Sidestep: Mocha Island
Mocha Island is a small (13x5.5 kilometers) island located 35 km from the southern coast of the Arauco region of south central Chile. Archaeological research on the island suggests that it was first occupied about 5,000 years ago, and that a permanent settlement was formed about 1500 years ago. Mocha Island is located within the region traditionally occupied by the Mapuche, a pre-Hispanic culture located in central-south Chile, Argentina and Patagonia.
Until now Professor Lisa Matisoo-Smith (Anatomy and Structural Biology) and her research group have been concentrating on using the DNA of dogs, pigs, rats and chickens – animals the Polynesian explorers carried in their colonising canoes – as a ways to track the movement of humans eastwards across the Pacific. It was a chicken bone found in South America in a pre-Columbian context that got us focusing on that end of the Pacific expansion and we found that they have the same DNA as chickens in the Pacific.
After investigations at the site a small human skeletal assemblage was discovered at the Concepcion Museum (Chile) in 2007 that had come from Mocha Island. Among the human remains were six complete human skulls, three of which were identified as having some Polynesian ancestry, based on physical attributes including a pentagonal skull form and rocker-shaped mandibles.
Professor Lisa Matisoo-Smith of the University of Otago and José Miguel Ramírez Aliaga of the University of Valparaíso, claim the skulls have “Polynesian features”, such as a pentagonal shape when viewed from behind,
Further excavation elsewhere in coastal Chile discovered similar skeletons with similar traits. This proves that Polynesians did travel east, and a few may have travelled back home but these ones stayed. Either because they chose to, had fled home from some reason or could not return because they had no idea how to get back. (blown of course, or just sailed as explorers).
The chicken bones would be left over from that which they would have brought with them for eggs and food. They weren’t there long or successfully enough for the chickens to breed and multiply. That’s the likely explanation anyway, otherwise more chicken bones would have been found,
Evidence of mixed ancestry between Polynesian explorers and native women of the central coast was the result of the archaeological rescue carried out in Tunquén, 44 kilometers from Valparaíso, under the direction of the researcher of the Center for Advanced Studies (CEA) of the University of Playa Ancha, José Miguel Ramírez. After a casual find on a particular site, the National Monuments Council commissioned archaeologist Ramirez in 2011 to lead the rescue of what would be part of a cemetery and a conchal. Together with volunteers, physical anthropologists and archaeological students set out to rescue a cemetery made up of individual tombs excavated in the basement below the reservoir of pre-Hispanic occupation.
There were a dozen skeletons from a thousand years ago, which were in very good condition. They presented the same morphological features of the archaeological remains found in 1990 and later years, in Isla Mocha, south of Concepción. Some of the bodies had all or some of the three morphological features that characterize the Polynesian phenotype: a rocker jaw, a pentagonal skull, and the oval form of the femoral head orifice that connects the ligaments To the hip ", explains the professional conference at the CEA.
The material is still in the process of being studied and much remains to be investigated. "The interesting thing is that we reached to do analysis of mitochondrial DNA which would reaffirm the idea of mestizaje, and that the contact was not occasional, but there were descendants. The only explanation is that there was a relationship of peoples speaking different languages, which would also explain the ten Polynesian words in the Mapudungun, "he says. The CEA-UPLA researcher has specialized in the analysis of human bones and pre-Hispanic materials in central-southern Chile, as well as evidence of contact and cultural and genetic transfer between the Polynesian explorer-colonizers and the local population. a thousand years.
The hypothesis of a Polynesian contact in southern Chile is very old. Archaeological, linguistic and even biological elements have been described among prehispanic Mapuches, which could be derived from a Polynesian contact.
"The novelty is that it left a mark on the Mapuche culture. In Arauco, for the first time, evidence of hen bones in a pre-Hispanic context (1300 and 1400 AD) was found, with Polynesian genes identical to those of Tonga and Samoa, "the archaeologist explains.
The finding was made at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, by Dr. Elizabeth Matisso-Smith.
In 1903 on Mocha Island the evidence of three Polynesian-shaped skulls was first described. But it was with the excavations of the '90s and fifteen years later that Ramirez and Matisso-Smith confirmed by DNA analysis on hen bones and morphological traits in human skeletons, Polynesian contact in southern Chile.
Colonization of the Pacific
The encounter with America might have been accidental, the researcher says, but it was an inevitable consequence of the process of exploration and colonization of the South Pacific as they moved consistently eastwards.
Going home was part of the strategy of exploration and colonization, and they did it with families, plants and animals. What is thought of the explorers who arrived at Isla Mocha and Tunquén is that to have left traces in the Mapuche culture, they stayed and left offspring. They could be several groups, not one, and may also be that they never met each other.
"The bones are telling us that there was mestizaje (interbreeding) between Polynesian explorers men and native women. There are many questions left and the possibilities of doing research through the CEA-UPLA are extraordinary, and that is what I hope to continue doing ", concludes archaeologist Ramirez.
“We want to establish the nature of the contact with the island. Was it actually Polynesians settling on this island and establishing a settlement or was it just male traders going back and forth? When we are looking at the ancient DNA for evidence of potential contact in the Americas we have to start thinking who would be the most likely people to be making that contact. We know, based on ethnographic evidence, that navigators and voyagers are generally men – women would be taken to settle once land was found. So it’s very possible that contact was by only men or they might have then come back with women and possibly established settlements. But we really need to be looking at Y chromosome markers. We guess that it probably happened sometime between 1200 and 1400 AD – possibly as early as 1000AD,” says Matisoo-Smith.
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This same effect is what occurred in the early colonization of Aotearoa by Polynesians. They arrived and interbred with the local inhabitants on a limited scale (mostly Melanesian immigrants) but did not mix that well with the taller ancient but small race groups on the west coast. These were eventually wiped out. DNA testing from our cave will confirm the origin of these very ancient peoples once and for all. Until then we can only speculate.
