The Ancients - The Polynesians: Ancient Mariners of the Pacific

Episode Date: September 27, 2020

The ancient Polynesians remain the greatest seafarers in history. Already by the time of the legendary founding of Rome on 21 April 753 BC, Polynesian voyagers had crossed huge parts of the Pacific Ocean and settled on isolated islands such as Tonga and Samoa. Mind-boggling and incredible. Later they would voyage even further into the Pacific, settling the likes of Easter Island, Vanuatu and New Zealand. So how did they do this? How were they able to reach these far-flung islands in their iconic canoes? What were the keys to their success? And perhaps most fascinating of all what drove groups of Polynesians to want to set sail in their iconic canoes into the vast and treacherous Pacific?So many questions still surround the ancient history of Polynesia and their unparalleled voyaging across the vast Pacific Ocean and in this podcast I was delighted to be joined by Christina Thompson to talk me through this 'Puzzle of Polynesia'. From the iconic outrigger canoes to the canine animals they brought with them, she explains what we do know (and what are the theories) about the ancient Polynesians and their incredible voyages across the Pacific Ocean.Christina is the author of: 'Sea Peoples: The Puzzle of Polynesia' and 'Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All'

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient 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. Today we are heading to Southeast Asia and the vast Pacific Ocean, because we are talking about perhaps the greatest seafarers in the whole of history,

the ancient Polynesians. For hundreds of years before the first European ships reached these remote islands in the Central Pacificific the polynesians had settled them but how did they do this how were they able to reach these far-flung islands in their iconic canoes what was the key to their success well in this podcast i was delighted to be joined by the one and only christina thompson christina is the author of a couple of books all about polynesia and in this podcast we talk through well she chats to me about what we know about ancient Polynesian navigation and the many mysteries that still abound. Here's Christina. Christina, it is great to have you on the show. Thank you for inviting me. I'm really pleased to be here.

Now, the ancient Polynesians, can we say that they are the greatest navigators in history and perhaps also some of the earliest? Yes, they are certainly the greatest. I don't think there's any question about that. They are certainly the earliest over the distances they covered. There may have been other people who were in the ocean before them, but they really made the long haul voyages. The whole area of Polynesia today, this is an absolutely massive area. It's said to be 10 million square miles inside the triangle.

The actual extent of Polynesian voyaging is probably well beyond that because there is the question of whether they reached South America or not. There is also some voyaging back to the West again. There are these things called Polynesian outliers, which are probably people who came from the centre of Polynesia and back towards the West. So it's really probably almost the whole Pacific. Wow. And even that there's so much distance between all these islands, these communities and the people who still live on these islands today, they still share this identity that seems to stretch back thousands of years. Yes. So the thing that's interesting about this is that, you know, until Europeans arrive in the Pacific, which is in

the 16th century, until that point, there doesn't seem to have been anybody else there except the people. This is I'm talking about the middle of the Pacific, sort of Tahiti, you know, and around the middle. Up until the time of European arrival, there isn't anybody there except the people who found the islands, who are the people we call Polynesians, who are the descendants of these Austronesian voyagers. But up until that point, they are there alone for a really long period of time. And they're just this amazing group of voyagers who found this space and then were there by themselves. Absolutely. And for the people on these islands, especially before the Europeans, to learn about their

ancestors, these Austronesian voyagers, I mean, what sources do we have to learn about their ancestors today? So because European colonisation, so not just the discovery of the islands, but really the colonisation of the islands, takes place comparatively recently. So at the beginning, say, of the 19th century, you have missionaries in the field. And also you have some very kind of interested, sort of scientifically-minded explorers in the late 18th century. So you have people who are starting to document as they voyage, as they travel. So this is a huge advantage because up until this point,

you haven't had a lot of interference. People are still speaking their own languages. They haven't contracted a lot of disease yet. They've started to, but not terrible. So you don't have the kind of destruction of the cultures that later follows and that you do see in the 19th century. But in the early part, you have people who go out into the field and actually try to write stuff down. And they do document a pretty surprising amount of stuff. And admittedly, you have to understand that the people who are doing the documenting have blind spots, they have limitations, the missionaries have certain things that they won't get near. And then also they're determined to find things like, you know, they're always looking for a flood myth. Every time they write

down the myth, they're like, where's the flood myth? And so they find flood myths and you wonder if, you know, those are sort of affected by the missionary perspective. So there's some contamination, or maybe that's too strong a word, but there's some filtering, let's call it filtering. But there still is a very large corpus of Polynesian oral tradition from certain places, which has been recorded. So that's pretty impressive. I mean, absolutely impressive when we consider that oral tradition may have been passed down more than a thousand years. Yes, pieces of it are certainly thousands of years old. I mean, pieces of it are probably hundreds of years old. Some pieces of it may be 20 years old. I mean, you know, oral traditions

change depending on what the purposes of the people who are reciting them are. You know, sometimes it's to prove that your particular ancestors are the first ancestors in the place or that you own the best fishing grounds or that whatever it is, you know, the outcome of the war, you know, the stories told by the victor. Oral traditions are just incredibly tricky as sources.

I felt that that was one of the great revelations for me in writing the book was that I found that a lot of people were using oral traditions as a kind of corroboration for, say, scientific, archaeological, whatever ideas that they had. And I think that the oral traditions are so malleable, or so complex, let's say, that you can kind of support a lot of different things with them. And so if you're super careful about what it is you're looking at, who collected it, when they collected it, what agenda they had, all that stuff. Absolutely. And you mentioned there are scientific methods as well, which could go hand in hand with

this. We were talking about this earlier, just before we started recording, because quite recently, we've had, of course, the development of experimental archaeology. And for Polynesian seafaring, how important has this been? So the experimental stuff, I mean, Thor Haradol's the instigator in a way with his Contiki expedition, but really it's a 1970s, 1980s, 1990s kind of thing and arises out of a movement in Hawaii, which is a cultural revival movement in addition to being an experimental, you know, history or experimental archaeology kind of method. So that's the Polynesian Voyaging Society and they do these voyages all over the place in these recreated vessels using these basically kind of partly

borrowed techniques and partly kind of reinvented techniques. It was a total game changer. It was huge in terms of the story of Polynesian voyaging. And is that a key then to understanding more about Polynesian history, ancient history in particular, is being able to combine results from, let's say, experimental archaeology, but also with things we found from oral history written down. And also the archaeology is combining that together to try and get a picture of how the ancient Polynesians managed to get to where they did. It's absolutely the case. And it's been, I think it was well understood among archaeologists. For example, the fit between archaeology and linguistics has really been understood for a long time

in the idea that one might corroborate or dispute or whatever the other. But there's also genomics plays a big, so the relationship of genomics to archaeology, the relationship of both of those to linguistics, those are kind of three really useful tools that you almost never see, at least in terms of these historical questions, you never see really one without the other anymore. I mean, everybody recognises that you need to be looking to match your theory to the

theories that have arisen in these neighbouring disciplines. That's remarkable in itself. I mean, let's go to the, well, what we know about the history of Polynesian seafaring now. Let's go back all the way to the beginning. I think it's called the voyaging period, but correct me if I'm wrong. With the whole Polynesian seafaring, where does it all begin? Does it begin in Southeast Asia? Yes. Well, maybe the Asian mainland, if you want to go back far enough.

I think the Asian mainland would probably be the way to think about this. All through the Asian coast and island Southeast Asia, there are sea peoples, you know, there are lots of people who live on the ocean, who live in boats, who take their living from the sea, who, you know, who have a sort of oceanic culture. And so you have this really complicated, deep history of people's relationship to the sea and to seafaring and to boats and to fishing and all of that kind of stuff right throughout that part of the world. into seafaring, into boats, into fishing and all of that kind of stuff right throughout that part of the world. And how far back does that stretch, that sea people's culture stretch in Southeast Asia? Well, so this gets pretty complicated and it's a little bit outside my field. But if we just look at the Austronesian migration, which is the one that kind of ends up in remote Oceania,

which is like central and eastern Polynes, and Hawaii in the north. If you take that, if you think of that migration, that group, they're just called Austronesians. That's actually a term from linguistics. It's a language family. That's how they're traced. So you take that language family and you take them back to the first language you can find them, and it's in Taiwan. So that's the Formosan languages are the kind of earliest language in this family. And so that's right off the coast of Asia, you know, the Asian mainland. And that's sort of the starting point of the Austronesian migration. And in terms of time, that's maybe five or six thousand years.

Wow. And when do we think, you kind of mentioned that, but when do we think the Polynesians, they really start embracing these grand voyages into the Pacific? Right. So there's this thing that was discovered archaeologically, which is, again, one of the kind of great parts of the story is the Lapita people, the Lapita culture, which is a kind of an identifiable culture, which you might mainly find on islands off of the north of Papua New Guinea and into the Solomon Islands in those clusters there. And then you find they have pottery, distinctive pottery, which is the thing that enables you to track there. And then you find they have pottery, distinctive pottery, which is the thing that enables you to track them. And that's maybe 3000 years ago, three and a half,

something like that. They seem to appear for a fairly comparatively, not a super long period of time. And then you see them stretch, reach all the way out to Tonga and Samoa. That indicates that you have people who are in this sort of, you know, this place where the islands are all intervisible, where the islands are close, and it's not so hard to travel from one to the other. And then by the time you get out to Tonga and Samoa, you're looking at islands that are very far apart and require very long voyages. And yet you can see archaeologically that the same people were in these two places. So they're the ones who started making these great voyages. And that's, you know, three and a half thousand years ago, something like that.

Maybe four. I have to look at the numbers again all the time. That's astonishing in itself. You're saying these remnants of archaeology that we can find from, you said, from one island to another island, extreme distances in between. But because of the similarities, we can tell from that, that they are the same people voyaging across large swathes of the Pacific to get to this other island. Well, that's the beauty of pottery, you know. I mean, pottery is great like that because it can be kind of really distinctive.

And these pottery fragments were an amazing clue once people sort of in the 20th century sort of put it together and began to realize that they were looking at the same stuff in these areas that were quite far apart from one another. And so it kind of filled in this gap between the linguistics, which kind of took you all the way back to this sort of Asian origin, and then this Polynesian cluster, which is comparatively modern, say a thousand, two thousand, you know, something in that range. And that cluster, which is really clearly identifiable culturally, but where was the link, you know? And that Lapita pottery really provided this link in terms of understanding the continuity of movement from the distant, distant past into kind of the comparatively recent past. Absolutely. And how long, I mean, roughly, I'm not asking for specific dates, because I know it's probably very, very difficult to know. I'm not asking for specific dates because I know it's probably very, very difficult to know.

But how long roughly do we think does it take for the Polynesians to, well, make settlements on all of the islands that we now know as Polynesia? Well, it's kind of tricky. So let's work backwards from the most recent. New Zealand is the last of the Polynesian nations or island clusters to be settled. The dates change. That's the other thing. You know, dates change a lot. Like even over this period of time when I was researching settled. The dates change. That's the other thing. You know, dates change a lot. Like even over this period of time when I was researching this thing, dates change.

So maybe 800 years ago, so not that long ago, they didn't arrive in New Zealand. So let's call it 1,000. And then you have a lot of other kind of settlement dates in the Central and Eastern Polynesian, so Hawaii, Tahiti, possibly Easter Island, the Marquesas, all of these islands we think of kind of around the 1000 AD mark, maybe a little earlier,

maybe 800 AD. Nobody has any really firm dates. But then when you go west towards the group of islands that is the kind of intermediate zone between this central Polynesian area and kind of the western Pacific, you have Samoa Tonga Fiji, right? Fiji is actually not considered Polynesian technically, but there's a relationship between those islands. There's a cluster there. The archaeology tells us that the people have been in those islands quite a bit longer. So there's now considered to be kind of this long pause where they get to Samoa Tonga, and then they kind of pause before they make the last push out. And that's a bit mysterious. But, you know, dates,

dates are tricky, and you have to find the stuff that's really old. It's also interesting exactly what you're saying there. So it's not as if the record doesn't suggest that it was okay, they went from one island to the next island to the next island, it was pretty quick going. From what you're saying, on Samoa, on Tonga, there seems to have been quite a long pause before they went further. Yeah, that's what it seems like. But you know, the other thing is hard. And again, this is one of those areas that the theories change on this a lot. But one of the things that's tricky is that you have both subsidence of the islands, you have sea level rise, it's possible that some of the oldest sites are now underwater on islands, you know,

islands are doing different things. In Vanuatu, which is west of the Polynesian Triangle, different things. In Vanuatu, which is west of the Polynesian Triangle, it's like halfway between the Samoatonga group and Papua New Guinea, there is this Lapita Cemetery there, which is the biggest ever found and the most amazing. And it happens to be, I've forgotten what it is, like 800 meters or something inland, but it would have been coastal. It just happens that Vanuatu, this particular island of Ifate, has had uplift, you know, because volcanic, they're on the rim of fire over there. So, you know, they have all kinds of stuff going on with the tectonic plates. So that island got lifted up. And that meant that the sites, which were coastal, moved inland and then were discoverable.

But, you know, if it goes the other way and the island subsides, you know, not so discoverable anymore. So a lot of this is kind of, you know, I mean, this is the great thing about archaeology is kind of the luck of the draw, you know, did you find it or not? Absolutely. So there may be islands that the Polynesians did settle on that actually we have no idea about today. Well, maybe. I mean, they did, there are things in the legends, there are a lot of legends about like islands that disappear and stuff like that. And there are things, there are, there are volcanic things that pop up and go down, you know, in areas of extreme volcanic activity. And I think, you know, mostly we know where they were. Yeah, okay, fair enough. Because actually, you know, the other thing about it is that they were everywhere. I mean, when Europeans arrive in the Pacific, they find islands that are

effectively, you know, uninhabited, and yet show signs of habitation. They find things where there are piles of coconuts or old bits of canoes. Or there's a great story about some Dutch navigators who found an island that had dogs on it, but no people. It's like, okay, somebody was there because those dogs didn't swim, you know? Let's move on to the next question then, because you actually mentioned dogs there. I mean, what animals do the Polynesians take with them on these journeys? So they are responsible for the spread throughout these islands of chickens, dogs, pigs, and the rat, the little Polynesian rat, who, you know, is often described in the literature as a stowaway, although people ate it, so I don't know. And then various

other things, some land snails, some, you know, a bunch of other stuff that went along with them. And plus, obviously, a bunch of plants, which they brought too. So, you know, taro and, well, kumara, which is the sweet potato, the mysterious sweet potato, and many other things. Wow, it sounds like they're well supplied. And I guess it goes on to the next question I was going to ask, which is, of course, about the transport themselves, about how they got to these places.

What do we know about ancient Polynesian canoes? One of the things that's good, again, about this sort of period in which some of the stuff was described was that, I mean, it would have been better if it was even earlier, but there were a lot of measurements and things made of existing ceremonial or voyaging canoes, different kinds of canoes that were observed and drawn and measured by, particularly by 18th and early 19th century explorers, especially the British, but the French as well. And so there's pretty interesting documentation of that. Haddon and Hornell wrote a huge book called Canoes of Oceania, which is really largely based on this documentation of

what there was in the 18th century. And by that time, people were not making the really long voyages, say from Tahiti to Hawaii, but they certainly were traveling around archipelagos and often long distances, comparatively long distances from Tahiti out to the Tuamotus, to the Marquesas, maybe, I don't know. But certainly they had large canoes at that point. So that's one avenue. There were some old hulls people have found, but not super, super old. So a lot of that is from seemingly accurate description, empirical description from the historical period. peoples. You also mentioned how there were ceremonial boats as well as seafaring boats. Do you think this emphasises how building a canoe and the canoe itself was actually very important to the ancient Polynesian societies? I think it was probably the single most important thing, period. Yeah, because, you know, there's a lot of sort of analysis of canoe design and,

you know, sail shape and, you know, all kinds of stuff, which sort of gets beyond my technical knowledge. But one of the key notions here is that what they developed somewhere in island Southeast Asia was they developed the outrigger. And the outrigger is a stabilizer. So you can sail a narrow craft, physically narrow hull on the ocean with an outrigger. And it allows you to, it's very, you know, makes stability and you don't capsize and so on. So and you put a sail on it and you do all these things. And the outrigger is like a technical innovation. And once you see the outrigger, the outrigger is the foundation of the whole kind of Polynesian Voyaging Canoe. Because the Polynesian Voyaging Canoe is a double-hulled,

it's a catamaran, basically. It's a large double-hulled vessel with a platform on it and a sail that can sometimes be shifted and a steering oar at the back. But the outrigger is the innovation that makes it all possible. When I was looking into this, I was kind of struck by the number of words that could be reconstructed in Proto-Polynesian or in Proto-Oceanic in one of these languages that sort of presume, say, Lapita people type age. The words for canoes, for parts of canoes that can be reconstructed, it's this amazing vocabulary. And it's not always easy to reconstruct a vocabulary from thousands of years ago or hundreds of years ago. But the canoe vocabulary is immense. So that's kind of interesting.

Oh, that is very interesting. I mean, I was immediately struck because in the UK and England, there's this whole question and a lot of enigma around the old stone circles but someone i was trying to do a few weeks back he was talking about how actually for these prehistoric communities the actual building of the stone circle was just as important as the finished product itself i mean of course perhaps it's speculation but perhaps the building of the canoe was just as important for the community as also the sailing across the oceans oh i think it was huge i think it was a huge thing i mean if you think about what you need to do in not just physically in order to build it but if you think about what you need to do, not just physically in order to build it, but kind of psychically what you need to do to imbue or to endow your vessel

with this kinds of, you know, the spiritual character that it needs to have in order to accomplish an enormously long and dangerous voyage. And also that's the other thing that survives. In the oral traditions, a lot of canoe stuff survives, you know, chance for going going safely stories about people traveling

all that kind of stuff you can imagine that there would be there is and a lot of that survived so that was kind of cool too absolutely and i guess it goes on to the next thing as to of course there are seafaring people they have this connection with the canoe this real deep felt connection what do you think drives them to want to and continuously go out into the sea, into the oceans to find an island, to find a new place, which they have no guarantee that they will find? Yeah, this is a kind of a really interesting question. And there's lots of different ways of thinking about this. I mean, one of the things that I became very persuaded of as I thought about this more and more was that the notion of people

for whom the sea is the environment, it's not that it's the only environment. I mean, land is super important. Land is where you have to live. Land is where your animals have to live. You can't live without land. But the sea is a big piece of your world. And it's not sort of an extra.

I mean, I'm a land person. And the sea for me is this like great treat. You know, I go and I look at it and I'm amazed. But that's not what it was like for them. They didn't go and look at it and be amazed. They lived on it. They got a huge amount of their food from it. And they traveled from place to place all the time. There are these great stories about the Tuamotu, which are the big archipelago of atolls, where in order to really live in the Tuamotu archipelago, you kind of have to use all different islands. You know, you have to travel from island to island all the time. And people would just decamp from their island and go to another island. And this would be sort of the way, you know, people used to say when they came in the 20th century to do kind of anthropological

surveys and stuff, they would say all the people have gone away. You know, they've all gone someplace else, and we can't find them. And this was part of the way of living in this world. Because in one place, there would be seabirds, and you would go and get their eggs. Another place, there would be coconuts, and you another place turtles would come and you would go there. So there are all these different things. So you have to think of these people as people living in the sea in a way that's really different from what a land person, a land-based person experiences in terms of their life. So that's one thing. The other thing is that if you think of this as an Austronesian migration, which has been going on for thousands of years, you also have a

tradition of traveling from place to place of migration. And that seems to be just true of these people. Like the Lapita migrations are within a comparatively short period of time, some hundreds of years maybe, and they move pretty far in that period. So they seem to be travelers. I guess you just think of them as travelers. And then there's one other piece that I like, which is, this was some very clever anthropologist suggested this, that if you look at the way the culture is structured. So my husband, for example, comes from New Zealand, and he belongs to a kind of large tribe called Ngapuhi. What that means is the people sort of of Puhi, comes from New Zealand, and he belongs to a kind of large tribe called Ngapuhi. What that means is the people sort of of Puhi, who is a person, who is an ancestor, there

is a founding ancestor. So there is an entire culture of founding ancestors who are named, and lineages which are based on the names of founding ancestors. And I think there's a value, a great value in the culture of being a founding ancestor. So again, I think you can sort of see that culturally, it makes sense if you were a very aspirational young man, you might want to be the guy who left the island you were on and became the founding ancestor of another place. Seemed like a good idea to me.

Wow, absolutely. And this idea, I mean, thanks to the oral tradition that survives that you mentioned earlier, is that key to us having this quite a rich and also diverse on all the different islands, a rich founding ancestor or semi-legendary founding ancestor belief? Yes, I do. I do think that the oral traditions are hugely helpful in explaining this, in making us understand it. Because for one thing, what you learn when you look into this is that basically one of the kind of key forms of the tradition is genealogy. Genealogy is immensely important in these cultures. But that continues into the present. I mean, that's not gone. So you can look at the fact that my husband has a tribal affiliation, which is

still named and goes back all the way to wherever it goes back to, which is a long time ago. And that people are still talking about it in, you know, 2010 or 20 or wherever we are. So it just tells you that it has never gone. It hasn't gone away, even though they're, you know, the impact of colonization in New Zealand has been very profound. So that notion of lineage, that notion of genealogy and that notion of ancestral, of one's relationship to one's ancestors is really deep and central to these cultures. And so it's alive now, but it also is corroborated by all of this amazing genealogical stuff that was collected. Absolutely. And I guess it also must emphasize how all these people from all these different islands, they must feel similar in that they're all Polynesian, but there's also on each island, this individual

identity developed from their own ancestry and these legendary traditions. Yes, they are all distinct. That is true, too. I've just been reading some stuff about Easter Island. You know, it had a very difficult modern history. But it's interesting to see some of the differences in what is understood to have been the, you know, the pre-contact culture in Rapa Nui was kind of different from some other places. I know New Zealand may be best of all, but again, Hawaii, kind of different again. Samoa Tonga, different again. So yeah, they're definitely significant sort of local cultures. I mean, I write in the book, this is one of my problems in the book, was that I write about Polynesia all the time. And in a way, Polynesia is kind of like, from one point of view, it is a thing.

But when you're in it, it's not really a thing because it's really just the different islands and the different subcultures within the islands and so forth. So it's a perspectival issue. Absolutely, absolutely. Going back to these journeys and these ancient journeys in particular, I'd like to talk about navigation now because this is also so fascinating. How do we think the ancient Polynesians navigated to these islands? Well, it seems fairly clear that some of their conceptual technology, let's say, not the boats themselves, but their thinking, their navigational methodology, has been sort of reconstructed. Also, it was still being practiced in Micronesia in some places. So that was part of the way that it was reconstructed in Polynesia, where non-instrumental

navigation really hadn't been practiced for quite a long time. The basic techniques involve things like, part of it is just observation of the environment, right? So star paths are used for navigation. And that means understanding the behavior of the heavens, right? So star paths are used for navigation, and that means understanding the behavior of the heavens, like what are the stars doing? What are they going to do? Where are you in relationship to different stars? And so on and so forth. There's also some understanding of how the swell works. There is, if you've ever been out in the mid-Pacific, there is this swell associated with the trade winds, which is just so powerful and so regular and so fascinating. And across that, there are other kinds of things going on, local wind wave patterns,

wind-driven wave patterns, and all kinds of other different things. Then within archipelagos, there are patterns of reflection, where the waves hit the islands, bounce back, and the very sophisticated navigators were able to tell where they were in relationship to different islands based on that, which is like mind-bending. And then there's land-finding techniques, which is another thing that's kind of interesting because the islands are really, really small and they're really far apart. But the circle of sort of the findability, the sort of area of findability is actually much bigger than the land itself. It's what the birds are doing, what the color of the sky is at a distance over the island,

what the clouds do over islands. You know, there's a whole lot of stuff. So it's a real kind of science, basically. And a lot of it requires a lot of experience. In terms of it being transmissible, it is transmissible. And that's one of the things that the experimental voyaging movement proved was that it was transmissible. You could teach another person to do it. But, you know, it does take a lot of practice and a lot of experience. I mean, it's astonishing what you're saying there. You first mentioned, of course, the stars, but then, of course, the clouds and the reflections and the birds. I mean, it sounds like no matter whether it was at night or whether it was at day,

these ancient Polynesians, they would have still had a method for navigation. Absolutely. You know, nobody really knows how they did the exploratory voyages. The best theory that I know of is Jeff Irwin's, and he really posits this notion of kind of going out and coming back and going out and coming back and going out and coming back. And he has a whole theory about how you go out, you know, first you go upwind, then you go across the wind, and you only go downwind last, which makes total sense,

because if you explore with the wind and the wind wind carries you away, and you get out there, and there's nothing, you're dead, because you can't get home. So you go, you know, into the wind, and then the wind brings you home if you find nothing. You know, there's a whole kind of theory about how this might have worked, but it must have happened, because you have people going from places like the Marquesas and Tahiti to Hawaii, which is 2400 miles away. And there's an atoll in between, but you can't actually hit that atoll if you're going to sail from the Marquesas. Because if you did, you'd end up too far west of Hawaii, you'd never reach Hawaii. So like they just how, you know, I mean, this is what happens when you look into it,

you just end up going, ha ha ha. You know, how did they do this? It's just so amazing. I mean, yeah, I can imagine when you're writing this book, you said, as it goes on, and the questions just become more and more mind-boggling because of how amazing these achievements were. They really are. And, you know, when I talk to school kids and stuff like that,

I always start with a map of the Pacific, and I try to give them a sense of the scale, because that's the piece you need to understand is how big this is and how small the islands are in order to really grasp what's going on. Because otherwise, it just seems like, oh, these people, they got in these boats, they went to these places, they carried their stuff, so great. But the fact that they really found everything, that's the other thing you sort of have. You know, when the Europeans start coming into the Pacific, and they find the islands, and then they realise that there are always people on the islands. And then, as I said,

even sometimes signs of people who were there and aren't anymore, which is always interesting. It was just that their penetration of the island region in the mid-Pacific, which is very scattered, was thorough, really thorough really thorough indeed and even more astonishing is that when the europeans do come that these people have been living on these islands for hundreds of years beforehand right definitely they've been there for a long time they've been there for well maybe 500 600 depends a thousand years two thousand years in some cases when you get over to the west they've been there a long time just it's just such remarkable history polynesian ancient history and all of that.

I mean, from what you're saying, there is still so much to learn about it, which seems so fascinating for future generations. There are lots of big questions still. I mean, I think the question of how people actually found the islands is a really interesting one. I don't really think it's solvable myself, but I like to think about it. There is a big question which has been on people's minds for a long time about Polynesian contacts with South America. There's recently a paper that just got a lot of airplay that was about the suggestion that there was South American Indian DNA in Marquesan populations, and among other people. And so suggesting that there were

contacts at an earlier period, quite a lot earlier than people would have thought. It's really unclear how that took place. You know, there've always been, Tor Heyerdahl's idea was that these South American Indians had come into the Pacific, but it's sort of Occam's razor, right? The sort of more probable argument is that Polynesians in their amazing exploration of these vast spaces, did reach South America, because they're going that way anyway. If they overshoot, or if they explore from Marquesas, or if they explore from wherever, why not? The problem is there's no real hardcore evidence of their presence on the South American mainland. So people have been kind of looking for that for a long time.

So it's possible that they've reached South America, the Americas, but we need concrete evidence to really back it up. Yeah, I mean, they have this plant, they have the kumara, which is a South American plant. It's the only thing that Polynesians carry around with them that does not come from Southeast Asia. And it is widespread in the Pacific. It's in New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island when Europeans arrive. So, you know, it's been there for a while. It's a major food plant. It's the sweet potato, the kumara, and it's from South America. So this is like a big problem and has always been a big problem. Did they go and get it? Did somebody bring it to them? There are a lot of theories, but I could talk to you the whole show on the kumara, which we're not going to do,

but it is a real puzzle. Wow. It seems maybe probable that they reach South America. It seems more likely than not, I think. This one plant has opened up a whole can of worms, but a very interesting question at that. Christina, that was fantastic. And just before we go, your book is called? Sea People, The Puzzle of Polynesia. Christina, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. The part of the book that is, I guess, ultimately for me was the, one of the most interesting things was the conflict between the theories. To me, the way that a theory is built, the way that a conclusion is

reached, and the way that you have all these false, kind of false positives all the way along, like, you know, the radiocarbon dates are all, in the beginning, are all wrong, and everybody builds these theories around them, and then they gradually get shifted, shifted, and shifted, you know. I mean, there's so many things that are wrong. Tor Haardal is wrong. The Kumara, the whole Kumara thing makes people crazy. If you could go fast forward a hundred years and see what people are doing then, you just wonder, are they gonna be doing the same as that we're doing now with people before us?

Or it'd be amazing to see where the conversation is then. Yeah, it really will. It really will.