![]() ![]() Otherwise, “you would just find that the islands with the ‘most Polynesian’ DNA were more related,” Ioannidis said. GENETIC SEQUENCES CROSSWORD SOFTWAREThey used a software to analyse samples from 430 inhabitants across 21 different islands to identify recurring gene patterns specific to Polynesians, blocking out DNA sequences associated with European or other ancestry. While genetic studies of ancient peoples have tended to focus on ancient DNA samples unearthed from archaeological sites, Ioannidis said his team had been able to home in on telltale sequences buried in modern DNA. Today’s Polynesian populations have mixed heritage, with traces of Europe, Africa and other places in their ancestry. “The date we found for that contact is very close to the dates we find for these voyages out from the Tuamotus to settle these remote islands,” Ioannidis said. ![]() The timing of those expansions fits with earlier DNA-based findings by Ioannidis and his team showing that Native Americans – probably from the north-western coast of South America – and Polynesians mingled around the year 1200. This became ground zero for the megalith-building peoples who came to inhabit the Marquesas, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Raivavae. “I think that explains in some part why it is from there that we see the longest-distance voyages going out.” “They needed to have a maritime culture to get in between these small, ring-like islands,” Ioannidis said. The study notes that the low-lying islands most likely emerged from below sea level only a few hundred years before Polynesians spread there. Now sparsely populated, thanks in part to their role as nuclear test grounds, the Tuamotus span an area equal to the distance between England and Greece. It is from the small, long-overlooked sand-bar islands of Tuamotu that the most ambitious forays set out, Ioannidis said. The outward expansion from Samoa unfolded westward to Fiji, Tonga in the south, and then east to Rarotonga around the year 830.Ī few hundred years later, descendants on Rarotonga travelled to settle present-day Tahiti and the Tuamotu archipelago just beyond. The researchers were able to piece together the puzzle of trans-Pacific migration by comparing the genetic material in 430 present-day inhabitants across 21 islands. ![]() The expansion happened rapidly – over about 17 generations – outpacing major changes in language or culture that could have served as markers, the findings show. “This had been an open problem since Captain Cook first noticed that the people on the Polynesian islands were all speaking the same language,” Ioannidis said. Ioannidis and his team were able to map and date the first Polynesians’ path of settlement, which began in Samoa and fanned out across the Pacific between the years 8, using cutting-edge analysis of modern DNA. “These statues are only on those islands that are closely connected genetically,” the study’s lead author, Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford University, told AFP. ![]()
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