Voyaging by canoe and computer: experiments in the settlement of the Pacific Ocean

Abstract

There is no expansion of human settlement to match the colonization of the Pacific islands, from Island Southeast Asia right across to Hawaii, Easter Island and down to New Zealand. The expansion is given an extra interest by the new finding that it began as early as the Pleistocene. The settlement of the remote Pacific began after 3500 BP and computer modelling and analysis of inter-island transits explains not just how settlement was possible-but how it must have followed from the controlled navigation of directed voyages and strategies for survival.