Comment on Old Easter Island genomes show no sign of a population collapse
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 months agoI wonder if there was ever a minority NA population on the island alongside Polynesians
That’s an interesting hypothesis and definitively worth checking, but I personally find unlikely that Rapa Nui had any sort of meaningful (in numbers) Native American minority - there’s practically no material pressure to do so.
jack@hexbear.net 2 months ago
It was a similar distance from there to the nearest Polynesian island, and we know they maintained contact and trade that direction. South America would’ve offered entirely unique trade goods, so I don’t think it’s out of the question at all. These were history’s greatest sailors and navigators, after all.
Certainly 10% DNA admixture requires more than just a few small interactions.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 months ago
I do think that it was more than just a few small interactions, but I don’t think that they happened in Rapa Nui island, or that they got the chance to develop an Amerindian minority there. I think that, instead, the Polynesians had small coastal settlements here in South America, used for trade.
So those 10% admixture would be like in your other hypothesis - mixed kids raised Polynesian.
The key is that what you said is true for the Polynesians, but not for the Amerindians - from the Polynesians’ PoV the Amerindians were a big cluster of potential trading partners with exotic resources, but from the Amerindians’ PoV it was just a small island in the middle of nowhere, that could be only safely reached by knowing how to navigate the oceans - and at least Andean Amerindians likely didn’t know how to do it, as they were way more focused on land-based tech (terrace farming, road building, freeze-drying…).
jack@hexbear.net 2 months ago
That makes a lot of sense! Agreed that that’s more likely. Though those settlements would’ve been pretty transient and/or small since we have nothing in the archaeological record. And no pigs.