Marcos, there's no doubt that people have been drifting around on floating things probably since chimps first fell into a flooded river and grabbed hold of a passing log.
The claim to fame for the euro navigators was that they did it in big ships [for the time] which went all the way around the world in 80 days [or whatever it was - more like a couple of years] using sextants to know just where they were.
Certainly, there were people zipping around the Pacific Ocean 2000 years ago, with outriggers and sails to make it easy. But they would go from home base, sail that way for a while, then head home again with news, or not, of a new island in the vicinity. <reinforces in me the theory that people moved about the seas a long long time before euros started ballyhooing their own voyages as the first>
We'll soon see from the current DNA studies just where everyone came from and went to. There won't be any guesswork needed based on kumara and linguistic similarities.
I don't know about the papa business. There's also payaya which has lots of baby fruit, so maybe the papa was derived from the descendants of fruit, or the fruit was named for having lots of children.
Easter Island was colonized by polynesians. So perhaps they went as far as South America too. It wouldn't be a stretch, given how far they'd already traveled east across the Pacific Ocean from Taiwan or somewhere. China of course therefore owns all of Polynesia, Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand and maybe Australia, not just Taiwan. I expect they'll be making claims in due course, once they have Taiwan and they see where people escaped/adventured to from there. Maybe Japan too! Japan should be returned to China's ownership! Not to mention all of North and South America because the original inhabitants migrated from China 10,000 years ago or so, laying claim to vast new uninhabited [by humans] lands.
Mqurice |
