Posted on 06/04/2007 5:58:20 PM PDT by blam
Polynesians beat Columbus to the Americas
22:00 04 June 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Emma Young
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Prehistoric Polynesians beat Europeans to the Americas, according to a new analysis of chicken bones.
The work provides the first firm evidence that ancient Polynesians voyaged as far as South America, and also strongly suggests that they were responsible for the introduction of chickens to the continent - a question that has been hotly debated for more than 30 years.
Chilean archaeologists working at the site of El Arenal-1, on the Arauco Peninsula in south-central Chile, discovered what they thought might be the first prehistoric chicken bones unearthed in the Americas. They asked Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and colleagues to investigate.
The group carbon-dated the bones and their DNA was analysed. The 50 chicken bones from at least five individual birds date from between 1321 and 1407 - 100 years or more before the arrival of Europeans.
Two-week journey
However, this date range does coincide with dates for the colonization of the easternmost islands of Polynesia, including Pitcairn and Easter Island.
And when the El Arenal chicken DNA was compared with chicken DNA from archaeological sites in Polynesia, the researchers found an identical match with prehistoric samples from Tonga and American Samoa, and a near identical match from Easter Island.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Kon Tiki, Aku Aku, Thor Heryrdahl, etc.
The polynesians, the vikings, the chinese, the atlantians, the celts? The only ones who count are the ones who made a go of it....namely the indians.
ML/NJ
Casino licenses for everybody who might have gotten here before Columbus!
Good policy; probably protected them from diseases for which they had no immunity. I guess you CAN choose your neighbors after all.
DNA studies have found no evidence South American Indians settled Polynesia thus proving Heyrdahl's theories of the settlement of Polynesia from South America incorrect.
Interesting lesson though - because of the spectacular nature of his voyage, his flamboyance, etc. people haven't really noticed the key fact he was wrong, and some nerds in labs with DNA who aren't interesting were right.
ROFL!
And the Vikings beat them anyway, also if the peace loving polys met them, there would have been village ruins.
Still the quote from Civilization 2 “Viking Scientists unlock the secrets of the Manhattan project” sends chills down my spine.
[snip]
Somebody got corn to the Americas or they got it to the Middle East.
“Now when Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt, Jacob said unto his sons,Why do ye look one upon another? And he said, Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt: get you down thither, and buy for us from thence; that we may live, and not die.”—Genesis 42:1, 2.
She needs to do some sailing in the Pacific, you don’t turn around and go home in the slug boats they had back then. Even modern sailing boats of today with GPS have a tough go to windward.
Seems obvious to me. Lose a war and run away. Their mission: simple survival.
Wars are endemic in more primitive societies. An excellent book on the subject is: War Before Civilization.
“Now when Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt ...
"Corn" in England (where the KJV was translated) used to mean wheat.
Corn was the word the English used to use for grains. And the new world had maize, which English settlers called corn. So the “corn” in the Bible, which by the way is not the language the Bible was first written in, was not what we call corn today.
Drinking water - haven’t some shipwrecked people survived a long time on the flesh of fish? And nets full of green coconuts might come in handy. Anyway, if you could sail 100 miles a day (and it’s possible to sail 200) you could cross 2000 miles of ocean in three weeks. The Polynesians had some massive canoes, room for lots of coconuts. Finding the dots in the ocean is a whole other problem.
See the book The Last Navigator for some info on how the Polynesians did it.
Mrs VS
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