Decent article, though a little thin on details. For example, alludes to but doesn't mention Polynesian wayfinding techniques, which are quite fascinating. Th

Decent article, though a little thin on details. For example, alludes to but doesn't mention Polynesian wayfinding techniques, which are quite fascinating. The Polynesians developed some really clever nautical wayfinding techniques without instruments, or with rudimentary, imprecise, non-machined ones, that enabled them to reliably traverse the islands of the South Pacific, even to remote ones like Tahiti. Lots of articles on "Polynesian wayfinding" across the web, and a great exhibition on it at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu in case you happen to be in the vicinity. https://www.bishopmuseum.org/?s=wayfind https://www.bishopmuseum.org/?s=wayfind Probably the best observation in the article, is the way theories can potentially become distorted the further away in time they are from their subject of study: >GAZETTE: The book deals also with the flip side of that wondrousness, the Western skepticism that an “unsophisticated,” “primitive” people could manage this feat. What underlies Western skepticism? Was it also wonder at the distances involved? Or was it rooted in racism, in ignorance? Why not just take folks at their word when they say they did it? THOMPSON: There was a lot of skepticism, and I think that was basically rooted in a sense of Western superiority and classic colonialism and that set of attitudes. But one of the things that I think is misunderstood is that this was not a uniform view. There are periods, at the end of the 18th century and in the 19th century, when Europeans who were interested in this subject were actually not that skeptical at all of Polynesian voyaging capacity. Some of the 19th-century figures I write about took for granted — completely — that Polynesians had been the greatest navigators ever. They were convinced that they had sailed these distances and they had gone back and forth repeatedly. What I saw that sort of surprised me, because it ran contrary to the conventional wisdom, was a rise in skepticism in the 20th century. My interpretation is that this is because we’re actually moving away from understanding the people. We’re moving away in time from real contact with the islanders and a real understanding of what they were doing. The earlier theorists of the 19th century had many bad ideas, but they did believe in Polynesian voyaging. And they were quite close to the people. They spoke the languages. They often married into these cultures. They were intimate with them. And they lived in a period before there was so much lost knowledge. So that was an interesting aspect of the story that I didn’t foresee.