the November Journal of Archaeological Science.
The island’s Polynesian society, which got started from around 900 to 1100, is famous for two reasons: for having erected large statues known as moai that were sculpted out of volcanic rock, and for collapsing in the late 1600s after supposedly overusing the land. But previous research has questioned that narrative of societal disintegration. The new study is “one more piece of evidence against the traditional story of Easter Island’s self-inflicted environmental demise,” says Sherwood, of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn.
Radiocarbon dating of burned wood and plant fragments found in sediment layers and on two of 21 partially buried statues on the quarry’s slopes identified two main phases of farming at the quarry. During the first phase, visits probably started between 1495 and 1585 and lasted until roughly 1675 to 1710, shortly before Europeans first arrived on the island in 1722. During that time, one of the statues — which has been more intensively studied than the other — was raised, the scientists say.
Cultivation occurred in many parts of Rapa Nui before European contact, says archaeologist Carl Lipo of Binghamton University in New York, who was not involved in the study. Investigators need to determine whether any other sites on the island contained soil as productive as that at the statue quarry, he suggests.
Findings from Sherwood’s group help to show how Rapa Nui was transformed from a palm forest into a cultivated terrain that supported islanders for more than 500 years, Lipo says. Quarry cultivation “adds to growing knowledge of how pre-contact people smartly utilized their landscape,” he says. Related research has found that, as palm forests shrank on Rapa Nui, farmers cultivated yams and other crops using clever techniques such as rock gardens (SN: 12/16/13) that fortified soil quality.
Farming at the quarry by the island’s native population began again in the 1800s and likely lasted into the early 1900s, the researchers found. Other evidence also suggests that Rapa Nui farming continued after European contact (SN: 1/5/15).
What’s more, excavations of the two partially buried statues, led by archaeologist and study coauthor Jo Anne Van Tilburg of UCLA, revealed that each had been placed in a carved pit packed with gravel and boulders to hold it upright. Crescent shapes and other figures carved on statues’ backs, and a carved human head found resting against the base of one statue, suggest that these objects were used in ceremonies of some kind, perhaps intended to promote crop growth. Red pigment pieces and coral found near the statues probably also had ritual uses, the team says.
Researchers traditionally have assumed that builders of the island’s partially buried quarry statues had either planned to move them elsewhere on the island or abandoned them. Designs on the roughly 6.6-meter-tall quarry statues display similarities to those on the only other Rapa Nui statue displaying numerous carved images. That carved figure was previously found at a ceremonial site nearly 20 kilometers west of the quarry.
Although the quarry measures only about 800 to 1,000 meters across, the new soil data show that it was a “little productive gold mine” for farming, says archaeologist Christopher Stevenson of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, who did not participate in the study. Reeds growing in a lake at the base of the quarry would have provided additional phosphorus to the soil, he says.
“The area immediately to the east of the quarry was and is one of the most intensively settled parts of the island, and now that makes much more sense,” Stevenson says.
Tales of Hawai'i 