PEOPLING

The Last Great Voyages

~1200 CE

History · Middle Ages · Holocene · Meghalayan

The peopling of the planet ended at sea: around 1200 CE, Polynesian navigators found and settled the last uninhabited islands of the remote Pacific, from Hawai'i to Rapa Nui and at last Aotearoa, steering by stars, swells and birds. Genomes add a coda: Polynesians and Native Americans met and mixed in that same era, before any European ship entered the ocean, and ancient Rapanui DNA finds no trace of the self-inflicted collapse the island is famous for.

Why it matters

Ten million square kilometres of ocean, crossed in double-hulled canoes with the knowledge held in memory: the most audacious expansion in our species' history, and the last. The genetic trace of a meeting with Native Americans settles it: the two worlds touched in prehistory, whoever made the crossing. And the 'ecocide' of Rapa Nui is a cautionary tale about cautionary tales: fifteen ancient genomes reject the seventeenth-century crash it rests on, and a famous parable dissolves.

Dating & uncertainty

East Polynesia's remote islands were settled in a rapid pulse centred on about 1200 CE, later than once thought. Two methods bracket the same era for contact with Native Americans: around 1200 CE from present-day Polynesian genomes, 1250 to 1430 from ancient Rapanui ones. Where the meeting took place is still argued, though the first of those studies places a single contact event in eastern Polynesia, before Rapa Nui itself was settled.

Sources

1. Ioannidis et al. (2020), Nature · Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlementdoi:10.1038/s41586-020-2487-2
2. Moreno-Mayar et al. (2024), Nature · Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with the Americasdoi:10.1038/s41586-024-07881-4
3. Horsburgh & McCoy (2017), Diversity · Dispersal, isolation, and interaction in the islands of Polynesia: a critical review of archaeological and genetic evidencedoi:10.3390/d9030037

Our species’ history as one day

23:56:133 min 47 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day