Ancient World Review

Video From The Kon Tiki Expedition 1947

This is original footage taken during Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947.  During the expedition, Heyerdahl and his crew sailed over 4000 miles from Peru to Polynesia in a a wooden raft, demonstrating that long distance sea voyages could have been made by the neolithic South American people he thought could have originally settled the Polynesian islands.

Polynesians Related To Indigenous Taiwanese

"According to folklore, Polynesians originated from a mythical homeland called Hawaiki. Their origins and the existence of such a place, however, have been the subject of much speculation. In a new study in the premier open access journal PLoS Biology, Jean Trejaut and colleagues now provide the first direct evidence for the common ancestry of Polynesians and indigenous Taiwanese" (Source: ScienceDaily News) This is an old story (2005), but still interesting because it shows, among other things, that the Taiwanese aborigines must have had fairly advanced ocean-navigation skills.

The populating of Oceania has always been a mystery. I find it hard to believe that people back then would just sail off on an unknown ocean looking for unknown lands, especially since they couldn't know that they would find anything. Considering the size of the Pacific Ocean, that would be a death sentence. It's possible that these aborigines discovered various islands in the course of fishing expeditions near their own shores, but how did they get to Polynesia? French Polynesia is over 6,000 miles from Taiwan. Still, it looks like this is what happened. Language studies have also confirmed the connection between Polynesia and Taiwan.

Richard Attenborough On Easter Island

Coral Reef Cemetery Discovered In Vanuatu

"A find of 60 headless skeletons...may reveal the identity of the people who first inhabited the Pacific Ocean archipelago Vanuatu 3000 years ago," according to the University of Stavanger's Museum of Archaeology in Norway. "When a team of archaeologists began excavating an old coral reef in Vanuatu in 2008 and 2009, they soon discovered it had served as a cemetery in ancient times. So far, 71 buried individuals have been recorded, giving new information on the islands' inhabitants and their funeral rites." The discovery is "the oldest and biggest skeleton find ever in the Pacific Ocean," according to Mads Yavn, head of research at the museum. I can't explain the discrepancy in the number of remains discovered. Presumably, the sixty headless skeletons were found in the reef; the rest elsewhere on the archipelago.