The Committee to Nuke Elysium

Polynesians were able to sail downwind to Easter Island and New Zealand centuries ago, a new analysis of past climate has found. There were narrow windows of time between 1140 and 1260 AD where the winds allowed this, say researchers in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It’s really incredible to think that for a 120-year period the Polynesians took advantage of these windows of opportunities and they crossed almost a third of the surface of the Earth,” says co-author Associate Professor Ian Goodwin of Macquarie University. Archaeological evidence suggests that from around 1000 years AD, Polynesians travelled in their ocean-sailing canoes east from Samoa to what is known as Central East Polynesia (CEP) – which includes Society, Tuamotu, Marquesas, Gambier, Southern Cook and Austral Islands. In a short period between 1140 and 1260 AD they then migrated on to New Zealand and Easter Island. “It’s always been quite a mystery as to why there was a concentration of colonisation in a period of a couple of hundred years and why it ceased after that,” says Goodwin. Especially since, according to today’s prevailing winds, travelling to these later destinations would have been against the wind for most of the time, he adds. While some researchers have proposed Polynesians must have had much more complex canoes than have been found to date, Goodwin and colleagues suggest this was not necessary. They have found that during this short time there were actually a number of ‘climate windows’, lasting around 20 years each, where the winds were in favour of the long voyages to New Zealand and Easter Island.