How did ancient Polynesians first find all the remote Pacific islands? Did they just sail in random directions hoping to find land?

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28 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Couldn’t they follow birds? (Asking not telling)

Anonymous 0 Comments

So, as others have mentioned, waves bounce off of islands, so that’s one method.

Another is that clouds tend to accumulate over islands (different air patterns over land than water), and *birds* were a big help.

They figured that if they spotted a bird at sea, it was either headed *from* or *toward* land, or food, since it had to have nests somewhere. They could easily use other methods to determine if the birds were leaving land, though time of day was a big factor. (If it was morning, they were leaving the nest to hunt. If it was evening, they were returning to the nest to sleep.)

Combine this with eventual familiarity with local currents, and likely *generations* of experience passed down through oral tradition and recordkeeping (they didn’t do it overnight, after all.), and there you have it.

I am by no means an expert on this topic, so I likely missed some things, but I did look into it at some point in the past year or two.

Edit: As some people pointed out, *yes*, at night, they could navigate using the stars and night sky. This could be as simple as following the correct stars for a direction, to as advanced as measuring how high a constellation has risen over the horizon relative to global position and time of night to track progress, using nothing more than your hand, the star and the horizon as a measuring stick and points of reference, and the positioning of the moon to track time of night.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I was listening to some podcasts on the subject. In addition to what other people said, they sent out active explorers looking for new islands and even had a standard way of organizing a new colonial fleet. It was very purposeful. The explorers did in some cases set off in random directions, but they had ways of looking for land as other people had already explaining, and knew now to reliably return.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The ancestors of Polynesians came from what is now Taiwan, apparently. Indigenous Taiwanese, that is, not the Han latecomers who followed Chiang Kai Shek off mainland China.

They went south and some populated SE Asia (becoming Indonesians, Malaysians and Filipinos), and others went on all over the Pacific as Polynesians. Southeast Asians learned ironworking, while Polynesians never found useable metal deposits on the islands and were stone-tech until European contact.

Curiously the Polynesians also had no tradition of pottery. They had gourds but no clay pots.

Anonymous 0 Comments

No they, they used a wide variety of wayfinding techniques that others have mentioned – wave patterns, currents, maps, birds. Also you can tell if there are islands over the horizon based on cloud formations that gather over the land. They were incredibly skilled navigators – the sea was basically the core of their lifestyle.