Tag: Remote Places

How Remote Places Are Populated?

Looking at the map of Remote Oceania which is a region containing Hawaii, New Zealand, French Polynesia and Micronesia you might wonder how people manage to settle on places like this. They are located so far apart from the landmass and they are so far from each other too. Although these are some of the last places that human race has populated, it is still surprising that people managed to get there.

Looking at various evidences such as archaeological, anthropological, genetic as well as linguistic evidence suggests that people have reached there as early as 3400 years ago. There is not a clear estimate of which island was colonised first, it is still remains under debate as to where it originated from and what kind of strategies were used.

There is no concrete information on how people could have sailed to these locations due to the limited navigational option available those days. Settling in remote places such as these must have required many trips across thousands of kilometres of the sea. There is no idea on how the boat technology was those years and what was used the early settlers to get to these islands.

Another intriguing factor is how the colonisation process happened after a hiatus of about 2000 years. Because, after some time there was a pause in expansion leading to some expansions not happening. During this pause, somewhere between the 1,100 and 800 BP only Tahiti, Rapa Nui and Hawaii were occupied.

After conducting many voyage simulations and trajectories some concepts were theorized. The reason for the 2000 year pause in simulation raised from the fact that the area from Samoa has an increasing distance between two islands. To get to these locations, one has to travel against the wind which would have made it very difficult.

In future, these researches will continue to analyse on the colonization and how these remote islands were occupied.