"The peopling of Polynesia was a stunning achievement: Beginning around 800 CE, audacious Polynesian navigators in double-hulled sailing canoes used the stars and their knowledge of the waves to discover specks of land separated by thousands of kilometers of open ocean. Within just a few centuries, they had populated most of the Pacific Ocean's far-flung islands."
Geneticists "compared the DNA of 430 modern individuals from all across Polynesia, and then eliminated later genetic input from European people. Because the researchers knew Polynesians had journeyed stepwise from island to island, their genetic analysis utilized a genetic phenomenon known as a population bottleneck. When a few dozen to a few hundred individuals from already-isolated island populations settled a new island, and then a subset of that group left to settle an additional island, and so forth, their genetic diversity would have shrunk with each voyage."
"To estimate how many generations went by between each island discovery, the scientists measured the length of shared genomic sequences between founder populations. Together, the data showed who descended from whom. That made it possible to not only show that two populations were related, but which came first."
"Canoes set sail from the shores of Samoa -- more than 2000 kilometers north of New Zealand -- around 800 CE. The explorers arrived first on Rarotonga, the largest island in a chain now called the Cook Islands. Successive explorers moved in all directions, island hopping over the course of centuries and eventually reaching all the way to Rapa Nui, 6500 kilometers from Samoa and 3700 kilometers off the coast of Chile, by 1210 CE."
"Three island cultures known for carving massive stone statues -- Rapa Nui, Raivavae, and the North and South Marquesas -- shared a common founder population in the Tuamotu Islands, even though they are thousands of kilometers apart and geographically closer to other parts of the Pacific."
"Those three islands also hold the earliest genetic traces of Native American ancestry among Polynesians. That suggests ancient Polynesians first contacted the Americas around 1100 CE, when the seafarers were beginning their last, and longest, expeditions."
'No one could have predicted.' DNA offers surprises on how Polynesia was settled
