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r/MapPorn - Difference Between Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia [872x567]

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621 votes and 40 comments so far on Reddit

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This is one of piece of evidence that can be used

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An ancient canoe has helped solve a puzzle as to how Polynesian seafarers first made it to the far reaches of the Pacific.

A LONG-STANDING mystery about how people migrated to remote regions of the Pacific, such as New Zealand and Easter Island, may have been solved.

"Our research shows - and this has always been a conundrum - why there was this burst of activity followed by what seems like a cessation of long-distance voyaging," says Professor Ian Goodwin.

His team at Macquarie University in Sydney revealed several windows around 800-1300 AD when it was easier to sail from the central Pacific, around Tonga and the Southern Cook Islands, to NZ and Easter Island. The discovery was made by reconstructing historic wind patterns and sea level pressure conditions over the last 1200 years.

Meanwhile, another team led by Dilys Johns at the University of Auckland, examined the remains of a canoe discovered in western NZ in late 2012 that was dated to around 1400 AD. This is the only confirmed pre-European contact canoe in Polynesia, and its sophistication suggests it was used for long voyages.

Polynesian expansion in the Pacific

These studies, published this week in the journal PNAS, have shed light on an enduring mystery. Polynesian expansion of the Pacific reached Samoa about 3,500 years ago, at which point archaeological evidence suggests a hiatus, with no further expansion south-east across the Pacific until around 1000 years ago.

Then, within the windows of opportunity revealed by Ian's team, Polynesians suddenly reached Easter Island, Hawaii and NZ before the large-scale migration ceased around 1300.

"The winds were favourable for Polynesian migration in this couple of hundred year period," Ian says.

The new data suggests the epic voyage could have been achieved in a couple of weeks during these climate windows, four times faster than during other periods with less favourable wind conditions - especially when travelling in the type of canoe examined by Dilys' team.

"It's a large, powerful, robust canoe that would've been capable of travelling long distances - a lot more sophisticated than the canoes documented on European arrival," she says. "The turtle carving on the canoe also points to Polynesians bringing their ideas to New Zealand, as turtles don't historically feature in Maori carvings."

Migration to New Zealand and Easter Island

Ian adds that the patterns of migration show how the Polynesian society was resilient to climate shifts, using wind conditions and canoe-building skills to colonise new lands that had more reliable rainfall.

"Exactly at the time this is occurring, the Vikings are spreading out across the north Atlantic, the Mayan civilization in Central America is collapsing because of intense drought, and there's societal upheaval happening right across the world due to climate changes," he says. "Certainly the Polynesians were adaptable to these conditions."

Ian says the research provides us with an insight into the future, as similar climatic patterns are predicted to recur in the next century.
Figure below shows possible routes of migration available during windows of favourable wind conditions identified by Professor Ian Goodwin and his team at Macquarie University in Sydney (Credit: PNAS).

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Polynesian migration mystery solved - Australian Geographic

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An ancient canoe has helped solve a puzzle as to how Polynesian seafarers first made it to the far reaches of the Pacific.

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This is the whole handout that matches the one you were given in class

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Get help with developing your assignment, study, digital, numeracy, and referencing skills through self-paced how-to modules.

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It was only 3000 years ago that humans first set foot on Fiji and other isolated islands of the Pacific, having sailed across thousands of kilometers of ocean. Yet the identity of these intrepid seafarers has been lost to time. They left a trail of distinctive red pottery but few other clues, and scientists have confronted two different scenarios: The explorers were either farmers who sailed directly from mainland East Asia to the remote islands, or people who mixed with hunter-gatherers they met along the way in Melanesia, including Papua New Guinea.

Now, the first genome-wide study of ancient DNA from prehistoric Polynesians has boosted the first idea: that these ancient mariners were East Asians who swept out into the Pacific. It wasn't until much later that Melanesians, probably men, ventured out into Oceania and mixed with the Polynesians.

"The paper is a game-changer," says Cristian Capelli, a population geneticist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, noting that that it settles a decades-long dispute. By showing that the East Asians hopscotched past islands already populated by Melanesians without picking up their genes, it is also a case study in how culture can initially bar mixing between groups. "Farmers move in and don't mix much with the hunter-gatherers," says evolutionary geneticist Mark Thomas of University College London. "We see this again and again and again" elsewhere in the world.

The first Polynesians left plenty of tantalizing artifacts, including distinctive stamped red pottery, obsidian tools, and shell ornaments. Collectively known as the Lapita culture, this set of artifacts first appeared more than 3000 years ago in the Bismarck Archipelago in New Oceania (see map below). This culture grew taro, yams, and breadfruit; brought pigs and chickens; and spread rapidly to the islands of Vanuatu and New Caledonia and eventually to Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and beyond.

Early farmers rode 'express train' to remote Pacific Islands

The first Polynesians sailed across Oceania at least 3000 years ago without mingling with the Melanesians already living there.

Back in 1985, archaeologist Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University in Canberra proposed that the Lapita had roots in farming cultures in East Asia. Based on dating of Lapita sites, he proposed that they moved rapidly from mainland China to Taiwan and the Philippines, then out across the open ocean from Vanuatu to Samoa, covering 24,300 kilometers in about 300 years. This "express train" picture fit with linguists' models, in which Austronesian languages spread from East Asia into Oceania and were distinct from Papuan languages in Melanesia.

But other researchers argued that the DNA of living Polynesians showed evidence that their Lapita ancestors had lingered in Melanesia, mixing with the locals and slowly spreading eastward. This so-called "slow boat" model had prevailed in recent years.

In the new study, an international team extracted ancient DNA from the skeletons of four ancient women from the islands of Vanuatu and Tonga, dated to 2300 to 3100 years ago, including three directly associated with the Lapita culture. The team sequenced the DNA at up to 231,000 positions across the genomes of each skeleton and compared the sequences to those of nearly 800 present-day people from 83 populations in East Asia and Oceania.

All the evidence from different disciplines has come together ... the genomics has clinched it.

Peter Bellwood, archaeologist, Australian National University in Canberra

The four women were from a distinct population that had no evidence of mixing with the ancestors of people living in Papua New Guinea today, as the team reports in Nature this week. Instead, the women shared all their ancestry with the indigenous Atayal people in Taiwan and the Kankanaey people in the Philippines. "The Lapita have no evidence for Papuan ancestry," says co-author Pontus Skoglund, a postdoc in David Reich's lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston. That suggests that their ancestors rode the fast train, sweeping all the way to Oceania without mixing with Melanesians on the way.

Polynesians today do carry a significant amount of Melanesian DNA. But that DNA is in relatively long, unbroken chunks, the analyses found, suggesting that it was incorporated into Polynesians' genomes recently, perhaps about 500 to 2500 years ago, after the Lapita period. The team also noted that the Polynesian X chromosome has less Melanesian DNA than the other nuclear chromosomes. Because X chromosomes are more likely to be inherited from mothers (sons get only a Y from their fathers), that suggests that much of the Melanesian DNA came through the male line, as Melanesian men interbred with Polynesian women. "The female ancestors of modern-day Oceanians are mainly Lapita, whereas their male ancestors include Papuans," Skoglund says.

Bellwood is pleased. "All the evidence from different disciplines has come together," he says. By getting DNA from the ancient Polynesians themselves, "the genomics has clinched it."
For more coverage on human migration, visit our Human Evolution topic page.

doi:10.1126/science.aah7372

Ann is a contributing correspondent for Science.

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'Game-changing' study suggests first Polynesians voyaged all the way from East Asia

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It was only 3000 years ago that humans first set foot on Fiji and other isolated islands of the Pacific, having sailed across thousands of kilometers of ocean. Yet the identity of these intrepid seafarers has been lost to time.

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Waka - canoe
Pa - Village
Iwi- tribe
hapu - sub tribe consisting of about 500 people
Whare wananga - learning house
Whare runanga -meeting house
Marae - public meeting place generally outdoors
hangi - method of cooking food in a large pit
Ta Moko - facial tattoos
tapu - sacred

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