DNA links Native Hawaiians to Easter Island and reveals 7,000 km Pacific crossing
Study in Science indicates that navigators from Rapa Nui were among the first to colonize Hawaii.
Translated from the Portuguese original by the Panorama newsroom. Read in Portuguese
Summary written by the Panorama newsroom from the sources listed below. Facts are attributed to the original publications.
A group of navigators from Easter Island set out in double-hulled sailing canoes and crossed the largest ocean on the planet to Hawaii, more than 7,100 kilometers away. According to Folha, in a Reuters text, the odyssey was no myth: new genetic research showed that Native Hawaiians are genetically closer to the inhabitants of Rapa Nui, the island's local name.
The study was published in October in the journal Science. Computational geneticist Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford University explained that, with complete genomes, algorithms find identical DNA sequences among people from different islands, inherited from common ancestors, and use them to build the islands' family trees.
The results indicate that a founding population from Easter Island arrived in Hawaii as the first humans to colonize the volcanic archipelago, the only Polynesian one in the Northern Hemisphere.
The data also show that the colonizers reached Easter Island in the 13th century, after traveling from the island of Mangareva, in French Polynesia, more than 2,400 kilometers away.