When I look at a map, it boggles my mind as to how humans arrived on remote ocean islands. Some of these islands are many thousands of miles from any large land mass.
How did humans get to Hawaii, Easter Island, and the Polynesian islands?
I understand that these outcroppings of humans share the same ancestory as “mainland” civilizations, and scientists are able to trace where these island civilizations came from.
My question has multiple parts:
How the hell did they get there?
Did they use boats?
How did they know where they were going?
WHY did they leave where they were in the first place?
And perhaps most importantly, why don’t we give these ancient mariners more credit than we have?
My question may be completely misdirected, or I may be uninformed, but either way…lead me to the TRUTH!
Canoes, mostly. Sometimes they strapped two of them together to make a catamaran lagre enough to carry a small village.
They didn’t, exactly, but they had learned how to read the subtle signs of the ocean. They had lots of practice over the course of centuries. Also, seafarers who missed and never found a suitable landfall tended to not leave records of their existence.
Population pressure. Any given island can only support so many people. Linguistic evidence suggests that they started out from Taiwan and perfected their navigational skills in the relatively island-dense regions of the East Indies.
Who doesn’t give them enough credit? Anyone who has thought about it is impressed as all hell. Perhaps the fact that they did not contribute to the formation of European civilization causes them to be below the notice of the average yahoo.
The ancient Polynesian navigators who colonized the most distant islands of the Pacific Ocean are believed to have made their longest voyages in double canoes. Captain Cook once claimed to have observed such a canoe capable of carrying 200 people, though he may have overestimated. They were experts at using ocean currents and winds to their advantage. They could also determine where land was by observing birds in flight, since most species of seabirds tend to fly outward from land early in the morning and back towards land around sunset.
Why has history failed to appreciate their achievements properly? My guess is that we have a very narrow definition of what counts as a great civilization. The ancient civilizations that we pay the most attention to created great architectural wonders that remained for future archaeologists to discover (the Egyptians, the Romans, the Mayas, etc…), while those who didn’t build anything long-lasting have generally been ignored.
The peoples of the Pacific seem to have had a number of highly sophisticated means of navigation.
Astronavigation seems to be fairly advanced. Charts are still extant which mapped star positions on a rectangular frame, with the intersections of two lines representing the location, and presumably the apparent occlusion of, noteable stars when held at arm’s length. They appear to be adjustible.
My all-made-up theory is that if such star charts were used in the daytime they could be used to plot a rough longitude, by tracking the position of stars against a semi-set daytime benchmark. Stars are visible during the daytime; Japanese fighter pilots used to train by tracking stars while flying in daytime. So, if a navigator were lying flat on his back at high noon, he might be able to match a star chart against a previous daytime reading to estimate east-west course. Maybe. Hey, these guys were probably like the Gallileos and Hubbells of their age. While we can no longer duplicate the profession, it would be unwise to discount it out of hand. They got where they got somehow.
It’s not really incomprehensible. RAF radar plotters during the Battle of Britain worked from intuition with a degree of accuracy well beyond that of the devices they were reading. Of course, adjusting for the waves would take a helluva lot of practice, and sometimes you’d have to look almost directly at the sun…
…Which brings up the story of the blind Polynesian navigator. I can’t find the citation to save my damned life, but someone recorded an incident from (I think) the late 1800s where an old navigator on an outrigger well beyond the visible range of the target island began tasting the water and eventually pointed an accurate direction. Apparently, he was using his sense of taste to identify the currents roiling around an atoll. That he was considered valuable enough to be included on an ocean-going voyage as a blind man on an open boat indicates to me that he had a clue I don’t. That’s all I can really remember.
Even those that did build something lasting are pretty much ignored. (OK, maybe it’s not as old or as big as the pyramids. It’s still pretty unusual, and built before contact with western civilization.)
I read several books on Pacific Islands archaeology that claims “the colonization of the Pacific was the greatest human migration in history”. Of this there is no doubt. There is also evidence (I don’t have it in front of me) that about 6500 BP obsidian from a site in the Bismark Archipelago was the trade commodity with the widest geographical distribution at that time (I’ll verify this when I get home). When you look a Melanesia and Micronesia the islands are closer together than they are in the eastern Pacific, also at the time that humans started the colonization, about 33,000 BP, the sea level was substantially lower, so there were even more islands, and smaller distances between islands that were larger at the time.
As has been stated, the islanders would send out canoes with people, pigs and a few other things to colonize new islands. What we don’t know is how many of these expeditions were lost. Also, Capt. Cook had said that Easter Islanders had displayed navigational abilities that were beyond the Europeans of that time.
