So how did the Polynesians manage to cross the ocean in

They weren't canoes and they weren't tiny.

>>1831984
Ice age?

>>1831986
Pretty much explains it

fishing the same areas of ocean for decades and following birds

File: Hokule'a.png (286KB, 700x570px) Image search: [Google]

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>>1831986
Half right...

>>1831984
because they where able to build decent ships and because they were generally badass
i can respect any people who spreads and conolizes new land by sailing into the big unknown

>>1832088
They really aren't that small anon, they're about the size of Columbus's ships.

>>1831984
Stellar navigation, mostly. You can roughly approximate your latitude based on which stars rise first and where and if you keep track of time somehow you can get your longitude as well.

>>1831984

they were realy good canoes, designed for ocean travel, and sea people are habitualy good sailors

>>1831984
You can still cross the Pacific in a canoe. It was done in the 20th century just to prove the Polynesians could have done it. I can't remember the name of the person, but it was some sort of famous author

>>1832726
wrong, polynesian navigation was based on reading swells to find the location of land, it had very little celestial navigation at all

>>1831984
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition

>>1832861
Thor Heyrdahl

>>1832886
Lol thanks. That question comes up on my Trivia team all the time, but we never need to write it down so I never bothered to learn the spelling

>>1832151
They are canoes though. Double hulled canoes

>>1831984
Star navigation
>tfw light pollution has rendered our species incapable of living in the dark

>>1834151
Ain't gonna find much light pollution in the middle of the Pacific even nowadays mate.

>>1832868
but would this help them find Easter Island in the middle of fucking nowhere?

>>1834190
Absolutely. Polynesian navigation fucking werks, especially in the Pacific.

It's also worth mentioning that Easter Island wasn't settled until ~1200 AD, despite the fact that eastward migrations into the heart of the Pacific had been happening since before the birth of christ - it's not like they made a beeline to it.

>>1832886
>>1832888
>>1832915
Thor Heyerdahl was a crank and an idiot. All genetic and linguistic evidence points toward migration from South-East Asia.

>>1832868
That was only one part of it. The Austronesian peoples who settled the Pacific Islands had sophisticated navigation techniques. They were still being taught in traditional schools in the Caroline Islands (Micronesia) up until at least the 1970s. Techniques like observation of seabirds, cloud formations and wave patterns were used on exploratory voyages to figure out when they were near land.

There were a series of test expeditions in the 1970s and 1980s by the Polynesian voyaging society using an ocean-going vessel built according to traditional designs, using only traditional celestial navigation, which was done by a guy Mau Pialug from the Caroline Islands who had been trained as a navigator in the traditional way. They sailed from Hawai'i to Tahiti successfully using only traditional methods, and did a bunch of other successful voyages to other places.

Pretty impressive stuff really.

>>1835107
he may have been a crank, but at least he actually went out and did it.
better than most armchair nerds these days.

>>1835107
Thor Heyerdahl was working off of the available information in an era before DNA was even fucking discovered and he had the balls of steel to actually put his money - and his life - where his mouth was. And although he's most famous for his Kon-Tiki trip he was doing cool shit before and long after as well.

>>1832923
its called a pontoon boat, is this bait?

its not a canoe you dumb fuck

>>1835107
I read up on Mau Piailug just now. That guy's badass. Polynesians are a really underrated seafaring culture.

>>1831984
My question is how did they manage to breed without it being a death sentence for the smaller poly.

>>1831984
Shit does not sink. You fill your canoe with shit and it is, basically, invulnerability code.

>>1831986
but they were canoes and they were tiny

>>1835295

Yes it is you dumb fuck.

>>1832151
Columbus's ship is also tiny

File: kon-tiki-22.jpg (69KB, 980x551px)

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They built bigger ones. After European diseases wiped out 95% of the populations in the pacific they lost the need for them. They no longer had to trade or spread out, they suddenly had all the food they needed on their own islands and European ships carried passengers and traded goods between islands. Only small canoes were kept for fishing.

Imagine what would have to our civilization if 95% of the population was wiped out in a few years. We wouldn't be making computer processors anymore.

>>1835295
>pontoon boat
No such thing. A boat can have pontoons, but what are they? In this case the pontoons are canoes.

>>1831984
On surfboards.