page_title: Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories
section_title: California canoes
hierarchical_section_title: Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories / Claims of Polynesian contact / California canoes
caption_attribution_description: English: Chumash Tomol 'Elye'wun paddlers crossing at Santa Cruz Island. California, Channel Islands NMS, Santa Cruz Island.
context_page_description: Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories speculate about possible visits to or interactions with the Americas, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or both, by people from Africa, Asia, Europe, or Oceania at a time prior to Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the Caribbean in 1492. Such contact is accepted as having occurred in prehistory during the human migrations that led to the original settlement of the Americas, but has been hotly debated in the historic period.
  Only one historical case of pre-Columbian contact is widely accepted among the scientific and scholarly mainstream. Maritime explorations by Norse peoples from Scandinavia during the late 10th century led to the Norse colonization of Greenland and of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, which preceded Columbus' arrival in the Americas by some 500 years. There is also significant evidence of material exchange between the peoples of Siberia and Alaska dating at least five centuries before Columbus' travels to the New World. Genetic evidence presented in 2020 found that some eastern Polynesian populations have admixture from coastal northern South American peoples, with an estimated contact around 1200 CE.
context_section_description: Researchers including Kathryn Klar and Terry Jones have proposed a theory of contact between Hawaiians and the Chumash people of Southern California between 400 and 800 CE. The sewn-plank canoes crafted by the Chumash and neighboring Tongva are unique among the indigenous peoples of North America, but similar in design to larger canoes used by Polynesians for deep-sea voyages. Tomolo'o, the Chumash word for such a craft, may derive from kumula'au, the Hawaiian term for the logs from which shipwrights carve planks to be sewn into canoes. The analogous Tongva term, tii'at, is unrelated. If it occurred, this contact left no genetic legacy in California or Hawaii. This theory has attracted limited media attention within California, but most archaeologists of the Tongva and Chumash cultures reject it on the grounds that the independent development of the sewn-plank canoe over several centuries is well-represented in the material record.
caption: 'Elye'wun, a reconstructed Chumash tomol
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