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Originally posted by Rasbelin
Actually I can tell you that I have read two books about Polynesia and the South Pacific, and one about Easter Island, so I can tell you that the their ancestors came from east South American cost. They also used similar rafts in Peru as in Polynesia. If you have read these books, then I suppose you would change your opinion.
But I don't want to argue about this with you.
Actually I can tell you that I have read two books about Polynesia and the South Pacific, and one about Easter Island, so I can tell you that the their ancestors came from east South American cost. They also used similar rafts in Peru as in Polynesia. If you have read these books, then I suppose you would change your opinion.
But I don't want to argue about this with you.
I'm sorry to have to reiterate, but you are wrong. If the settlement of Polynesia came from South America, then there would have to be more evidence, in the form of agricultural products, pottery, culture, farm animals, plants, wildlife, and there isn't. All Thor Heyerdahl proved was that contact was possible, not that mass settlement or emigration occurred. If you regard the cultural of Polynesia, you can see an eastwards drift, not a spread from South America. Look at the main food items of Polynesia, pre-European contact: they are all Asian related, except for the sweet potato, which is one of the items offered as evidence that migration happened from South America outwards.
It remains inconceivable that the potato, quinoa, the guinea pig, and other basic South American foodstuffs, easily transported, would not have been taken. There is no genetic or linguistic evidence to support the South American theory, simply a desire to make the facts fit the theory, and not vice versa.
"The findings of the archaeological work subsequently conducted throughout Polynesia and in Melanesia have not been kind to Heyerdahl's theory of American origins. Through their excavations and analyses of artifacts and other recovered materials, archaeologists were able to develop a model of Polynesian settlement that demonstrated the eastward movement into the Pacific of ancestral Polynesians, located the "true" homeland of the Polynesians on the western edge of Polynesia itself, outlined population dispersion within the Polynesian triangle, and demonstrated the lack of evidence of any noticeable population movement from the Americas to Polynesia.
The discovery of a distinctively decorated type of pottery called Lapita provided the first solid evidence of the general route by which the ancestors of the Polynesians migrated into the Pacific. The Lapita cultural complex, made up of his pottery and associated artifacts, began turning up in excavations from islands extending from the islands off the northeast coast of New Guinea to archipelagos at the western edge of Polynesia. These sites, with their distinctive artifacts, not only demonstrated that the ancestral Polynesians sailed through Melanesia, and not Micronesia as some had proposed, but also indicated that it probably took them no more than a few hundred years to move from island to island through Melanesia to Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, some 2,000 miles east of their starting point off New Guinea.
There followed the realization that the long-sought Polynesian homeland was not outside the Pacific, but was really within Polynesia itself. The Lapita voyagers were seen as ancestral to, but not yet identifiably Polynesian. Not until they began to adapt to life in the isolated mid-Pacific archipelagos of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa do sites there indicate that the distinctively Polynesian cultural complex begins to emerge from its Lapita roots. "
and:
"The distribution of domesticated plants and animals across Polynesia at the time of European contact, and archaeological evidence of the early introduction of these, lends credence to the idea that this migration was intentional. All the Polynesian food plants except the sweet potato - notably taro, bananas, yams, breadfruit, and sugar cane - and the three domesticated animals - the pig, dog, and chicken - come from the Asian side of the Pacific. Most Polynesian islands have these domesticates, which suggests that colonization was intentional since accidental drift voyagers were not likely to have carried all the plants and animals with them on short inter-island trips or fishing expeditions. "
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