Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there.

(Mar.A blend of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester’s Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.įor more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. This fascinating work could prove to be the standard on the subject for some time to come. Along the way, she writes with infectious awe and appreciation about Polynesian culture and with sharp intelligence about the blind spots of those investigating it at different times. Thompson does not hesitate to point out erroneous thinking, such as Thor Heyerdahl’s unfounded claims that Polynesians migrated westward from South America. Thompson looks at the contributions to knowledge of the migrations of Polynesian oral tradition (first shared with Cook by Tahitian “man of knowledge” Tupaia, a master of various fields including navigation, medicine, and genealogy), ethnographers (including Maori anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa), linguists, archaeologists, mathematicians, and latter-day experimental voyagers who recreated Polynesian sea journeys (including Nainoa Thompson, president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society no relation to the author). James Cook, the first European to recognize that the distantly dispersed islands he visited were all populated by related peoples. This story, she tells readers, “is not so much what happened as a story about how we know.” Since “we” here refers to Westerners, the narrative begins not with the prehistoric Polynesians but with Europeans’ first journeys into the Pacific, most notably those of Capt. In this artfully written book, Thompson ( Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All) ably elucidates changing understandings of the ancient Polynesian migrations.

Sea people by christina thompson