Posted on 04/24/2023 12:29:34 PM PDT by Rummyfan
These expert navigators sailed thousands of nautical miles long before other societies.
The 2016 animated family film Moana brought the long-told story of Polynesian seafarers (along with some incredibly catchy tunes) to a much wider worldwide audience. Now, geochemical analysis is confirming the oral history of ancient Polynesia’s incredible sailors in a new study published April 21 in the journal Science Advances.
Long before Europeans arrived, Polynesian wayfinders sailed to islands across the central Pacific in canoes, and the stories of their adventures have survived largely through oral history. There has been limited material evidence supporting these accounts of Polynesian societies from distant islands interacting with one another.
“Pacific islanders were able to travel over very long distances and did so in every region of the Pacific. Polynesian peoples settled hundreds of islands from Papua New Guinea to Easter Island (Rapa Nui),” study co-author and French National Centre for Scientific Research archaeologist Aymeric Hermann tells PopSci. “The extent of long distance voyages in an Ocean as vast as the Pacific, and several centuries before any other society could really master seafaring, is pretty amazing.”
Details of the westward expansions to a group of islands west of Polynesia called the Polynesian Outliers have been even more unclear. Indigenous cultures vary across the Pacific’s islands, but oral traditions and shared cultural items indicate that there could have been contact and exchanging of goods across long distances.
(Excerpt) Read more at popsci.com ...
They were one serious badazz seafaring society.
What was the minimum cohort for such a journey, and how did they maintain fresh water?
Guaranteed a bird in the middle of an an ocean
will find land quicker than you can.
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