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According to Grete Mostny, clava hand-clubs "appear to have arrived to the west coast of South America from the Pacific". [49] Polynesian clubs from Chatham Islands are reportedly the most similar to those of Chile. [50] The clava hand-club is one of various Polynesian-like Mapuche artifacts known. [50]
The Polynesian triangle. Between about 3000 and 1000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages spread through the islands of Southeast Asia – most likely starting out from Taiwan, [9] as tribes whose natives were thought to have previously arrived from mainland South China about 8000 years ago – into the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia, through the Philippines and Indonesia.
In 1644, he followed the south coast of New Guinea, missed the Torres Strait, turned south and mapped the north coast of Australia. In 1688, the English buccaneer William Dampier beached a ship on the northwest coast. In 1696, Willem de Vlamingh explored the southwest coast. In 1699, Dampier was sent to find the east coast of Australia.
The mainstream view of the Polynesian settlement of New Zealand and the Chatham Islands as representing the end-point of a long chain of island-hopping voyages in the South Pacific. Since the early 1900s it has been accepted by archaeologists and anthropologists that Polynesians (who became the Māori ) were the first ethnic group to settle in ...
The Kon-Tiki expedition was a 1947 journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl. The raft was named Kon-Tiki after the Inca god Viracocha , for whom "Kon-Tiki" was said to be an old name.
Within the next few centuries Polynesians reached Hawaii, New Zealand, Easter Island and possibly South America. Polynesian navigators used a range of tools and methods, including observation of birds, star navigation, and use of waves and swells to detect nearby land. Songs, mythological stories, and star charts were used to help people ...
Polynesians also share cultural traditions, such as religion, social organization, myths, and material culture. Anthropologists believe that all Polynesians have descended from a South Pacific proto-culture created by an Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) people that had migrated from Southeast Asia.
It has been claimed that in 1886 Lapita pottery shards were discovered on the Antipodes Islands, indicating that Polynesians did reach that far south. [11] However, the claim has not been substantiated; indeed, no archaeological evidence of human visitation prior to European discovery of the islands has been found.