> The title of this thread is "First South Americans Were Australian Aborigines", just making sure we are all aware that this sub conversation concerns a different population at a different time. Might as well throw in some Vikings ;)

Fair enough.

> Super interesting point about evidence of Polynesian travel in New Zealand. Now if there were some of that evidence with regard to South America, we'd be all clear. But there isn't as far as I know, which raises even more questions about the sweet potato conjecture.

It would be rather easy, presumably, for the evidence of transitory usage to be destroyed or at least rendered indistinguishable by several hundred years of settlement. We have that problem in NZ - Maori legend speaks of the greate explorer Kupe who found New Zealand (Aotearoa) and returned to Hawaiki to bring people back. Nearly all Maori tribes claim to descend from an original migration canoe (waka) from Hawaiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Māori_waka

However, archaeologically, we can't really tell where they, or Kupe the Great, specifically landed first - we can date earliest settlements, but how would you distinguish evidence of temporary occupation from evidence of permanent occupation?

So yeah, I would speculate that any travel to South America from Polynesia would probably have transited via Easter Island in the first instance - especially as it used to have dense forests before the Polynesian induced deforestation - thus making it an ideal staging post for resupplying by fishing and hunting, and providing materials to repair your canoes.

> With regard to the glacial maximum, nobody is claiming the oceans were plains to roam around. But a sea level 100 lower may uncover some new islands and make island hopping a whole lot easier. For example, Baral Guyot is a barely submerged island https://earthref.org/SC/SMNT-257S-0866W/ along the Sala y Gomez ridge and Nazca Ridge.

That is a very good point, I was only thinking Bering Sea-esque 'land bridges' and didn't consider seamounts becoming islands.

> Obviously there is no archeological confirmation of the conjecture I made, but that leaves both conjectures in the same uncomfortable spot.

The chicken DNA hypothesis needs more investigation IMO. Although it still leaves the question of the 'navigators' vs the 'navigees' unspoken. Who knows, maybe I'm manifesting extreme modern privilege and ignorance by assuming that seafaring was extraordinary to the Polynesians in the 10th century. It may well have been that contact between Polynesia and South America was driven from both sides mucking about in boats and having a great time. I guess I'm being a bit defensive of the Polynesians who were summarily dismissed by Heyerdahl - I hesitate to call him racist, but he overlooked what I consider to be an extraordinary amount of persuasive evidence that the Polynesians could easily have made the trip.

> This places the sweet potato travel around 1000 AD, which matches pretty well our conversation, but it's definitely not evidence for "first americans".

It's an interesting time for it to arrive - Hawaii was settled in the 900s, so we can speculate that population pressure (or perhaps food pressure?) drove a wave of exploration and migration from Polynesia. Tying it all together :D Some of those explorers found Hawaii, and some of them found kumara and Mapuches. :D