The Eastern Discovery

Very firm evidence is coming into play that the Americas were a marginal but real part of a global trading and exploration schema centuries before Columbus and the subsequent age of discovery, colonization and conquest. Chicken bones in Chile show that there was significant contact between Polynesian seafaring cultures and mainland South American cultures

After decades of contention, New Zealand researchers have provided the first direct evidence that Polynesians sailed across thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean to reach South America long before the arrival of the Spanish around AD 1500.

Their proof? Chicken bones.

Using genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating of chicken bones found in Chile, the researchers showed that the fowl originated in Polynesia, not Europe as was previously believed, the researchers said Monday.....

"The basic premise has always been that there was only one civilization capable of crossing the ocean and discovering the New World," he said. The new findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that "the prehistory of the New World was probably a little bit more complicated than we thought in the past."...

The chicken bones studied were recovered from a site called El Arenal-1 in south-central Chile, about a mile and a half inland on the southern side of the Arauco Peninsula. Thermoluminescent dating of ceramics from the site indicates it was occupied from AD 700 to 1390.....

Genetic analysis of the chickens showed that they were identical to genetic sequences of chicken from that same time period in American Samoa and Tonga, both more than 5,000 miles from Chile.

The sequences were very similar to those of chickens from Hawaii, also about 5,000 miles distant, and Easter Island, located about 2,500 miles away.

This is what I love about the study of history, the stories get more interesting, and more complex. We first learned the Columbus story in pre-school and first grade, and then the Vinland/Viking story by ninth grade, and the Polynesian/South American contact stories through bad airport novels... who knows what else...