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  • This aligns with the idea that Rapa Nui was the stepping stone via which Polynesians and Native Americans made contact, traded crops, and had kids together. I wonder if there was ever a minority NA population on the island alongside Polynesians or if it was just occasional mixed kids raised fully Polynesian.

    • I wonder if there was ever a minority NA population on the island alongside Polynesians

      That's an interesting hypothesis and definitively worth checking, but I personally find unlikely that Rapa Nui had any sort of meaningful (in numbers) Native American minority - there's practically no material pressure to do so.

      • It was a similar distance from there to the nearest Polynesian island, and we know they maintained contact and trade that direction. South America would've offered entirely unique trade goods, so I don't think it's out of the question at all. These were history's greatest sailors and navigators, after all.

        Certainly 10% DNA admixture requires more than just a few small interactions.

  • It's tempting to look for potential vocab exchange between Rapa Nui and (Quechua and Aymara). That could help dating the exchange with the Andes, as the lexicon stops following the lender's sound changes to follow the borrower's instead.

    (Polynesian syllabic structure and small phonemic stock make this extra tricky though. For example, Classical Quechua /s ʂ h/ would probably end all merged into /h/, and you'd see multiple epenthetic vowels popping up.)

    Even then I wouldn't be surprised if they contacted the folks up south, like the Mapuche. Specially as I don't expect the landing spot from a Rapa Nui → South America to be the best spot to start the opposite travel, due to sea currents.

    • It seems likely that the Polynesian word(s) for sweet potato is a direct borrowing from Quecha. Beyond that I don't think there's accepted evidence for vocabulary exchange.

      • I gave it a check. It's hard to take a lot of conclusions from a single word, but

        • Quechua - kumar, khumara
        • Rapa Nui - kuma porá
        • Maori - kūmara, kūmera
        • Hawaiian - ʻuala
        • Tongan: kumala

        This got to be at least two instances of borrowing, since either Rapa Nui picked another variant of the word to borrow or solved the issue with the ending consonant in a different way (by eliding it instead of adding a new vowel).

        The Hawaiian cognate underwent /k/→/ʔ/ (spelled ʻ), so it's probably really old.

        Based on that, if I had to take a guess: Polynesians contacted the Amerindians multiple times across the centuries, and it was kind of a big deal for Rapa Nui ones. Sadly a better analysis would need a bigger lexicon than a single word.

9 comments