Easter Island is the most remote place humans have ever colonized , and the fact we got there at all is a miracle . Now it look like this island was colonize not once , not doubly , but three whole separate time .
The first and most important wave of settlement was by Polynesians , who belike reached the island sometime between 700 and 1,100 C.E. The third and final moving ridge were the Europeans , who first encountered the island in 1722 and returned in the 1860s for a series of devastating raids that sell much of the endemic universe into slavery . There ’s now genic evidence to evoke another colonization of Easter Island in between these two : specifically , by the people of South America .
The melodic theme that ancient Americans had a hand in colonizing Easter Island is not Modern . The fabled ( and controversial ) explorer archeologist Thor Heyerdahl was convince that the ancestor of Easter Island were in South America , not Polynesia , a stopping point he reach base on supposed similarities between the renowned head statues on Easter Island and monuments from ancient Bolivia .
To bear witness ancient Americans could have reached Easter Island , he contract the illustrious Kon - Tiki voyage , in which he voyage a quite a little all the way from Peru to Polynesia , using materials interchangeable to those that would have been available to ancient Americans . The trip made outside headlines , but it was at best circumstantial evidence . Later , more rigorously scientific enquiry rise evenhandedly definitively that Easter Island was in the first place , if not exclusively , settled by Polynesians .
But that might be about to modify . University of Oslo researcher Erik Thorsby has collated blood samples he collected from Easter Islanders in 1971 and 2008 . The specific people he dealt with had no history of interbreeding with Europeans or other non - autochthonal visitors to the island , meaning their bloodlines were effectively the same as those who lived on the island before European liaison .
Thorsby examined the HLA gene , which are utile for revealing the geographical origin of one ’s ancestors . Most of the islanders involve in the study had HLA genes that showed obvious Polynesian inheritance , but a prize few also carried HLA factor that are only known in Native American populations .
Since those who carried these HLA factor come from the same extended family , Thorsby was able-bodied to trace the probable first carrier of these unusual genes . Her name was Maria Aquila , and she was born in 1846 , more than a tenner before European slave traders showed up and start interbreeding . That means , in all likeliness , that the Native American visitors who bring these HLA genes to the island go far before the Europeans .
But how long before ? What ’s interesting is that the Polynesian and American HLA factor have start out to blend together , a process known as recombination . That need a long time to hap , and Thorsby suspect the influx of American genes must have happened before Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen visited the island in 1722 .
This does n’t mean that Heyerdahl was right – he ’s still pretty massively wrong – but Thorsby say this means he was n’t altogether wrong about an ancient American presence on Easter Island . The only doubt now is how these factor sustain there . It ’s potential that Native Americans did undertake a voyage to Easter Island much like Heyerdahl ’s Kon - Tiki sashay .
The more likely possibleness , based on the cultures ’ various nautical technology , is that Easter Islanders sailed on eastwards to Chile , then riposte with Native Americans colonists . Whether they made that journey volitionally is lose to history . Either way , we can regard this another scrap of evidence in favor of the idea that Polynesians and Americans made striking long before Columbus .
Tissue AntigensviaNew Scientist . Imagevia .
ArchaeologycolonizationGeneticsScienceSettlement
Daily Newsletter
Get the best tech , science , and culture news in your inbox daily .
News from the hereafter , deliver to your nowadays .
You May Also Like
