DNA suggests people from the Americas had a role in the peopling of Pacific islands
More than 800 years ago, Indigenous people in South America traversed more than 7,000 kilometers of open sea to reach eastern Polynesia, a new study suggests.Genetic analyses show that initial DNA swaps between the voyagers and people on a still-undetermined eastern Polynesian island were followed by the spread of the South American ancestry to other eastern Polynesian islands.
Eventually that ancestry spread as far east as Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, a team led by computational biologist Alexander Ioannidis and population geneticist Andrés Moreno-Estrada reports online July 8 in Nature.
The study offers the first genetic glimpse of “a prehistoric event that left no conclusive trace, except for the one recorded in the DNA of those who had contact 800 years ago in one of the most remote places on Earth,” says Moreno-Estrada, of the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity in Irapuato, Mexico.
