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 swept across the last uninhabited islands of the remote Pacific, from Hawai'i to Rapa Nui to, eventually, Aotearoa, steering by stars, swells and birds. Genomes add a coda: Polynesians and Native Americans met and mixed around that same era, before Europeans entered the ocean, and ancient Rapanui DNA refutes the island's supposed self-inflicted population collapse.

Why it matters

Ten million square kilometres of ocean were navigated with double-hulled canoes and knowledge held in memory, the most audacious expansion in our species' history and its finale. The genetic trace of an American meeting vindicates the voyagers' reach, and the debunked 'ecocide' of Rapa Nui is its own lesson: a famous parable of collapse dissolved by fifteen ancient genomes.

Dating & uncertainty

East Polynesia's remote islands were settled in a rapid pulse centred on about 1200 CE, later than once thought. The genetic date for contact with Native Americans, around 1200 CE by one method, 1250 to 1430 by ancient Rapanui genomes, brackets the same era; where that contact happened, Polynesia or South America, is not yet known.

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