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Jul 08, 2020 2 mins, 20 secs
The researchers also raise a tantalizing prospect: that South Americans were already living on a Polynesian island when the Polynesians got there.

The obvious place to look for contact between Native Americans and Polynesians is Rapa Nui, also called Easter Island.

And as on other South American islands, sweet potatoes, which originated in the Americas, were a staple of the diet.

Two different studies of people native to Rapa Nui came to completely different conclusions about whether they shared DNA with Native Americans, possibly because not all of the island's population has mixed with post-colonial arrivals from South America.

These date from before the Spanish spread the crop across the Pacific and indicated that the original crops used by the Polynesians had originated somewhere near the junction between Central and South America.

To do so, the researchers obtained a large collection of Polynesian DNA samples—166 from Rapa Nui and 188 from 16 other island populations.

The software did identify stretches of DNA that appeared to come from South American groups native to Peru and Chile, the closest areas to Rapa Nui.

All of this is consistent with this Native American DNA having arrived as people from Spain's South American colonies travelled to Rapa Nui, perhaps as recently as when it was annexed by Chile.

This suggests that the Central American ancestry isn't associated with European ancestry and instead arrived as these Polynesian populations spread among these islands.

Over the next hundred years, it spread south from there and eventually on to Rapa Nui, although it didn't spread back to the core Polynesian territory to the west.

This evidence, the researchers argue, makes sense of the fact that the Polynesian word for the crop sounds similar to terms used for it in South America.

Given their astonishing navigational skills, the obvious choice would be for the Polynesians to have reached South America as part of the expansion that brought them to the Marquesas and later returning to these islands; the prevailing winds and currents make that a relatively easy trip from the Colombian coast.

But there's another possibility, made famous by the Kon Tiki expedition of the 1940s, which showed that a raft built using technologies that may have been in use on the South American coast could reach the Polynesian islands from there.

Thor Heyerdahl, who led the expedition, viewed it as evidence that the Polynesians were originally South Americans.

"This is close to the date estimated by radiocarbon dating for settlement of that island group, raising the intriguing possibility that, upon their arrival, Polynesian settlers encountered a small, already established, Native American population.".

But the authors suggest that getting DNA from more people native to different island groups could clarify the dynamics of the DNA's spread through the Polynesian population and might favor one or the other explanation.

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