A Question - Ancient Hawaiian History

[Mahi Waina]

Anyone knowledgable about whether the early Hawaiians, as a seafaring society, made contact with indigenous Americans?

[pzarquon]

Re: A Question - Ancient Hawaiian History

There are people who have theorized such contact, pointing at things like certain linguistic elements -- perhaps even the word for canoe, IIRC -- that are remarkably similar. But I admit I don't know much about them. I imagine debate over such a possibility (and its implications) in academic circles can get quite intense!

Edited to add...

Googling about, I found serveral mentions of a paper by Kathryn A. Klar of UC Berkeley and archaeologist Terry L. Jones of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo that raise this possibility. Not surprisingly, it was controversial. Here's a write up from the university about how they challenged prevailing anthropological attitudes, and here's a June 2005 article in the San Francisco Chronicle about their research.

I remembered one of the points correctly:

The Chumash [Indian] word for "sewn-plank canoe" is tomolo'o, while the Hawaiian word for "useful tree" is kumulaa'au. The Polynesians colonized Hawaii during the first millennium A.D., and in the process their language evolved into the Hawaiian language. The Polynesian word tumu means tree or tree-trunk, and ra'akau means wood or branch; Klar's complex linguistic analysis shows how the combination of those two words evolved into the Hawaiian kumulaa'au. Many Hawaiian words that start with "k" originally began with "t." Replace the "k" in kumulaa'au with a "t" and the similarity between the words becomes obvious. The similarity is so great, Klar says, that it is highly unlikely to be a coincidence.

There are several other facts that point to a Polynesia-North America link as well, including canoe building methods and sweet potato cultivation. Interesting stuff!

[LikaNui]

Re: A Question - Ancient Hawaiian History

Anyone knowledgable about whether the early Hawaiians, as a seafaring society, made contact with indigenous Americans?

I'm glad you asked, as I've wondered the same thing. Many of the indigenous Americans words have a Polynesian ring to them; for example, the word alii is very common with IA's.

[Peshkwe]

Re: A Question - Ancient Hawaiian History

http://cita.chattanooga.org/mtdna.html

Polynesian Links?

To their surprise, however, the researchers found that native Siberians lack one peculiar mutation that appeared in the Amerinds 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. This raises the question of where, if not from Siberia, this mtDNA originated.

It turns out, Dr. Wallace says, that this particular mutation pattern is also found in aboriginal populations in Southeast Asia and in the islands of Melanesia and Polynesia. This hints at what may have been "one of the most astounding migrations in human experience," he says. A group of ancient peoples moved out of China into Malaysia where they became sailors and populated the islands of the South Pacific.

Then some 6,000 to 12,000 years ago these ancient mariners made it to the Americas. "I don't know how they came," Dr. Wallace says. "They either came across the Pacific to Central and South America or they went up the east coast of Asia and across the northern Pacific to Alaska and Canada," he says. He already is examining mtDNA samples from natives of the Kamchatka Peninsula north of Japan to see if there is any mtDNA trace of these ancient sailors.

This PDF might interest you too:

http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/~mcdonald/Wo...groupsMaps.pdf



And a discussion about a link:

http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/...4-08/0879.html