Between 3,500 and 900 years ago, people first settled the islands of the vast Pacific Ocean in double-hulled and outrigger canoes. Many scientists have tried to explain just what made these epic journeys possible. University of Utah anthropologist Adrian Bell tackled the problem from a completely new perspective. He used statistics that describe how an infectious disease spreads and applied them to computer simulations of the colonization of 24 major island groups.
“We model ocean migrants as ‘infecting’ uninhabited islands,” he said in a statement.
If the results of the analysis are correct, the colonizers didn’t just hop to the nearest islands or drift around hopefully. The study, published in this month’s issue of the journal American Antiquity , suggests that those early Pacific seafarers “had a strategy for the best way to discover new places: movement across the ocean in a less risky fashion – often meaning into the wind – and moving to places that were more easily visible.”
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