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What the world’s most remote islands were like before humans arrived
- EdwardDiego 5y agoI've always been in awe of the navigational capabilities of the Polynesians. Sailing 2500 miles from the Marquesas to Hawaii, someone must have scouted it out and told everyone how to get there.
- bruce343434 5y agoMaybe there was a civil war and a group just got exiled, then needed to find a new place?
- PostOnce 5y agoFor every tiny speck of land in Polynesia? Across like 20 million square miles of water? Over the course of thousands of years? Samoa was colonized like 1000 years before Rome was founded, and New Zealand wasn't discovered by humans until about 2500 years later.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoWell, yeah, kinda, the general consensus in academia is that a decrease in the carrying capacity of settled islands, whether climate induced or manmade, tended to drive Polynesian expansion. And yep, every speck that was habitable, and quite a few that weren't in the long term - e.g., Raoul Island in the Kermadecs, Norfolk Island, Campbell Island in NZ's Sub-Antarctic Islands, Pitcairn Island, Henderson Island, etc. etc. Plenty of places Polynesians settled, or tried to settle.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoThe academic consensus is pretty much in agreement with you, not sure why you got downvoted. Polynesian migrations tended to happen after a decrease in carrying capacity of settled islands that led to civil war over limited resources. I can, if really needed to dredge up papers to back this, but I'm not making any promises for when.
- oh_sigh 5y agoDoes it count as navigation if they didn't even know where they were going?
- thaumasiotes 5y agoYes, most places in the Pacific aren't islands.
- bombcar 5y agoI wonder how far from the islands a trained navigator could be and still notice them - via currents or birds or ?
- thaumasiotes 5y agoI believe islands form distinctive cloud patterns. Birds seem like a likely indicator too.
- bombcar 5y agoBeing able to see an island from 50 miles away would greatly increase the chance of finding it, even in an expanse as large as the ocean.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoPolynesian navigators used wave patterns to detect islands at a distance IIRC, and even created woven maps based on wave refraction.
- taneq 5y agoMaybe not if they only did it once but it was a pretty regular thing, no?
- EdwardDiego 5y agoHow do you know that the settlers who had packed a bunch of stuff to settle the new lands, didn't know where they were going?
- ggm 5y agoMy understanding (happy to be corrected) is that with skills you can sail into and with the wind, at the cost of how much leeway you lose sailing into the wind. Which means for exploration, you can go 1/3 to 1/2 the distance of your food "out" as long as you wear the risk of the sums going wrong "back" The oceans have strong prevailing wind and wave patterns. I think this played to the compass-less navigation (stars and planets help) model: you did know "which way was up" for a single frame of reference view. So it was awesome, but also awesome engineering of cost-optimisation. I think it came down to successive waves of exploration. You do the limit of the craft, then you do a flotilla of craft with more stores, then you do portage of stores to intermediate places or send on a sub-team and eventually you "arrive" somewhere you know the cost of getting to, within acceptable water-limited margins of error. Kon Tiki gets a bad rap, but some things they found workable like extracting drinkable non-salty water from fish (swim bladders? lymph system?) and the sustainability of sweet water in coconuts, go to how long you can go "out" for that magical 1/3 to 1/2 of your stores.
- Maursault 5y ago> at the cost of how much leeway you lose sailing into the wind There is still vigorous debate concerning it, but IMO, the fastest tack is the close haul -- sailing into the wind (not directly into it, but the closer you get to it without pointing directly into it, the faster you go). I have a sailing buddy that swears the broad reach is the fastest tack (sailing at an angle away from the wind). Some say running is fastest... but of course they're mistaken. Seems to me this is a controversy that only Mythbusters could have designed an experiment for and revealed once and for all which sailing tack is fastest.
- mattclarkdotnet 5y agoThere’s no debate, just a lack of clarity around terms. The fastest point of sail is a broad reach as measured against the true wind angle. Naturally this leads to a close hauled point of sail measured by the apparent wind angle. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186515/why-is-a-beam-reach-the-fastest-point-of-sail-on-modern-sailboats https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186515/why-is-a-...
- stupendousyappi 5y agoI've read that the the Hawaiian islands disrupted ocean swells in ways that Polynesians could detect even 1000+ miles away. In addition, the Hawaiian islands are huge and lush, and dumped a large amount of plant debris into the water, some of which Polynesian sailors would occasionally notice while at sea. I'm skeptical that those signs would have been noticable all the way from the Marquessas islands, but the Marquessas Polynesians were likely ranging 1000+ into the ocean themselves, which evidently was enough for them to deduce the existence of large islands in the general direction of Hawaii long before they discovered it. Evidently according to oral tradition, the discoverers of Hawaii arrived equipped with plants, animals and other gear to establish a new settlement- they knew the islands were there before anyone set foot on them.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoIt's the same for the settlement of NZ, they brought kūri, kūmara, uhi, and aute. That's dogs (for hunting and food), sweet potatoes, yams, and paper mulberry, used to make tapa cloth in the Pacific. (We're not sure if they didn't bring the pigs and chickens widespread in Polynesia, or if they didn't survive the voyage or the initial landings, or their bones didn't end up in excavated middens. Maybe a flu virus got in there?). The aute didn't really flourish in Aotearoa, and the cloth derived from it wasn't that warm, so clothing as well as fish hook styles, canoe styles etc. from Polynesia were rapidly adapted, but it's clear that the Polynesian settlers who became the Māori, they came prepared.
- helsinkiandrew 5y agoBirds seem to have provided evidence of land too - migrating birds consistently appearing from one direction suggest that land could be in that direction. Polynesians also seem to have taken birds on their voyages - when a bird is released and comes back there's no land nearby, if it flies off in one direction follow it to find land.
- mceoin 5y agoThe Wayfinders, by Wade Davis, is a great book on the topic.
- intrepidhero 5y agoWell, not the MOST remote. Wikipedia has a list[1]. Maybe Marquesas is the furthest from a continental landmass (3000mi to Mexico). But it's much closer to Tahiti than many of the other islands on the list. Remote islands became a casual study of mine during the pandemic... for some reason. Happy to learn more about French Polynesia. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremes_on_Earth#Remoteness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremes_on_Earth#Remoteness
- Stevvo 5y agoFor many years I've been searching for the perfect beach; the one with the white sand and palm trees from the postcards. I've gone half way around the world on this quest, sailed to places few will ever see. I've come to the conclusion this beach does not exist; beaches are only ever free of pollution when they are regularly cleaned by humans, regardless of how remote it is.
- omegabravo 5y agonever sailed to French Polynesia I assume?
- Stevvo 5y agoNot yet, will get there eventually but it's a slow journey at 6 knots even if you are not working most of the time...
- moneywoes 5y agoAny favourites along the way?
- alexk307 5y agoYou're not trying hard enough then... They're out there.
- taneq 5y agoReminds me of a conversation I had with a guy on a plane once. We were staring out the window over central Australia and he commented that it's almost impossible to find a place so remote that you can't see a sign of human occupation from the air. And he was right, even 500+ km from anywhere there were still a few roads, sheds etc. visible at any given time.
- deanCommie 5y agoI think the sign of human activity that is the most visible from the furthest out into space is forestry clearcuts. They are much bigger than cities. Farms fade and start to blend together and their perfect geometric shapes are harder to see. But clearcuts are more haphazard but spread over hundreds of kilometers, so even when you zoom out really far, it just looks like someone spilled a bunch of salt on the map.
- kazinator 5y ago> What the world’s most remote islands were like before humans arrived They were the ultimate example of NIMBYism; zero people per square mile: no density at all. 3000 miles of swimming or paddling to get the nearest store or library. Shitloads of fossil fuels required to deliver supplies. Totally unlivable. All the resident animals cared about were their property values, ocean views, and their god forsaken current way of life and character of their neighborhood.