Part of the answer I think is that we often underestimate the level of sophistication of people who lived a very long time ago. Polynesians were expert navigators, they had a lot of knowledge of things like wind patterns, currents, birds, the positions of the sun and stars... and knew how to use those to orient themselves at sea. Long voyages were probably dangerous, but they may well have had the means to turn back and return home in case they didn't find land. This article is really interesting:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation

Maybe discovering far away lands was to them meaningful for exactly the same reasons that it was later for the European explorers who rediscovered their islands...

> Part of the answer I think is that we often underestimate the level of sophistication of people who lived a very long time ago.

I couldn't agree more.

> Tupaia was born at Ha'amanino Harbour on Ra'iatea around 1725 and became a leading ariori priest for the Taputapuatea marae. Tupaia was trained in the fare-'ai-ra'a-'upu, or schools of learning, about the origin of the cosmos, genealogies, the calendar, proverbs and histories. He was also taught how to be a star navigator. His memorized knowledge included island lists, including their size, reef and harbor locations, whether they were inhabited, and if so, the name of the chief and any food produced there. More importantly, his memory would include the bearing of each island, the time to get there, and the succession of stars and islands to follow to get there. These islands included the Society Islands, the Austral Islands, the Cook Islands, plus Samoa, Tonga, Tokelau and Fiji.[1]

> when asked for details of the region Tupaia drew a chart showing all 130 islands within a 2,000 miles (3,200 km) radius and was able to name 74 of them

> The chart he drew for James Cook in August 1769 shows interconnected voyaging routes ranging from Rotuma west of Samoa, via Samoa and Tonga, the southern Cook Islands and the Austral Group, Mangareva and Pitcairn all the way to Rapa Nui. A second major composite route leads from Tahiti through the Tuamotu Group to the Marquesas Group and on to Oahu in Hawai'i. Tupaia invented a cartographic system for Cook and his men which located a northern bearing from any island he drew in the centre of his Chart (marked by the word 'avatea', this is '[the sun at] noon'). This allowed him to translate his own wayfinding knowledge for island-to-island voyages into the logic and terms of Cook's compass. The Admiralty manuscript of James Cook's journal indicates that Tupaia told Cook that he himself (or his ancestors) travelled to most islands drawn on the Chart excepting only Rotuma (north of Fiji) and Oahu in Hawai'i. [7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupaia_(navigator)

Having dipped my toe in mnemonic techniques, I think part of why we underestimate people of the past, is we have forgotten just how much the human brain is capable of sans external tech.

Yeah, it shocked me the first time I memorized a deck of cards with a memory palace. Plus, imagine how well trained muscle memories became since methods would have hardly changed from generations before.

One of the Polynesian navigational methods I have heard described, was laying down in the bow of the canoe and going into a meditative trace, thereby being able to feel the ocean swell, and infer the location of distant islands by the diffraction pattern of waves. https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/media_colorb...

I wonder how it was even discovered this works

Though rogue waves are infrequent I wonder if their vessels were able to navigate them or do those vessels have the same issue as a small fishing boat does?

You don't have any evidence for that. All of human history is consistently filled with violence, every single day, and it still is.

It's easy to criticize the successful, but each of us is the result of a global legacy of competitive murder, no matter your race.

Indeed. The history of the Chatham islands is enough to dispell any notion that polynesians are somehow incapable of mass murder and enslavement. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_Islands

This history also illustrates that peacefulness is also within the capacity of any people.

Wow, interesting. We should all feel very lucky that we live in a time where we don't even have to kill our own food, much less each other. And we're only like half way to real peace.

Some Polynesian Body armor was pretty bad ass https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-oceania/oceania-p...

That is Micronesian, not Polynesian. It seems to be very common amongst Americans to think that all Pacific Islanders are Polynesian. Probably because of Hawaii.

This is a racist attitude.

I doubt they considered it risking their lives the way most of us do. The Polynesians were expert seamen and navigators. They knew how to build boats, provision them, navigate by the stars, and find tiny atolls across vast seas. Sure, sailing has inherent danger, but if you're an expert, the risks are not insurmountable. Even today, many people sail across entire oceans alone in tiny 27' sailboats. Some guy just sailed from England to Argentina on one to return home for his dad's birthday when he couldn't get a flight. One man's deadly risk is another man's adventure.

Pacific islands had very limited population caps. It was a necessity to continuously explore that embedded itself in the culture and evolved into surprisingly (to us) good navigation techniques and technology.

Some of those ideas fuel the passion to head out to Mars which has a similar cost/benefit. If we establish there I’m sure a new horizon will appear with some of us driving ourselves towards it.

You start chasing available game in Africa and end up in South America. Seriously, that's our lineage.

In a pre agrarian, pre sheparding society, all you could do is find things to eat since you couldn't create them yourself. Pastoralism made it possible to store the energy from natural resources in the form of animal meat, but that still required grazing your flock and moving to available grass and water. Even one person camping can strip an area of natural resources surprisingly quickly. It wasn't until the development of agriculture that people were able to stay in place long term.

I always keep in mind that before Industrialism, most human lives were lived on the edge of starvation. Violent death and disease was also much more common.

So life was cheap, people had little to lose, and the average person had to take risks we can barely imagine.

There weren't unlimited resources. Each of the Pacific islands (except to some extent the large ones like Hawaii, which was settled late) got to carrying capacity pretty quickly after settlement, and populations were balanced through some variety of ritual warfare, cannibalism, infanticide, and starvation.

Plus, it doesn't take everyone doing it. It only takes a couple families in a couple boats, each generation, to hop across the whole ocean.

In no particular order:

1. Boredom. Yeah, plenty of food, whatever; what should I do all day, shake coconut trees? BORING!

2. Prestige. Growing a family is not cool. Do you know what’s cool? Finding a new island and coming back a chief.

3. Conflict. Damn, the chief is a pain in the ass, males me shake coconut trees all day. I’m going to get my own island, with hookers and blackjack.

4. Curiosity. I want to see what’s beyond. Maybe I’ll meet the gods, that would be great!

5. Swagger. I am the best sailor in the tribe, the sea is my bitch, and I’ll show you.

6. Duty and tradition. Our culture is defined by expansion, it is my duty to do what our ancestors did.

7. Redemption. I screwed up, my life in this tribe is over, I have nothing to lose trying to start again beyond the sea.

There may have been many reasons, but we do know they were very adept at sailing very long distances. They could identify the direction of land a very long way away (based on cloud formations, wave pattern, sea birds, fish and I am sure other signs).

I have not read any literature about the motivations, but they may have gone a long distance and turned back if they found no land. They were probably explorers with the same human motivations as European explorers, the desire to find out what is out there whatever the cost, and we remember the ones that succeeded, such as Kupe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kupe

I don't think there were relatively unlimited resources, many islands were quite heavily settled. Tupaia, for instance, was born on Ra'iatea but had to flee to Tahiti due to conflict. He then went with the Cook expedition and taught them about Polynesian navigation.

It's very possible that some of the longest distance voyages such as the ones that found the corners of the Polynesian triangle in NZ, Easter Island, and Hawaii were triggered by conflicts with the losing group opting to go on an exploratory voyage.

| what was the motivation to risk your life

Read up on Bartle Types (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...). I have to assume that the idea of the Explorer type is not limited just to games.

I highly recommend Michener's Hawaii, which provides one possible reason in the second(?) chapter. The book is fiction, but is a pretty good read. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12658.Hawaii

The book 'first migrants', which I recommend, covers this topic in detail offering several hypotheses. In particular, the founder myth ran and runs strong in our (H. Sapiens) blood.

An epic journey could also be accidental: someone gets blown off course and survives because they had fishing equipment with them.

With homo sapiens, the frequency of "some kind of local conflict" is not to be underestimated.

Based on the documentary Moana, maybe there came a time where things were not going well at their current place so they set out looking for a new place.

Or maybe warring peoples invaded from the west, so they picked up and headed east looking for a new home.

Or maybe there was overpopulation on their island so they looked for a new place to spread out.

Or maybe they were just like us and some young guys were thrill seekers/adrenaline junkies/adventurers/etc. and they just wanted to head out to see what they could find.