Afarensis

There are other clues to Polynesians making landfall in the US. For example, the plank canoes of the Chumash tribe near Santa Barbara and the Channel Islands.

Posted by: Enrique | June 5, 2007 1:32 PM

I think Nick is speaking tonga in cheek

Posted by: Michael Roberts | June 5, 2007 5:08 PM

Sweet Potatoes, Chicken Bones and Polynesian Mental Oceans.
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I found your "sweet potato comes to Polynesia" post too late to comment. It indicates you'd enjoy a pdf I have, found via Google, so I was planning to send this as an email with the pdf attached. The abstract was included in case it fell by the wayside. Please excuse my not chasing down some links as I don't have time. And I'll apologize for the length -- it was not written for posting.
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ABSTRACT
Stars Shed Light on Hawaiian Settlement dates, Voyaging, Catastrophic or "Extreme" Events in the Hawaiian Islands and a California connection

Society for Hawaiian Archaeology, 2005 (SHA)
Victoria S. Creed, Ph.D., Waihona `Aina Corp.

Hawaiians encode not only a long history of astronomical events in their genealogies and literature, they also include catastrophic, or what today are called "extreme events." Many of these astronomical and extreme events are datable and, along with other fields of study, add more pieces to the puzzle of voyaging and early settlements. The genealogy of Kanalu tells of repeated catastrophes in the Hawaiian Islands with total or near decimation of early populations. Similarly, an encoded description of the sky, a spectacular star event along the Northern limit of the Tropic of Cancer, the ensuing catastrophe and a Hawaiian connection with the American continent appear in S.M. Kamakau's Kaua`i/O`ahu tale "No ke Ano Hoku" or Pupuhuluana. Hawaiian voyaging involved planning of every aspect of the venture - including catastrophes - and it appears that food plant nurseries were set up wherever they went, including on the west coast of the Americas, to access for replenishment after catastrophes. This tale may be a Hawaiian tie into the Chumash Indian site in Ventura County, California (Carbon date 601 A.D.).
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I've only skimmed this but it's fascinating. I've had 15-year interest in Polynesian navigation technology, which to my way of thinking stands as one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. It was done without instrumentation by wringing out of an open ocean environment all possible sensory data. Navigators used a 3-dimensional geographic mental map on which they kept their start and target islands, a reference, or proposed, course, and an actual, adjusted course, the latter of which was constantly updated as it was effected by currents, winds, course references, etc. It was all done in their minds; there was never a physical map. This required the navigator never sleep more than 20 minutes at a time for weeks, even a month or more. Otherwise, they could miss course-altering events and when the endpoint was near they would not have the proper adjustments required and so might never find the island[s] they were targeting.

Human navigational prowess got to this level again only with the European exploration and mapping of the Pacific. That purposeful exploration had to wait for technological capability and early scientific instrumentation.

This ancient technology, the long-range versions, came within a couple decades and 2 or 3 individuals of disappearing from Earth.

One of the most important early elements of the Hawaiian cultural renaissance was the Polynesian Voyaging Society, [extensive website] which constructed one of the first modern long-distance Pacific voyaging canoes. They brought one of the last navigators from the western Pacific to Hawaii, and later he taught Nainoa Thompson. It took years. Nainoa in turn has taught many new Pacific navigators. [Nainoa's teacher, Mau Piailug, says he never sleeps when navigating, that his eyes are closed but inside he's not sleeping. It's pretty easy to understand how this might actually be true, and done.]

An Ocean in Mind [Will Kyselka, 1987] first sets up the Hawaiian's first recapitulation voyage to the Marquesas, home of the ancient Hawaiian colonists, an over 2,00 mile journey. It then goes into Nainoa's mind, day-by-day, for the month-long voyage explicating how it was done. This is more than half the book.

One item of note. The Hawaiians could not find a single koa tree left in Hawaii large enough for a canoe hull. Eventually, they accepted an offer from SeaAlaska, the southeast Alaska native corporation, of a gift of two trees from the thousands of spruce they owned. The ancient stories have hints that an occasional giant Pacific Northwest drift log grounded on ancient Hawaiian shore.

I have a memory of text and photos of a celebratory festival that attracted a dozen or so voyaging canoes from all corners of Oceania in the mid-nineties. However, it wasn't finadable in my most recent book on the subject, Sailing in the Wake of our Ancestor, [Ben Finney, 2003]. In there several such festivals or trips involving such multiple canoes are discussed, the largest number being seven. It cites a total mileage for the first Hawaiian canoe, the Hokulea, of 70,000 miles. In 1995 six voyaging canoes independently navigated to the Marquesas producing extremely similar courses.

One mental wayfinding technique in some traditions is so amazing and nominally anti-commonsensical, involving setting course with eyes closed, I put it in a poem. Navigators would lie down in the center of the bilge of the canoe, which is actually it's pivot point, and close their eyes to concentrate. They had memorized knowledge of seasonal swell patterns in open ocean along their trip route, and this was a means for them to be felt. Once perceived, multiple swells of different frequencies and directions could be teased apart and so give a relative sense of position and heading. For example, certain swell patterns are island-group wakes created by stable seasonal winds and these wakes incrementally shift as one's position relative to such islands changes.

A couple further pdf notes. The Chummash mentioned in the abstract are the most maritime Californian tribe beyond possibly some extreme northern ones that are outliers to the Pacific northwest cultural area. The Chumash used a sophisticated and anomalous sewn plank canoe technology. Closest [I surmise] other place this is found is Hawaii, and it's a central technology throughout much of Polynesia.

The extreme Hawaiian tsunamis caused by earthquake-triggered [I think] megaslides popped up as an article in sci am within the last few years. If my memory's correct, these have all been generated by the big island. One mind-boggling calculation of one such tsunami sent toward Maui showed that as it passed Molokai, on the lee-side, it trailed a trough so deep it exposed the ocean bottom.

The connections in the pdf are many. One particularly caught my eye. There was an ultimately failed attempt to colonize Hawaii centuries before the successful one, which is news to me. [Hawaii was "rediscovered" centuries after it's settlement by, as I remember, a Fijian priest-warrior checking out references in their oral tradition. He mounted an exploratory trip, found it, then later returned with a fleet and a 10,000-man invasion force and conquered the islands. One of my favorite places in Hawaii, the big island's Kohala peninsula, has a large heiau built in one auspicious night to celebrate that victory over the Hawaiians. The stones came from the Pololu valley, about five miles distance, passed bucket-brigade style by this army.]

Regarding the successful colonization, here are the concluding sentences of the pdf, a note in some web references after the reference section:

"The actual ultimate successful colonization of Hawaii in the 8th or 9th century AD comes on the years of the largest cluster of Pacific El Nino events during the past 10,000 years during the period of around 400 through 700 AD, as I and co-authors discovered in recently writing a paper (for the journal Quaternary International) on the impact of the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period in the Palau Islands."

A note on academia here and I'll begin by stressing my superficial knowledge of the controversy. However, signs are numerous that arrogance at some level is a root cause that a significant portion of interested scholars held the position, at least through the 70s and likely much longer, that this navigational technology never existed. I assume this position has been extinquished. They insisted the expansion was accidental with an absolute minimum of follow-up contact. It's clear, now, Oceania was populated through purposeful exploratory enterprise, likely driven by overpopulation.

It's also worth noting this stupidity lead to scholars declaring, accusing actually, the cultural renaissance across Oceania was actually a falsified reconstruction being done for political reasons. As far as I know these were exclusively foreign scholars. It's clear, if one considers for a moment, that without some sort of immersion in that specific renaissance. as an anthropologists would do, the falsification occurring was done by the academics. Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence.

That academic attitude, prejudice actually, is all the more damning because as, the pdf demonstrates, [I'm only familiar with Hawaii] there are numerous pieces of evidence for the opposite in the saga-like songs and stories passed down for centuries. Such evidence tends to be dismissed as fanciful mythology, of course. Again, my knowledge about this is from minimal reference in a few books, but all of what I do know about this position was built on negative evidence. It seems likely this point of view had little or no positive evidence nor documentation [nor much archaeology?], just the incredulity these primal societies could figure out a way to do this.

A couple weeks ago I posted on Commonground about this area, specifically about aboriginal mythology and nuclear waste disposal. I would also have mentioned this navigational technology, but it never came to mind.

Much to my disappointment, but not to my surprise, my project last year at scienceblogs confirmed an apparent bias in science toward any complex, successful pre-science technology that science can't explain, particularly in primal cultures, and currently as. . . well, you know. Some of this, per the recent Nesbitt-Mooney framing explosion, is incredibly ignorant and obstinate. Many don't see they would never approach an unfamiliar field of science with such a mentality, but rather assume a complex, accumulated body of knowledge built from reference to reality and a sophisticated craft skill that needed learning. Stipulating such a bias exists, it suggests many scientists see the non-scientific world as innately inferior, which in turn allows them to turn off what are otherwise brilliant intellects capable of teasing apart the universe like ocean swell patterns.

It's a blind spot. One quick recurrent example of turned-off brains . . . the citation of the pressures of publish-or-perish or demands of a piecemeal, highly competitive funding structure, etc. making it impossible for scientists to undertake public communication as any sort of priority. For scientists, this is an astonishingly passive excuse and always misses a fundamental, to me obvious, element. These pressures, while existing for absolutely sound reasons, are still completely the doing of science itself. It's all internal. The rules are created and enforced by scientists. The structure of the funding system, the decisions -- funding, hiring, etc -- it's all science. Thus, science can, as an institution, decide to change things, and then successfully do so. I noted several times at sciblogs I had no idea how to overcome such problems, only that it was internal to science, and once a consensus acknowledges it and concludes it's dysfunctional, swift work will be done. How to do that is a trivial question compared to overcoming science's apparent isolation, sometimes even disdain, from the way the other 98% of our society functions. For the indefinite future, that isolation will be it's Achilles heel. It will steadfastly be exploited for political gain until science redesigns this weak point.

Posted by: SkookumPlanet | June 5, 2007 8:09 PM

I'll foward the pdf tomorrow. If more than two days go by without a pdf arriving, please send me a reminder email.

A late addition wasn't clear. It should read "In 1995 six voyaging canoes independently navigated from Hawaii to the Marquesas producing extremely similar courses."

Posted by: skookumplanet | June 6, 2007 3:21 AM