Polynesian voyaging driven by resource shortages

 A lot of the research into Polynesian voyaging looks at how it was accomplished and when, but less work has been done on why.

Why would groups of individuals, living in Pacific paradise islands, expend enormous treasure and energy to build great canoes and outfit massive voyaging missions?

The answers are coming.

This blog first looked into the issue in 2007.

That article reviewed a paper that suggested that sea level changes between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago, which created resource shortages, could have launched the Polynesians eastward into the Pacific from the islands near Asia.

And now, there’s new research that suggests a second period of resource shortages 1,000 years ago drove the final exploration phase—the one that led to the inhabitation of Hawai’i, Tahiti, the Marquesas, the Cooks, and eventually Rapa Nui and Aotearoa.

The suggestion is that a huge, multi-century central Pacific drought, from about AD 900 to 1200 drove settled populations out of the central Pacific and led them to locate new homelands that could feed expanding populations.

A team of Hawai’i, United Kingdom and New Zealand researchers in 2020 published a paper saying the signs of that drought can still be located in lake sediments in the Pacific Islands.

Their work answers that nagging question about Pacific voyaging: Why? Why would islanders in rich environments expend vast resources to build and provision voyaging canoes, and then sail into the uncharted ocean?

The paper’s authors are David A. Sear, Melinda S. Allen, Jonathan D. Hassall, Ashley E. Maloney, Peter G. Langdon, Alex E. Morrison, Andrew C. G. Henderson, Helen Mackay, Ian W. Croudace, Charlotte Clarke, Julian P. Sachs, Georgiana Macdonald, Richard C. Chiverrell, Melanie J. Leng, L. M. Cisneros-Dozal, Thierry Fonville, and Emma Pearson. Morrison is a senior archaeologist with Honolulu’s International Archaeology, LLC.

Their research paper, “Human settlement of East Polynesia earlier, incremental, and coincident with prolonged South Pacific drought,” was published in 2020 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That prolonged drought was detected in sediments in Efate in Vanuatu, ‘Upolu in Samoa, and Atiu in the Southern Cook Islands. Other data from Tahiti and Kiribati also supports the drought hypothesis. It lasted from about AD 900 to AD 1200.

Their suggestion is that exploratory voyagers sailed out initially around 900, that they located islands and brought that information home, but that actual colonization took place generations later.

But once again, the message is that Polynesians voyaged because they had do.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Voyaging: Nailing down when the first canoe pulled up on a Hawaiian beach.

 

Your grandfather might tell you otherwise, but it is increasingly clear that the first humans set foot in Hawai’i in the year AD 1000, give or take a few decades.

Archaeologists and other researchers have been honing on that period for a couple of decades as their tools have improved for determining the age of human-related activities and artifacts. Early, widely varying carbon-14 dates have been adjusted and refined, and several new technologies have been added to the tool kit.

This isn’t brand new information, but I still hear older Hawai’i people advocating for dates they remember being taught as little as 30 or 40 years ago.

Until and into the 1980s, the common assumption was that the Hawaiian Islands were first inhabited early in the first millennium after Christ, and a few folks still still argue for AD 500, 300 or occasionally even earlier.

In his seminal 1985 book Feathered Gods and Fishhooks, leading Pacific archaeologist Patrick Kirch reflected the wisdom of the period: “It is clear that colonization parties from the Marquesas were responsible for the settlement of Easter Island by about A.D. 400 and of Hawai’i by possibly by A.D. 300.”

But the science has improved much since then, and the errors of the early dating have been corrected. By the 2023 revision of Feathered Gods and Fishhooks, Kirch and Mark McCoy had moved the number to closer to 1000.

Why? Wrote the authors: “No one could have foreseen…the major technological advances that would come…the use of GPS and GIS in settlement archaeology, AMS radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modeling…high-precision dating of corals, stable isotope analysis of faunal remains or XRF geochemical analysis of stone artifacts.”

Professional archaeology now assumes there weren’t any humans in the eastern Pacific as early as CE 300 or 400. (Maybe a lost fisherman or an intrepid sailor who left no evidence.) It is more likely that Polynesian voyaging canoes around AD 900 began pushing—probably from the Samoa islands—into eastern Polynesia.

Why did those Polynesians voyage? There have been many theories, but one recent one is that they were driven out of their home islands by drought. David Sear and co-authors Melinda Allen, Jonathan Hassall and Emma Pearson said that drought may have lasted 200-400 years, certainly from before AD 900 to after 1100. 

Whether or not drought alone was enough to coerce people to abandon their homes, there’s an associated stressor. Population pressure would have been a big factor as expanding island families began outgrowing their small islands’ ability to feed them.

Science now generally presumes that on departure from the central Pacific islands, some of the eastern Pacific islands south of the Equator were populated first. Perhaps the Cook Islands, which are just to the southeast and downwind of Samoa. Then the nearby islands and finally then canoes came north to Hawai’i, east to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and then west to Aotearoa (New Zealand.) The chronology could change with additional findings and new technologies.

But all of that voyaging may have occurred in a pulse of only a few generations. The voyaging canoes left Samoa around 900 and would have populated all those other islands within just a couple of hundred years.

“The archaeological and paleoenvironmental estimates of the colonization date show a striking convergence, indicating that initial settlement (of Hawai’i) occurred at A.D. 940–1130…and most probably between A.D. 1000 to 1100,” wrote pollen expert Stephen Athens and Timothy M. Rieth and Thomas S. Dye, in a 2017 article in the journal American Antiquity, entitled, “A Paleoenvironmental and Archaeological Model-Based Age Estimate for the Colonization of Hawai’i.” 

They cited updated radiocarbon dating and pollen from archaeological coring data.

One of the best resources for dating first human activity on Kaua’i was developed by David Burney and William “Pila” Kikuchi at Makauwahi Cave on the swampy south coast of the island. Their 2006 paper, based on flooded sediments in the cave floor, estimated first Polynesian activity at between AD 1039-1241. 

A lot of the earliest archaeological dates in Hawai'i are now settling in on that time period.

What is amazing, given the compressed period of Hawaiian occupation, is the extent of the great public works that were completed: the many hundreds of fishponds, the massive stone temples, the remarkable waterworks for flooded kalo fields and the vast dryland field agricultural systems.

© Jan TenBruggencate

Stone adzes traveled widely, perhaps as a lubricant for Polynesian trade networks

 

How valuable was high-quality stone in a stone-age culture?

So important that the valuable stone found its way long distances from home.

This isn’t news to the archaeological community. It has found a Kaho`olawe-sourced basalt adz in the Tuamotu Islands. Mauna Kea adz quarry stone tools in the Marquesas. Marquesan Eiao Island adzes throughout what is now French Polynesia. The longest adz in the Bishop Museum’s collection was found in the ocean off O’ahu, but came from the Pu‘u Pāpa‘i quarry on Molokai.

Quality stone tools traveled. Maybe as trade items. Maybe a gifts between chiefs. Maybe because a stone tool from afar had a special prestige, or a mana, a perceived spiritual power.

They were part of what archaeologists call “interaction networks” between the spread-out islands across the Pacific.

The Museum of Stone Tools has some adz images here. 

Most volcanic islands had at least some good quality stone, although the quality varied. New Zealand and Australian researchers Christopher Jennings, Marshall Weisler and Richard Walter last year in the journal Archaeology in Oceania published a comprehensive report on stone quarries across the Pacific. It is entitled, “An archaeological review of Polynesian adze quarries and sources.”

They argue that stone tools were more than just useful implements, but a significant part of cultural activity in Polynesia. They hold that “the adze industry played a much more significant and complex role in Polynesian cultural history than is currently realized.”

Early Pacific residents could make tools from readily available sources near home, but if they found exemplary qualities in remote sites, they would go to great lengths to get that material—such as quarrying in the frigid heights of Mauna Kea, or an isolated island like Eiao.

Adzes, they say, were “the most distantly exchanged items in the Neolithic world.”

But why? “We can establish a relationship between large scale quarry production, fine grained stone, highly skilled flaking technology and long-distance exchange, but we still do not know what drove these associations,” they wrote.

A good quarry would be used continuously over long periods of time. The Pu‘u Pāpa‘i quarry on Molokai is one of the oldest in Hawai’i, perhaps because it had high quality stone and was near an early settlement site at Kawela.

Researchers Marshall I. Weisler, John Sinton, Quan Hua, and Jane Skippington reviewed that quarry in the Journal of Pacific Archaeology, a 2024 paper with the ponderous title, “Indirectly Dating one of the Oldest Adze Quarries in the Hawaiian Islands Provides Insights into the Colonisation Process and Community Network.”

Adzes made from stone at this specific Molokai quarry are readily identified because it the unique chemical characteristics, high in strontium and phosphate. The unique chemical makeup of quarry stones is how adzes are sometimes linked to their home islands.

One suggestion from a lot of recent work is that adzes were a key component of exchange networks. It is not clear whether adzes were a lubricant that facilitated trade between distant islands, or whether voyaging canoes were simply early Snap-On tool trucks, hauling quality tools to customers.

One thing that seems clear is that hauling valuables between island was a long-standing practice in the Pacific. It dates back at least to the Lapita culture of thousands of years ago, according to paper from May 2024 by Nicholas W. S. Hogg, Scarlett Chiu, Patrick V. Kirch and Glenn R. Summerhayes. 

That paper, in Archeology in Oceania, reviews early exchange networks involving adzes and pottery in the Lapita era of far western Polynesia.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Finally, a thorough tally of Hawaiian canoe plants, including pa'ihi and kamole.

 Which Hawaiian plants are canoe plants, the plants that Polynesian voyagers carried on their voyaging canoes to support new lives in new islands?

Some folks will say there were as few as 23. Others say as many as 32, Most are in between. Where’s the truth? Come on along for this investigation.

In most parts of the world, plants are conveniently divided into native and introduced. And among the natives, there are the endemics that are found nowhere else and the indigenous, which somehow got here without human assistance, but are also found in other parts of the world.

Canoe plant kukui (left), alongside hala, which might be but was already here. 
Jan TenBruggencate photo.

In Hawai’i, we had another classification: canoe plants or Polynesian introductions—the plants the Polynesian canoe voyagers carried with them to support their lives on newly found islands.

The late Lynton Dove White, in her book Canoe Plants of Ancient Hawai’i, lists 24 canoe plants. 

Art Whistler has more.

“The farther into the Pacific from the center of dispersal (Western Polynesia), the fewer successfully introduced canoe plants there were (e.g., ca. 60 in Tonga, c. 27 in Hawai‘i). Only about six canoe plant species were successfully introduced to New Zealand by the Maoris, mainly because canoe plants are tropical, and did not survive or thrive in temperate New Zealand,” wrote ethnobotanist Art Whistler. He is the author of “Plants of the Canoe People.” 

They are probably both low in their counts.

There were certainly somewhere between two and three dozen of them. 

At a minimum, these: `ape elephant ear, `awa kava, ‘auhuhu wild indigo or fish poison plant,`awapuhi shampoo ginger, ipu Lagenaria gourd vine, kalo taro, kamani Alexandrian laurel, ki ti leaf, ko sugar cane, kukui candlenut, mai`a banana, niu coconut, noni Indian mulberry, `ohe bamboo, `ohi`a `ai mountain apple, `olena turmeric, pia arrowroot, `uala sweet potato, uhi yam, `ulu breadfruit, and wauke paper mulberry.

That’s 21.

Many think hau or sea hibiscus and milo or portia tree were likely canoe plants, but could also have already been on the Islands.

That’s 23

Hala or pandanus used to be on the canoe plant list, but then fossils of hala were found in rocks erupted 100,000 to 500,000 years ago, and later ancient pollen was found in sediments that predate human arrival in the island.

The orange-flowered Kou (Cordia subcordata) also used to be placed on the list, but again, ancient pollen showed there were forests of it already there to greet the first canoes.

That said, the quartet of hala, hau, milo and kou were such valuable plants in Hawaiian and the larger Polynesian culture that they might have been on the first arriving canoes as part of the Polynesian survival kit, even if they turned out to be already in the Islands.

They would make 25.

There are problems with the list we’ve made so far. It is as far as most tallies go, but it is incomplete. For example, it lists banana as mai’a, but there were at least two quite different species of mai’a, and it lists one but there were three species of yam. And there are other plants that are not on the most common lists at all.

The yams: not only the uhi or winged yam, but also the hoi or bitter yam and pi’a Hawai’i, or five-leaf yam, Dioscorea pentaphylla, which is different from the Polynesian arrowroot that is also known as pi’a, Tacca leontopetaloides.

There appear to have been not one but two bananas, the more common mai’a , but also the fe’i banana, he’i, Musa troglodytarum.

The Bishop Museum’s Plants of Hawai'i program lists 32 canoe plants, some of which are so obscure they most people won’t know them. This Bishop Museum botany site seems to be the most thorough list out there, although (as I write this) it is missing the Hawaiian names of a couple of the less common species.

Plants of Hawai’i includes the popolo, or American nightshade, which clearly was an early arrival in the Islands, and is not commonly included in canoe plant lists.

Another canoe plant on its list is the Oxalis corniculata, yellow wood sorrel, has several Hawaiian names, ‘ihi ‘ai, ‘ihi ‘awa, ‘ihi maka ‘ula, ‘ihi mākole. It is edible, used medicinally for several ailments and made a dye.

Plants of Hawai’i cites two canoe plant species without Hawaiian names, although other sources do identify the Hawaiian names of those plants.

One is the Mexican primrose willow, Ludwigia octovalis, which other sources call water primrose, and in Hawaiian kamole or alohalua. It is said to be edible, but seems primarily to have been used medicinally, often in the form of a tea.

Another is pa’ihi, Polynesian cress, Rorippia sarmentosa. It is both edible and medicinal. Plants of Hawai’i lists this cress, as well as the primrose willow and wood sorrel, as possible accidental introductions—which suggests that perhaps seeds were on the canoes, but that they were not intended canoe plants.

The upshot is that while some folks will tell you there were precisely 23 or “more than 24” or 27 or exactly 30, or 32 canoe plants, nobody can be entirely sure. Here’s our comprehensive list—including the ones that might have been canoe plants but were also here already, and the ones that might have hitchhiked on canoes.

‘Ape, ‘auhuhu, ‘awa, ‘awapuhi, hala, hau, hoi, ‘ihi’ai, ipu, kalo, kamani, kamole, ki, ko, kou, kukui, mai’a, mai’a he’i, milo, niu, noni, ‘ohe, ‘ohi’a ‘ai, ‘olena, pa’ihi, pi’a Hawai’i, pi’a, popolo, ‘uala, uhi, ‘ulu, wauke.

And that’s 32 canoe plants.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Unique Hawaiiian farming system being revived: kalo growing in kukui mulch

 

While early Hawaiian agriculture clearly grew out of Polynesian farming systems, these islands developed a unique food-production structure quite different from those elsewhere in the Pacific.

Ethnobotanist and forest ecologist Noa Kekuewa Lincoln reviewed that uniqueness in a book chapter, “Pakukui: The productive fallow of ancient Hawaii,” printed in the book Farmer Innovations and Best Practices by Shifting Cultivators in Asia-Pacific.

Kukui (left) and Hala trees. 
Jan TenBruggencate photo.

“The Hawaiian Islands, one of the endpoints of Polynesian settlement of the Pacific, saw the development of unique agricultural advances that have not been seen anywhere else,” he wrote.

While flooded taro paddies (kalo,) hilled sweet potato fields (‘uala) and garden plots with sugar cane (ko) and fiber plants like wauke and mamaki are well understood, the importance of tree crops—agroforestry—has perhaps been overlooked, he argues.

“Although a robust literature and investigation of Hawaiian agriculture exists, arboriculture is severely underrepresented. This had led to a simplified understanding of Hawaiian arboriculture with an emphasis on permanent, breadfruit-dominated arboricultural systems.”

It may be that Western viewers look at agroforestry through shaded lenses, missing key features. For example, focusing only on foods, oils, medicines and fiber may miss key contributions of some tree crops, he suggested.

“In some regions, it may be that Hawaiians planted trees specifically to accumulate fertility. In these systems, very fast-growing woody plants that decomposed quickly, such as candlenut and hau, were cultivated,” he wrote.

Candlenut or kukui (Aleurites moluccanus) is and was an immensely useful tree, providing food for humans and livestock, oil for many purposes, dyes, medicine and much more. 

Less well understood is its value as a mulch. In a culture without Western fertilizers, mulches were of inestimable value. Mulches of kukui and other plants were stamped into the muds of kalo fields, where they rotted and improved fertility.

“In a recent experiment we grew taro in pure mulches of candlenut, sugar cane, and hau (Hibiscus tiliaceus), and the growth in candlenut mulch was by far the largest (by ~150%), despite it having the lowest nitrogen content of the three treatments,” Lincoln wrote.

Kukui leaves, branches and logs could also be used to create soils on solid lava. A mulch pit filled with kukui was called a pakukui.

“In these situations, litterfall was gathered into relatively impermeable pits in the lava and composted in order to create a growing medium. Local organic waste and small amounts of soil that could be excavated nearby was added to these enclosures, or pa, to aid in the rotting of composts.”

The system is similar to but larger than the manavai planting technique in Rapa Nui, where circular walls of stone protected small planting areas in rugged windswept environments. Manavai were also used for taro, as well as banana and sugar cane. 

The use of the pakukui led, Lincoln said, to a shifting agricultural pattern, in which farmers would be growing crops in some fields while other were composting. That contrasted with areas with breadfruit forests, which would be harvested year after year.

Kukui helped to make poorer soils much more viable for agriculture, though only for intermittent use. With the decline in Hawaiian population, the practice appeared to have died out.

“Following European contact in Hawaii, several forms of traditional agriculture rapidly declined, primarily due to the population crash that accompanied the introduction of foreign diseases. Among the practices that declined rapidly was the pakukui,” he wrote.

But the agricultural system still has value, and should be revived, he said. He is working with partners in Hamakua to convert “a long-established pasture back into a candlenut forest to reinitiate the practice of nutrient accumulation and natural fertilization to realize significant taro productivity.”

Lincoln works with Indigenous Crops and Cropping Systems in the Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences Department, College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, University of Hawaii at Manoa. His pakukui chapter was published in December 2023.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2024

Nihoa Island: Conservation crucible protects the last of a genus

Swimming in the clear, 60-foot waters in the lee of Nihoa’s western cliffs, I came across a floating leafed branch blown off the island in high winds.

It was, of course, a native plant: `aweoweo, an edible amaranth that is found on all the small islands from Nihoa to Laysan and Lisianski.

Little Nihoa rises abruptly from the sea 160 miles west of Kaua’i and Niihau. It is a fragment of an old, larger volcanic island, with steep basalt cliffs on three sides, a single sandy beach, and small forests of native loulu fan palms.

The `aweoweo is in good company. Nihoa is also home to many other native species, from the Hawaiian monk seals that sometimes litter the white sand beach by the dozens, to the native Nihoa miller birds that perch in the low bushes, to the native clumping grass, Eragrostis variabilis.

And, it turns out, on the blades of the grass, known in Hawaii as kawelu, there is an exceedingly rare tiny snail found only on this little island. The snail has been known to science for a century, but has only now been given a name.

Endodonta christenseni, photo by David Sischo

It is believed to be the last survivor of the 11 species of Endodonta snails of the Hawaiian Islands.

The story of the Nihoa snail was published in the October 15 issue of the Bishop Museum Occasional Papers, under the title, “The last known Endodonta species? Endodonta christenseni sp. nov.”  

The authors are Kenneth Hayes, John Slapcinsky, David Sischo, Jaynee Kim and Norine Yeung.

They write the snail’s story with a passion many might find unusual in scientific literature:

“Here we finally give what we think is the last Endodonta species a name and describe it using an integrative taxonomic approach. 

“In describing this last Endodonta species, our hope is to inspire increased awareness and appreciation that facilitates and motivates conservation for this species and all the other undiscovered and unnamed species threatened with extinction. 

“Unless protection of this species is implemented, it may be extinct within the next decade and we will lose the last of a lineage that existed for millions of years, and the stories it could tell.”

The snail was discovered on an expedition to Nihoa in 1923, and seen again periodically since then, including by land snail expert Carl Christensen, after whom it was named. 

There’s not much to this snail. It is described as pea-sized. Viewed from the side, it is shaped like a flying saucer. The shell has a complex pattern of striped whorls in browns and tans. And when it’s traveling, the little snail’s two antennae stretch out ahead of it.

The authors say it probably spends most of its time in the moist hearts of the grass clumps, and feeds on films of fungus that form on dead leaves. 

In a press release, co-author Yeung said that there remains hope that other rare species exist and can be protected and saved. “We need to act quickly and decisively if we are to beat the extinction clock that ticks louder with each passing day,” she said.

The paper emphasizes how critical the conservation challenge is: "Despite 15 years of sampling across more than 1000 sites throughout the Hawaiian archipelago, none of the 11 previously described species of Endodonta has been observed in our studies and it is likely that all are extinct. Endodonta christenseni sp. nov. is the only known extant member of the genus and quite possibly the last."

One ray of good news is that related land snails have been raised and increased number in captivity, and it is possible that the Nihoa snail could be re-introduced to parts of the island where it has disappeared due to human-caused wildfire during the 1800s.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2020

Ancient botanical ink between far-flung Polynesian cultures, and why does Pitcairn keep showing up?

Polynesian voyagers visited nearly every island in the tropical and subtropical Pacific, and they colonized and remained on most of them.

But a remarkable few were abandoned, despite apparently having the resources to maintain a population. Pitcairn is one of those.

This remote high island in the eastern South Pacific is best known as the refuge that the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian friends went to, to hide from the British navy. Pitcairn was uninhabited at the time. But it had been inhabited.

Canoe-sailing Polynesians had moved there a millenium ago, apparently thrived for 400 years, and then vanished. Like a sailing ship found drifting with no one aboard, its story is a mystery. Even today, as a British Overseas Territory, it has difficulty attracting people. An immigration site for Pitcairn is here. 

There is something eerie about Pitcairnʻs Polynesian history. Where did these islanders go? Did they abandon their island. Were they killed off by disease? Did war play a role? Or starvation?

One thing they may not have been is alone. 

In a major study of the Pacific-wide connections between island samples of paper mulberry (wauke, or Broussonetia papyrifera), which this blog covered in an earlier post, the plants collected on Pitcairn display deep genetic connections to Polynesiaʻs ancient past.

Wauke was a canoe plant—one of the critically important plants that all Polynesian voyaging canoes carried on their missions of colonization. It was important because it was the key plant for making fabric.

In studying the genetic differences and similiarities of wauke collected on different islands, the researchers found that Pitcairnʻs plants had strong genetic roots elsewhere in Polynesia.

For example, they found that "New Guinea is directly connected to Remote Oceania through Pitcairn."

There are distinct cultural differences between portions of Polynesia that were occupied at different times. For example, Fiji, Tonga and Futuna are an older Polynesian culture, which the authors call Western Remote Oceania (WRO). Islands like Niue, the Cook Islands, the Marquesas, the Austral Islands and Rapa Nui are understood to have been populated later. They are called Eastern Remote Oceania (ERO). New Guinea, in Near Oceania is outside that range and is considered even older in Polynesian history.

Yet, then there is Pitcairn.

"We found Pitcairn plants in a pivotal position between WRO and ERO. In addition, Pitcairn accessions linked with genotypes from New Guinea in Near Oceania," they write.

How to explain that? Pitcairn is physically in the newer area of Eastern Remote Oceania. Yet its wauke tells a different story, a story of ancient connections: "The link between these... groups was Pitcairn," the researchers write.

But the authors suggest that this does not suggest that Pitcairn was an ancient voyaging crossroads that maintained voyaging connections across thousands of miles of open sea. "We do not propose a direct migration route from New Guinea to Pitcairn," the authors write.

The explanation, they suggest, is simpler.

Pitcairn was occupied so long ago, and also abandoned so long ago, that it retained the ancient genetics of the wauke that the earliest voyagers carried with them.

"This relationship between samples from New Guinea and Pitcairn represents the survival of old genotypes on Pitcairn Island due to centuries of isolation after initial colonization by Austronesian speaking peoples. We suggest that these genotypes were probably lost on other islands that represent the intermediate steps of dispersal and migration," they write.

Hawaiʻi, the Marquesas, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Pitcairn are also linked genetically through wauke.

"The connections observed in our study through the genetic analysis of paper mulberry plants... show ties between Rapa Nui and Marquesas and between the Marquesas and Hawaii," the write.

Ultimately, the work confirms the conclusion that all Polynesia is connected, and that a thousand years ago, this stone age culture was tightly connected.

©Jan TenBruggencate 2019

Wauke tracks Polynesian voyaging routes: New genetic studies

Fiji kapa making. 

Credit: Andrea Seelenfreund

Genetic studies of one of the key canoe plants, wauke, appear to confirm Polynesian voyaging from west to east across the Pacific, but also identify key regions of voyaging.

Wauke, also known as paper mulberry or Broussonetia papyrifera, is the raw material for some of the best Hawaiian and Polynesian kapa or bark cloth. It also produces edible fruit. And interestingly, most of Polynesia only has female plants, while the Hawaiian Islands have both males and females.

How does that happen? The Hawaiian males apparently were brought to these islands after European contact. That will be reviewed later.  On all other Polynesian islands, all plants found today are female, but the research did find a couple of examples of male plants in samples from the early 20th century from the Marquesas and Rapa. 

This is confusing. The authors of one study on the subject said it could be that wauke males were included in early voyaging, and have since disappeared, leaving the plants to be reproduced only by human involvement. But there is an odd alternative possibility. The Broussonetia clan is known to occasionally undergo sex reversion, in which female plants may rarely produce male flowers, or males may change to females. 

Wauke

Credit: USDA, J.S. Peterson

Hawai`i is different from the rest of Polynesia because it still has male wauke. But those do not appear to be from early Polynesian introductions. Rather, the males apparently descend from a separate, non-Polynesian introduction to the Islands by 19th century Asian immigrants. The male wauke do not appear to have come through Polynesia, like the females. You can read more about the sexual distribution of the paper mulberry here. 

"Most paper mulberry plants now present in the Pacific appear to be descended from female clones introduced prehistorically," the authors of that paper write.

The dominant wauke stock in the Pacific appears to have originated in Taiwan, where, as in China and Indochina, it is native. But as a valued canoe plant, it was carried by Polynesian voyagers virtually everywhere they went. The plants are found not only in Hawai`i but at New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa, Wallis and Tonga, in the Marquesas, the Society Islands, the Austral islands (Rapa), Pitcairn and Rapa Nui or Easter Island.

Wauke is a dioecious plant, meaning that male and female flowers occur on different plants. Because the existing plants are all female, the Polynesian wauke can't reproduce itself, and needs human help being transported and being kept alive.

"In the absence of breeding populations, the spread (i.e. movement) of paper mulberry depends entirely on a continuous human cultural tradition of preserving, propagating and transporting the plant," wrote the authors of the paper cited above.

In a new paper, many of the same authors, add to the story of the wauke. The latest paper, published this year in the journal PLOS One, is entitled "Human mediated translocation of Pacific paper mulberry [Broussonetia papyrifera (L.) L’He ´r. ex Vent. (Moraceae)]: Genetic evidence of dispersal routes in Remote Oceania."

The authors are from Chile, New Zealand and Taiwan. They include Gabriela Olivares, Barbara Peña-Ahumada, Johany Peñailillo, Claudia Payacan, Ximena Moncada, Monica Saldarriaga-Cordoba, Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, KuoFang Chung, Daniela Seelenfreund and Andrea Seelenfreund. 

A Eurekalert press release on the study, which is simpler reading. 

The researchers conducted genetic studies on samples of wauke from 380 modern and museum samples from 33 islands across the Pacific.

They found that while all those female wauke are presumably clones of an original import, there is still some genetic diversity, and it can help understand migration patterns within the remote islands of Oceania.

"Our data detect a complex structure of three central dispersal hubs linking West Remote Oceania with East Remote Oceania. despite its vegetative propagation and short timespan since its introduction into the region by prehistoric Austronesian speaking colonists," wrote co-author Andrea Seelenfreund.

The three clusters where the wauke are most closely related to each other are: 1. Tonga and Fiji; 2. The islands of Samoa, Wallis and New Caledonia; 3. and then all of eastern Polynesia, including Hawai`i, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, Austral Islands and Rapa Nui.

There is evidence that Hawai`i had a more complex wauke heritage than other islands. Not counting the modern importation of male plants, it appears that traditional Polynesian strains of wauke came from both eastern Polynesia and Tonga in separate importation voyages. That adds an odd wrinkle to migration theory.

There seems to be a suggestion in the data that the wauke traveled between Taiwan and New Guinea, and from there into the rest of Polynesia. There are also suggestions that the wauke traveled on all voyaging canoes that were in the process of colonizing new areas, but after that were likely not on subsequent back-and-forth voyages.

"Crops important for survival and cultural reproduction were probably aboard all colonizing canoes, although probably not part of later inter-archipelago commercial networks or part of ritual exchanges of high valued objects, such as textiles, adzes, whale teeth, shells and other items between established settlements," the authors wrote.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2019

Polynesian tattoos: Out of Tonga, into the world

Tattooing is not a Polynesian invention, but it clearly developed into a fine art in the Pacific Islands.

Ötzi, the fellow who died in the ice in the Italian Alps 5,300 years ago had dozens of tattoos. And his death predates the development of Polynesian culture. Ötzi's 61 tattoos were generally geometric forms. Crosses and stripes and rows of lines. Early Egyption mummies had tattoos as well.

But tattooing certainly developed dramatically during the Polynesian period. A new paper on Polynesian tattooing reviews the way the tattooing art progressed.

(Image: Australian archaeologist Geoffrey Clark of The Australian National University holds a 2,700-year-old tattoo comb from Tonga. Credit: Jack Fox/ANU)

It is "Ancient Tattooing in Polynesia," published in the Journal of Island and CoastalArchaeology by Australian researchers Geoffrey Clark of the Australian National University at Canberra and Michelle Langley of Griffith University at Langley. 

Tattooing is the art of inserting pigment under the skin to create a permanent mark. In its finest form, the skin is used as a canvas for broad patterns. In Polynesia most of those patterns were geometric, but they often represented organic organisms—like sharks or birds.

Much Polynesian tattooing was done with bone "combs," thin planks of bone with a series of sharp points carved into one end. The bone used to make the tattooing combs was sometimes human, but more often bird or pig, and even flying foxes and fish. The sharp bone tips would be dipped in pigment, placed against the skin and tapped repeatedly with a mallet to inject the dye.

One of the interesting things about the history of Pacific tattooing is that tattoo tools don't show up in the earliest archaeological sites, the authors say. It is also clear that while tattoo tools were found through much of the Pacific and Asia, "the most elaborate bone tattoo tools restricted to Polynesia," they write.

People in other parts of the Pacific used other tools—like bits of sharp obsidian—for tattooing, but the Polynesian tattooing comb first appears in archaeological sites dating to about 2,700 years ago in Tonga.

The many similar tattoo tools in Eastern Polynesia, including Hawai`i, date much younger.

"Bone combs are relatively common in the archaeological record of East Polynesia which was colonized 1,000–700 years ago," they write.

The materials are so common that it suggests tattooing itself, while it did not exist 3000 years ago, became a regular part of growing up in Polynesia, particularly in what is now French Polynesia. Joseph Banks, who was Captain Cook's botanist in the Pacific during the 1760s, wrote:

"It [tattooing] was done between the ages of 14 and 18 and so essential it is that I have never seen one single person of years of maturity without it."

In the 1800,s Tongan men who failed to be tattooed were subject to ridicule.

Polynesian tattooing became such a social force, the authors say, that the techniques spread to other parts of Oceania. And although some tattooing was clearly done earlier in Europe—Ötzi being the best example—European whalers and explorers brought back an interest in the tattoo from Polynesia to Europe in the 1700s and 1800s.

"Interest in 'native' tattooing continued during, and after, the voyages of Cook and others to the Pacific during the Enlightenment," Clark and Langley write.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2019

Do humans always wipe out the big animals, or can they sometimes coexist? Evidence from Madagascar.

Scientists generally accept the theory that once humans arrive at an isolated landscape, they quickly destroy the big animals there.

Some call it the blitzkrieg hypothesis. But there's new evidence that, at a minimum, raises questions about this theory.

(Image: Bones with tool cut marks of the Madagascar Aepyornis, the giant elephant bird. Credit:  V. Pérez, Science Advances, 5:9 (2018))

In the Hawaiian Islands, the big flightless ducks that have been called moa nalo were in the islands when the first Polynesians arrived, but were gone soon thereafter. Smithsonian researcher Storrs Olson reported that the moa nalo—which represents a class of extinct big birds—disappeared during the early human occupation of the Islands.

Fossils of numerous such species are "contemporaneous with Polynesian culture. The loss of species of birds appears to be due to predation and destruction of lowland habitats by humans before the arrival of Europeans," Olson wrote. 

In New Zealand, the class of giant moa birds (Dinornis sp.) also disappeared with the arrival of the humans. New Zealand Geographic has a piece on that loss. 

In Madagascar, the arrival of humans has been linked to the loss of the giant elephant birds, Aepyornis maximus and other species.

But recently, researchers in Madagascar found Aepyornis bones more than 10,000 years old with human tool marks on them. Until now, humans were not believed to have been in Madagascar until 2,500 years ago or at most 4,000 years ago. Some came from Polynesian origin societies to the east and some from Africa to the west.

And Aepyornis are believed to only have gone extinct in the last couple of thousand years.

So, 10,500 years ago?

"Our evidence for anthropogenic perimortem modification of directly dated bones represents the earliest indication of humans in Madagascar, predating all other archaeological and genetic evidence by >6000 years and changing our understanding of the history of human colonization of Madagascar," write the authors of this paper, Early Holocene humanpresence in Madagascar evidenced by exploitation of avian megafauna. 

An article in Science reviews the issue. 

In it, paleoecologist David Burney says it's a big deal: The findings"fly in the face of all that we thought we knew about human arrival in Madagascar." Burney has worked extensively with the Kaua`i-based National Tropical Botanical Garden, and has also done considerable work in Madagascar.

If humans were there that early, why didn’t they earlier wipe out the big birds and big mammals as the theory suggests they do? And if humans were there that early, why haven't archaeologists found evidence of the human presence?

For now, two theories arise.

1) It was perhaps a small, temporary human presence—maybe a visiting group of people that killed and ate some creatures and then left, or died out.

2) Maybe they haven't found evidence because they haven’t been looking for archaeological sites that early.

That said, scientists for four decades have understood that when humans arrive, they conduct a "blitzkrieg" that wipes out many big animals. Is it possible that in Madagascar, humans were able to coexist, to survive for thousands of years without wiping out megafauna?

Depending on what researcghers uncover next, it is at least possible.

Well, and then there's the question of how humans were voyaging across oceans as early as 10,500 years ago. That's more than 5,000 years before Polynesians began plying the Pacific in their voyaging canoes.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2018