One thing I took away from the book was that Polynesian colonization follows a pattern that looks deliberate. Specifically that they would depart on a voyage against the winds and currents, the hard way, so that they could make a swift return if they couldn't find the destination. Or at least that's what some computer modelling of the spread of Polynesian culture says. That finding is a bit at odds with this NYT article, not sure what that means.

Some other links for this NYT article:

The PNAS page (abstract only, paywall) http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/10/18/1612426113

Another summary with more details https://around.uoregon.edu/content/study-finds-climate-helpe...

Except the very latest issues it's all online for free, and some fascinating reading. I used a lot of it writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(watercraft)

For example http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/document?wid=4414&page=0 discusses modern trimarans versus traditional craft complete with rigging, photographs and vessel schematics, and http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/document?wid=5567&page=0 provides wind tunnel measurements of the efficacy of traditional rigging.

http://www.hawaii-nation.org/gis/8-conclusion.html

Thx!

A popular theory is that Polynesian navigators would hone in on these cloud patterns in the sky, treating them as the big arrows in the sky pointing to land that they essentially are.

Only islands with high peaks, which means most likely, volcanic islands. Which happens to be true for large islands in the pacific. As opposed to purely coral islands which rise just above the sea level.

However, Polynesian navigation was quite sophisticated. They followed the stars at night; they could read the ocean to tell where land was; they could follow sea birds to roosting places.

That enlarges your target some, but still... over those kinds of distances, to hit a speck of land like Easter Island seems pretty amazing.

I've heard stories of Islanders that could detect different types of fish from surface wave patterns.

More than anything, I just wonder how they managed to cross thousands of miles of open water and hit relatively tiny targets.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Madagascar

One thing we know now is that it is possible to sail Polynesian voyaging canoes pretty much any direction you want to go, at least over long distances. The Polynesian Voyaging Society has sailed Hōkūleʻa [1][2] all over Polynesia at this point and in fact they've sailed her all the way to the North Atlantic since then.

Back in Kon Tiki's day, the performance of Polynesian voyaging canoes wasn't well understood. They can't tack near as well as a modern sailboat, but they can tack to 45 degrees off the wind. And although it's true that prevailing winds in the South Pacific blow east to west, they still vary quite a lot in their exact direction. This means it's possible to sail to an island east of your starting point in a voyaging canoe even though the prevailing winds and currents are against you. Also it turns out the the prevailing winds can completely change directions during El Niño years, which happen with some frequency, making west to east sailing a lot easier. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokulea

[2] http://www.hokulea.com/

[3] I don't have a good citation for this last paragraph, but it might be from Ben Finney's paper "Anomalous Westerlies, El Niño, and the Colonization of Polynesia", https://www.jstor.org/stable/677659?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

ie Russia and Alaska were supposedly connected, same for Britain vs Europe mainland, and also South pacific to some extent.

It doesn't explain all cases (ie mentioned easter island, no clue there), but this might have many reasons

I have heard/read that changing weather patterns had an effect on the movement of people around the Pacific, making some journeys easier or harder during different periods. Long distance voyaging had essentially ceased again by the time Europeans were exploring the Pacific. Unfortunately, I can't provide a reference.

In Polynesia that's mostly true (although Samoa to Tonga is rather far, so depends on what you mean by 'long'). In Hawaii, the home and voyage of the ancestors was a place in legendary history.

In Micronesia though, there are still a few people who can do long-distance voyages.

https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/physical/nav...

"How we think ancient humans reached remote ..."

We will never know without having been there, just like the bering straight migration "fact" has now been debunked, to name an example.

It is very disappointing how sbjective and arrogant researchers have become, from astronomers to psychologists, and political scientists at the top.

We don't know many things, we think that is how they work based on what we see, but they never say that and it becomes the master narrative.

Publishing this article in a wide forum like PNAS is the way of asking the community at large for reactions, for or against. If it had been a more narrowly discipline-specific article, it would appear elsewhere, like Oikos or Oecologia.

It is, however, incompatible with an orthodox interpretation of it.