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Chicken Bones Suggest Polynesians Found Americas Before Columbus

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Jill Elvgren
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« on: June 06, 2007, 12:22:50 am »

This has to be the wildest claim to discovery of America pre-Columbus yet.  Add the Polynesians to the list that now also includes, of course, the Vikings and Chinese:

Chicken Bones Suggest Polynesians Found Americas Before Columbus
By Heather Whipps, Special to LiveScience

posted: 04 June 2007 06:02 pm ET

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 Email Which came first–the chicken or the European?

Popular history, and a familiar rhyme about Christopher Columbus, holds that Europeans made contact with the Americas in 1492, with some arguing that the explorer and his crew were the first outsiders to reach the New World.

But chicken bones recently unearthed on the coast of Chile—dating prior to Columbus’ “discovery” of America and resembling the DNA of a fowl species native to Polynesia—may challenge that notion, researchers say.

“Chickens could not have gotten to South America on their own—they had to be taken by humans,” said anthropologist Lisa Matisoo-Smith from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Polynesians made contact with the west coast of South America as much as a century before any Spanish conquistadors, her findings imply.

DNA in bone

The chicken bones were discovered at an archaeological site called El Arenal, on the south coast of Chile, alongside other materials belonging to the indigenous population. While chickens aren’t native to the region, it was believed the local Araucana species found there now was brought to the Americas by Spanish settlers around 1500.

Tests on the bones, however, now indicate the birds arrived well before any European made landfall in South America, Matisoo-Smith and her colleague Alice Storey found.

“We had the chicken bone directly dated by radio carbon. The calibrated date was clearly prior to 1492,” Matisoo-Smith told LiveScience, noting that it could have ranged anywhere from 1304 to 1424. “This also fits with the other dates obtained from the site (on other materials), and it fits with the cultural period of the site.”

Did Polynesians continue eastwards?

DNA extracted from the bones also matched closely with a Polynesian breed of chicken, rather than any chickens found in Europe.

Polynesia was settled by sailors who migrated from mainland Southeast Asia, beginning about 3,000 years ago. They continued gradually eastwards, but were never thought to have journeyed further than Easter Island, about 2,000 miles off the coast of continental Chile.

The chicken DNA suggests at least one group did make the harrowing journey across the remaining stretch of Pacific, Matisoo-Smith said.

“We cannot say exactly which island the voyage came from. The DNA sequence is found in chickens from Tonga, Samoa, Niue, Easter Island and Hawaii,” Matisoo-Smith said. “If we had to guess, we would say it was unlikely to have come from West Polynesia and most likely to have come from Easter Island or some other East Polynesian source that we have not yet sampled.”

The results are detailed in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Kon-Tiki trip in reverse

It might be the most tangible, but this isn’t the first evidence that pre-Columbian voyages from the Pacific to South America were possible.

In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl, the famous Norwegian anthropologist, made the voyage from Peru to Polynesia aboard his Kon-Tiki raft to prove the trip was doable with a rudimentary vessel.

There are more scientific arguments, too, said Matisoo-Smith.

“There is increasing evidence of multiple contacts with the Americas,” she said, “based on linguistic evidence and similarities in fish hook styles.” Physical evidence of human DNA from Polynesia has yet to be found in South America, she added.

http://www.livescience.com/history/070604_polynesian_chicken.html
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Jill Elvgren
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« Reply #1 on: June 06, 2007, 12:24:10 am »



El Arenal artifact. Credit: Daniel Quiroz
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Jill Elvgren
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« Reply #2 on: June 07, 2007, 01:30:30 am »

Kon Tiki Fried Chicken?  June 4, 2007 
by Eric A. Powell 


Evidence emerges that Polynesians introduced the chicken to South America.



South America's Araucana chicken (collonca) (Photo by Jose Miguel)
Most scholars assume that the chicken, like the horse, was unknown in the New World before the arrival of the Spaniards. But now radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis of a chicken bone excavated from a site in Chile suggest Polynesians in ocean-going canoes brought chickens to the west coast of South America well before Europe's "Age of Discovery."

Some 50 chicken bones belonging to five chickens were recently recovered from the site of El Arenal-1, on Chile's Arauco Peninsula. The site is the first excavated settlement of the Andean people known as the Mapuche, who lived on the southern fringe of the Inca empire from about A.D. 1000 to 1500.

An international team including bioarchaeologist Alice Storey of the University of Auckland studied one of the El Arenal-1 chicken bones. They found that its DNA sequence was identical to chicken remains recovered from archaeological sites on the Polynesian islands of Tonga and American Samoa, according to a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Falling between A.D. 1321 and 1407, the chicken dates to the period when Easter Island and the other easternmost islands of Polynesia were being colonized.



Pacific chickens eating coconuts (Photo by Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith)
Possible contact between South America and Polynesia first made a splash in the popular imagination when Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl sailed his balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia in 1947. Though Heyerdahl's thesis that South Americans settled the Pacific was never credible, evidence has surfaced in recent years that Polynesians may have occasionally sail as far as the New World. South American sweet potatoes have been found in pre-European contexts in Polynesia, and the Proto-Polynesian word for sweet potato, kumala, is similar to the indigenous Peruvian cumal. Other plants that may have found their way from South America to Polynesia include a subspecies of calabash, or bottle gourd, and the soapberry, a plant that can be used as a natural detergent. (Oceanographer Alvaro Montenegro at the Univeristy of Victoria recently carried out computer simulations that show New World plants could have been accidentally transported to Polynesia by drifting South American vessels.) Some researchers have even purposed that sewn plank canoes and fishhooks found in Chumash Indian sites in southern California are a technological legacy of Polynesian visits (see "The Polynesian Connection").

As far as South American chickens in the historical record go, in 1532 Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro recorded their presence in Peru, where chickens were already integrated into Inca religious ceremonies. "That suggests chickens had already been there for a while," says Storey, whose is now studying the DNA of the Araucana, a South American chicken that has no tail and lays blue eggs, to see if it could be descended from Polynesian chickens. Storey also hopes the news that chicken wings and drumsticks were being eaten in Precolumbian South America will prompt archaeologists to take a second look at some of their finds. "It's possible there are stylized chickens in the iconography that we have not recognized because we did not know they were there. I'm fascinated to see what [archaeologists] are going to do with this information."

Eric A. Powell is senior editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.


© 2007 by the Archaeological Institute of America

www.archaeology.org/online/features/chicken/
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Boreas
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« Reply #3 on: July 09, 2007, 09:50:10 pm »

Quote
Though Heyerdahl's thesis that South Americans settled the Pacific was never credible, evidence has surfaced in recent years that Polynesians may have occasionally sail as far as the New World. South American sweet potatoes have been found in pre-European contexts in Polynesia, and the Proto-Polynesian word for sweet potato, kumala, is similar to the indigenous Peruvian cumal. Other plants that may have found their way from South America to Polynesia include a subspecies of calabash, or bottle gourd, and the soapberry, a plant that can be used as a natural detergent. (Oceanographer Alvaro Montenegro at the Univeristy of Victoria recently carried out computer simulations that show New World plants could have been accidentally transported to Polynesia by drifting South American vessels.) Some researchers have even purposed that sewn plank canoes and fishhooks found in Chumash Indian sites in southern California are a technological legacy of Polynesian visits (see "The Polynesian Connection").

As far as South American chickens in the historical record go, in 1532 Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro recorded their presence in Peru, where chickens were already integrated into Inca religious ceremonies. "That suggests chickens had already been there for a while," says Storey, whose is now studying the DNA of the Araucana, a South American chicken that has no tail and lays blue eggs, to see if it could be descended from Polynesian chickens. Storey also hopes the news that chicken wings and drumsticks were being eaten in Precolumbian South America will prompt archaeologists to take a second look at some of their finds. "It's possible there are stylized chickens in the iconography that we have not recognized because we did not know they were there. I'm fascinated to see what [archaeologists] are going to do with this information."


Great news - Tx! Grin
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