‘No one could have predicted.’ DNA offers surprises on how Polynesia was settled

The peopling of Polynesia was a stunning achievement: Beginning around 800 C.E., audacious Polynesian navigators in double-hulled sailing canoes used the stars and their knowledge of the waves to discover specks of land separated by thousands of kilometers of open ocean. Within just a few centuries, they had populated most of the Pacific Ocean’s far-flung islands.

To learn more, Stanford University computational geneticist Alexander Ioannidis and Andrés Moreno Estrada, a population geneticist at Mexico’s National Laboratory of Genetics for Biodiversity, compared the DNA of 430 modern individuals from all across Polynesia , and then eliminated later genetic input from European people.

To estimate how many generations went by between each island discovery, the scientists measured the length of shared genomic sequences between founder populations. Together, the data showed who descended from whom. That made it possible to not only show that two populations were related, but which came first.

And because the genetic evidence allowed the researchers to reconstruct the order in which the islands were settled, they could spot connections between islands that might not seem intuitive based on the geography.

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