An international group of scientists from Denmark, Switzerland and other countries conducted a genetic study of the inhabitants of Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island. They concluded that the Rapanui people traveled to America and contacted its indigenous population long before the continent was discovered by Europeans. The study was published in the scientific journal Nature.
Easter Island is located in the Pacific Ocean. It is located 1,900 kilometers east of the nearest inhabited island of Polynesia and 3,700 kilometers from the shores of South America. Today, this territory belongs to Chile.
The team used DNA from 15 Rapa Nui people whose remains are housed at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris. The analysis showed that about 10% of the islanders' gene pool is of Native American descent.
“We studied how Native American DNA was distributed in the Polynesian genetic background of the Rapa Nui. This distribution is consistent with contact occurring between the 13th and 15th centuries,” said Victor Moreno-Mayar, a geogeneticist at the University of Copenhagen and one of the authors of the study.
This means that the Polynesians from Easter Island had been to America at least 100 years before the expedition of Christopher Columbus, who set foot on the American continent in 1492.
Scientists have also refuted a long-standing theory of Easter Island's population collapse, which suggests that the Rapa Nui people used up all available natural resources, leading to famine, war, and even cannibalism, and catastrophically undermining the Aboriginal population.
The researchers studied the ancient Rapa Nui genomes, expecting to find genetic evidence of a population collapse, such as a sudden drop in genetic diversity. But, surprisingly, the data showed no evidence of a population collapse in the 1600s.
