Looking at the beginning of Polynesia in an archipelago of Shards

Looking at the beginning of Polynesia in an archipelago of Shards - New York TimesHome PageToday PaperVideoMost PopularTimes TopicsMost RecentHelpRegister NowLogin all science search tips collections SAMOA algorithm searching at the beginning of an archipelago of ShardsBy JOHN NOBLE WILFORD Polynesia

Published: 08 January 2002 Sign In to single-page print e-mail

David V. Burley archaeologist hopes on Fanga ' Uta Laguna and tried to think of as old seafarers. Here, at the head of the lagoon, is the first of their canoes stabilizer must have thrown, concluding heroic travel hundreds, maybe over a thousand kilometers from the West. So here decided to dig on Tongatapu, in the Kingdom of Tonga South Pacific island.

While the site had previously been excavated, Dr. Burley, Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, made a new and revealing discovery concerning an issue fiercely debated in Archaeology: source routes and migration of the Polynesians.

What Dr. Burley found fragments of distinctly decorated pottery, Lapita peoples cultural ancestors to modern Polynesians. Radiocarbon in coal between the fragments showed that the adventurer seafarers had reached Tonga Islands between 850 c. and 900, a. c., making it the first settlement in Polynesia.
Tongatapu, concluded Dr. Burley, "probably served as the starting point test for the expansion of the population" to other islands of Tonga and Samoa. The place seemed to be what anthropologists and geneticists call a founding colony. These people, he said, there must be "formed the gene pool for the remainder of Polynesia."

This new frontier, scholars believe the ancient navigators perfected the stabilizer double hull sailing canoe and exposed in its final expansion, venture into more huge stretches of open sea. Probably, every one of their larger canoes led to dozens of people with their pigs and load.
Seafarers did all the way this Tahiti and northeast to Hawaii. Hawaii is separated by more than 2,500 kilometers and from Tahiti 2,700 miles of Samoa and Tonga. Then went to South New Zealand and even more far East to Easter Island. Thus, all of Polynesia, extending over almost a quarter of the Pacific, became the last major area of the world to be settled by people.

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