Nah. The potato, all 2,000 varieties, are native to South America...no one questions that. The question is how they got to the Pacific Islands.
the cannibal polynesians apprehended the South American voyagers, stole their boat, ate the sailors, planted the potatoes?
> Nah. The potato, all 2,000 varieties, are native to South America...no one questions that. The question is how they got to the Pacific Islands.
Nobody questions it because it is “conventional wisdom”. Just like the earth being flat was once “conventional wisdom”. Aside from discovering gold and gems, the South American natives didn’t seem to do too much to advance their civilization beyond their jungles.
They were certainly no match for the Spaniards. So I doubt they did anything nearly so brilliant as invent potatoes: far less export them to the South Pacific.
(Could they even swim? Where are the Inca war canoes? The Mayan navy? The Aztec Flotilla? Naw, these lot were all Land-Lubbers!)
I can confidently assert that the Spaniard conquistadors would not have been able to knock over the Maori the way they knocked over the Aztecs, the Maya and the Incas. The conquistadors would have been yum-yum-yummy in the Maori tum-tum-tummy, and they would have had the unpleasant side-effect of introducing Maori to firearms and light armor 300 years before they gottem off the British. History would surely have been re-written if that were the case.
Nope — I propose that until proven otherwise the Maori invented Kumara and brought ‘em to South America.