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Polynesian Seafarers 'Discovered' America Long Before Europeans, Says DNA Study

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It's possible Polynesian visited Galapagos Islands since the islands itself is on the way to Colombia, Peru and Ecuador from Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and Marquesas Islands however they found out soon that the islands were an inhospitable place to stay since it lacked basic necessities to survive such as fresh water. Galapagos Islands are only 605 plus miles (974 kilometers) away from Ecuador, South America.

On the other hand, it's also possible that seafaring Polynesians didn't visit Galapagos Island if they took the coastal route either from Chile to Peru, Ecuador and Colombia or another route which was Mexico to Central America to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Sailing on a sail boat to South America depends on the direction of the trade winds which is seasonal however they were experts at seafaring.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where are the Galapagos Islands Located? (naturegalapagos.com)

 

 

Where are the Galapagos Islands

 

 

Galapagos are an archipelago of volcanic islands located in the Pacific Ocean right in the Equator Line, 605 miles to the west of South America.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is there Freshwater on the Galapagos Islands?
 
 
Although fresh water is not very visible in Galapagos, it is found in several places (underground, crevices, and streambeds) and is indispensable for all forms of life.
 
Historically, Galapagos residents barely survived, having to search for water (rainwater, brackish water, and springs).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Native South Americans visited Galapagos Islands?

 

 

 

 

Galápagos Islands - Wikipedia

 

Pre-Columbian era

 

Whether the Incas ever made it to the islands is disputed. In 1572, Spanish chronicler Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa claimed that Topa Inca Yupanqui, the second Sapa Inca of the Inca Empire had visited the archipelago, but there is little evidence for this, and many experts consider it a far-fetched legend, especially since the Incas were not seafaring people. According to a 1952 archaeological survey by Thor Heyerdahl and Arne Skjølsvold, potsherds and other artifacts from several sites on the islands suggest visitation by South American peoples in pre-Columbian era. The group located an Inca flute and shards from more than 130 pieces of ceramics, which were later identified as pre-Incan. However, no remains of graves, ceremonial vessels or constructions have ever been found, suggesting no permanent settlement occurred before the Spanish arrived in the 16th century. A 2016 reanalysis of Heyerdahl and Skjølsvold's archaeological sites rejected their conclusions. They found that at all locations, artifacts of Indian and European origin were interspersed without the distinct spatial or stratigraphic arrangement that would be expected from independent sequential deposition (indeed, Heyerdahl and Skjølsvold had reported the intermixing of European and American artifacts in their original report). Radiocarbon dates from the sites placed them in the historical (post-Spanish-arrival) era, and preliminary paleoenvironmental analysis showed no disturbance older than 500 years before present, suggesting the islands were probably not visited prior to their Spanish discovery in 1535. The authors suggested that native artifacts found by Heyerdahl and Skjølsvold had probably been brought as momentos or souvenirs at the time of Spanish occupation. Whatever their identity, the first visitors to the islands were likely unimpressed by the lack of fresh water on the islands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

European voyages

 

European discovery of the Galápagos Islands occurred when Spaniard Fray Tomás de Berlanga, the fourth Bishop of Panama, sailed to Peru to settle a dispute between Francisco Pizarro and his lieutenants. De Berlanga's vessel drifted off course when the winds diminished, and his party reached the islands on 10 March 1535.

 

 

 

 

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Indigenous South Americans received DNA from Indigenous people in Oceania.

 

1st Americans had Indigenous Australian genes | Live Science

 

1st Americans had Indigenous Australian genes

 

During the last ice age, when hunters and gatherers crossed the ancient Bering Land Bridge that connected Asia with North America, they carried something special with them in their genetic code: pieces of ancestral Australian DNA, a new study finds.

 

Over the generations, these people and their descendants trekked southward, making their way to South America. Even now, more than 15,000 years after these people crossed the Bering Land Bridge, their descendants — who still carry ancestral Australian genetic signatures — can be found in parts of the South American Pacific coast and in the Amazon, the researchers found.

"Much of this history has unfortunately been erased by the colonization process, but genetics is an ally to unravel unrecorded histories and populations," study senior researcher and professor Tábita Hünemeier and study co-lead researcher and doctoral student Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva, both of whom are in the Department of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, told Live Science in an email. 

The new research builds on earlier work, first published in 2015, which showed that ancient and modern Indigenous people in the Amazon shared specific genetic signatures — known as the Ypikuéra, or Y signal — with modern-day Indigenous groups in South Asia, Australia and Melanesia, a group of islands in Oceania. 

 

This genetic connection caught many scientists off guard, and it remains "one of the most intriguing and poorly understood events in human history," the researchers wrote in the new study.

 

To investigate the Y signal further, a team of scientists in Brazil and Spain dove into a large dataset containing the genetic data of 383 Indigenous people from different parts of South America. The team applied statistical methods to test whether any of the Native American populations had "excess" genetic similarity with a group they called the Australasians, or Indigenous peoples from Australia, Melanesia, New Guinea and the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean.

 

In other words, the team was assessing whether "a given Native American population shared significantly more genetic variants with Australasians than other Native Americans do," Hünemeier and Araújo Castro e Silva said. South American groups that did have more genetic similarities with Australasians were interpreted by the new researchers as being descendants of the first Americans and Australasian ancestors, who coupled together at least 15,000 years ago. 

As expected, the study confirmed the previous findings of Australasian genetic ties with the Karitiana and Suruí, Indigenous peoples in the Amazon. But the new genetic analysis also revealed a big surprise: The Australasian connection was also found in Peru's Chotuna people, an Indigenous group with ancestral ties to the Pacific Coast; the Guaraní Kaiowá, a group in central west Brazil; and the Xavánte, a group on the central Brazilian Plateau.

 

When the team looked specifically at the Chotuna people and other coastal Indigenous peoples, including the Sechura and Narihuala, the researchers found that these peoples had ancestry from a mix of South American people and a sister branch of the Onge, Indigenous people who live on Little Andaman island. When the team included the Xavánte people in the analysis, the model suggested that the coastal groups got started first, and later gave rise to the inland Amazonian groups with Australasian heritage.

 

The first settlers likely "stuck to the Pacific coast due to their subsistence strategies and other cultural aspects adapted to life by the sea," Hünemeier and Araújo Castro e Silva wrote in the email. "For this reason, they would have at least initially only expanded through and settled the whole American Pacific coast from Alaska until southern Chile. In this context, the expansion to the Amazon, passing through the northern Andes, would have been a secondary movement."

 
 

According to archaeological records, a settlement on the Pacific coast dates to about 13,000 years ago, the researchers said. This jibes with the time frame the team suggested for the initial migration and the later inland coupling events in South America, which likely happened between 15,000 and 8,000 years ago, respectively, they said. Furthermore, while previous research suggested that there were two waves of first Americans who left  Beringia about 15,000 years ago, and likely several waves from Beringia after that, the new study found that "one of the waves that came by the Pacific route was composed by individuals carrying some Australasian ancestry," Hünemeier and Araújo Castro e Silva said.

"This study is a welcome addition to prior literature, which had described signals of Australasian (southern Asian) ancestry in Amazonian groups," Alexander Ioannidis, an adjunct lecturer in computational engineering and researcher in biomedical data science at Stanford University, who led a 2020 study in the journal Nature about Polynesian ancestry, told Live Science in an email. Ioannidis wasn't involved in the new study.

 

As to why the Y signal isn't found in North American Indigenous peoples, the "authors suggest that if such a migration had traveled rapidly along the Pacific coast of North America into Central and then South America, then it could explain why the signal is present predominantly in South America (both on the Pacific coast and in the Amazon), but not in North American Indigenous groups," Ioannidis said. Or, perhaps Indigenous people in North and Central America who had the Y signal were wiped out during Europe's colonization of the New World, Hünemeier and Araújo Castro e Silva said.

How did they get there?

 

The researchers acknowledged that news of the Australasian-South American connection might spark ideas of an ancient sea voyage in the public's imagination. But the genetic model the team developed shows no evidence of an ancient boating expedition between South America and Australia and the surrounding islands at that time, the researchers said. Rather, the team emphasized, this ancestry came from people who crossed the Bering Land Bridge, probably from ancient coupling events between the ancestors of the first Americans and the ancestors of the Australasians "in Beringia, or even in Siberia as new evidence suggests," Hünemeier and Araújo Castro e Silva told Live Science.

 

"What likely happened is that some individuals from the extreme southeastern region of Asia, that later originated the Oceanic populations, migrated to northeast Asia, and there had some contact with ancient Siberian and Beringians," Araújo Castro e Silva said.

 

Put another way, the Australasians' ancestors coupled with the first Americans long before their descendants reached South America, the researchers said. "It is as if these genes had hitched a ride on the First American genomes," Hünemeier and Araújo Castro e Silva said.

The study will be published in the April 6 issue of the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Originally published on Live Science.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surprising study suggests Indigenous Australians migrated to South America | Salon.com

 

 

Surprising study suggests Indigenous Australians migrated to South America

Some Indigenous communities in South America share genetic ties with Indigenous communities from Australia

By MATTHEW ROZSA
APRIL 7, 2021 1:00PM (UTC)

Humans truly are one big family. 

An upcoming genetic study reveals that a number of Indigenous communities in South America share genetic ties with Indigenous communities from Australia, South Asia and Melanesia. This builds on the surprising discovery of genetic links between the two communities that was first published six years ago and contributes to a recent and ongoing paradigm shift in our understanding of how humans migrated to the Americas.

Perhaps just as significantly, the study allows scientists to peer into the past of the Americas prior to the horrors of European colonization — which, due to genocide, violence and forced resettlement, marred our ability to study human migration. As a pair of scholars who worked on the new study told Live Science, "Much of this history has unfortunately been erased by the colonization process, but genetics is an ally to unravel unrecorded histories and populations."

In a study that will be published in the issue Tuesday of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found genetic links between populations in Australia and the surrounding islands and the Karitiana and Suruí communities, which are indigenous to Brazil. More surprisingly, they found Australasian genetic connections in Indigenous groups on the South American Pacific Coast, including communities in the Peruvian region such as the Chotuna, the Sechura and the Narihuala tribes; among a group on the central Brazilian Plateau, the Xavánte community; and among the Guaraní Kaiowá community, a group in central west Brazil.

 

The study builds on research from 2015 that first hinted that both ancient and modern Indigenous people in the Amazon shared some genetic signatures as populations from Oceania, or the land regions of the southern Pacific Ocean. This news was regarded as significant because the regions are so geographically remote from each other.

 

So how did Australasian DNA end up in South America thousands of years ago? The genetic revelation might conjure images of an epic oceanic voyage from Polynesian islands to South America, Kon-Tiki style. Yet scientists believe the truth may be less dramatic.

"What likely happened is that some individuals from the extreme southeastern region of Asia, that later originated the Oceanic populations, migrated to northeast Asia, and there had some contact with ancient Siberian and Beringians," study co-lead Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva, of the University of São Paulo in Brazil, told Live Science.


 


Scientists have a number of theories as to how the first human beings came to the American continents. The evidence strongly suggests that there have been Indigenous populations in the Western Hemisphere for roughly 15,000 years, and perhaps even 20,000 years, although there is some evidence of people living on these continents as far back as 30,000 and 40,000 years ago. One theory that is popular among scientists — even as it is controversial among some Native American activists as simplistic and culturally biased — is that the Bering Strait, a body of water that separates Russia from Alaska, used to be a large land mass called Beringia that connected northern Asia with the tip of North America. These researchers believe that populations crossed Beringia, and may have even settled there for a period of time, before eventually migrating downward to the American continents. This seems to be consistent with the findings of the new study.

Along with his senior researcher and colleague, Professor Tábita Hünemeier, Araújo Castro e Silva explained to Live Science that the earliest inhabitants of the Americans likely "stuck to the Pacific coast due to their subsistence strategies and other cultural aspects adapted to life by the sea. For this reason, they would have at least initially only expanded through and settled the whole American Pacific coast from Alaska until southern Chile. In this context, the expansion to the Amazon, passing through the northern Andes, would have been a secondary movement."

Some Native Americans argue that the Bering Strait migration theory is based on outdated and offensive stereotypes about Indigenous communities.

"Dominant science believed in a concept of superiority," Alexander Ewen, a member of the Purepecha Nation and author of the "Encyclopedia of the American Indian in the Twentieth Century," told Voice of America in 2017. "And that created an idea that either people were genetically inferior or that there were stages of civilization, and Indians were at a lower stage." He argues that the idea that Native Americans' ancestors would have had to have crossed by way of what is now the Bering Strait is simplistic.

"In the first place, it's simplistic," Ewen explained. "The people in this hemisphere were — and are — extremely diverse, more than any other place in the world."

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bacano G
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@prau123

nice work! 

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Amado
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@jose

I don't know why most of LATAM isn't interested. 

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@Amado

Latinos in general don't view Pacific Islanders as their ancestors.  

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Most Latinos do not even want to admit that our ancestors originated from Siberia because we don't want to be affiliated with East Asians honestly. 

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Siberians today look somewhat different than the Siberians who migrated into the Americas several thousands of years ago.  Your Siberian ancestors  have some level of Caucasoid admixtures in particular South Indian genes.

 

 

 

 

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Siberia was a jumping-off point to cross the Bering Strait and into the Americas but the origin of your people are a mixture of different ethnic groups found throughout several parts of Eurasia.

 

 

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Where Did the Polynesians Really Come From? | Ancient Origins (ancient-origins.net)

 

 

 

 

A Wa'a Kaulua (double canoe) of Hawaiian Nobility of the 18th Century. Polynesia was inhabited by skilled seafarers.
 

Where Did the Polynesians Really Come From?

 

Oceania was the last region to be settled by humans and the last part of Oceania to be settled by humans was Polynesia. Polynesians are famous for their voyages to remote islands in distant parts of the Pacific. Using outrigger canoes, they founded a society across islands stretching in a triangle from the Hawaiian Islands to Easter Island to New Zealand. That society was reasonably well-connected by trade, language, culture, and religion, despite its distribution over such a large area.

One major question today is where did the Polynesians originally come from? Several theories have been proposed over the years, but one which is gaining ground is that the Polynesians originated from Taiwan, parts of Papua New Guinea, and Southeast Asia. Another intriguing area of study is the genetic connection between Polynesians and South Americans.

Could the Polynesians Have Origins in South America?

One early theory of the origin of Polynesians is that they came from South America and sailed west, eventually reaching the Polynesian triangle. This was proposed by the archaeologist, writer, and explorer Thor Heyerdahl , who even constructed a Polynesian balsa wood raft and, with a team, sailed it west of Easter Island from the South American coast. This demonstrated the feasibility of using a primitive craft to cross the Pacific.

irls Carrying a Canoe in Samoa by John La Farge.

Girls Carrying a Canoe in Samoa by John La Farge. ( Public Domain ) Polynesian outrigger canoes may have been used to cross the Pacific.

The thing to remember about experimental archaeology is that just because something could have theoretically been done doesn’t mean that it actually happened that way. Although it is plausible that Polynesia was settled by ancient South Americans; all the genetic, linguistic, and ethnographic evidence points toward a predominantly southeast Asian origin.

The Express Train or Slow Boat to Polynesian Origins

The two main theories today are called the Express Train Hypothesis and the Slow Boat Hypothesis. The Express Train Hypothesis says that Polynesians originally come from Taiwan by way of the Philippines and Melanesia. According to this view, Polynesians are mainly a part of a migration wave that came out of Taiwan.

The western part of Polynesia was settled between 3000 and 1000 BC by people from Taiwan via the Philippines as well as parts of New Guinea. Eastern Polynesia was settled beginning around 900 AD as Polynesian voyagers began to set out from Tonga and Samoa and other islands of western Polynesia to settle the Hawaiian Islands, New Zealand, and Easter Island, among other islands of the region.

According to the Slow Boat Hypothesis, the ancestors of the Polynesians are of Austronesian descent and still have a connection to Taiwan, but the ancestors of modern Polynesians spent several centuries intermarrying with people of Papuan and Indonesian lineage before setting out to Polynesia.

Depiction of possible Tahitian warrior dugouts. ( Public Domain ) Much of the origins of Polynesians remains uncertain.

The first view is supported by linguistic and ethnographic data, but there is genetic evidence for the second hypothesis. Genetic studies have shown, for example, that a significant percentage of the Polynesian population has y-chromosomal DNA haplogroups coming from Papua New Guinea while most of the mtDNA comes from haplogroups in Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

This suggests some degree of intermarriage between Polynesians and other Austronesian groups as well as non-Austronesian groups. Another possible line of evidence for this hypothesis comes from the fact that there is a gap in the language evolution of Polynesian Austronesian languages. Polynesian languages have features that no other Austronesian languages possess. This could be because of interaction with Papuan and Indonesian populations.

 

Reconstruction of the face of a Lapita woman. National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka. (Yanajin33/ CC BY SA 3.0 ) Genetic studies have shown that most mtDNA in Polynesia comes from Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

Are there Amerindian Connections to Early Polynesians?

 

It is even possible that Thor Heyerdahl may have been partly right about an Amerindian connection . Genetic studies of the Rapa Nui of Easter Island reveal a small percentage of Native American ancestry (8%). To be fair, this study also revealed 16% European ancestry for the Rapa Nui.

However, the genes and haplogroups associated with European descent are much less degraded due to recombination than those associated with Native American descent, making it clear that European haplogroups are from 19th century Europeans intermarrying with the natives. The genes associated with Native American ancestry are much older, suggesting a date closer to the 13th-15th centuries AD for these elements entering the genes of the Rapa Nui .

However, a study in 2020 has suggested that the date for Polynesians meeting South Americans should be pushed back even further, to around 1150 AD. The nature of those genetic links and the location for that first contact also differs from previous beliefs. As Ed Whelan writes:

“Genetic evidence appears to prove that Polynesians are related to present-day Indigenous people, especially from the coast of Colombia and Ecuador. Interestingly, the DNA study concludes that the earliest contact was on Fatu Hiva, an island in the South Marquesas islands, sometime around 1150 AD, and not Rapa Nui which is much closer to the coast of South America.”

Is it possible that Amerindian cultures are partially responsible for the colonization of Polynesia, or at least part of it, after all?

Genetic analysis appears to prove that Polynesians have genetic roots tracing back to diverse regions across the Pacific and the Americas, denoting the mixed origin of the population. (Ruben Ramos-Mendoza / Nature)

Although it is possible that South American voyagers sailed to Polynesia to meet the Rapa Nui or another group of Polynesians, the Polynesians are known to have been more skilled at seafaring at the time, so it is more likely that it was the Polynesians who came to the Americas. The Polynesians may have come to South America to trade with the natives, and as a result may have ended up also bringing home South American brides.

Intriguingly, there is circumstantial evidence for pre-Columbian contact between Native Americans and Polynesians - chicken bones that have been found at an archaeological site on a beach in Chile that appear to predate the coming of the Spaniards.

Regardless of where the Polynesians originally came from, their ancestry appears to be more complex than initially thought. The more we learn about historical genetics , the more we realize just how convoluted the communication and intermarriage between different populations was in the past.

If we go far back enough, current thinking is that we are all a mixture of many lineages of mankind which originally diverged from a single lineage that goes back to Africa, perhaps 200,000 years ago.

Top Image: A Wa'a Kaulua (double canoe) of Hawaiian Nobility of the 18th Century. Polynesia was inhabited by skilled seafarers. Source: Herb Kawainui Kāne

By Caleb Strom

Updated on August 26, 2020.

 

 

 

 

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