Indigenous Americans had contact with Polynesians 800 years ago, DNA study confirms

[Ponietz]

Indigenous Americans and Polynesians crossed thousands of miles of open ocean and made contact with each other as early as 1200 A.D., centuries before the arrival of Europeans, a new study has found.

Archeologists have long believed the two regions made early contact, pointing to the early, widespread cultivation of a South American plant in Polynesia, a collection of more than 1,000 islands scattered over the Pacific Ocean.

The results of a genomic study now confirmed they did.

According to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers found "conclusive evidence" for the early encounter between the two groups, after analyzing the DNA of more than 800 individuals from 17 Polynesian islands and 15 indigenous American groups on the Pacific coast.
The researchers were looking for signs that prehistoric Polynesians and Indigenous Americans had children together, which would leave a clear genetic signature in their offspring -- called an admixture.

What they found was that people from several eastern Polynesian islands, including Rapa Nui -- also known as Easter Island -- have genetic traces in their DNA linked to indigenous South Americans. The genetic signatures showed a strong connection to the Zenu, an indigenous group from Colombia.

Researchers then traced the timing of their encounter by analyzing the length of the indigenous American genomic segments, and decided the initial admixture took place in the eastern islands of Polynesia around 1150-1230 A.D.

But in Rapa Nui, that admixture was dated much later to around 1380 A.D., despite the island being the closest to South America.

"Our analyses suggest strongly that a single contact event occurred in eastern Polynesia, before the settlement of Rapa Nui, between Polynesian individuals and a Native American group most closely related to the indigenous inhabitants of present-day Colombia," the study said.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/09/asia/polynesia-america-intl-hnk-scli-scn/index.html

🗿 There it is—Thor Heyerdahl is vindicated. A good reminder to keep thinking outside the box. There is an astonishing theory that, after the 3rd Punic War, Carthaginians made their way to South America and founded the Chachapoyas culture. Looking forward to additional evidence there. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/carthages-lost-war

[wnylib]

1. I believed this was the case for many years.

Now science confirms evidence that people could not accept before.

In a strange coincidence, the day before this information was publicly released, I was reading a chapter of an old book (published 1977) about possible Pacific crossings. It mentioned Heyerdahl's raft, the sweet potato appearance in Polynesia with a nearly identical name in both places, the exceptional sailing skill of the Polynesians, and Asian chickens in South America.

Then it concluded that the notion of contact between Polynesians and South American Native people was unfounded. It gave very strained and stretched "reasons" why the idea was far fetched. I was so anmoyed at reading it that I wrote up a rebuttal essay which will go nowhere and never leave my laptop hard drive. But it was satisfying to get it out of my system.

Then yesterday evening it was even more satisfying to hear the DNA results reported on BBC.

This also means that the Vikings in the east and the Polynesians in the west both beat Columbus as early foreign arrivals to the Americas by a few centuries. I think the main reason why the evidence of Polynesian contact was discounted before had less to do with an interest in scientific or historical accuracy, and more to do with an assumption that "primitive" people could not have accomplished such a feat before Magellan's crew did.