Review: Sea People

 Sea People
The Puzzle of Polynesia

by Christina Thompson

One of the more fascinatingly comprehensive books about an unusual subject that I've ever encountered!  Gripping from beginning to end. How is that possible for a work of strict nonfiction?

I guess it's because he put a lot of everything in. His own background (a little), then the history of the sea captains who explored the Pacific; descriptions of the people they met on the Islands; the geographic and logistics of sailing between the islands; the many conflicting theories on how people without modern navigational instruments could have routinely (or accidentally???) sailed so far, and more.  And then he shifts gears and describes the attempts in modern history to recreate the Polynesian voyages.  And then jumps into archeology and the puzzle of pottery, which together with the study of fishhook design shows the interrelationship of the peoples of the Islands.

All of these puzzles had my brain wondering if he was ever going to reach some sort of comprehensive theory about "this is how it happened"--and then he jumps into radiocarbon dating of samples.  This answered some questions but also introduced a lot of errors into the theories that were being tossed around by various researchers. I had thought that radiocarbon dating was only accurate up to a range of a few thousands of years, but this book explains how refinements in radiocarbon dating technique, statistical analysis, and corrections for sampling error, can produce much more precise results.

For example, dating the ashes of a campfire created by humans doesn't take into account the age of the trees that were burned in the fire.  That doesn't make the date useless, but it helps if you can also date the trees or other objects in the ashes for correlation.

And then the evidence from modern genetics studies comes into the puzzle. Interesting thing I learned--in problems of origins such as this, if access to the human remains is culturally sensitive, scientists can be a lot of information from the remains of the humble rat, man's eternal companion.  There are three species of rats on the islands--the Norwegian, the black, and the Polynesian (Rattus exulans). the latter of those accompanied the original explorers of the islands on their journeys.

So the book has a pretty satisfying conclusion to its many questions--where did the inhabitants of the Islands (New Zealand, Hawai'i, Easter Island and those in the triangle of these three) come from?  When did they come?  How did they get there? Was it a one-way journey or back-and-forth?  and the only question left unanswered, for now, is Why?