Arrival· Where Sapiens lives
The remote Pacific
1200
The last empty islands are settled, ending an expansion that began in Africa three hundred thousand years earlier.
What the evidence shows
Genomes from 807 people across seventeen island populations and fifteen Native American groups of the Pacific coast settle an argument that had run for decades: contact did take place, around AD 1200, at the same time as the settlement of remote Oceania, and it looks like a single event in eastern Polynesia, before Rapa Nui was reached. Ancient Rapanui genomes carry about 10% Native American ancestry, the same proportion as living Rapanui, from an admixture dated between 1250 and 1430. The same genomes refuse the other famous story about the island: there was no population collapse in the 1600s.
Dating & uncertainty
These are the last habitable places on Earth to be reached, and they were reached deliberately, against the wind. The pulse is now dated later than it once was.
Sources
- Ioannidis et al. (2020), Nature · Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement
- Moreno-Mayar et al. (2024), Nature · Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with the Americas
- Horsburgh & McCoy (2017), Diversity · Dispersal, isolation, and interaction in the islands of Polynesia: a critical review of archaeological and genetic evidence