Anthropology Alert!
Jun 4th, 2007 | 7 responses
LA Times: Chicken bones say Polynesians beat Europeans to New World
After decades of contention, New Zealand researchers have provided the first direct evidence that Polynesians sailed across thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean to reach South America long before the arrival of the Spanish around AD 1500.
Their proof? Chicken bones.
Using genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating of chicken bones found in Chile, the researchers showed that the fowl originated in Polynesia, not Europe as was previously believed, the researchers said Monday.
“The Polynesian contact probably didn’t change the course of prehistory, but I think maybe it makes us recognize the ethnocentrism in our long-standing views of the prehistory of the New World,” said archeologist Terry L. Jones of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, who was not involved in the research.
“The basic premise has always been that there was only one civilization capable of crossing the ocean and discovering the New World,” he said. The new findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that “the prehistory of the New World was probably a little bit more complicated than we thought in the past.”
The possibility of contact between Polynesia and the New World has been a subject of contention since Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s famous 1947 voyage aboard his crude raft Kon-Tiki.
7 Responses to “Anthropology Alert!”
Thor Heyerdahl is right after all.
The Billo, Blond Jesus and EuroCentric crowd won’t like this.
This is fascinating.
It also makes one wonder what else we don’t know about history.
As someone in Hawaii, I have to say, “damn straight”. It would be rather remarkable if the Polynesians by chance had never made it there, as they were able to travel all the way to New Zealand, up to Tonga, all the way up to Hawaii in the middle of absolutely nowhere, down to Tahiti, and as far east as Easter Island, which just isn’t that far from Chile. At the same time, it is entirely appropriate for scientists to leave open the possibility (even probability) of Polynesian contact with South America, but wait to say that it actually did occur until there is direct evidence of it.
And in the silly vein again, the doubters can kiss our sweet okole.
aloha pacatrue,
indeed, given how wide-ranging were Polynesian sailors, in retrospect it seems implausible that, after finding all those little tiny islands, they’d miss an entire damn continent.
mahalo nui loa
This is sheer nonsense. Anyone with knowledge of history realizes that this is evidence of the primacy of Colonel Sanders.
Clearly the Polynesians craved it fortnightly.
Wasn’t there already proof that the vikings arrived somewhere in what is Canada today well before the actual conquest?
Actually, lots of non-indigenous folk were here before Columbus!