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waserwill | 4 years ago

> But it is meaningless since they did not write about it not they stablished commerce

Depends on what you find meaningful! There was almost certainly exchange of goods between Polynesians and South Americans. The presence of early sweet potato agriculture in Polynesia and genetic admixture in both regions points to non-trivial contact. There are even parallels in terms of folk-tales [0]! (Though these are likely older events, more to do with ancient dispersal).

There are also possibly earlier relationships across the Pacific, but these would have been ancient and interesting largely from historical curiousity [1].

[0]https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-39445-9_...

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aav2621

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mtoohig|4 years ago

I live in Vanuatu and is it very far to the west side of the Pacific yet the almost southern most island of Vanuatu, Aneityum, has stories of what they called the "Yellow People" that were on the island before they, Melanesians, arrived from northern islands. These people on the island were excellent stone carvers and could make stone walls which the current locals admit they never learned from the "yellow people". Old engravings exist still of these original people that to me sound like those may have come from the east, South America. I don't have photos though, this is a story I just heard recently from family members of that island.

koboll|4 years ago

Wow. You should really, really write a blog post about this, and get some of them on the record about it. A Google search for 'Aneityum "yellow people"' returns only 4 results.

However, one of those four is this dissertation: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794...

Which reads:

>His canoe and his moiety were the first to adopt the chiefly system, and it was brought to Aneityum by natimi-yag (yellow-people), which he now believes to have been Polynesian.

chana_masala|4 years ago

I don't think I've come across anyone on HN from Vanuatu. If you're open to answering, I wonder if you work in tech? What's the tech industry like there?

bitxbitxbitcoin|4 years ago

Could also be that last push of Denisovans that was recently discovered through the genetic record.