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 ...
I will buy this theory. That might mean that they were here before those that claim they arrived by the land bridge first. In other words the native Americans stole the land from the polynesians. Nah who would have thought LOL
The Chumash plank canoe, or tomolo, held up to a dozen people and may hold a clue to pre-Columbian contact between Polynesia and the New World. (Photo courtesy Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.)
"Scholars swim in choppy waters Did Polynesians visit Southern California many centuries ago? The evidence some fishhooks, a boat design, and a few words in common is limited. But to some those clues are tantalizing, even persuasive."
It's more than you think. Look Here:
"The oldest human remains found in the Americas were recently "discovered" in the storeroom of Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. Found in central Mexico in 1959, the five skulls were radiocarbon dated by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Mexico and found to be 13,000 years old. They pre-date the Clovis culture by a couple thousand years, adding to the growing evidence against the Clovis-first model for the first peopling of the Americas."
"Of additional significance is the shape of the skulls, which are described as long and narrow, very unlike those of modern Native Americans."
Nope. The theory is that there was peripheral contact only 100 or 200 years before Columbus. Before that Polynesians hadn’t reached the eastern Pacific.
It's not unfair to suggest that the Europeans have had a fair degree of success too.
Until we left the door open.
I was only referring to pre-columbus days.
Thor was correct that such voyages were possible. He was incorrect about the direction.
I’ll see if I can post the photos later.
The word “corn” in the Bible means “grain”, wheat etc. Look it up, it is not the corn we think of.
logical enough...
another arg is that colonization in the South Pacific accomplished 2 goals:
1. reduce conflict within the settlement.
2. reduce drain on limited resources.
I think Diamond’s “Collapse” mentions something on these lines. Either way, run for your life or voyage out to find new resources. In any event people were travelling more than we have imagined/
You see what happens when you try to interpret a book literally, that has undergone many translations.
Only in America does “corn” mean specifically maize, once called “Indian corn”.
please see post #30.
Thanks,
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