We are continually involved in discussing claims on influence or presence of various peoples in areas of the New World: !200-800 BC Egypto/Nubians, Mande, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Shang Chinese, etc. on the Olmecs; Indonesians, Chinese and Balinese on the Maya before Christ; Home Erectus in Valsequillo; Polynesians in South America 200 BC; Vikings in Minnesota; Jews in New Mexico; Africans (or Khoisan or Polynesians in Brazil thousands of years ago); Chinese on both coasts of the continent; and coke dealing Egyptians in Peru 1000 BC). The common denominator is that all of these people were transported here on magic carpets.

When facing any of these claims, my threshold questions are: 1) exactly how did they get there and 2)what is the date claimed. People making these claims wave their hands and like Van Sertima say “currents in the Atlantic will automatically deliver.” Not so. One should specify exactly what the wind and currents are that supposedly deliver people easily from place to place. For example, Kon Tiki is a non starter because leaving from Callao a raft will go north because that is where the current and the wind go. Kon Tiki had to be towed out more than a 100 kilometers by a tug before finding the Humboldt Current. Similar data can be found for going from Africa to the New World or for leaving the Indian Ocean.
Another crucial point is the status of open sea boat technology at the time claimed for contact. If Mesoamerica was going to be seriously influence culturally, contact would have to be in the 1500-1000 BC time period. NO ONE in the world had boats able to travel long distances in the open Atlantic or Pacific at 1000 BC; Polynesians included as I show below.

How about accidental drifting? As Howe (2003:119-120), speaking of the settlement of Polynesia, points out: “It is now widely accepted that the discovery and settlement of the Pacific resulted for deliberate voyages of exploration. That does not preclude the possibility, indeed probability, that there were instances when canoes, or rafts, or any other watercraft might have been driven by wind and currents across the ocean. Anything that can float for long enough can end up in distant places.. . But what is denied is that such journeys explain the major routes of first human settlement of the islands and contain clues about the Islanders’ distant cultural origins.” By definition, accidental voyages blown of course, mean that it was an unplanned event and, thus, involved boats or rafts that were not provisioned with food and water for lengthy trips. For thousands of years, ships did not have cooking facilities and put in at night. Very few would have survived extremely long drift voyages or survived the scurvy involved. More importantly, it seems miraculous to me given the general level of illiteracy in ancient societies, and more particularly among common sailors, that inevitably the boats arriving by drift have learned priests, experts on calendrics, scribes, skilled artisans. etc. Baloney! The most probable fate of these drifters would have been that of the Spanish sailors who arrived in Yucatan after their ship sank some years before the arrival of Cortes: they went native and had zero influence on the Maya.
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The following is an update on the colonization and exploration of Polynesia according to recent reviews summarizing the active research in this area.

During the Pleistocene low water levels formed land masses by joining New Guinea to Australia and Tasmania forming Sahul. At the same time, the Malayan Peninsula was joined to Indonesia as far as Bali forming Sunda. These two wee separated by the islands of Wallacea. Human colonization of Sahul as well as moving from New Guinea to the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomons involved simple water craft such as bamboo rafts. All the islands involved in this trek were intervisible.
“Within Near Oceania proper, the earliest archaeological evidence remains that at Huon on the northern coast of New Guinea, where split-cobble waisted blades have been bracketed between 60,000 and 40,000 years BP. The large islands of New Britain and New Ireland both have evidence for occupation by around 35,000 BP, Buka in the northern Solomons was settled by around 28,000 BP, and Manus sometime before 13,000 BP (Kirsch 2010:134, references erased).”

At this point further colonization ceased for millennia until the arrival of new group from South East Asia, the Lapita. There are Lapita sites in the Bismarck Archipelago by 3500 BP. Kirsch (2010: 137-38) points out that: “Throughout the late Pleistocene and most of the Holocene, humans were confined to the geographically restricted region of Near Oceania, not venturing farther than the eastern end of the Solomons (San Cristobal and Santa Anna islands). Even the main Solomons may have been quite sparsely populated until the advent of Lapita, in part due to the rapid decline in terrestrial biodiversity as one moves from New Guinea and Bismarcks eastwards, limiting the potential resources for hunters and gatherers.
Nonetheless, the Bismarcks to the Solomons comprise a chain of almost continuously intervisible island masses, which would have facilitated discovery of new islands and subsequent voyaging between them. Beyond Santa Anna, however, one encounters the first significant gap of 380 km of open ocean before landfall is reached in the Santa Cruz group. Beyond this, distances become even more formidable— some 800 km from northern Vanuatu to Fiji, for example. Making such long ocean crossings required seaworthy sailing craft, which the Lapita people had evidently perfected with a variant of the ∗waηka outrigger canoe. Moreover, the colonization of Remote Oceania— which is far more biotically depauperate than is Near Oceania—also necessitated the ability to transport both crop plants and domestic animals to newfound islands. Although island colonizers may have relied heavily for the first few months on abundant wild birds and seafood, in the long run the success of new colonies de depended on the establishment of horticultural production systems. The timing of the Lapita expansion out of Near Oceania into the southwestern archipelagoes of Remote Oceania (Figure 2) has been narrowed down by extensive radiocarbon dating to the three centuries between 3200 and 2900 BP, a time span equivalent to roughly 15 human generations. The earliest Lapita settlement in the Reef-Santa Cruz group, the Nanggu site (SE-SZ-8), was occupied around 3200 BP (Green et al. 2008). From there colonization seems to have proceeded rapidly down through Vanuatu, across to the Loyalty Islands, and to La Grande Terre of New Caledonia. Sand (1997) puts the initial settlement of La Grande Terre at between 3000 and 2900 BP The wide ocean gap between Vanuatu and Fiji was crossed by between 3050 and 2950 BP (Anderson & Clark 1999, Clark & Anderson 2009), and Lapita colonization continued rapidly into the Lau and Tongan archipelagoes. Extensive dates from Lapita sites in the Ha’apai group of Tonga indicate initial settlements in place by 2850 BP (Burley et al. 1999). Samoa, along with Futuna and ‘Uvea, were also settled at approximately this same time. Thus the Lapita expansion brought human settlement as far east as the Tonga-Samoa region, what is commonly known as Western Polynesia. At this point, further long-distance exploration to the east apparently halted, and would not be resumed until the later Polynesian diaspora in the first millennium AD.”

The lesson to be learned, and even more strongly in the next step, is that ocean traveling is not as easy and automatic as diffusionists would have it. From 60,000 BP to 4000 BP humans colonized Sahul and Near Oceania (up to the Solomons) using simple watercraft and traveling between intervisible islands. However, for thousands of years they could not cross 350 km of open ocean when the Santa Cruz Islands could not be seen. Advancements in naval technology and seamanship are not automatic and inevitable. The advances made by the Lapita made the next step possible to the limits of Near Oceania Tonga, Samoa, and Fiji settled by 850 BC (2850 BP). However, the Lapita outrigger canoes were not able to embark on the long distance open ocean journeys carrying the supplies, water, and plants and animals needed to sustain life in the barren islands of Remote Oceania. One more time it took a very long hiatus before the double-hulled deep water Tongan canoes and the navigational skills needed to go on were developed. In 2010 Kirsch, stated that this hiatus took 1000 years: “Given the evidence for rapid Polynesian expansion
throughout southeastern Polynesia between about AD 800 and 1000.” A recent paper, which has the most thorough and rigorous radiocarbons AMS dates for Polynesia has extended the hiatus between the settling by the Lapita of Samoa/Fiji/Tonga (850 BC) to the exploration of the rest of Polynesia to almost 2000 years.


“The 15 archipelagos of East Polynesia, including New Zealand, Hawaii, and Rapa Nui, were the last habitable places on earth colonized by prehistoric humans. The timing and pattern of this colonization event has been poorly resolved, with chronologies varying by >1000 y, precluding understanding of cultural change and ecological impacts on these pristine ecosystems. In a metaanalysis of 1,434 radiocarbon dates from the region, reliable short-lived samples reveal that the colonization of East Polynesia occurred in two distinct phases: earliest in the Society Islands A.D 1025–1120, four centuries later than previously assumed; then after 70–265 y, dispersal continued in one major pulse to all remaining islands A.D.1190–1290. We show that previously supported longer chronologies have relied upon radiocarbon-dated materials with large sources of error, making them unsuitable for precise dating of recent events. Our empirically based and dramatically shortened chronology for the colonization of East Polynesia resolves longstanding paradoxes and offers a robust explanation for the remarkable uniformity of East Polynesian culture, human biology, and language. Models of human colonization, ecological change and historical linguistics for the region now require substantial revision (Wilmshurst 2011)”

What this means is that Polynesians did not undertake long distance open sea voyages between 850 BC and about AD 1000. Long distance sailing is not automatic or inevitable. New technology must be developed and tested as well as the required seamanship and navigational skills. BTW- any claim that Polynesians influenced any population in the New World before A.D. 1000 is now falsified.

K.R. Howe 2003 The Quest for Origins Honolulu: U. Hawaii Press.

Kirch, P.V. 2010 “Peopling of the Pacific: A Holistic Anthropological
Perspective,” Annual Reviews in Anthropology 39-131-148

Wilmshurst, J.M., et al. 2011 “High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia,” PNAS (5): 1815–1820