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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.
They proposed that an initial admixture event between indigenous South Americans and Polynesians occurred in eastern Polynesia between 1150 and 1230 CE, with later admixture in Easter Island around 1380 CE, [6] but suggested other possible contact scenarios—for example, Polynesian voyages to South America followed by Polynesian people's ...
Before the Hōkūleʻa voyage in 1976, academic debate about the settlement of Polynesia was divided between several schools of thought. [54] Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl hypothesized that the Pacific was settled by voyages from South America and set out to prove that with his Kon-Tiki expedition. [55]
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 fact that some Polynesians possessed the South American sweet potato implies that they may have reached the Americas or, conversely, that people from the Americas may have reached Polynesia. Thor Heyerdahl 's Kon-Tiki expedition successfully demonstrated that the trip from the Americas to Polynesia using only materials and technology ...
In this region, a distinctive Polynesian culture developed. 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 ...
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.
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.