Not sure you’ll ever get a smoking gun, but there is DNA evidence that there was contact. Couple that with the fact that Polynesians were certainly the greatest seafarers in the ancient world and certainly could have made the trip had they wanted to. I could see one of their various expeditions getting to the Americas, possibly trading for foodstuffs such as potatoes, then heading back out and replanting those potatoes on some of their islands. After all, that was their standard practice and why there are so many freaking chickens and pigs on some of their islands.
Except for the implication that of course the people who were actually living in those areas didn’t have the wits to develop anything on their own. That attitude isn’t harmless.
– theories of occasional trade exchanges are IMO a different thing; and much more likely. It seems implausible to me that there are lots of places in the world that humans managed to get to once, and then never again until European trade routes were set up. Possibly that’s another form of the Those People Couldn’t Have Built Pyramids fallacy: Those People Couldn’t Have Built Trade Routes.
Close. They built them right there at home, brought them to Brazil, and shipped them to Egypt.
Using Amazon.
I’ll see myself out.
Trade routes - or occasional contacts? It’s not impossible that once in a while someone, deliberately or inadvertently, made the crossing from Chile to Easter Island. After all, it’s only 2300 miles. Even a guy from Norway could do it. And then another 2000 to Pitcairn, which was eventually abandoned as lacking in resources. But the occasional foolhardy adventurer is at least as plausible, or more so, than sweet potatoes floating across the void and taking root or hitchhiking on birds. A laden swallow can only go so far.
What’s lacking is the oral traditions describing the feat that would suggest it was a regular thing. Since South America would have far greater resources and almost as close as the rest of Polynesia, it would be surprising if it would not have greater influence, leave a lot more evidence. Plus, what’s the impetus for trade? The original Polynesian expansion was to find more land to relieve population pressures; plus indications are after the original settlement, there was not a lot of subsequent communication with the rest of the islands.
My wild-ass guess is that the Easter Islanders, after establishing, perhaps went looking for more empty places to settle - got to South America, but found it was not that hospitable and already fully occupied. They could have come home with a few things and the report “don’t bother”. (HAwaii, too, is only 2400 miles from North America but for some reason nobody says “trade routes with Hawaii” and some North American locals had much bigger boats)
I guess the question is - how long, how widespread had sweet potatoes been part of Polynesia? I find it less credible that the islanders would be exploring all over the Pacific for centuries all the way to South America before they bothered to settle the eastern-most islands. I presume they settled any island they ran across almost immediately.
Also, almost the entire population of Easter Island - what was left after the collapse and the advent of European diseases - was kidnapped to South America as slave labour for a generation before being allowed back, so you have to wonder how accurate any DNA evidence could be. .
That’s a good point. (I presume; I don’t actually know much about the oral traditions.)
That also makes sense to me.
It’s different from saying that yes they could find Polynesia but were somehow incapable of finding anyplace else; it’s not that they weren’t capable of getting there, but that they had no good reason to bother.
I think some people have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that not every culture wanted (or wants) to take over the entire planet.
A five-ounce bird could not carry a one-pound sweet potato!
Dude, seriously…not if it grasps it by the husk…
Er, do sweet potatoes even have a husk? Regardless, you have to calculate the airspeed velocity of an unladen 5-ounce bird…
It could have been a South American Swallow. Working in teams.
But seriously…
IIRC the arrival on Easter Island was around 800AD (possibly as late as 1200AD), and they appear to have little or no back contact with the rest of Polynesia. The question would be when and how widely the sweet potato spread given that tight timeline. Wikipedia suggests that perhaps the contact maybe even bypassed Easter Island and went straight to the main Polynesian islands, although a dispersal timeline of 1200AD to 1400AD is consistent with either theory.
It’s 2400 miles from Hawaii, perhaps 3000 miles from other islands. But explorers from the islands probably set out and after a certain amount of time were more committed to going forward than turning around… If you know it’s too far to go back, your only choice is to keep going. The non-Easter people at least had the model from their area that there should be islands nearby.
What reason to brave the oceans except for the prospect of wealth through trade or plunder. The motivations of the Portugese and Spanish were clear. They were trying to find a way around the stranglehold the Ottomans and Venetians had on trade with the big economies of Asia through their control of the land routes or hugging the coast to India. It was internation trade sanctions that forced them to brave the oceans and it took a long time to discover how to use the currents and trade winds.
Why would the Egyptians venture west beyond the Libyan deserted to the wild Atlantic in a flimsy craft intended for river and in shore trading? The wealth was in the big river valleys with high food production capacity. The Nile and the fertile crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates with onward links to the Indus valley. Unless people return with something substantial to show for it, there will be few people interested in following. Ships equipped for ocean travel with provisions for weeks at sea were substantial investments that required state sponsorship.
However, in the 20th Century there was a space race to the Moon. The reasons for that were political: Cold War willy waving. We may be having more of the same in the 21st century: which rising super power will get to Mars first? There is little evidence that such expeditions will find any resource that would pay for the journey. So could it be the Egyptian were trying to impress their regional rivals by sending their intrepid reed boats into the wild Atlantic? There are better ways to impress rival states if you have a naval capability.
Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra expedition was interesting, but inconclusive. Making comparisions between the building projects of civilsations that happen to live near limestone quarries is not evidence of any historic contact. If they shared the same infectious diseases, that could be evidence. But the elephant in the room is that the humans in the Americas had little exposure to Eurasian infectious diseases and suffered hideous epidemics when the Spanish arrived. If the Egyptians have beem paying visits in the past, they would have brought disease with them and there would have been some immunity. Susceptibility to common contagious disease is a sure sign of an isolated population. Ships also bring many other clues: plants, animals unique to a landmass. Then there is the human legacy written in the genes. But what does this video rely on? A suposed commonality in working large stone blocks and the conjecture that there may be a common religious symbolism. That is very scant evidence indeed, intended for a very impressionable audience.
However, the sweet potato mystery is interesting. Maybe it was a potato eating albatros…specially trained by…Egyptians. 
What if the potato weighs the same as a duck?
It’s a fair cop.
Yes, the Polynesians had a different motivation - they’d realized the isolated islands were uninhabited and as they filled up each island, they tried looking for more living space (plus the motivation that “I can be grand chief of my own island if I can find one…”). But as I said, that suggests that they would have stopped if they hit a locale that was already occupied.
Plus the adventures of European explorers suggests the locals in almost every land were quite friendly to strangers who were just visiting. Their hostility would manifest when the explorers either through cultural misunderstanding or more often, European arrogance, acted like assholes. (To be fair, it wasn’t just Europeans) The other driver of hostile reception would be any attempt to horn in on the current occupants’ turf.
Regardless, the Polynesians probably weren’t acclimatized to a mainland lifestyle with unfamiliar flora or fauna. Nor could a small colonizing party defend itself against a mainland with comparatively unlimited manpower.
Sweet potatoes will reproduce from slips: basically any bit of the vine that winds up with at least a leaf or two in the air and at least a bit of it in water or wet soil is likely to grow roots and start a new plant.
(I still think humans moving them is more likely, though. While they can survive brief dry spells, I don’t think the slips like salt water.)
That actually implies to me that visiting strangers showed up from time to time. I’d expect a population that hadn’t seen anybody new for hundreds of years to freak out.
Sure, but strangers could include other American Indians. There were a lot of distinct cultures and civilizations in the pre-Contact Americas. And we know from archaeological evidence that on the population level there was significant movement around the Americas. People being people, there would pretty much had to have been smaller scale movements of traders, envoys, explorers, and adventurers. And the Americas had extensive trade networks. In all of recorded history, I don’t think there has ever been a trade network along which only goods travelled - there were always at least occasionally people who would also travel along those trade networks. The Americas also had quasi-imperial states, like the Inca and the Aztecs, and it’s pretty much universal for imperial states to at least occasionally send out representatives to survey their tributaries and try to expand their reach, and for members of smaller-scale societies to visit the Big City on occasion. I don’t think the fact that natives encountering European explorers were used to having strangers from unknown cultures occasionally show up says anything in particular about transoceanic contacts.
(Personally, given the tantalizing physical evidence like sweet potatoes and chickens, and what we know historically of the range of Polynesian voyages, I’d think there would almost have to have been intermittant contact between Polynesians and coastal American Indians).
I meant the people on the islands. It’s obvious that there was significant movement on the continents.
But it’s possible that travel between the islands accustomed their residents to the occasional arrival of strangers, and that it’s not necessary to postulate that they were used to the occasional arrival of people from other continents in order for them not to freak out when that did happen.
– I don’t see how it would even be possible to have a trade route that only moved goods and not people. Even now, people are needed to move the goods, and some of those people have to travel with them.
A trade route needs someone to carry the goods. A trade network just requires handoffs between neighbors. Of course, in the real world, those usually aren’t totally distinct.
It’s not that they couldn’t have built trade routes, but that the original settlement of the Americas was overland or coastal, not trans-oceanic. There were lots of trade routes in the Americas, as other posters have said, but trade routes across the Pacific would have been much harder to achieve, and also not have much of a profit margin. Trade routes are always developed in ways that someone is going to profit, so coastal or overland trade routes in South America would be much more likely to evolve than trans-Pacific trade routes.
Also, I don’t recall hearing of inter-island warfare between groups on the widely spaced islands. After all, (a) there’s not much in the way of booty to make it worthwhile in Polynesian life, (b) there’s less likelihood of creating offense and feuds when it takes a week or more between islands, (c) any war party risks being overtaken by a whole angry island flotilla chasing them home.
Most stories of explorations of the South Sea Islands recount hordes of friendly canoe-loads coming out to greet them; the only risk being, they also stole them blind. At which point the Europeans retaliated and things went downhill from there, to the point where for example, Captain Cook was cooked.
The logical main “booty”, women, were sometimes traded from island to island - they were well aware of inbreeding risks.
The same story is told by explorers in many areas - the interior of Africa or Asia, for example. Hospitality to visitors passing through was good; they only were hostile to neighbours who tried to encroach on their territory, possibly intending to take it. Where the locals are hostile, is where earlier encounters did not go well. (A good example is the Andaman Islands, where that one island, for example, the locals kill anyone who comes ashore. They came by this attitude honestly, having been raided for slaves since the islands were found by nearby kingdoms in the 1200’s.)
According to google, the phrase “constipated albatross theory” does not appear on the internet.
Up until now, that is.
j
Well done. You’ve made the Dope proud.