Polynesians brought chickens

I reported on this subject back in Polynesians Were Here First. Now it's come up again.

Polynesians beat Columbus to the AmericasPrehistoric Polynesians beat Europeans to the Americas, according to a new analysis of chicken bones.

The work provides the first firm evidence that ancient Polynesians voyaged as far as South America, and also strongly suggests that they were responsible for the introduction of chickens to the continent--a question that has been hotly debated for more than 30 years.

Chilean archaeologists working at the site of El Arenal-1, on the Arauco Peninsula in south-central Chile, discovered what they thought might be the first prehistoric chicken bones unearthed in the Americas. They asked Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and colleagues to investigate.

The group carbon-dated the bones and their DNA was analysed. The 50 chicken bones from at least five individual birds date from between 1321 and 1407--100 years or more before the arrival of Europeans.

Two-week journey

However, this date range does coincide with dates for the colonization of the easternmost islands of Polynesia, including Pitcairn and Easter Island.

And when the El Arenal chicken DNA was compared with chicken DNA from archaeological sites in Polynesia, the researchers found an identical match with prehistoric samples from Tonga and American Samoa, and a near identical match from Easter Island.

Easter Island is in eastern Polynesia, and so is a more likely launch spot for a voyage to South America, the researchers say. The journey would have taken less than two weeks, falling within the known range of Polynesian voyages around this time, says Matisoo-Smith.DNA from chicken bone shows Polynesians 'found' South AmericaDomestic chickens are thought to have derived from wild birds that lived in the forests of the Indian subcontinent and the people who first migrated to the Americas from Asia--using a land bridge across the Bering Strait--are not believed to have taken chickens with them.

Yet the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro reported on his arrival in Peru in 1532 that the local Inca were using chickens as part of their religious ceremonies, suggesting that the domestic bird had been part of the native culture for some time.

Some experts believe, however, that chickens could not have existed in South America before the arrival of the first Europeans and that they must have been introduced by sailors from Europe.

The chicken bones came from an archaeological site at El Arenal in the Arauco region. A total of 50 bones have been recovered, but the single bone that provided the crucial dating evidence came from a bird estimated to have lived between 1321 and 1407--a century before the Portuguese landed in Brazil, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Until now the evidence in support of a direct cultural connection with Polynesians has been circumstantial. Linguists have identified similarities in language and anthropologists have noted the presence of American items such as the sweet potato and the bottle-gourd plant in eastern Polynesia long before Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas.

Alice Storey, a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at the University of Auckland, and her colleagues suggest that Polynesian seafarers could have used the reliable trade westerlies of the southern hemisphere to carry them and their cargo of living chickens to Chile.Comment:  Writer Russell Bates claims that Robinson Crusoe's Friday was a Polynesian. Wrong, but Russ isn't totally off his rocker. Alexander Selkirk, on whom Crusoe was modeled, marooned himself on a Chilean island. It's possible Selkirk found traces of Polynesians on his island.

Of course, if Polynesians visited South America in the 1300s, they would've encountered longstanding Native civilizations. They wouldn't have had more than a minor influence on the development of Amerindian cultures.

For more on the subject, see Rediscovering America:  The New World may be 20,000 years older than experts thought.

Below:  A chicken in Ecuador.