erhebung

Across the Pacific

Yes­terday I happened upon an inter­esting article about a theory that might explain how pre­his­toric peoples migrated from Asia to America:

Mr. Enock indic­ates as the prin­cipal islands upon which [pre­his­toric relics] are to be found, Easter Island, Pitcairn Island, Tahiti, the Mar­quesas, Tonga […], Lele and Ponape of the Caroline Islands, and the Marianas or Ladrones. Tracing these islands on a chart of the pacific Ocean and it will be seen that they form points — “stepping stones” — reaching from the island region just off the southern coast of Asia to the coast of Chile in South America. On most of these islands there has been extensive work by wall-​building man, some of the vestiges of which are as puzzling as those found on the South American coast line of the Pacific.

[…]

[W]e are told, Mr. Enock refer­ring to Dr. Wallace’s letter […]: “It is the opinion of Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace that a stream of migra­tion from East tropical Asia, where the Veddahs of Ceylon, the early temple-​builders of Cambodia, and the Ainos of Japan, forming remnants of the Caucasian races, which emig­rants in con­junc­tion with Malay tribes produced the Mahoris of Samoa, Hawaii, and New Zealand, reached South America and were the origin of the Incas of Peru.“

Thor Heyer­dahl, a fas­cin­ating man who warrants a post all to himself, also believed that there could be a con­nec­tion between the South American Indian and Easter Island cultures. And there are other pieces of evidence indic­ating that there were links across the Pacific:

The fact that the sweet potato, a staple of the pre-​contact Poly­ne­sian diet, is of South American origin, and that there is no evidence that its seed could spread by floating across the ocean, indic­ates that there must have been some contact between the two cultures. Either Poly­ne­sians traveled to South America and back, or Indian balsa rafts drifted to Poly­nesia, possibly unable to make a return trip because of their less developed nav­ig­a­tional skills and more fragile boats, or both. Poly­ne­sian con­nec­tions in South America have been claimed to exist among the Mapuche Indians in central and southern Chile. The Poly­ne­sian name for the small islet of Sala y Gómez (Manu Motu Motiro Hiva, “Bird’s islet on the way to a far away land”) east of Easter Island has also been seen as a hint that South America was known before European contacts. Further com­plic­ating the situ­ation is that the word Hiva (“far away land”) was also the name of the islanders’ legendary home country. Inex­plic­able insist­ence on an eastern origin for the first inhab­it­ants was unan­imous among the islanders in all early accounts.

I’m now going to dive back into the dozen or so Wiki­pedia articles I book­marked while writing this post.

An illus­tra­tion from ‘Does Easter Island Solve Secret of the Pacific?’, an article pub­lished in The New York Times on the 4th of August, 1912. (Source)