http://etd.lib.umt.edu/theses/available/etd-12152006-100028/unrestricted/Thesis.pdf
In 2004, Douglas Wallace of the University of California at Irvine and his colleagues reported signs of natural selection in human mitochondria - the fuel-generating factories of the cell. Mitochondria convert the glucose in food into a compound called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which the cell can then use as fuel as it crawls around, produces hormones or performs some other task. The production of ATP releases heat as a byproduct, which can help keep our bodies warm.
Studying over 1,000 people, Wallace and his colleagues discovered that people in Europe and northeastern Siberia have inherited unusual mutations in their mitochondrial DNA that can't be found in the genes of Africans. These mutations appear to make European and Siberian mitochondria produce more heat. Wallace and his colleagues suggest that these mutations brought benefits to humans as they moved into cold climates.
https://profgrant.com/2016/08/01/the-thrifty-gene-found-in-samoa-and-what-it-means/
The Island of Korsae, a speck of reef-fringed rainforest in the
middle of the Pacific, is one of the most gorgeous and unspoiled places
on earth. Tourism has not yet desecrated the island with four-story
cabana-style resorts because Korsae is so utterly remote from just about
anywhere else...Such an idyllic and out-of-the-way island, with fresh
reef fish, rainforest fruit and plenty of sunshine, should be the
perfect place to live a healthy and well-nourished life. Unfortunately,
at last estimate, nine out of ten adult residents Korsae were officially
overweight and three out of five were obese.
Those are
staggering numbers, but Korsae is by no means the only place where such
a high proportion of people are overweight. In fact, the federate
states of Micronesia, of which Korsae is the smallest state, ranks only
sixth among nations by the proportion of people who are obese.
Strikingly, the top seven are all Pacific islands. Obesity was not
always this common in the Pacific;early European explorers found the
inhabitants physically impressive, lean and powerful in build. But
obesity erupted in the Pacific, as in many other parts of the world, in
the late twentieth century. Luckily we know a lot about the social and
economic changes that occurred around the same time, which are probably
part of the cause.
...
In order to
illustrate the complex and subtle interplay of genes and environment in
obesity, we need to revisit the Pacific Islanders. Their ancestors
gradually colonized the Pacific over the last 8000 years, from which
time until very recently they ate a diet rich in fresh reef fish and
tuna. This is about as healthy a dietary foundation as you can get: high
in protein and the healthiest fats. They also ate vegetables and fruit
high in fiber and complex carbohydrates such as breadfruit, taro, yams,
cassava and bananas; and coconuts, which are rich in the healthiest
fats. Agriculture on Pacific islands was confined largely to these
fruits and root crops. There was probably seldom great overabundance of
food, and probably periodic hunger, including the very real chance of
going days without food if a fishing trip fell foul of weather or
currents. As a result, Pacific islanders are probably among the peoples
whose ancestors never experienced the very high carbohydrate diets that
characterize transitions to agriculture. Pacific islanders may also have
adapted to the presence of abundant fresh fish, evolving a higher
protein intake target than people in many other parts of the world.
Recent
modernization in the Pacific reduced both physical activity and
reliance on traditional foods. At the same time imports of salted and
processed foods full of saturated fats and cheap carbohydrates rose.
Since the 1950s, life in Micronesia has changed substantially with the
rise of a cash economy fueled first by US subsidies and then by the sale
of tuna fishing rights to Japan. As a result, the local foods have been
steadily supplanted by rice, wheat flour, sugar, tinned fish, fatty
tinned meats, and turkey tails.
The tale of the turkey
tail is typical of the tragedy. Turkey tails are gristly, fatty skin
flaps cut from American Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys and either
discarded, used for pet food or exported frozen to poor places like
Micronesia where they are sold to the poorest citizens. The U.S.
department of Agriculture's supplementary feeding program, which
provides school lunches compromising tinned fish, tinned meats and rice,
has also been blamed for increasing food dependency and replacing the
production and consumption of healthy local foods with less healthy
imported alternatives.
I don't have much of a palate
for conspiracy theories, and goodness knows there are enough of them
surrounding the modern diet. I think that obesity on Korsae and
elsewhere in the Pacific is far more interesting than a conspiracy
theory could ever be. It seems likely that a very unfortunate confluence
of interlinked political and commercial interests as well as global
economic changes and the challenges faced by most developing nations
have had the largely unintended effect of changing diets in places like
Korsae, Nauru, the Cook islands and Samoa. The shift from a very healthy
locally sourced diet rich in fish protein, healthy fats and complex
carbohydrates to a diet full of low-quality tinned protein, cereal grain
staples and sugar has been hastened by poverty, the transition to a
cash economy and the growing influence of foreign developed nations.
Sex, Genes, and Rock 'N' Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped The Modern World. Brooks, p.38-39 54-56
As I described, people at higher latitudes are on average heavier than those at lower latitudes. The
other part of the world where we find that the native peoples, the
original inhabitants, are relatively large is on the Pacific islands, at
the opposite extreme of the geographic world from the poles. Some of
the heaviest people in the world are Samoans.
Rather
than having Artic peoples' solid body build, though, the large Pacific
islanders are simply fat. Recent figures from the World Health
Organization indicate that nearly three quarters of Samoans are obese.
In other words, they have abody mass index (often abbreviated as BMI) of
more than thirty, the threshold for classification as obese. For other
Pacific islands, the proportions of the population with such high body
mass indices range from forty to seventy-five percent of the population.
By comparison, the proportions for two countries often considered
overweight, the UK and USA, are just twenty-five percent and thirty-five
percent respectively.
https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/uploadedFiles/moynihan/dst/curtis5.pdf?n=3228
POLYNESIANS ARE BORN FAT AND WITH THE GENES TO EASILY BECOME FATTER AND THEY DO SO BY CONSUMING A STEADY INTAKE OF FOOD LIKE THAT PICTURED IN THE LINK ABOVE. (WE EAT THE FOOD THAT OUR PEER GROUP EATS AND OUR PEER GROUP EATS THE FOOD THAT THE MAINSTREAM CULTURE INFLUENCES THE PEER GROUP TO EAT. AND WHAT DOES MAINSTREAM AMERICAN CULTURE INFLUENCE PEOPLE TO EAT? SHIT! EAT SHIT AND DIE BITCH!)
Body mass index is
calculated as mass in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. It
so happens that those two easily measured values, weight and height
correspond more or less to the percentage of fat in a normal human body
when combined in the equation that I have just described. Of course, the
values vary depending on sex, age, and the sort of exercise we taken,
given that bone and muscle also affect our total weight. But as a near
approximation, the equation adequately indicates body fat.
Why
are Pacific Islanders so prone to fat? Look at a globe and think about
the original journeys to those islands. The Pacific Ocean covers nearly
half the globe. The initial trips to the Pacific Islands covered
thousands of kilometers in open boats. The travelers would have been
soaked much of the time, and probably half starved by the time they got
to an island, let alone by the time they produced their first crop. It
is easy to imagine that the people who survived best were those with the
most efficient metabolism, a metabolism that was best at converting food
to fat.
Once
established on an island, if harvest failed, survivors could not easily
move elsewhere. They would have to sit out the bad period. Again, those
individuals with he most efficient metabolism would have been the ones
most likely to survive. In the words of people who study the phenomenon,
the islanders had and still have "thrifty" genes, gens that make the
body extremely efficient at converting food calories to stored calories -
or, in other words, fat. A case of survival of the fattest?
Nowadays,
the islanders no longer face starvation. Indeed, quite the opposite.
They find themselves in a feast of carbohydrate, sugar, and fat. The
consequence? Body mass indices of over thirty. The story is similar to
the one of the Africans finding themselves for the first time in their
evolutionary history in a perpetual high-salt diet. What was a useful,
adaptive beneficial ability in the past environment can be a cost in a
new setting.
The thrifty-gene hypothesis has its
critics, as Elizabeth Genne-Bacon describes in her review of the
various ideas to explain obesity. However,
it appears that island animals might also have a thrifty metabolism. In
their case, they often have a low metabolic rate, instead of or in
addition to efficiently using food. They can afford a low metabolic rate
and lethargy, Brian McNab points out, because large predators are rare
on small islands.
Humankind: How Biology and Geography Shape Human Diversity. Harcourt, p. 112-113
If You Surround Yourself With Fat People Who Have Poor Eating Habits And Eat A Poor Diet You Too Will Become Fat!
 |
| Approximately 3,000 years ago, the ancestors of the Polynesian people began colonizing the Pacific archipelagos. Starting at Tonga and proceeding stepwise eastward with large canoes designed for long voyages, they reached, by AD 1200, the extreme reaches of Polynesia, a triangle formed by Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand. With this achievement of the Polynesian voyagers, the human conquest of Earth was complete. (The Social Conquest Of The World.) |
...
We don't deliberately breed humans for particular characteristics, we
don't (more fairly, we shouldn't) cull those who have them, and
generation times are long, making even the results of natural
experiments difficult to discern. Nonetheless, one natural experiment
has produced very obvious results in a relatively short period. In his
recent book The Lapita Peoples, my Berkeley colleague, Patrick V. Kirch,
has summarized the linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence,
showing that today's Polynesians derive from a population, or
populations, living off the eastern end of New Guinea. Over the past
4,000 years, they have spread out to cover a vast triangle of islands
from New Zealand in the south to Hawaii in the north and to Easter
Island in the east.
This expansion meant crossing thousands of miles
of ocean that could be chillingly cold at night, and doing so in large
outriggers for which upper-body strength would have been at a premium,
thus apparently selecting primarily for larger body size (Bergmann's
Rule) and, by extension, proportionately even larger upper bodies (there
is positive allometry between overall body size and upper-body size in
apes and ourselves). That big-bodied people live in the tropics at
first glance seems odd, but they are there. Jon Entine has noted that
more than fifty Polynesians have been in the National Football League,
making them by far its most "overrepresented minority." (Extended visits
in Auckland have left me [Sarich] noting to myself that "scrawny
Polynesian" would appear to be a null set.)
Race: The Reality of Human Differences. Sarich, Miele, p. 178-180.
http://www.silkassociates.com/information.php?info_id=8
READ THIS
http://www.silkassociates.com/information.php?info_id=9
READ THIS
0N 10 T0ES! REAL FOOL BLOODED HAWAIIANS ABOVE AND BELOW. THEY'RE BOTH EXAMPLES OF BERGMANN'S RULE!
This One Looks Like She Has Some White Genes, Tho! She Looks A Quarter White!
http://www.wsamoa.ws/index.php?m=83&s=&i=3860
Both cultural and biological adaptations were
required to make this crossing possible. The cultural innovations likely
included improvements in sailing technology and navigational expertise
and enhanced food preservation techniques. The biological adaptations
probably included the robust body build that facilitated paddling the
vessels and metabolic adaptations to dietary and cold stress. All of
these biological
adaptations may be the result of selection for a ‘thrifty phenotype’.
The Lapita sailing vessels had a large triangular sail that precluded
sailing too close to the wind.
The canoes sat low to the water, making paddling possible when winds
were too low or from the wrong direction. Skeletal remains from
Lapita sites and measurements on modern Polynesians depict a people of
substantial stature with broad shoulders and hips, and robust, long
limbs. The broad body, long limbs, and sizeable muscle mass are
particularly well suited to the biomechanics of paddling—a voyaging
strategy that only would have come into play in situations critical to
survival.
Thus, this body build would have had a strong selective advantage.
Houghton (1996) has modeled the severe cold stress that early Pacific
voyagers would have experienced. Maximum cold stress is achieved
overnight when moderately low temperatures, high wind chill, and wet
clothes and skin combine to produce substantial cold stress. Overnight
voyages would have been very rare prior to the “break out” from the
Solomon Islands. The same bodies that are well suited to paddling canoes
also have a favorable low surface area to body mass ratio, excellent
for conservation of body heat in cold stress. Again, a large, robust
body build would provided an advantage.
Traditionally the thrifty genotype argument has been used to explain
adaptation to periodic famine. In the case of the Pacific it has been
invoked as an adaptive response to caloric restriction associated with
voyaging and settlement of the islands (Bindon and Baker, 1997).
Metabolic efficiency in storage of excess calories is achieved through
over secretion of insulin which increases fat tissue formation and the
accumulation of an energy store.
This would also increase subcutaneous fat tissue which acts as an insulation against cold stress. It has been suggested,
however, that a population as well adapted to a marine environment as
the Lapita people were may not have suffered from extreme caloric
deprivation during voyaging and settlement.
Even so, their diet would have been drastically altered: lower
carbohydrate intake and an increase in protein intake. They would have
eaten through their supply of the poi-like fermented crops (taro,
breadfruit, banana) that they were carrying on their voyage and then had
to wait for new crops to grow before regaining their normal
carbohydrate intake. Several people have argued that the thrifty
genotype provides a metabolic adaptation to just such a high protein low
carbohydrate diet through the metabolic shifts involved in
hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance.
Recent research into thrifty genes has provided some clues that the
cold- and work-adapted body build and the metabolic shift to accommodate
dietary stress may be related. These adaptations may be the result of
mutations in the region of the insulin gene (INS), like the variable
number tandem repeat (VNTR) polymorphism near INS that causes increased transcription of both the INS gene and the close
Insulin-like Growth Factor 2 (IGF2) gene. Increasing transcription of
INS could generate high blood insulin levels (hyperinsulinemia) and
decrease sensitivity to insulin binding in peripheral cells (insulin
resistance). Meanwhile, high levels of IGF2 stimulate muscular and
skeletal growth predisposing to a large, robust body.
I do not mean to imply that this particular VNTR polymorphism represents
the thrifty gene, but it points to a possible area for exploration and
integrates the biological adaptations found in modern day Polynesians that appear to result from their voyaging history.
http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/ike/moolelo/long_canoes.html
Emory published my statement of the idea in 1974.
In 1991, Philip Houghton of the University of Otago, New Zealand,
published a massive compilation of data which demonstrates conclusively
that the indigenous peoples of Remote Oceania (Polynesia, Micronesia,
and the more eastern part of Island Melanesia) have
physiques better suited to cold regions than to the tropics—larger,
more muscular, with more fat than any other tropical people. Observing
that for closely related mammals and birds, those living in cold regions
tend to have greater body mass than those of warm regions (Bergmann’s
rule), Houghton found the reason for the evolution of the Remote Oceania
physique in the chill of the open-ocean environment, which he amply
demonstrates with meteorological data. Houghton’ s conclusion:
“For Homo Sapiens, the wider Pacific, with its fluctuation
between hot and very cold conditions, is a unique environment. Neolithic
technology provided no useful protection against the wet—cold
conditions, and among the adaptive responses was selection for a large
muscular body. This change began in Island Melanesia.
...
When Proto-Polynesians departed from their Southeast Asian
homeland many thousands of years ago, their physiques may have been no
different that those of other tropical peoples. Their eastward drift
through the myriad islands of Indonesia and Melanesia may have been the
result of many explorations, each originating from a previously
established island settlement. Through findings of distinctive artifacts
archaeologists have traced the movement of Proto-Polynesians along the
Bismarck island chain off the northern coast of New Guinea and through
islands of Eastern Melanesia. Moving ever eastward into the vast ocean,
they honed their maritime skills as distances between islands increased,
sailing when the prevailing easterlies were replaced by more favorable
winds shifting from the north, south or west. Except for picking up
Melanesian genes along the fringe of Melanesia, their island world kept
them isolated. At some time more than 3,500 years ago, explorers
discovered uninhabited islands in what are now Samoa, Tonga, and the
small eastern islands of Fiji. Perhaps no more than a few canoe loads
arrived at what has been called “The Cradle of Polynesia.”
...
Imagine the following situation on any of the islands that
Proto-Polynesians settled on the long movement out from Asia: A chief
has reason to leave and search farther eastward for new land. Perhaps he
has lost a battle, or is a younger brother with no lands or
expectations, or a drought has brought the specter of famine. Let’s say
he is able to build or commandeer no more than four voyaging canoes. He
would favor companions who would give him the best chances of
survival—men able to wield a war club if a landing had to be forced on a
hostile shore, men and women large and strong enough to handle a canoe
in any weather. The canoe’s limitations would make it a silent but
powerful partner in deciding who would be selected. Call this “social
selection,” a preference for large size which seems to have echoed long
after voyaging was discontinued as a desirable trait, most notably in
chiefs.
During an arduous voyage, natural selection would likely cancel
out mistakes made on shore. Again the canoe would bring selective
pressures on those who would sail in it, favoring for survival those
with ample natural fat to insulate the body from the deadly chill of
wind evaporation upon spray-drenched skin.
And when an uninhabited island was discovered, those who settled
it would, as a small group in isolation, form the sole genetic pool for
future explorations. Such conditions, repeated over many voyages of
exploration and settlement, would have a cumulative impact on the
physical evolution of the people.
http://humanevolutionontrial.blogspot.com/2009/06/human-evolution-on-trial-pacific.html
http://humanevolutionontrial.blogspot.com/2009/06/human-evolution-on-trial-polynesian.html
http://humanevolutionontrial.blogspot.com/2009/06/human-evolution-on-trial-eastern.html
Near
Oceania laps at the eastern shores of New Guinea and stretches far
south and west into the Pacific. The heavily forested islands form a
voyaging corridor with predictable winds and currents, sheltered from
the tropical cyclone belts to the north and south. A canoe could sail in
summer from New Ireland or New Britain down the Solomons as far as
distant San Cristobal or Santa Ana, then return during the winter when
the winds shifted. By 25,000 years ago, late-Ice Age seafarers had
settled as far south and east as the Solomon Islands. They were hunters
and fisherfolk, clinging to the islands in small camps and rock
shelters. Judging from the lack of imported artifacts, each island
community seems to have kept to itself as they all adapted slowly to
their new homelands. But this isolation may be an allusion, for about
20,000 years ago, we have clear signs of contacts with others. Small
obsidian flakes now appear in settlements in the Bismark Archipelago,
toolmaking stone carried thither from Mopir and Talasea, on New Britain.
Since Talasea is a straight-line distance of at least 127 miles (350
kilometers) from the Bismarcks, it's clear that the islanders were
venturing long distances to obtain useful commodities. (We know this
because the distinctive trace elements of different obsidian sources can
be identified with spectrographs.)
As interisland
visits intensified, so did exploration. About 13,000 years ago, a canoe
from either the north coast of Sahul or the northern end of New Ireland
sailed 124 to 143 miles (200 to 230 kilometers) across the open Pacific
to invisible Manus Island. Thirty-seven to 56 miles (60 to 90
kilometers) of the passage involved sailing out of sight of land. As the
archaeologist Matthew Springs writes, "These would have been tense
hours or days on board that first voyage and the name of the Pleistocene
Columbus who led his crew will never be known." This epic voyage, known
only from evidence of human occupation on Manus dating to at least
13,000 years ago, leaves no doubt that late-Ice Age peoples in the
southwestern Pacific were capable of long ocean voyages.
These
explorers were without agriculture, but had hunted out so much island
quarry that they deliberately imported game. The islanders brought the
arboreal marsupial the gray cuscus (Phalanger orientalis) by canoe from
New Guinea to islands where they were unknown. Cuscus had arrived on New
Ireland by 15,000 years ago, bandicoots on the Admiralty Islands by
12,000 years before present, and wallabies on New Ireland by 7,500 years
ago. These seemingly haphazard attempts to increase food supplies on
relatively impoverished islands are unique in human history: for the
first time anywhere, people shifted food resources instead of moving to
them. Sometime later, farming began on the islands. New Guinea and the
Bismarcks were the places of origin for many tropical crops, among them
such later staples as taro, sugarcane, and some forms of banana. Fruit
trees were also important on the islands, with trees being cropped to
improve orchard yields. Domesticated plants allowed canoe skippers to
store food such as taro and yams for long voyages. Waterlogged remains
of such species found on New Britain date to at least 2250 B.C.E.
However, for all the voyaging, the human population of the southwest
Pacific was still tiny. This may have been because of endemic malaria,
for at least two species of malaria parasite had accompanied the first
human settlers when they crossed from Sunda to Sahul thousands of years
earlier. Only in the New Guinea highlands, above the habitats of malaria
mosquitoes, did denser farming populations flourish.
Island
life changed dramatically in about 1600 B.C.E., just when a massive
eruption of Mount Witari, on New Britain, smothered much of the island
in choking ash. The Witari cataclysm dwarfed the famous Krakatau Island
explosion of 1883, in the Sunda Strait off Indonesia, and must have
killed many of the island's inhabitants. Either just before or after the
disaster, strangers in much larger, more powerful canoes arrived in the
Bismarcks from the west.
The outriggers appear without
warning, large canoes with high-peaked, woven-fiber sails that seem to
move faster than the wind. Heavily laden, they come swiftly to land on a
beach by a stream some distance from the hunters' camp. Men, then women
and children, disembark cautiously, the males with weapons in hand. The
islanders watch silently from the forest's edge as the newcomers pull
their canoes clear of the breakers. They offload piles of taro roots and
yam plants, axes, adzes, and large pots. Two elders approach the canoes
cautiously, making gestures of friendship, chanting ritual greetings.
They're puzzled to discover that the strangers speak a different,
unintelligible language, but smiles and nods defuse the tension. In the
days that follow, the seafarers clear forest for taro plots, plant
crops, and build permanent houses, which are much more substantial than
the hunters' temporary shelters. It's clear that they are here to stay.
Except for some bartering of game meat for exotic shells, the contacts
between hunter and farmer are sporadic at best. Within a few weeks, the
hunters board their canoes and paddle away to forage
elsewhere.Meanwhile, more outriggers arrive from the east and establish
another village some distance away. However, some time later some of
these new arrivals also restlessly sail away to the next island on the
horizon, their crews as much at ease on the water as they are on the
land.
We archaeologists call these newcomers the Lapita
people, because a University of California at Berkeley anthropologist,
Edward W. Gifford, mounted an archaeological expedition to New
Caledonia, south and slightly east of Solomon Islands, in 1952, setting
to work at a site his team named Lapita, on the west coast. There he
unearthed a distinctive kind of stamped pottery radiocarbon-dated to
about 800 B.C.E., which was nearly identical to some exotic potsherds
found on Tonga, far to the east, thirty years earlier. Gifford realized
that his "Lapita ware" was a marker for deep-sea voyaging in the western
Pacific centuries earlier than had been assumed. Similar pottery soon
turned up throughout the southwest Pacific. Some of the vessels bear
intricate designs, including stylistic elaborations of human faces,
perhaps intended as symbolic depictions of cultural identity at a time
when Lapita people traveled over enormous distances. Today, we know of
more than two hundred radiocarbon-dated Lapita sites scattered from the
Bismarcks to the Solomons and far beyond into Remote Oceania - to Fiji,
Tonga, and Samoa, in Polynesia.
With so many dates and
this distinctive pottery, we can now track what was a rapid migration of
seafarers across Near Oceania - one of the most remarkable maritime
explorations in history. Quite where the Lapita people originated is
still a mystery, but it might have been from the northern Moluccas, in
eastern Indonesia, where clay vessels of similar shapes, but without the
stamped decoration, are known. The newcomers spoke an Austronesian
language, one of a vast family of such tongues that spread, perhaps from
Taiwan or some other location, more than halfway around the world, from
Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean, to Rapa Nui (Easter Island), deep in
the pacific. By 1500 B.C.E., they had settled throughout the Near
Oceania. For the next two or three centuries, the canoes stayed where
they were, the newcomers intermarrying with the indigenous populations.
Around
1200 B.C.E., a new chapter in long-distance voyaging began. For the
first time, canoes voyaged into Remote Oceania and its uninhabited
islands, beyond an invisible, and perhaps psychological, barrier at the
southeastern end of the Solomons that had stood for about 30,000 years.
They sailed first to the Santa Cruz Islands, which lie 235 miles (380
kilometers) southeast of San Cristobal. The journey from the southern
Solomons to the archipelago was simply a matter of using the seasonal
winds and following the east-west zenith path of the stars that passed
over both island groups. This technique, latitude sailing, was the
foundation of deepwater navigation as canoes sailed ever farther east.
Between about 1200 and 1100 B.C.E., other groups of Lapita people moved
into the Vanuatu archipelago, then on to New Caledonia.
Still
others sailed east from either Santa Cruz or Vanuatu against the
prevailing trades and currents. They crossed 530 miles (850 kilometers)
of unexplored ocean where there were no islands to stop and rest, until
they arrived in the Fiji archipelago, in around 800 B.C.E. From Fiji
came even more voyages eastward, threading through the numerous islands
of the Lau archipelago and from there to Samoa and Tonga, in what is now
known as western Polynesia. Without question, the Lapita colonists were
the ancestors of later Polynesian navigators who were to settle Hawaii,
Rapa Nui, and some of the remotest islands on earth many centuries
later.
We still know little about the Lapita people
or their voyages, except for the pathways left by their shell-decorated
potshreds. We can only guess at the ritual exchanges, the volatile
relationships - friendships and enmities - that defined their vast
island world. They were farmers, so, as crews zigzagged from island to
island, they carried seedlings, as well as chickens, dogs, and pigs, the
first domesticated animals to arrive in the southwestern Pacific. They
literally carried their own landscape with them. The new foods added
great flexibility to island economies that relied heavily on fish an
wild plant foods and some limited hunting. Lapita crops could be stored,
which tided people over from one season to the next. Above all, canoe
skippers could remain at sea for much longer, the pressing limitation
now being their ability to carry drinking water. A significant expansion
in longer-distance trade and in settlement and exploration of hitherto
uncolonized lands might have resulted.This expansion might also have
coincided with significant innovations in watercraft and in the
navigational lore that enabled sailors to make passages out of sight of
land for days on end.
Only rarely do these remarkable
seafarers come into historical focus. In about 1150 B.C.E., some Lapita
canoes landed at Teouma, a wide and shallow bay on the southwestern
shore of Efate Island, in the Vanuatu archipelago of the New Hebrides.
Here, freshwater came from a nearby stream, so the newcomers founded a
village nearby. They also established a cemetery on the coral-rubble
beach and in cavities in a nearby uplifted and volcanic-ash-covered
reef. Three archaeological field seasons in 2004-2006 recovered almost
fifty burials from the cemetery, which bring us face-to-face with a
Lapita society that clearly placed great emphasis on relationships with
their forebears. Remarkably, the skeletons are all headless, the skulls
having been detached by the mourners. Apparently, the living manipulated
the corpses of the deceased for some time after burial as part of their
transition to revered-ancestor status. Burial customs varied
considerably. For example, in one large grave, an adult male lay in a
grave with four others, three skulls and the jaw of a fourth person
lying on his chest. Isotopic readings from the bones and teeth of the
dead in the cemetery generally tell us that most of them subsisted on a
predominantly maritime diet, heavy on shellfish. But the four adult
males in the large grave produced distinctive readings associated with
diets more terrestrial than marine. Very likely these four individuals
migrated from to the island from elsewhere, a place where their drinking
water came from coastal rainfall near sea level, which is isotopically
distinct from Efate's spring-derived supply. Where these people came
from is still a mystery and may be difficult to pin down, because
shoreline environments are similar over a huge area of the western
Pacific. There of the four lay with their heads facing south, as if this
direction had some significance to the deceased. Perhaps they were the
first settlers, from a land with a more terrestrial diet. Alternatively,
they may represent people voyaging between communities to arrange
marriages, or for economic or political purposes.
One
possible clue may be the obsidian flakes found in the cemetery. We know
that obsidian from the Bismarck Archipelago traveled to Lapita
communities in the southwestern Solomons, to Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and
even Fiji. Perhaps the social networks created by these exchanges
linked islands out in the Pacific, over the open sea, up to as far as
125 miles (200 kilometers) away. Relatively few people were seafarers.
If the Teouma cemetery is any indication, then Lapita passage making was
as much a social phenomenon as a matter of colonization and trade. The
powerful social and ritual underpinnings of later interisland voyaging
might have originated with them.
None of the
Lapita voyages would have been possible without a legacy of seafaring
experience from the distant past and without major advances in canoe
technology, the means to navigate out of sight of land, and the ability
to stay at sea for days on end. For anything more than a day passage,
the canoes had to be capable of handling heavy weather and strong winds
with no convenient refugees nearby. They had to sail well, often in the
face of prevailing headwinds, and also be capable of carrying not only a
relatively large crew but also enough food and water. As we saw in
Chapter 2, a canoe sailing in waves is far more stable if it becomes a
platform rather than a single hull. Two ready solutions must have come
into play soon after people plied the waters off Sunda: outriggers and
double hulls. Of the two, the double-hulled canoe is the most practical
craft for offshore sailing, on account of both its load capacity and its
sailing qualities. Unfortunately, the last double-hulled canoes
disappeared at least a century ago, leaving us with nothing but drawings
by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists, notably of elaborate
Tahitian war canoes, so we know little about these craft. We know from
modern experiments that double-hulled canoes were capable of sailing at a
reasonably close angle to the wind, perhaps as close as sixty degrees.
This would have made passages against prevailing trade winds entirely
practicable, if relatively slow. Thus, one always had the guarantee of
being able to return by turning in front of the wind.
...
The
Lapita ancestral voyages were far more than journeys of exploration.
They were deliberate voyages of colonization. We know this because the
earliest sites on previously uninhabited lands are clearly permanent
settlements, founded as colonies rather than transitory encampments. The
newcomers stayed for a generation or more, then some of them went to
sea again to find another new island. A rapid-fire sequence of Lapita
colonization continued for generations.
Why did Lapita
canoes keep on exploring ever outward into the unknown Pacific? Theories
abound. The founding populations must have been small, simply because
of the limited load-carrying capacity of their canoes. But the constant
expansion speaks to rapidly growing populations resulting from high
birth rates, low infant mortality, or increased life expectancy, perhaps
as a result of less malaria infestation. We do not know. But why would
people, having safely colonized a remote island with no close neighbors,
feel compelled to keep sailing southward and eastward? Many have argued
that population pressure was the cause, but many of the newly colonized
islands such as Efate had been large and uninhabited. Centuries would
have passed before population densities rose to crises levels. Thanks to
widespread finds of obsidian flakes, we know that the ancestral Lapita
were inveterate traders. Their explorations of the Bismarcks and other
closer islands might have been searches for new trading opportunities,
especially for obsidian outcrops and other valued commodities. However,
the farther out into the Pacific the canoes sailed, the fewer
opportunities there were for trade.
We are left with
intangible motivators, like social organization. According to linguists,
Proto-Oceanic words for such terms as kinship, social status, and so on
reveal a strong emphasis on birth inheritance in Laputa society.
Older
siblings ranked above younger ones. The firstborn inherited house
sites, gardens, and property - this apart from cherished ritual
privileges and all kinds of privileged knowledge. The University of
California at Berkeley archaeologist Patrick Kirch points out that
rivalries between older and younger brothers are a persistent theme in
Polynesian myths, which may perpetuate much earlier folklore. He writes,
"In such societies, junior siblings frequently adopt a strategy of
seeking new lands where they can found their own 'house' and the
lineage, lineage assuring their offspring access to quality resources."
Founders - the original colonists and discoverers - may have assumed
great prestige and importance in Lapita society, thereby providing a
powerful incentive for bold voyaging into the unknown. How, then,
did Lapita canoes navigate when out of sight of land? Even more
puzzling, how did the Lapita detect unknown islands beyond the horizon?
The art of navigating the open Pacific developed out of many centuries
of coasting and line-of-sight pilotage in Near Oceania. Once seafarers
had the watercraft and the motives, it was an easy matter to head
offshore, with the confidence both that they could return if need be and
that they could maintain a course by sun, moon, and the stars until
distant signs of land such as irregular wave patterns came into play.
Small wonder canoe pilots were highly respected members of society.
Colonists
revered their ancestors, whose names, like navigational lore, passed
down the generations: their deeds, fictional or otherwise, were a social
glue of oral traditions that linked isolated communities near and far.
When oceanic peoples moved from one island to another, they carried with
them a rich lode of knowledge about deities and culture heroes, about
human existence.
History and ritual beliefs passed by
word of mouth were one social bond, but just as important in practical,
day-to-day terms were the relationships between individuals and wider
kin groups living on other islands. No village was ever completely
self-sufficient. Quite apart from subsistence needs, the islanders
married outside their communities, which often meant moving to another
island. In time, durable kin ties maintained not only social links but
also complex trading networks that endured for centuries. Fine-grained
obsidian for tool making traveled in canoes from island to island. So
did rocks used to fashion stone axes and adzes used for cultivation;
seashells, including large ones used to make shell adzes; red feathers;
and all manner of objects, many of them having important prestige value -
to mention only a few items of exchange. All of this activity,
conducted between what were basically egalitarian groups, meant that
even sporadic contacts with other islands produced important social and
economic networks among individuals and groups that endured from one
generation to the next. Over time, their connections developed into
direct and indirect relationships that extended over hundreds of miles,
far over the horizon.
Material objects tell us nothing
of the complex relationships and social dynamics behind the voyages that
carried them far from their source. If historical Near Oceanian
societies are any guide, factionalism, ever-shifting alliances, and
sudden raids were part of island life, as were cherished relationships
between individuals living at considerable distance from one another,
who might meet face-to-face only once or twice in their lifetimes. Such
contacts, often endowed with profound spiritual meaning and frequently
reinforced by the exchange of valued objects, formed the umbrella for
much wider trading. That such contacts and relationships existed in
Lapita society seems unquestionable, for survival on remote islands
depended on relationships far beyond the confines of one's own village,
as it did right into modern times. The roots of today's elaborate
connections go back deep into the past, perhaps even to Lapita time,
albeit in different, probably simpler, forms. Most famous and enduring
of them all is the celebrated Kula ring of the Trobriand Islands. Such
networks, with their constant passages over open water, also contributed
significantly to the long process of decoding the ocean between the
islands.
...
Lapita canoes colonized a
mosaic of islands deep into Remote Oceania with remarkable speed. At
Samoa, the seafarers paused, for reasons that are little understood.
East of Samoa, landmasses are smaller, more isolated. But sometime in
the late first millenium C.E., voyaging resumed. By 1000 C.E., drawing
in the ancient voyaging expertise of their Lapita ancestors, people were
sailing to the Cook and Society islands, in the heart of Remote
Oceania. In western Polynesia, the traditions of interisland contact
expanded into a form of maritime empire centered on the large island of
Tongatapu. A sacred paramount chief, the Tu'i Tonga, presided over a
carefully controlled system of chiefly governance based on deliberately
nurtured connections across open water far beyond the Tonga archipelago,
into Fiji to the west and Samoa to the east. Long-distance voyaging
along familiar routes lay at the core of this "empire," combined with
strategic marriages that cemented ties over hundreds of miles.
Prestigious goods such as mats, feathers, sandalwood, bark cloth,
canoes, and pottery flowed into Tongatapu, the pinnacle of what became a
highly stratified, quite stable society. Tongan royal power depended on
a seamless knowledge of surrounding waters that blurred distinctions
between land and sea. Such blurring, inherited from Lapita ancestors,
was, here as everywhere, one of the keys to decoding the ocean.
...
Think
of a random pattern of islands scattered over thousands of square miles
of open water, most of them lying upwind against the prevailing trades,
and you can visualize the challenge facing those who first deciphered
the vast waters of eastern Polynesia beyond Samoa. These seagoing
journeys were that last great expansion of Homo sapines, a complex
diaspora that had begun south of the Sahara some 100,000 years ago. (The
date when our first modern ancestors left Africa is a matter of
debate.) Fully modern humans had settled in Southeast Asia by 60,000
years before the present, or perhaps earlier; had replaced Neanderthals
in Europe and Central Asia by 45,000 years ago; and had crossed into
North America by 15,000 years ago. As we've seen, by that time small
numbers of fisherfolk and seafarers had long since settled in New Guinea
and the southwestern Pacific - on the Solomon islands and in the
Bismarck Archipelago. After 1500 B.C.E., their successors, the Lapita
people, farmers and expert seafarers, navigated from island to island by
line of sight until they ventured offshore to the Santa Cruz Islands,
then ultimately to Tonga and Samoa, where they had arrived by 800 B.C.E.
There the seafarers paused for many centuries.
The
last pulse of the great diaspora reached far more than five hundred
islands in eastern Polynesia, an area of the Pacific larger than North
America - from Hawaii to Rapa Nui and as far south and west as New
Zealand and the Chatham Islands. Some canoes may even have reached South
America.
Tracing the voyages has engaged a small
regiment of scholars since Captain Cook's day. All manner of ingenious
approaches have been attempted to decipher the colonization of Remote
Oceania, including elaborate computer simulations and experimental
voyaging. The former are, of course, theoretical exercises that are only
as good as the data behind them, but they are strongly against one-way
voyages. The simulations also highlight the increasing difficulty of
voyaging and navigation as one sailed east. When sailing into unknown
waters, the pilots probably went by indirect routes if they could, as
well as by some form of latitude-like sailing using the stars. As in
Lapita explorations, each canoe traveled onto the teeth of the
prevailing easterly winds, taking advantage of periods when the trades
were down. This ancient, conservative strategy allowed them to discover
new lands over the horizon while always knowing that they could return
safely home.
We'll never know much about these voyages.
Many of the probes must never have sighted land. One imagines two
canoes sailing close to one another, food and water running low, the
pilots talking quietly across the water. They look at the sky, see
tell-tale trade-wind clouds, a sign the winds are changing. After
careful deliberation, they reverse course, using familiar
constellations, to return home safely. On many occasions, too, the
canoes would never return, victims of sever squalls or prolonged calms,
of starvation. If they did sight land and found it suitable for
settlement, the canoes would have to return home first. They knew well
that repeated visits would be needed to establish a viable island
community.
The initial explorations might have involved
just men, but deliberate colonization would have brought women,
children, crops, and animals to the newly discovered land. Perhaps later
voyages would have carried skilled artisans, as well as single women to
maintain a viable sex ratio if too many people died. Such voyages were
long and dangerous to undertake, so it's hardly surprising that the
tempo of passage making slowed once the new community flourished. Oral
traditions suggest that later voyages were matters of piety or social
connection. For instance, canoes from all over Polynesia made
pilgrimages to the Taputapuatea temple, on Raiatea in the Societies, the
religious center of eastern Polynesia. Here priests and navigators
gathered to make scarifices to the gods and to exchange genealogical and
navigational lore. Adventurous Tahitian chiefs occasionally sailed to
Hawaii to marry into noble lineages or to visit long-departed kin. But
eventually the voyages ceased as new priorities at home revolved around
war and the shifting sands of competing alliances.
When
did the voyages take place, and how long did colonization take? Dating
them was largely a matter of guesswork until the University of Chicago
chemist Willard Libby and his research team developed radiocarbon dating
in the late 1940s. For the first time, there was a way of dating the
settlement of Polynesian islands - or so it seemed. By 1993, 147 dates
had produced a mosaic timescale for the first settlement, with the
colonization of the Society Islands and surrounding archipelagos in the
900-950 C.E. range. This chronology appeared just before accelerator
mass spectrometry (AMS) refind carbon dating dramatically. Now
excavators could obtain dates from samples as small as individual seeds
adhering to a pot.
The rules of the dating game have
changed completely since AMS arrived. The newer dates, a tenfold
increase over 1993, are much more accurate, their contexts more
carefully researched. Instead of looking at individual dates, one can
treat them as statistical groups. A recent study of the first
settlements uses no fewer than 1,434 samples from at least forty-five
eastern Polynesian islands, carefully appraised for accuracy and for
their associations with human activity or with what are called
commensals, animals like the Pacific rat that lived only with humans. We
now have an even shorter chronology of remarkable precision that spans
thousands of square miles of the Pacific. The 1,434 dates revealed a
dramatic burst of ocean voyaging.
For about 1,800 years
after arriving there, in about 800 B.C.E., the Lapita ancestors of the
Polynesians stayed around Samoa and the Tonga archipelago. Then,
suddenly, between about 1000 and 1300 C.E., Polynesian seafarers
discovered, and usually colonized, nearly every other island in the
eastern Pacific in a relatively narrow time span.
The
colonization dates speak for themselves. A wave of canoes arrived in the
Society Islands between 1025 and 1121 C.E., the Marquesas between 1200
and 1400. Other voyages reached New Zealand between 1230 and 1280, Rapa
Nui between 1200 and 1263, and Hawaii between 1219 and 1269. Some
Polynesian pilots might have even have sailed to South America and back.
The rapid pace of colonization might account for the remarkable
similarities in artifacts such as adzes and fishhooks in places as
widely separated as the Societies, the Marquesas, and New Zealand. A
mere three centuries of ocean voyaging wrote the last chapter in the
100,000-year journey of Homo sapiens across the world. By the time
European voyagers arrived a few centuries later, farming, imported
animals, and promiscuous hunting had changed the environments of
Polynesia's islands beyond recognition.
...
How
did the Polynesians find their way over trackless oceans? The answer
lies in the heavens, as visible as sea is on land. A Polynesian
navigator acquired his knowledge by apprenticeship to experienced pilots
when he was still a child. The late Mau Piailug, a master navigator
from the Caroline Islands, in Micronesia, started his apprenticeship at
age five, listening to his grandfather talking about passages he made.
As Piailug grew older, he accompanied his grandfather on interisland
voyages, learning about stars, swell patterns, and birds. When he was a
teenager, Piailug studied with an uncle who taught him not only
practical knowledge but also complex magical and spiritual lore. At age
fifteen, he was initiated as a palu, a navigator, and subject to intense
oral drilling day and night for a month as he memorized star tracks
across the heavens. Only then was he allowed to sail offshore as a
pilot.
Mau Piailug might have lived out his life in
quiet isolation, had it not been for the English physician David Henry
Lewis, an expert small-boat sailor who abandoned medicine for the sea.
He sailed through the Carolines in the 1960s, learned something of
traditional navigational practices long assumed to be forgotten, then
piloted his catamaran from Tahiti to New Zealand with the help of a
Micronesian pilot, steering by the stars just as the ancients had done.
Subsequently, Lewis apprenticed himself to Melanesian and Micronesian
navigators from the Caroline islands and Tonga. Meanwhile, in the late
1960s, the American anthropologist Ben Finnery began long-term
experiments with replicas of ancient Polynesian canoes. Hokule'a,
designed by Hawaiian Herb Kawainui Kane, was 62 feet (19 meters) long,
with double hulls and two crab-claw-shaped sails. Finney, Mau Piailug,
and a mainly Hawaiian crew sailed Hokule'a from Hawaii to Tahiti and
back in 1976. They followed this journey with a two-year voyage around
the Pacific using only indigenous pilotage. Thanks to the successful
Hokule's experiments and other replica voyages, ancient Polynesian
navigational skills have been preserved for posterity.
...
The
great voyages were long over when Bougainville, Cook, and other
European explorers arrived in Polynesia in the mid-eighteenth century.
However, the deeds of the great pilots linger in Polynesian oral
traditions as part of the common beliefs and values transmitted from one
generation to the next. Great culture heroes like Maui, the father of
lands, and Rata, an expert canoe builder, figure in historical
narratives throughout much of Polynesia and may date back to Lapita
times. Maui snared the sun, fished up islands, and obtained fire, a
symbol of the human struggle to harness the forces of nature. Rata, the
canoe builder, perhaps himself a voyager, figures in traditions that may
be at least 3,000 years old. The oral traditions preserve the names of
the great navigators like Hiro. He was born in the Societies and, as an
adult, acquired a passion for sailing, stealing, and womanizing. He is
said to have sailed to the Marquesas, Hawaii, the Australs, and Rapa Nui
in large canoes with sewn planks. Whoever the navigators were, they
carried far more than sailing lore with them. Generic place names
meaning "passage" and "reef" traveled around them throughout Polynesia.
They designed small islands at the entrances to natural harbors as
places of sanctuary for visiting canoes waiting to see if it was safe to
go ashore. The mosaic of oral memories provides some names, some shared
cultural traditions, but does not answer the question of questions: Why
did small numbers of people suddenly decide to sail over the horizon in
search of new lands?
What prompted such deliberate
voyages? Were they quests for religious enlightenment, for the realm of
the ancestors, or simply a reflection of those most human of all
qualities, curiosity and restlessness? We don't know. Whatever the
motivation, to sail eastward toward sunrise into unknown waters was a
hazardous enterprise, given the prevailing northeasterly trades. To
cover any distance would require setting sail when the trades were down,
something that happened for only a few weeks a year between January and
March, except when El Ninos dampened the trades. It might be no
coincidence that the eastern voyages occurred during a documented spike
of El Nino activity during the early second millennium. Even with
unexpected breaks from the wind, the social reasons for taking off into
the unknown must have been compelling. We can only speculate about
them.
Like their Lapita forebearers, early
Polynesian societies placed great emphasis on birth order, inheritance,
and kin ties. As was the case farther west, older siblings outranked
their younger brothers and sisters. Oral traditions are full of
rivalries between older and younger brothers. Some siblings sailed away
to seek new homelands, where they could found their own privileged
lineage and pass land to their offspring. Such ventures were
expensive but prestigious, requiring superlative navigational skills
acquired over many years. Thus, successful voyages over the horizon
acquired a mystique that was passed down the generations, not
necessarily because their leaders were exceptional pilots but because
they became founders of descent lines firmly anchored in new lands.
Long-distance
voyaging was a privileged activity. Most Polynesians stayed at home,
fishing in lagoons and cultivating their gardens. Cultivable acreage was
the basis for social life, even on the larger islands. The social
structure associated with agriculture revolved around inheritance and
access to the land. Birth order was all-important. So the driving force
behind colonization of Remote Oceania may have been a quest for land and
the privileges of inheritance. Prestige and power also came from
maritime expertise, from knowledge of a deciphered ocean, To those who
traveled across them Polynesian waters became not a barrier but a
network of watery highways that connected one's island to many others.
With
these pathways came economic, social, and other ties, some of which
endured for generations, while others were but transitory. Soon after
initial settlement, a complex network of interconnections linked island
to island, settlement to settlement, individual to individual -
economic, ritual, and social ties maintained by navigators and seafarers
over many generations. Just as with the Kula, contacts with other
islands resulted in trade and exchange, and also sometimes in marriage
partners. Much of the contact was with near neighbors, with whom people
shared a common history as well as close cultural and other ties. This
meant, for example, that the Tongans sailed regularly to Samoa and Fiji.
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| Walk The Plank Pimp |
...Elsewhere,
navigational traditions virtually disappeared until the
twentieth-century revival. They were alive and well in 1769, when James
Cook arrived at Matavai Bay, on Tahiti, to observe the passage of Venus
across the sun. There he met a navigator-priest named Tupaia and other
pilots, who astounded him with their knowledge of neighboring islands.
He wrote: "Of these they know a very large part by their Names and the
clever ones among them will tell you in what part of the heavens they
are to be seen in any month when they are above their horizon." Cook,
himself a consummate navigator, learned that Tupaia knew the names and
locations of more than a hundred islands around Tahiti. He compiled a
chart of seventy-four islands from Tupaia's verbal accounts of their
bearings on the horizon. They ranged from Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga in the
west to some of the Marquesas, Australs, and Tuamotus in the east, a
huge swath of the Pacific. Tupaia might not have visited them all, but
he had the knowledge (using the word in the same sense as London
cabdrivers do). Much of his information was probably in the form of oral
traditions, some of which must have dated back to the much earlier days
of regular long-distance voyaging. Subsequently, Tupaia guided Cook's
ship some 500 miles (800 kilometers) from Tahiti through the Society
Islands and from Raiatea to Australs. With each destination, he always
"pointed to the part of the heavens where each isle was situated,
mentioning at the same time that it was either larger or smaller than
Taheitee, and likewise whether it was high or low, whether it was
peopled or not." According to Tupaia, the longest a canoe could stay at
sea without reprovisioning was about twenty days.
Another
explorer, Spaniard Domingo de Bonechea, carried Puhoro, a Tuamotan
navigator, on a voyage to Lima in 1775. During the voyage, Puhoro
dictated a list of fifteen islands east of Tahiti, including most of the
Tuamotus, and twenty-seven to the west, both in the Societies and the
Cooks, He also enumerated the topography and reefs of each island, the
main products, the hostility or friendliness of the inhabitants, and the
number of days needed to sail to each one, and he described the sixteen
points of the wind compass used in conjunction with star paths.
Once
the template of surrounding waters lay in navigators' minds, the
routines of passage making were well established in seeming perpetuity,
despite a virtual cessation of very long trips. Dangerous voyages
lasting weeks gave way to shorter journeys that were part of the
tapestry of everyday existence. People sought wives on neighboring
islands, visited shrines, and traded foodstuffs. As island populations
grew, different communities acquired reputations for such items as red
feathers used in important rituals, shells for adze blades, and ax
stone. We know from sourcing studies of basalt adze and ax blades (akin
to those from obsidian) that there were repeated contacts between many
island groups. Basalt found in a rock shelter on Mangaia Island came
from American Samoa, nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away. Adze
stone from the Marquesas traveled by canoe to Moorea, in the Society
Islands, to mention only two examples of such contacts documented from
finds in archaeological sites. Trade networks ebbed and flowed,
prospered, then ceased to operate. For generations, the inhabitants of
the southern Cooks relied on exotic pearl shell and other materials for
both ornaments and such prosaic artifacts as shell fishhooks. After
regular contacts with other islands ceased, the villagers turned to
inferior local materials instead.
The arrival of humans
on the Pacific islands led to immediate, often fundamental
environmental changes - deforestation from agriculture, widespread
erosion, and the rapid extinction of many intensively hunted sea and
land birds as well as indigenous animals such as the giant turtles of
Efate Island, in the Vanuatu archipelago, some of them up to 8 feet (2.4
meters) long. Many islands in Remote Oceania abounded in birds, fish,
and shellfish and enjoyed salubrious, malaria-free climates but lacked
vegetable foods until farmers arrived. When people started clearing land
and planting, the islands rapidly became largely cultural environments,
whose productivity varied widely with soil and rainfall. Ingenious and
highly productive farming systems, combined with fishing, produced large
food surpluses in many places, despite rising population densities. The
wetter landscapes of the Society Islands supported dense farming
populations, while the ancient taro pond fields of Hawaii fed thousands
of people and are in use to this day.
Inevitably,
political and ritual power passed to those who owned the best land. By
1600 C.E., some Polynesian societies had developed into elaborate
chiefdoms headed by small elites of chiefs, navigators, and priests,
especially in areas where wet, swamp-based agriculture was possible.
Inevitably, the escalating demands of chiefs and priests questing for
ever more prestige threatened the fine line between subsistence and
surplus. Rivalries led to war. In the Society Islands, chiefdoms turned
in on themselves as they juggled slippery alliances and warfare in
vicious competition for good farming land and for political and ritual
power. The inhabitants were aware of islands over the horizon, of a much
wider world, but their cultural horizons were confined more to
landscape than to seascape, as if the broad expanses of the ocean were
no longer relevant.
The Society Islands maintained at
least tenuous contacts with outlying archipelagos, but the Hawaiians
flourished in isolation after some centuries of sporadic voyaging.
Judging from esoterica like the designs of shell fishhooks and adzes and
also linguistic similarities, it seems likely that the first settlers
in Hawaii came from the Marquesas. Hawaiian oral traditions speak of a
subsequent "voyaging period" in which great navigators like Mo'ikeha and
Pa'ao sailed to a mythic homeland, "Kahiki' - perhaps Tahiti - and
back. The great passages ceased after 1300. Complete isolation ensued,
except for the symbolic return of an anthropomorphic god, Lono, who was
said to journey from Kahiki each year to renew the land. When James Cook
anchored off Kauai in 1778, the local people thought his ship was a
floating island. The islanders learned that he had come from Tahiti, so
they assumed he was Lono, who had traveled there many generations
earlier and promised to return. Cook promptly became a great ancestor.
By this time, at least 250,000 people lived on the Hawaiian Islands,
under the rule of powerful chiefs.
Isolation was no
barrier to Polynesian navigators, who sailed enormous distances - not
only more than 2,500 (4,000 kilometers) to Hawaii but to New Zealand and
Rapa Nui, and perhaps even farther afield. Thirteenth-century
Polynesian navigators from the Cooks, the Societies, or the Australs are
said to have followed cuckoos to New Zealand (Aotearoa), the last, and
the largest, Pacific landmass they colonized. A pleasing legend, for the
long-tailed cuckoo indeed flies south from Polynesia to New Zealand in
September. There must have been more than a few voyages to achieve
lasting settlement in what was a heavily forested, unfamiliar
environment. Then the voyages ceased, as they did elsewhere. A now
isolated Maori society developed into a mosaic of competitive, warlike
kingdoms, but their oral traditions list the achievements of twenty or
more generations, recounted with the aid of notched sticks. What is
actual history ultimately merges into the mythological, but, like other
Polynesians, they have a profound sense of their maritime ancestry and a
strong bond with the great ocean, which their ancestors traversed
centuries ago.
 |
| ...the mass of archaeological evidence and oral accounts of war before European contact...makes it far-fetched to maintain that people were traditionally peaceful until those evil Europeans arrived and messed things up. There can be no doubt that European contacts or other forms of state government in the long run almost always end or reduce warfare, because all state governments don't want wars disrupting the administration of their territory. Studies of ethnographically observed cases make clear that, in the short run, the initiation of European contact may either increase or decrease fighting, for reasons that include European-introduced weaponry, diseases, trade opportunities, and increases or decreases in food supply. A well understood example of a short-term increase in fighting as a result of European contact is provided by New Zealand's original Polynesian inhabitants, the Maori, who had settled in New Zealand by around AD 1200. Archaeological excavations of Maori forts attest to widespread Maori warfare long before European arrival. Accounts of the first European explorers from 1642 onwards, and of the first European settlers from the 1790s onwards, describe Maori killing Europeans as well as each other. From about 1818 to 1835 two products introduced by Europeans triggered a transient surge in the deadliness of Maori warfare, in an episode known in New Zealand history as the Musket Wars. One factor was of course the introduction of muskets, with which Maori could kill each other far more efficiently than they had previously been able to do when armed just with clubs. The other factor may initially surprise you: potatoes, which we don't normally imagine as a major promoter of war. But it turns out that the duration and size of Maori expeditions to attack other Maori groups had been limited by the amount of food that could be brought along to feed the warriors. The original Maori staple food was sweet potatoes. Potatoes introduced by Europeans (although originating in South America) are more productive in New Zealand than are sweet potatoes, yield bigger food surpluses, and permitted sending out bigger raiding expeditions for longer times than had been possible for traditional Maori depending upon sweet potatoes. After potatoes' arrival, Maori canoe-borne expeditions to enslave or kill other Maori broke all previous Maori distance records by covering distances of as much as a thousand miles. At first only the few tribes living in areas with resident European traders could acquire muskets, which they used to destroy tribes without muskets. As muskets spread, the Musket Wars rose to a peak until all surviving tribes had muskets, whereupon there were no more musket-less tribes to offer defenseless targets, and the Musket Wars faded away. (The World Until Yesterday. Jared Diamond.) |
Aotearoa, some 600 miles (1,000
kilometers) southwest of Fiji and Tonga, was an enormous target by
Polynesian standards, very different from the tiny islands of the east,
such as Rapa Nui. Some canoes were sailing there by about 1200-1269 C.E.
The human population grew steadily in isolation, achieving
sustainability by using ingenious agricultural methods in face of the
deforestation caused by the depredations of rats that arrived in the
canoes, as well as humans. The carving of the great ancestral statues
(moai) and the building of temple platforms using communal labor were
important ways of maintaining social cohesion, which fell apart after
Europeans arrived.
Were Aotearoa and Rapa Nui the last
frontiers of Polynesian exploration? Or did canoes venture 2,200 miles
(3,500 kilometers) farther east, to the Americas, a distance roughly
equivalent to that from the Society Islands to Hawaii? In theory, canoe
navigators who had located tiny specks on the ocean were perfectly
capable of sailing to the massive continents to the east. According to
archaeologist Geoffrey Irwin, the most likely routes to South America
would have been from southeast Polynesia, passing south of the
high-pressure area that endures in the eastern South Pacific before
sailing to the coast ahead of southerly winds, using a northbound
current. Similar conditions would have pertained for canoes sailing
northward from Hawaii until clear of the North Pacific High, at which
point they could turn eastward, as many sailing yachts do today. In both
cases, returning canoes could ride the prevailing trades. But did they
actually do it? No one has yet found Polynesian artifacts anywhere on
American coasts, despite claims to the contrary. We know that the
American sweet potato and the bottle gourd reached Polynesia, the latter
as much as a thousand years ago. Coconuts, which originated in
Southeast Asia and Melanesia, were established on the west coast of
Panama before Europeans arrived. The chances of any of these plants
having drifted east or west for months, then germinating, are
infinitesimal, so canoes may well have carried them to new homelands. A
potential smoking gun comes from an unlikely source: chicken bones. The
mitochondrial DNA from chicken bones found on Tonga and Samoa is
identical to that from chicken fragments found at a coastal settlement
named El Arenal-1, in south-central Chile, dating to 1321-1407 C.E.,
nearly a century before Columbus landed in the Bahamas and before the
time of the great voyages. Perhaps, then, Polynesian canoes reached
South America soon after the colonization of Remote Oceania, bringing
chickens with them. Perhaps, they picked up plants like sweet potatoes
and bottle gourds and brought them back to Polynesia.
If
such voyages took place - and the genetic science seems impeccable -
what was the nature of the contacts between Polynesians and Americans?
Were they fleeting or more lasting? Did any of the visitors from beyond
the horizon stay in Chile or elsewhere and marry into the local
population? We may never know, but there is nothing in the story of the
human decipherment of the Pacific that suggest that such voyages were
impossible. We should never forget that as long as the land and the
ocean are seen as one, people will venture offshore and decode the most
demanding of seascapes.
Beyond the Blue Horizon.
Fagan, p. 34-72.
http://lens.auckland.ac.nz/images/3/31/Pacific_Migration_Seminar_Paper.pdf
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Fpublication%2F220042228_Rethinking_Polynesian_Origins_A_West-Polynesian_Triple-I_Model%2Ffile%2F79e415074cb654466a.pdf&ei=V6iPUrPYK4b3oASZ_4HgDA&usg=AFQjCNHJ8AAR1IycMuB1KiA3rZiYU9bOvQ&bvm=bv.56988011,d.cGU
http://class.csueastbay.edu/faculty/gmiller/3710/DNA_PDFS/mtDNA/mtDNA-Polynesia.pdf
http://www.anthropology.hawaii.edu/people/faculty/Hunt/pdfs/Barnes_and_Hunt.pdf
http://www.clarku.edu/~jborgatt/smfa_Oceania/Polynesia.pdf
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110203124726.htm
In fact, the DNA of current Polynesians can be traced back to
migrants from the Asian mainland who had already settled in islands
close to New Guinea some 6-8,000 years ago.
...This means we can be confident that the Polynesian
population -- at least on the female side -- came from people who
arrived in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea thousands of
years before the supposed migration from Taiwan took place."
Nevertheless, most linguists maintain that the Polynesian languages
are part of the Austronesian language family which originates in Taiwan.
And most archaeologists see evidence for a Southeast Asian influence on
the appearance of the Lapita culture in the Bismarck Archipelago around
3,500 years ago. Characterised by distinctive dentate stamped ceramics
and obsidian tools, Lapita is also a marker for the earliest settlers of
Polynesia.
Professor Richards and co-researcher Dr Pedro Soares (now at the
University of Porto), argue that the linguistic and cultural connections
are due to smaller migratory movements from Taiwan that did not leave
any substantial genetic impact on the pre-existing population.
"Although our results throw out the likelihood of any maternal
ancestry in Taiwan for the Polynesians, they don't preclude the
possibility of a Taiwanese linguistic or cultural influence on the
Bismarck Archipelago at that time," explains Professor Richards. "In
fact, some minor mitochondrial lineages back up this idea.
It seems
likely there was a 'voyaging corridor' between the islands of Southeast
Asia and the Bismarck Archipelago carrying maritime traders who brought
their language and artefacts and perhaps helped to create the impetus
for the migration into the Pacific.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2007/03/21/pig-dna-suggests-alternate-origin-malayo-polynesian-people/
"People tend to think of colonization and culture as moving in a
single unit," he said, "but with history we've learned that the simplest
answer is rarely the right one."
...
The Lapita people, "might have just come together in New Guinea from
different parts of Asia, with separate groups bringing different parts
of the culture with them," he said, and moving on to more outer lying
islands from there.
 |
| One Of The Polynesian Founder Populations May Have Come From The Moluccas MothaFucca. (Polynesia
Was Settled Within The Past 4,000 Years (The Ethnic Groups Of Polynesia
Came About In That Short Span Of Time). Some Islands, Such As New
Zealand, Were Only Settled Within The Past 1,000 Years. That's Not Much
Time For Evolution To Work Its Magic, But Its Worked Its Magic
Nonetheless And You Can Tell That It's Worked Its Magic By Looking At
All Of The Genetic And Cultural Variation Found Among The Islands.) |
