One of my favourite things about modern technology is how rapidly new information is cancelling, reinforcing or just plain shaking up old ideas. One of these involves the South Pacific.
Few adventures have captured the public imagination like Norwegian explorer-anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl’s daring 1947 attempt to prove that settlement of the South Pacific proceeded east-to-west from South America and not, as per the received view of the day, by Asians voyaging east to western Polynesia about 3,500 years ago, then, using masterful and well-documented navigation skills, making it to eastern Polynesia by around 1,000 years ago.
Despite computer simulations showing that winds and currents at that time would have indeed carried a vessel from northern South America to the Polynesian islands, and Heyerdahl’s compelling arguments around statue iconography and the presence of South American-derived sweet potatoes all over Polynesia (including use of its Indigenous Peruvian name, kumara) have yet to be adequately addressed, it has never been widely accepted that seafaring South Americans had a role in peopling the South Pacific.
Lashing nine enormous balsa logs under a square sail and sheltering in a bamboo cabin, Heyerdahl and five companions spent 101 days sailing from Peru to Polynesia. Crazy and heroic in equal measure, the resulting book, Kon-Tiki, can only be read with jaw unhinged. Each page drips with the travails of the vast, open Pacific and its mythical denizens: squid and giant sharks thrash literally underfoot; fish fly into the crew’s faces; and they have but to dip a toothbrush into the ocean to have something bite it. Despite proving something that few believed mattered, Kon-Tiki was an instant classic of adventure literature, while later volumes in Heyerdahl’s substantive canon—The Ra Expeditions, The Tigris Expedition, Aku Aku—would never affect readers the same way.
But public fascination with Heyerdahl’s sea-heroics belied a serious downside: yes, you could sit on a raft with a bunch of coconuts and drift 8,000 kilometres from the South American coast to Tahiti in a little over three months, but few academics working on the Polynesian question took Heyerdahl’s “wild theories” seriously. As a result, he was deeply ridiculed, as travel author Paul Theroux discovered—only to parrot—during 18 months spent travelling around a triangle anchored by Australia, Hawaii, and Easter Island. Preparing himself to visit Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Theroux complained of having to wade through “colorful and misleading information by the enthusiastic Thor Heyerdahl, who is regarded by many Pacific historians and archaeologists as of minimal consequence to serious archaeology. Scientifically, his books have as little value as those of Erich von Daniken who theorized that the Easter Island moai [giant heads] were carved by people from outer space.”
Theroux, however, had his own scorn to weather.
By the time he published The Happy Isles of Oceania—a paean to being emotionally adrift in the Pacific—Theroux was a globally celebrated writer. Thus, the thundering denouncements of his book from once-stalwart supporters suggests the writer either blew it, or that many reviewers dismissed the overarching subtext—the desperation of a collapsing marriage and cancer scare that provided not just raison d’être for the trip, but a lens for his sweeping geo-cultural exploration. To wit: a man, angry at himself and an implacable world, attempts to escape himself and said world by going solo into their respective psychological and physical immensities. It’s clear from the outset he hopes to be swallowed by the vastness: “More than an ocean, the Pacific was like a universe, and a chart of it looked like a portrait of the night sky… like the whole of heaven, an inversion of earth and air [that] seemed like outer space…”
But things aren’t quite the idyll imagined, and welded to Theroux’s own darkness result in a book whose major criticism is curiously ill-tempered descriptions of people, places, and nations that incur his ire, with Heyerdahl coming in for special condemnation.
A recent study published in Nature, however, holds out the possibility of at least partial vindication for Heyerdahl, a dreamer who never renounced his fancies: an analysis of DNA shows that over 800 years ago, Indigenous South Americans indeed crossed a huge expanse of ocean to reach a still-undetermined island in eastern Polynesia, where, in typical human fashion, they promptly mated with its original inhabitants.
Though the location of initial contact remains unknown, the South American genes spread to other eastern Polynesian islands. DNA resembling that of Indigenous Colombians appeared on Fatu Hiva in the southern Marquesas by around 1150; these genes reached three nearby eastern Polynesian archipelagos between 1200 and 1230, followed by Rapa Nui around 1380.
These results also provide support for a second possible scenario in which the original sea-going settlers of Rapa Nui travelled east to South America and returned home with sweet potatoes, then subsequently carried both that crop and South American DNA west to a majority of eastern Polynesian islands. With radiocarbon dating and linguistic studies suggesting that people first reached Rapa Nui nearly 200 years before the estimated arrival of South American genes, trade and cultural exchanges may indeed have connected Rapa Nui to South America before DNA did, accounting for Heyerdahl’s original suppositions about who populated the South Pacific—and why a South American potato was ubiquitous there when Europeans arrived.
Leslie Anthony is a Whistler-based author, editor, biologist and bon vivant who has never met a mountain he didn’t like.
