The Ancients - Ancient Polynesia: Pioneers of the Pacific

Episode Date: May 22, 2021

Despite sporadic food sources and the dangers of the deep sea, the remote islands of the Pacific Ocean have been home to Polynesians for more than a millennium. But what was life like for the first people to venture between Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, to name a few? In this episode Christina Thompson explores the new evidence which can tell us more about what the ancient Polynesians ate and how they lived. From the DNA of ancient rats to the mystery of the sweet potato, this is an intriguing listen. Christina is the author of ‘Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia’.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, we are going back to the ancient Pacific. We're talking about the Polynesians. We're going to be focusing in on what we know about food, what we know about the lifestyle of the Polynesians

in ancient history. Now, for this episode, I was delighted to be rejoined by the brilliant, legendary speaker that is Christina Thompson. Christina's been on the podcast once before to talk about what we know about how the Polynesians navigated the Pacific in antiquity. And she's back now. We're going to be looking at food types. We're going to be looking at animals. antiquity and she's back now we're going to be looking at food types we're going to be looking at animals we're going to be looking at the topography of these various Polynesian islands including some really intriguing mysteries. Now Christina will be back on the podcast again very soon after this one to talk about another incredible aspect of the ancient Polynesians and that is Polynesian mythology so look out for that one as well. But in the meantime, here's Christina to talk about ancient Polynesian food,

topography, lifestyle, and so much more. Christina, it's great to have you back on the podcast. I'm totally thrilled to be here. Well, I'm thrilled that you agreed to come back on because we're talking more Polynesians. Last time we really focused on the navigation and the reaching of these islands. When we now talk about food, and we'll get on to myth later, but food in particular, there's quite a lot of debates, questions, mystery surrounding how certain foodstuffs did reach these islands. Yes, there is. Some of it is kind of well known and some of it is kind of

mysterious. That is correct. We will absolutely get into the mystery as the time goes on. But let's start off with, let's say, before the Polynesians to really set the background to all of this and this travel, these reaching these islands. And in particular, a particular people, Christina, who were the Lapita people? Lapita is the name of a cultural group, an identifiable group of people who we can see in the archaeological record, basically between about 1500 BC and zero. So in the 1500 year period, we start seeing them in the islands north of Papua New Guinea, and then they appear to migrate eastward around the Solomons into the Santa Cruz Islands, and then eastward all the way to Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, which is a

little kind of triangle at the western edge of islands, at the western edge of the big Polynesian Triangle, which includes Hawaii and Easter Island and New Zealand and all of that. So that's the group of people. And they have characteristics that are continuous with people on either side of them and before and after them in time. But we know them because of their pottery. And alongside their pottery, Christina, do we know any more about their lifestyle? We do. We know, actually, I think a fair bit about their lifestyle.

They were coastal. They were seafaring people, obviously. They traveled from island to island. They seem to have preferred these coastal environments where there would be, you'd have a coastal plain at the edge of an island, and then you have a river. So you have a freshwater supply. And then you have this often a coral reef outside. So you have a little kind of mixture of environments, you have some gardening area, you have some freshwater, you have some coastal coral reef seafood stuff, and then you have the open sea, and then behind you some mountains usually. And so what has archaeology

told us therefore about their diet? So the interesting thing about them is that they have a certain, they refer in anthropology to this thing called a portmanteau biota, which I've always loved the expression, portmanteau biota, meaning a cluster of foods and plants and so forth that they carry with them as they travel. And these people are travelers, they are moving, they're moving eastward, and they are carrying this stuff with them. But some of the stuff they're carrying is also available kind of around them, other peoples in the neighborhood, because they're not the only people there. There are other people in the neighborhood, in the mountains, on other islands, and so on and so forth. And those people also share some of the same foods and animals. But once they move out into the wider Pacific, these people are bringing with them this cluster

of things. And what they are is they have a pig, they have a dog, they have a chicken, they have a rat, and they have other things like some insects, I think. I don't know. Some stuff goes with them, you know, as they travel. But they also have in terms of a food cluster, like a plant food cluster. They're also gardeners. So they have yams and taro and coconut and sugarcane and breadfruit and then some other things. There are some nuts, but mainly it's important that they have these starchy staples, breadfruit, yam, taro, particularly. So those are core foods that keep people alive, you know, and coconut, of course, some people call these people like they talk about a coconut culture because you can do so many things with the whole coconut, with the leaves, with the fiber, with the

shell, with the meat, the whole thing. So that's their kind of basic stuff. Absolutely. But I mean, Christine, the fact that they're taking all of these food stuffs with them to these new islands, and when they reach these new islands, these new environments, does this surely help alter the environment that they reach of this new island? It definitely alters it, but the arrival of people is what alters it. It's the arrival of people with practices, for example, burning, you know, which eats a lot of things. And then the people they eat, when they get there, whatever is there, they also start to eat or destroy or whatever. I mean, people are hard on a new environment. So definitely they changed the environments that they arrived in. And part of that was the introduction of new species for sure. And this changing the environment, can it sometimes lead to in severe cases,

did it lead to or do we know like the extinction of certain animals? Absolutely. I mean, the Lapita record is clear in some cases. So when the Lapita culture starts, we see it in this environment where there are all these other people. So it's kind of hard to tell what they're doing. But as they move eastward, they move into environments where there are no other people. And so there you can see this record of there are no people, and then they arrive, and now there are people, and what happens? And so one of the things that happens is basically the extirpation of many species. So people, when they arrive in a new environment, they eat everything. And they especially eat the stuff that's easy to eat. They eat the biggest birds. They eat the biggest

shellfish. They eat the things that don't move very shellfish they eat the things that don't move very fast they eat the things that are not afraid of them and in some of these environments for example birds there were no predators so they weren't you know I mean famous stories even in the European historical record of this kind of thing where they arrive someplace and the birds are like huh and the people just go oh yummy and they eat them so they definitely a lot of things went extinct at the point at which people arrived on these islands. Yes, my mind instantly went to the dodo right there and then. But I mean, Christina, talk about the other piece of people on this migration east, because it's so incredible how they change these environments. So let's then move further east and into the

Polynesian Islands proper. And first of all, Christina, what were and what are the high islands? Basically, in the mid-Pacific, every bit of land is originally volcanic. There isn't any other source of land. There is no continental land in the middle of the Pacific. So there's this volcanic land. Volcanic land comes, usually it's these hot spots in the middle of the Pacific in various places, and the magma comes up and it creates an island. So that becomes what we call a high island. So it's usually, it's recognizably volcanic, like the islands of Hawaii, I mean, are still active. Most of them are not active in the Pacific. I mean, Hawaii is unusual in this respect, but the island of Hawaii is still growing, and there's a little one coming up to the southeast of the island of Hawaii. And you can

see these islands are in chains, and that's because the plate coming up to the southeast of the island of Hawaii. And you can see these islands are in chains. And that's because the plate is moving over the hotspot and the islands are sort of successively emerging. We're talking millions of years here. And then over time, the islands wear down and they erode and they subside sometimes. So those are the high islands. So the islands of Hawaii, the islands of Tahiti, the islands of Samoa, they're all high islands and they have a mountain and then some flat land around it usually. These high islands for let's say the Polynesians venturing to these islands in ancient history, were they rich in resources? Were they ideal locations for settlement?

They are very nice environments. I mean, hence the tourist industry. I mean, they are mostly in the path of some strong winds, this particular in the kind of mid Pacific. So they get wind and therefore rain. And the rain, they're usually, you know, wet on the side where the wind comes and hits the mountains and dumps all the water and then dry on the opposite side in the rain shadow, as it were, of the mountain. So they have this kind of recognizable topography, which gives them variety, among other things. They have freshwater, but they also have like a, you know, rainforest-y side. And then they have a dry side, which is maybe easier to inhabit if you don't want to be in the rain all the time, but is also too dry. So they have a lot of things going on. And they also, a lot of them have a reef, a coral. They have, you know, coral grows up around these islands and it forms a reef first at the edge of the island. And then as the island subsides and erodes, the reef is further and further away. It sort of becomes a barrier reef. So the reef environment is also really productive in terms of life, marine life. And so the combination of all

these different things, freshwater, and then also volcanic soils are quite rich, so fertile. The thing that you find, though, is that as you go eastward across the Pacific from Asia, the islands, they have fewer and fewer species because, well, it's complicated, but because the species tend to come from the Asian side. And basically, as you move eastward, the islands are a little bit more what they call depauperate. You know, they have less stuff, fewer kinds of different animals, fewer kinds of birds, fewer kinds of everything. So they're not all super easy to live on. Some are easier than others. Some are richer than others.

They're not all the same. Well, you mentioned then coral reefs there. So let's kind of keep on that because I've got on my notes something called an atoll too, which I believe is quite linked to that. Because, Christina, I can imagine marine life, marine resources must have been absolutely central then for lifestyle, for diet on these islands. They absolutely are. They absolutely are. I mean, these are, I call them sea people. And the reason I do that is partly because they just get everything from the sea. They get a lot of their food from the sea. I mean, they do have these agricultural products, you know, these plants, these foodstuffs that are from the garden, which are really important in terms of diet. But there's a ton of the diet comes from the sea. The most of the protein comes from the sea. It doesn't

come from, it's not like they have these huge pig farms or anything. You know, they don't, the pigs are a part of the diet, but they're not core. The seafood is at the heart of it, I think, in addition to the starchy food that whatever particular starchy food they like in that island. One of the islands that always interested me as island groups is the Marquesas, because they're a high island group in the eastern side of the Polynesian Triangle, and they don't have reefs. And that really limits what there is available. It makes it harder to live in the Marquesas than it would be in some of the other islands, in other places where there are reefs. Let's focus on the Marquesas then for a second. Has archaeology told us anything about their diet?

Do we know of any fishing there or was it more, as you say, that kind of agricultural focus? No, they definitely had fishing. They definitely were fishing. And there is coral along the sides of the mountains down below. And it's just not, they don't have this established lagoon environment in maybe one or two tiny spots, but hardly anything. So they had to do a different kind of fishing. One of the things that I found really interesting was the suggestion that in the early archaeological context in the Marquesas, they found a lot of variety in the fishhook style. So people are

kind of experimenting and innovating with fishhook style. And somebody's theory, I'm sorry, apologies to the person who came up with this because I can't remember who it was. But the idea was, OK, these people have maybe come, let's say, from Tahiti, where they're quite substantial. The reef environment in most of the islands of the Society Islands. And they've arrived in the Marquesas and, uh-oh, no reef, no lagoon, no, you know, there's a lot of food there and they don't have that. So they have to adapt their fishing and they have to do deep sea fishing mostly, which is harder, more dangerous, more challenging in every respect. And so maybe what they're doing in those early decades, centuries, whatever, is like trying to figure out what is the right fish hook for this new environment. I thought that was kind of a cool theory about what they were finding. That is super cool. And I'm going on a tangent straight to the mist, but we'll come back to this new environment. I thought that was kind of a cool theory about what they were finding. That is super cool. And I'm going on a tangent straight to the mist, but we'll come back to this

very quickly. But just in regards to deep sea fishing and sea creatures in Polynesian mythology and all that, because like in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, when you go out to deep sea fishing and they have no idea what's under the seas, do they think that that could have been these huge creatures beneath them? Well, you know, I mean, I got really interested in this too. I mean, I'm a huge Homer fan, so I'm really steeped in all of that and I've been thinking about it. And there are some really interesting stories about people who go on sea voyages, usually on some kind of quest. They go to get something. The guy goes to find his father, they go to procure some kind of valuable object, whatever. And the hero of this story has to run the gauntlet of like all of these different sea challenges. And a lot of them are monsters. And some of them are other things like whirlpools

and stuff. So there's just this fabulous set of encounters between a giant, you know, fish with huge teeth or then some other kind of. So, yeah, there are definitely stories like that. And I thought that was pretty wonderful to know. No, absolutely. A hundred percent agree. Hence the tangent. Now, forgive my complete ignorance, Christina. I was born in southern England. I've never been to a really a very tropical place in my life, I don't think. So forgive my ignorance when I ask this question, what is an atoll? Ah, indeed. So when I decided that I was going to write this book, I wrote a grant application because what I really wanted to do was to see an atoll. That was like actually what I wanted more than anything else. I mean, there were other things I needed to do, other

places I needed to see, but I thought there is no way that I can do this without going and standing on one of these islands and seeing what does that feel like. And it is amazing. I am here to tell you. So it's basically the coral ring that's left that formed around the volcanic island, which is now left because the volcanic part of the island is now gone. It's subsided. It's disappeared. It's not there anymore. So they are coral rings. They are made entirely of coral. They're not made of anything else. So there's no rock. There's not really much soil to speak of. Basically, there are coral blocks. There are coral cobbles. There is coral sand. I mean, there is some soil on the more well-established ones and everything. And they tend to be kind of, they're not actually continuous rings always. Sometimes they're discontinuous rings with passes that go through, or these little

tiny islands around the ring that are called motu. That's just the word for the island. The coconut survives there pretty well, but it's a tough environment for terrestrial life. It is a great environment for marine life, but a tough one for terrestrial life. Now a tough one for terrestrial life, but it seems that the ancient Polynesians were there. This is one of the great parts of the story, in my view, is that when Europeans arrive, you get them kind of wandering around through the Pacific, trying to see what they can see. And they find these atolls, these coral islands. They're also known as low islands, you know, high islands and low islands. These are the low ones. And they sometimes arrived on these or found these low islands where there

would be signs of human habitation, but no people. My favorite one is the one where they found dogs. There are dogs, but there are no people. And so the dogs didn't get there by themselves. The dogs got brought there and then the people left them there, apparently. And they might have been in the neighborhood, actually. I mean, who knows, because nobody was observing everything very carefully. But there were lots of other things like that. Piles of coconuts, bits of old canoes, signs of human activity of various kinds. So there are basically signs of habitation. Plus, there are a lot of atolls that were actually inhabited with villages and stable populations. So in the Tuamotu Archipelago, which is a long archipelago basically made almost entirely of atolls, there's this substantial

population of people who have made a living in this particular environment, which is pretty impressive, really. catastrophic warfare bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles i'm james rogers and over on the warfare podcast we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics. Understandably, when we see it from hindsight, the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying, yeah, tell me something I don't know. The unexpected.

And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history. It's so impressive, isn't it, when you think, Christina, if they're all coming from the West, what are these different places?

This variety in the topographies of these islands. And yet, it seems that you can find evidence of Polynesian inhabitation regardless. That is absolutely incredible about these ancient people. Yes, it really is. And I think it's a great point. It bears repeating, which is that it's sort of easy to think of these islands as all similar. And they're kind of not. You know, one of the adaptations, the Polynesian adaptations was to New Zealand, which is completely different. High, cold, big, continental, full of flightless, giant flightless birds and some raptors, you know, it's really different. And that's kind of at the maybe easier adaptation end. The harder adaptation end is to places like Rapa Nui, you know, Easter Island, which is a really ecologically fragile place, or to the Marquesas, which again, are probably easier than Rapa Nui, but still harder

than Tahiti, and certainly harder than Samoa and Tonga, which are in a much more ecologically complex part of the region. Absolutely. Well, let's focus in on Easter Island now, because that topography in itself is really, really interesting, especially when looking at the ancient Polynesians. Because Christina, when the Europeans do reach Rapa Nui, it almost sounds like it was quite, compared to the other islands, quite a barren environment. Yeah. One of the first descriptions of it is they thought it was a sand island, because from a distance it was sort of golden. So what that really was, was dry grass. They were seeing dry grass. It was already in the early 18th century. So 1722 is the point at which it's put on the European map. It was already

denuded of trees. So there's been a lot of discussion about when that happened, how that happened, who's to blame. I mean, that's kind of like a stupid way of looking at it. But you know what I mean? That's been a conversation, a really kind of big conversation. Yeah. But what is the science telling us about how Rapa Nui once looked? Well, the one thing that is clear is that it did have trees.

It had a big palm tree that was like a Chilean palm. So comes obviously was kind of got there from however it got there from Chile. It had other kinds of trees. It definitely had a different kind of landscape, a different kind of flora when the Polynesians arrived. The question of what happened there is one that people have been fighting about for quite a while. And the big issue is, I suppose, so Jared Diamond's book Collapse was part of this story. It was sort of the idea that you could have a group of people who just committed ecological suicide. That's basically the concept. And I don't find it very hard to believe that people can commit ecological suicide.

I mean, it feels like maybe we're doing that globally, like as a species anyway. So how hard is that to understand? But at Easter Island, what that did was it sort of created an image of who was the last Rapa Nui person to cut down the last tree and what did they say? And it just doesn't seem right. It didn't seem very respectful somehow. So there have been people who've talked about what are the different possibilities here? And one thing about it was I mentioned that it's a kind of ecologically fragile. So it's old. It's an old island.

One of the things that's kind of interesting is that these islands, the soils of these islands are sometimes are replenished by dust that comes from Asia and volcanic dust and stuff. And the further east they are, the less of this they get. So the nutrients kind of leach away and they don't get replaced. And so also they don't get a lot of rain. They're drought prone. So drought prone is a bad thing to be. And then the early Polynesians, they practiced a slash and burn kind of agriculture. So they did cut stuff down. There's no question about that. They did cut stuff down. They did burn the landscape. How much did they do it? I don't know. Then there are these rats. And there's an argument that maybe the rats ate the seeds and the rat seed interaction,

plus dryness, plus fragile environment, plus poor soil, plus cutting. You know, it's some custer of things like that. But eventually that is what happened. It became a completely different kind of environment and not a very easy one to live in. Well, we'll get on to rats in a bit, don't you worry. But keeping on Easter Island and these great mysteries, because you mentioned how many of the foodstuffs, they do seem to come from Asia and brought across to these islands. But particularly in the eastern part of Polynesia, there's one particular food crop that there is a lot of mystery surrounding. Christina, what is this food plant? It is the sweet potato, or as we like to refer to it, the mysterious sweet potato.

So the thing about this is that pretty early on in attempts to understand who Polynesians were and where they came from, even in the 18th century, people realized that most of the stuff they had with them, the plants, the animals, the stuff they carried from island to island came from Asia. It all came from Asia. The chickens came from Asia. The dogs came from Asia. The pigs came from Asia. The Taro came from Asia. You know, like everything came from Asia, except there was this one thing. And it's not just in the East, actually. The food, which is known as kumara in New Zealand, and there are various other versions of that, sweet potato, is a staple, an absolute staple in New Zealand. It was found in Hawaii. It was also found in Easter Island,

Rapa Nui. It was in other islands as well. So it is like, by the time Europeans arrive, it is spread, not just spread across the Polynesian Triangle So it is like, by the time Europeans arrive, it is spread, not just spread across the Polynesian triangle, it is entrenched. You know, it's a core food in islands that are, take New Zealand, really far away from the South American coast. And it's a South American plant, right? So there's just a problem there. Here are these people traveling eastward, bringing with them their animals, their plants and so forth and everything. And yet, when we look at them and we look at the cultural complexes that we see in these different places, we see that they have the South American plant, food core plant, important plant. So how did it get there? Well, I wish I could tell you. I could write another book. There are still arguments about this. Most people believe that if you are Polynesian voyagers and you can make it all the way to the Marquesas, all the way to Tarapanui, all the way to Hawaii, what is to stop you from getting all the way to South America? And I think the Occam's razor answer is there is nothing to

stop you from getting all the way to South America. It's just logical. The problem is there's no actual hard evidence of Polynesians in South America. There's a little more here, which is there is the idea that possibly they went to South America and brought sweet potato back into Polynesia, back into, say, the Marquesas maybe, or back into Easter Island or back into Tahiti, someplace like that, and then it disseminates.ates but you see in order for it to disseminate out to all these other places it has to be there very early it has to be there before 1000 AD it just has to because otherwise how's it going to get to New Zealand and Hawaii and all these other places so it's a very early arrival there are some people who suggest that it actually predates people altogether and I can't evaluate that it's a DNA paper and I don't know whether it's right or not right. And then there is some other recent DNA

studies that suggest that there was contact at around 1100 AD between South America and the Marquesas, which again is new. And maybe that means like some raft or fishing canoe from the South American coast drifted into the Marquesas or the Marquesans went from their islands to South America and back again. I don't know. Christina, I absolutely love this. This whole debate surrounding this mystery food plant. There are so many mysteries of ancient history, whether it's the Ninth Legion or whether it's the sweet potato. I never thought I'd say that in a statement, but it's true. The thing is that it's just, there just isn't the right piece of evidence here. You know,

if you could find a burial site with some Polynesian DNA in it on the forgive me, because people don't like to talk about their people that way. But you know what I mean? Like, if you could find some hard evidence of Polynesians on South American coast somewhere, I mean, there's a lot of bits and pieces of stuff. There was an argument at some point about chickens, about maybe the chickens on South America were actually Polynesian chickens. That was then debunked. There's been some discussion of skulls on islands

off of the coast of South America that look like maybe Polynesian skulls. There's just a lot of debate. And then these new paper about the arrival of people with kind of whose closest connection is maybe people in Ecuador. I don't know. It's not rock solid yet. But hopefully, you know, that's the thing about these fields is that we just keep getting new information.

So absolutely do keep in touch about that. If there is any more information discovered about how the sweet potato reached Polynesia. Super exciting indeed. Now, you mentioned their DNA. You mentioned that the chickens, you talked about animals, and I did say we would go back to the rat. Because, Christina, what is Pacific rat DNA telling us about their introduction on certain islands? So I just want to tip my hat here to a genomics specialist and anthropologist in New Zealand named Lisa Matisu-Smith. She's the one who had this really clever idea, which was Polynesian cultures are ancestor

cultures. You know, there's a high respect for ancestors and people have been not happy about the idea of, quite understandably, frankly, of, you know, archaeologists and so forth poking around in grave sites and extracting bones and, you know, taking their ancestors away for grinding them up and doing research on them. I mean, you know, taking their ancestors away for grinding them up and doing research on them. I mean, you know, it's totally understandable. So there was a kind of a dearth of material for doing genetic, especially ancient DNA research, which is going to be very interesting because the techniques get better and better and better. The information is more and more interesting and it will help answer lots of questions, but people don't really like it. And so it becomes complicated. So Lisa had this idea

that you could use the animals that Polynesians took with them as sort of proxies for the traveling people themselves, because the animals can only go with the people. So the rat, for example, is not swimming from island to island. You know, The rat is dispersed via the canoes and the people in the canoes. So if you look at the rat DNA, you can see some stuff about rat populations, and those rat populations are basically kind of in parallel with the human populations. So for example, it looks like the rats of Easter Island were not introduced very many times. That would be kind of an example of what you might learn from this avenue of research, that you would look at the variety, this sort of diversity of the rat population, and to be able to understand how many different separate introductions of rats there were to that island. And it seems like not very many. So that means maybe not very many

canoes, not very many separate introductions of people. It's super exciting how you can use that animal DNA, as you say, as a proxy for all that. And we've talked about the archaeology and you've mentioned the science just there. Does this really emphasize how it's really exciting for the future in this field that these new finds, that science too, and experimental archaeology, which you really covered in our last podcast, how it's going to tell us so much more, hopefully, about Polynesian lifestyle, particularly in ancient history. You know, I think the thing is that when you really look at this field or this chapter in human history, it is really pretty astonishing.

I mean, it's not a very large number of people. You know, it's not a big population. They cover this huge amount of area. We don't know how many people were lost in the process. We don't know exactly how long it took them. We don't really know what their techniques were for finding new islands. We don't really, in some sense, know how they did it. So it feels like we know that they did do it. Like that's incontrovertible. They did do it. They did reach all these places and they did bring their stuff with them and they did manage to inhabit all these different new stuff, for example. DNA research gets better

and better. All kinds of things that some of the research on, for example, Lapita and other peoples, when they moved, they didn't just bring plants and animals, they also brought tools. So tools are made of different kinds of things, including stone. Stone can now be traced to different sources. And that's a newish kind of thing, too. So people keep coming up with new ways of trying to figure out what happened. And I find that kind of fabulous. It absolutely is. It really is super, super interesting. I mean, that was an incredible chat about all of those topics. Christina, wonderful chat as always. It's always great to have you on the podcast. And last but certainly not least, your book on this topic is called?

It's called Sea People, The Puzzle of Polynesia. Fantastic. Christina, great to see you again. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Hey, thanks so much. It's really always fun to talk to you.