"In May 2006, a second expedition to Teouma in Vanuatu revealed more skeletons in burial urns some of which were sitting in the lotus position. Geneticist Lisa Matissoo-Smith successfully extracted DNA from the teeth and found that they did not contain any Polynesian or East Asian genes. To date she has not yet determined whether the DNA is Melanesian or from a forgotten civilization of Caucasian seafarers related to the Berber Bell beaker people."
"Lisa Matissoo-Smith in her interview on TV NZ said; "We were able to look to see whether the individual possessed a particular mutation that we see at a very high frequency in Polynesians. It is a 9based pair mutation of Mitichondrial DNA and we found that the Teouma material - the first samples that we analysed did not have that mutation, so they did not look like 98% of the people we see living in Polynesia today."
"The possibility that the Lapita people, a people remembered in legends as tall white bearded men or red men and in carvings - people with large pointy noses - not the flatter nose more characteristic of Pacific cultures these days. Some might say it is a genetic adaptation to drinking coconuts, but I suspect these people were part of a global seafaring culture associated with the obsidian trade before, during and after the Bronze Age. This age of globalization meant connections were made between people from Tamil Nadu, Harappa, The Maldives, Ethiopia, West Africa, Spain, Britain, Sardinia, Greece, Crete, Turkey, North America (Isle Royale) and the Pacific. They were tall Caucasian red heads that were a branch of the same gene pool that gave rise to many other seafaring cultures around the world such as the seafarers of Paracas, the Phoenicians and Celts."
The claims of a New Zealand archaeologist that he's found Celtic structures there don't seem so foreign now.
It would be really interesting for those connections to be made.
In a decade or two we will have a lot better picture of the DNA patterns and migrations; they have only been doing these studies for about 15 years or so, and they are just starting to do some of the large-scale studies that should provide some real answers.
It an exciting field of research.