A new genetic study has uncovered evidence of an extraordinary chapter in medieval maritime history, suggesting that the same group of Polynesian seafarers settled both Hawaii and Easter Island, despite the islands being separated by some 7,000 kilometres of open ocean.
The research, published this month in the journal Science, reveals previously unknown genetic connections between some of the most remote islands in the Pacific Ocean. It suggests that medieval Polynesian voyagers possessed the skills and knowledge to undertake some of the longest maritime journeys in human history.
“What we uncover in this paper is where the native people of Hawaii had come from,” said Alexander Ioannidis, assistant professor of genetics and biomedical data science at Stanford University and co-senior author of the study. “Hawaii is the only Polynesian island in the Northern Hemisphere, so it’s a long way from everything.”
Tracing the Medieval Settlement of the Pacific
The settlement of Polynesia was one of the great achievements of medieval exploration. Over several centuries, skilled navigators crossed enormous stretches of ocean, establishing communities on islands scattered across a region of the Pacific roughly equivalent in area to North and South America combined.
Earlier genetic research had traced a sequence of migrations from western Polynesia, including Samoa, through the Cook Islands and the Society Islands, which include Tahiti, and eventually towards Mangareva and Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui.
The new study provides further evidence about the timing of this expansion. By analysing genetic information from 581 individuals from Tahiti, researchers estimated that the island experienced a founding population bottleneck around AD 1069, when its effective population of reproductive-age individuals numbered approximately 837. The actual settlement population would have been larger, since this estimate excludes children and older people.
This finding agrees with earlier archaeological and genetic estimates placing the settlement of the Society Islands in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries.
The researchers also point to earlier evidence suggesting that Rapa Nui was settled around AD 1210. However, rather than representing the final destination of Polynesian expansion, the island now appears to have been closely connected to the voyaging population responsible for settling Hawaii.
“We thought Easter Island was the end when we were first doing that study, but now it looks like it was part of this path to Hawaii, which is really incredible,” Ioannidis said. “By the time you’ve gotten all the way to Hawaii, you’re at the end of a series of founder effects, so it’s really intense.”
A Voyaging Culture Capable of Crossing Oceans
To investigate these connections, the international research team analysed whole-genome sequencing data from 1,050 individuals across French Polynesia, alongside additional genetic information from Rapa Nui, Hawaii, Samoa and Tonga. They focused on inherited DNA segments associated with Polynesian ancestry, allowing them to distinguish older population relationships from more recent genetic mixing.
The results showed that Native Hawaiians share more Polynesian genetic ancestry with people from Rapa Nui than with populations from other islands, including the geographically closer Marquesas. The next closest connection was with Mangareva, nearly 3,000 kilometres east of Rapa Nui.
This suggests that Hawaii and Rapa Nui were settled by closely related groups of voyagers whose deeper ancestral origins lay in Mangareva. It does not establish that settlers travelled directly from Easter Island to Hawaii, but it points to a shared maritime tradition capable of reaching both destinations.
The researchers have given this proposed long-distance voyaging population the name Holomoana Nui, meaning “great ocean voyaging”.
Their findings also add a new dimension to earlier theories about the settlement of Hawaii. Archaeological and linguistic evidence has frequently identified the Marquesas Islands as an important centre of Polynesian expansion. The genetic evidence supports the Marquesas’ wider importance but suggests that the more immediate ancestry of Hawaii’s founding population passed through Mangareva.
The study also fits with earlier research indicating that Polynesian voyagers reached South America and made contact with Indigenous American populations before European exploration of the Pacific.
How Medieval Migrations Shaped Modern Genetics
Hawaii – photo by R9 Studios FL / Flickr
Beyond reconstructing medieval maritime history, the study offers important insights into the health of present-day Polynesian populations. Each time a relatively small group of voyagers established a new settlement, they carried only part of the genetic diversity of their original community. Scientists call this a founder effect. When successive generations established further settlements, these effects accumulated, making certain genetic variants unusually common.
The researchers found that these cumulative effects were more than ten times stronger in remote Eastern Polynesian populations than in well-studied European founder populations, such as the Finns.
“What we discovered is in the Eastern Polynesians, such as Native Hawaiians, the founder effects are more than an order of magnitude, so more than 10 times, larger than what we have in the populations of European descent we’ve studied so well,” Ioannidis said.
The team identified three genetic variants associated with inherited conditions affecting eyesight and kidney function. Although these variants are extremely rare in global genetic databases, their estimated carrier frequencies in the French Polynesian sample ranged from approximately 2% to 4%.
My group’s paper out on the cover of Science!
Native Hawaiians are most closely related to the Rapanui of distant Easter Island 😮
Proud of it my students, the two co-first authors Cole Shanks & former MS student @edwardhuangc, and 3rd author @chrisoutho.
These findings could help improve genetic screening and medical care for Polynesian communities, which remain underrepresented in international genomic research. The researchers emphasise that further studies, particularly involving Native Hawaiians, are needed to understand the prevalence of these conditions across the Pacific.
For historians, meanwhile, the findings offer another way of understanding the remarkable achievements of medieval Polynesian navigators. Their journeys across thousands of kilometres of ocean not only established communities on some of the world’s most isolated islands but also left genetic connections that researchers can trace nearly a thousand years later.
The study, “Message in a bottleneck: Nested founder effects from French Polynesia to Rapa Nui and Hawaiʻi”, by Cole Shanks, Edward C. Huang, Christophe Thomassin, Anne-Katrin Emde, Vahinetua Rodière, Mauricio Moraga, Karla Sandoval, Tony Merriman, Tristan Pascart, Andrés Moreno-Estrada, Stephane E. Castel, Keolu Fox and Alexander G. Ioannidis, was published in Science. Click here to read it.
Top Image: 18th-century depiction of traveling by canoe in Hawaii, by John Webber (–1793)
A new genetic study has uncovered evidence of an extraordinary chapter in medieval maritime history, suggesting that the same group of Polynesian seafarers settled both Hawaii and Easter Island, despite the islands being separated by some 7,000 kilometres of open ocean.
The research, published this month in the journal Science, reveals previously unknown genetic connections between some of the most remote islands in the Pacific Ocean. It suggests that medieval Polynesian voyagers possessed the skills and knowledge to undertake some of the longest maritime journeys in human history.
“What we uncover in this paper is where the native people of Hawaii had come from,” said Alexander Ioannidis, assistant professor of genetics and biomedical data science at Stanford University and co-senior author of the study. “Hawaii is the only Polynesian island in the Northern Hemisphere, so it’s a long way from everything.”
Tracing the Medieval Settlement of the Pacific
The settlement of Polynesia was one of the great achievements of medieval exploration. Over several centuries, skilled navigators crossed enormous stretches of ocean, establishing communities on islands scattered across a region of the Pacific roughly equivalent in area to North and South America combined.
Earlier genetic research had traced a sequence of migrations from western Polynesia, including Samoa, through the Cook Islands and the Society Islands, which include Tahiti, and eventually towards Mangareva and Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui.
The new study provides further evidence about the timing of this expansion. By analysing genetic information from 581 individuals from Tahiti, researchers estimated that the island experienced a founding population bottleneck around AD 1069, when its effective population of reproductive-age individuals numbered approximately 837. The actual settlement population would have been larger, since this estimate excludes children and older people.
This finding agrees with earlier archaeological and genetic estimates placing the settlement of the Society Islands in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries.
The researchers also point to earlier evidence suggesting that Rapa Nui was settled around AD 1210. However, rather than representing the final destination of Polynesian expansion, the island now appears to have been closely connected to the voyaging population responsible for settling Hawaii.
“We thought Easter Island was the end when we were first doing that study, but now it looks like it was part of this path to Hawaii, which is really incredible,” Ioannidis said. “By the time you’ve gotten all the way to Hawaii, you’re at the end of a series of founder effects, so it’s really intense.”
A Voyaging Culture Capable of Crossing Oceans
To investigate these connections, the international research team analysed whole-genome sequencing data from 1,050 individuals across French Polynesia, alongside additional genetic information from Rapa Nui, Hawaii, Samoa and Tonga. They focused on inherited DNA segments associated with Polynesian ancestry, allowing them to distinguish older population relationships from more recent genetic mixing.
The results showed that Native Hawaiians share more Polynesian genetic ancestry with people from Rapa Nui than with populations from other islands, including the geographically closer Marquesas. The next closest connection was with Mangareva, nearly 3,000 kilometres east of Rapa Nui.
This suggests that Hawaii and Rapa Nui were settled by closely related groups of voyagers whose deeper ancestral origins lay in Mangareva. It does not establish that settlers travelled directly from Easter Island to Hawaii, but it points to a shared maritime tradition capable of reaching both destinations.
The researchers have given this proposed long-distance voyaging population the name Holomoana Nui, meaning “great ocean voyaging”.
Their findings also add a new dimension to earlier theories about the settlement of Hawaii. Archaeological and linguistic evidence has frequently identified the Marquesas Islands as an important centre of Polynesian expansion. The genetic evidence supports the Marquesas’ wider importance but suggests that the more immediate ancestry of Hawaii’s founding population passed through Mangareva.
The study also fits with earlier research indicating that Polynesian voyagers reached South America and made contact with Indigenous American populations before European exploration of the Pacific.
How Medieval Migrations Shaped Modern Genetics
R9 Studios FL / Flickr
Beyond reconstructing medieval maritime history, the study offers important insights into the health of present-day Polynesian populations. Each time a relatively small group of voyagers established a new settlement, they carried only part of the genetic diversity of their original community. Scientists call this a founder effect. When successive generations established further settlements, these effects accumulated, making certain genetic variants unusually common.
The researchers found that these cumulative effects were more than ten times stronger in remote Eastern Polynesian populations than in well-studied European founder populations, such as the Finns.
“What we discovered is in the Eastern Polynesians, such as Native Hawaiians, the founder effects are more than an order of magnitude, so more than 10 times, larger than what we have in the populations of European descent we’ve studied so well,” Ioannidis said.
The team identified three genetic variants associated with inherited conditions affecting eyesight and kidney function. Although these variants are extremely rare in global genetic databases, their estimated carrier frequencies in the French Polynesian sample ranged from approximately 2% to 4%.
These findings could help improve genetic screening and medical care for Polynesian communities, which remain underrepresented in international genomic research. The researchers emphasise that further studies, particularly involving Native Hawaiians, are needed to understand the prevalence of these conditions across the Pacific.
For historians, meanwhile, the findings offer another way of understanding the remarkable achievements of medieval Polynesian navigators. Their journeys across thousands of kilometres of ocean not only established communities on some of the world’s most isolated islands but also left genetic connections that researchers can trace nearly a thousand years later.
The study, “Message in a bottleneck: Nested founder effects from French Polynesia to Rapa Nui and Hawaiʻi”, by Cole Shanks, Edward C. Huang, Christophe Thomassin, Anne-Katrin Emde, Vahinetua Rodière, Mauricio Moraga, Karla Sandoval, Tony Merriman, Tristan Pascart, Andrés Moreno-Estrada, Stephane E. Castel, Keolu Fox and Alexander G. Ioannidis, was published in Science. Click here to read it.
Top Image: 18th-century depiction of traveling by canoe in Hawaii, by John Webber (–1793)
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