Sweet potatos

Potatos for new palms n naval tech. How did they get reeds? Could Rapa Nui rebound? Polynesians with new ideas?
 
Damn it Smaug, you've made me hungry with this talk of sweet potatoes, which I love, but you know what they say about not eating just before bedtime.
 
Yeah, the Polynesians made it to America. To spread as far and as fast as they did, there had to be intent on behalf of the sweet potato. There were some chicken bones discovered there that predated Columbus as well. I imagine any Polynesians who actually settled there were absorbed into the native states.
 
What gets me, if I remember correctly, it implyed sweet potatos in New Zealand, 1000-1200 AD. That would require an earlier exchange of, say tech, than previously thought. The chickens apparently got poo poo'd away, but there is interest on an island, Moche I think, that might have Polynesian remains.
 
Or, some unfortunate Native American got Robinson Crusoe'd after a hurricane, bringing some sweet potatoes with him to the Pacific. Boats can be swept a pretty surprising distance out to sea sometimes. The sweet potato is evidence of contact between Polynesia and the Americas, but it doesn't show in which direction the contact went or the nature of the contact.

The chicken bones are not very good proof, having only been found once. In Archaeology, redundancy is strength-if chicken bones had been scattered across the Americas before Columbus, and if the conquistadors had been commenting on the chicken meals being served to them, then I'd be more inclined to believe that they were there before European contact.

If the Polynesians had introduced chickens-why not taro? Why not sugarcane? Why not bananas? Why not pigs? These are all very useful things to have, but they don't seem to have been in the Americas during the Columbian contact.
 
If the Polynesians had introduced chickens-why not taro? Why not sugarcane? Why not bananas? Why not pigs? These are all very useful things to have, but they don't seem to have been in the Americas during the Columbian contact.

It's stuff like this that makes me wish we could send probes back in time to find out what really happened.
 
For polynesian contact look at what animals survived on Easter Island which is the closest polynesians to South America, No pigs and no chickens.
The polynesian name for sweet potatoes is very similar to its names along the south american coast.
I would be surprised if there was no contact, there is just no way to find out how much. And yes I would surely like to be able to go back and find out.
 
one book I have on this question notes that sweet potatoes do (rarely) produce seeds that can be carried naturally by birds, so there didn't necessarily have to be Polynesian contact to carry them out into the Pacific. The big question here is if there are any birds that migrate from S. America to the Polynesian islands regularly that could have taken them there...
 
For polynesian contact look at what animals survived on Easter Island which is the closest polynesians to South America, No pigs and no chickens.
The polynesian name for sweet potatoes is very similar to its names along the south american coast.
I would be surprised if there was no contact, there is just no way to find out how much. And yes I would surely like to be able to go back and find out.

The sweet potato shows that there certainly was contact. I didn't think that was even controversial anymore. But at the edges of Polynesia the populations were small, so I don't think there's going to be any massive population exchanges. South Americans and Polynesians had little reason or desire to colonize each other in any real way.
 
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