Chicken bones link Polynesia to Chile

Thor Heyerdahl’s historic 1947 voyage on the Kon-Tiki showed that people from the Southern Cone of South America may have traveled to the south Pacific in the pre-Columbian period. Yet a recent scientific report believes that the opposite may have been true.

Scientists have recently discovered a DNA mutation in the bones of a species of Chilean chicken that has only been found in Polynesian chickens. The discovery is significant in that chickens may have been brought to the Americas before Spanish and Portuguese explorers landed on the continent in the sixteenth century. According to the Belfast Telgraph’s Steve Connor:

“Until now the evidence in support of a direct cultural connection with Polynesians has been circumstantial…Alice Storey, a doctoral student in the department of anthropology at the University of Auckland, and her colleagues suggest that Polynesian seafarers could have used the reliable trade westerlies of the southern hemisphere to carry them and their cargo of living chickens to Chile”.

Image- CBS News

Sources- CBS News, Reuters, Belfast Telegraph