Almost 1,000 years ago, a group of exceptionally skilled seafarers left Easter Island, also called Rapa Nui, one of the Polynesian islands in the Pacific Ocean. They spent weeks at sea before finally docking their double-hulled catamarans in what’s now Hawaii—around 4,400 miles from their homeland. Researchers reported this surprising new insight into Hawaii’s first settlers on October 8 in the journal Science after analyzing genetic data from more than 1,000 modern-day Polynesians.
What’s more, the “ultravoyaging” group’s far-flung journey is just part of a broader settlement process that populated Polynesia—but also brought genetic health hazards that affect people today. Polynesia is a large cultural and geographic region of the east-central Pacific Ocean that includes more than 1,000 islands. The Hawaiian Islands are the only ones located in the Northern Hemisphere, while Easter Island is far off the coast of Chile.
Both sit more than 1,800 miles from another inhabited Polynesian island, meaning they’re “the two most remote islands in Polynesia,” study co-author Keolu Fox, an anthropologist at the University of California, San Diego, tells Olin Lagon at Honolulu Civil Beat. And yet, Fox and colleagues found just that. In the study, the team analyzed the complete sets of genetic instructions, or genomes, from 1,050 Polynesian individuals, including 317 Native Hawaiians and 12 Easter Islanders.
They specifically looked at the length of chromosomal segments shared among people from different islands. Longer shared segments between two people hint at a more recent common ancestor. Based on that information, the team reconstructed thousands of family trees.
The newly uncovered journey is the most recent addition to researchers’ understanding of the settlement pattern in Polynesia. In 2021, for instance, some of the same researchers reported that people traveled from Samoa through the Cook Islands, then to the Society Islands, followed by Mangareva. They finally reached Easter Island in approximately 1210.
The recent study shows that this ultravoyaging culture didn’t stop there. The researchers call the ultravoyaging group Holomoana Nui, the Hawaiian phrase for “great ocean voyaging.” Additionally, the genetic evidence bringing together Hawaii, Easter Island and Mangareva aligns with archaeological data, Patrick Kirch, an archaeologist at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa who did not participate in the study, tells Live Science’s Charles Q. The founders of the new community have a shrunken gene pool with limited diversity, which can increase the occurrence of usually rare genetic variants, including those associated with disease.
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