Another post on the contact and admixture between Polynesians and Native Americans. I cite my book's second edition:
A paper published in 2020 found evidence of Amerindian admixture in Polynesian people due to an early “one-time-only” event that took place around 1150-1230 AD in eastern Polynesia. Suggesting that Native Americans from Colombia or Ecuador navigated across the equatorial Pacific Ocean region and reached the Marquesas Islands, which at that time were uninhabited. Then came the island-hopping Polynesians from the west, and they met there, admixed, and then spread across the Pacific. A plausible alternative is that the Amerindians never set sail across the ocean. Instead, the Polynesians kept on sailing eastwards and reached America, where they fraternized with the locals and returned with Amerindian DNA back home. (1)
Human remains from Mocha Island, which is located 30 km from the Patagonian coast in Chile, were analyzed in 2010, and the shape of the skulls “suggests they may be of Polynesian ancestry.” (2)
A paper published in 2016 reported that genetic studies found Ameridian DNA markers among Easter Island Polynesians:
" [This] suggests that some Native Americans arrived early at Rapa Nui, probably as early as AD 1280–1495. Whether they sailed directly from South America to Rapa Nui on their own rafts or whether they came with Polynesians returning from visits to South America cannot be established … but the latter possibility may be the most likely given other evidence of early visits by Polynesians to South America. In any case, our data suggest that some Native Americans arrived on Rapa Nui not long after its first settlement by Polynesians, but long before the island was discovered by Europeans in 1722. (3)
Transpacific or Polynesian contact may not seem relevant, but as we will see in the coming chapters, the myths and legendary beings of the native Patagonians had many similarities to those of the Australians and Polynesians.
Refrences
(1) Ioannidis, A.G., Blanco-Portillo, J., Sandoval, K. et al., (2020). Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2487-2.
(2)Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, E. & Ramirez J.M. (2010). Human Skeletal Evidence of Polynesian Presence in South America? Metric Analyses of Six Crania from Mocha Island, Chile. Journal of Pacific Archaeology – Vol. 1 No. 1. Online.
(3) Thorsby, E. (2016). Genetic Evidence for a Contribution of Native Americans to the Early Settlement of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. 4. Online.
Additional information
The original paper published in Nature (1), included the following image (it is not included in my book), which shows the two possible explanations on how Amerindian and Polynesians intermingled and exchanged genes 800 years ago).
Click here to see a large sized view of this map
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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