Posted on 11/02/2026 9:34:17 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Science Alert reports that Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford University and his colleagues analyzed the genomes of more than 1,000 people who live in French Polynesia; 12 genomes from individuals on the island of Rapa Nui; and the genomes of people native to Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, and Tahiti. First, the researchers isolated segments of Polynesian ancestry with machine learning, and then they applied an identity by descent method, which can identify common ancestors of living people and people from the past. The study shows that people traveled across Polynesia in small populations, sometimes resulting in a genetic bottleneck of reduced genetic variation that can increase the odds of the occurrence of harmful mutations known as the founder effect. People who became Native Hawaiians are thought to have experienced a series of bottlenecks as they traveled long distances on small double-hulled catamarans. "Hawaii is the only Polynesian island in the Northern Hemisphere, so it's a long way from everything," Ioannidis explained. The study also suggests that Native Hawaiians are most closely related to the people of Rapa Nui. The two islands are more than 4,000 miles apart, and each one is about 2,000 miles from another island. Both populations were also found to be related to people on Mangareva Island, which may have been their launching point in French Polynesia, Ioannidis concluded. For more on early Hawaiian history, go to "Letter from Hawaii: Inside Kauai's Past."
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
The distances do seem to be extreme.
But now all these people can talk to each
other on the phone.
And then get on a plane and fly there.
How would they gather and transport sufficient fuel? They could float it on a raft, but keeping enough dry would be problemataic.
The whole Pacific ocean does not have to be only 400 feet deep for my point. It extends the beaches out, in some placd by miles. Hawaii is just not one of those llaces.
However, if you read my answer from Grok, if the oceans were 400ft lower, as they were 10,000 years ago, most of the world was either accessible on foot or short distance accessible by canoe. Back then, they didnt have to do massive ocean voyages to get to most places.
For example, back then, you could cross the Bering Strait on foot.
The ocean level in the Bering Strait was more like 800 feet lower, the sealevel varied a lot by latitude. And a lot of what happened in prehistory happened on what is now the continental shelf, so much more will be learned (probably, with luck) in the future.
But that doesn’t change the fact that most Pacific Islands — including Flores — were not accessible via foot traffic.
Im not trying to argue with yiu.
Here is what Gemini says it would have been like at this time.
When sea levels dropped by about **400 feet (roughly 120 to 130 meters)**—which occurred during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) around 20,000 to 26,000 years ago—the geography of the Asia-Pacific region was dramatically transformed.
However, accessibility to these landmasses varied entirely based on whether they sat on continental shelves or were separated by deep oceanic trenches.
### 1. Australia and New Guinea: Fully Accessible (The Supercontinent of Sahul)
* **Status:** **Directly connected.**
* **Details:** Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania were fused into a single, massive continent known to geologists as **Sahul**. The shallow Arafura Sea and the Torres Strait disappeared entirely, turning what is now shallow water into dry savannah and plains. People could walk freely between mainland Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania without ever crossing the ocean.
### 2. Southeast Asia: Fully Accessible (Sundaland)
* **Status:** **Directly connected to the Asian mainland.**
* **Details:** On the opposite side of the gap, the Sunda Shelf was completely exposed. Mainland Southeast Asia stretched southward, incorporating Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Bali, and Palawan into a massive Asian peninsula called **Sundaland**.
### 3. Wallacea (The Islands Between Sunda and Sahul): Closer, But Still Water-Bound
* **Status:** **Not connected by land; required water crossings.**
* **Details:** The islands lying between Sunda and Sahul—such as Sulawesi, Flores, Timor, Lombok, and the Maluku islands—sat across deep-ocean trenches (such as the Wallace Line and Weber’s Deep). Even with a 400-foot drop in sea level, **these deep channels never closed**.
* While individual islands became significantly larger and the water gaps between them narrowed (making island-hopping shorter), early humans still required watercraft to navigate through Wallacea to eventually reach Sahul (which humans accomplished roughly 50,000 to 65,000 years ago during earlier sea-level fluctuations).
### 4. Remote Oceania and Pacific Island Chains (Micronesia, Polynesia, Fiji, Vanuatu, etc.)
* **Status:** **Isolated by vast ocean expanses.**
* **Details:** While a 400-foot drop exposed more reef area and expanded the surface area of existing volcanic islands and atolls, **none** of the islands of Remote Oceania became connected to a continent or to each other by land bridges.
* They remained separated by hundreds of miles of open ocean. Consequently, they were **not easily accessible** during the LGM and remained entirely uninhabited until thousands of years later, when indigenous Austronesian and Lapita peoples developed advanced double-hulled voyaging canoes and deep-sea navigation technologies.
### Summary
* **Land-based access:** Only **Sahul** (Australia + New Guinea + Tasmania) and **Sundaland** (Southeast Asia + western Indo-Malayan islands) saw massive land expansion that united previously separated regions.
* **Island-hopping access:** **Wallacea** required watercraft crossings, though gaps were narrower.
* **Remote Pacific Islands:** Remained deeply isolated oceanic targets that still required sophisticated open-ocean voyaging technology to reach.
Just one point, if oceans are 400 feet lower, there may Islets or atolls that would have been available to these ancient peoples that aren’t available now to assist them in island hopping.
Atolls above the current surface formed (coral) at basically their current height above sealevel.
pacific seamounts
https://search.brave.com/search?q=pacific+seamounts
If they are touching the surface right now, how much more exposed would they be and how many more might there be if the oceans were 400 feet lower?
Coral doesn’t form above water, so they wouldn’t have been any more protruding than now.
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