Polynesian South America theory

@wajoma said
That was never my angle you ijit. The history of navigation is a good one, take it or leave it, many people (I'm reluctant to say cultures, because it is a story of individuals from various cultures) contributed to it, there were people that devoted their whole life to it. You would learn about the tools developed and the knowledge required to use those tools. Absolute bare ...[text shortened]... ck it up, maybe make a song about it.

Edit 8: It just gets better, they looked at the waves haha

The sky has these things called "stars" in it which can and were used for navigation. The types of "bare minimum tools" that you believe were necessary for navigation didn't exist until the 17th and 18th centuries yet people have been doing voyages of hundreds or even thousands of miles long before then.

From MB's link:

In island culture, the double canoe and its navigator were integral to the survival of the people. As an island became overpopulated, navigators were sent out to sail uncharted seas to find undiscovered islands. For weeks, they would live aboard boats made from wood and lashings of braided fiber. Thousands of miles were traversed, without the aid of sextants or compasses. The ancient Polynesians navigated their canoes by the stars and other signs that came from the ocean and sky. Navigation was a precise science, a learned art that was passed on verbally from one navigator to another for countless generations.

In 1768, as he sailed from Tahiti, Captain Cook had an additional passenger on board his ship, a Tahitian navigator named Tupaia. Tupaia guided Cook 300 miles south to Rurutu, a small Polynesian island, proving he could navigate from his homeland to a distant island. Cook was amazed to find that Tupaia could always point in the exact direction in which Tahiti lay, without the use of the ship's charts.

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Using no instruments, the canoe team navigated as their ancestors did, by the stars. They had no maps, no sextants, no compasses, and they navigated by observing the ocean and sky, reading the stars and swells. The paths of stars and rhythms of the ocean guided them by night and the color of sky and the sun, the shapes of clouds, and the direction from which the swells were coming, guided them by day. Several days away from an island, they were able to determine the exact day of landfall. Swells would tell them that there was land ahead, and the surest telltale sign would be the presence of birds making flights out to sea seeking food. By sailing from Hawaii to Tahiti, Hokule'a's team was able to prove that it was possible for Polynesian peoples to migrate over thousands of miles from island to island.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/polynesia-genius-navigators/

@wajoma said
Edit: BTW that's not a book, that's a copy and paste wiki link, maybe you should try a book instead of the standard kaka notion action, google wiki, CTRL C, CTRL P

https://www.amazon.com/Polynesian-Navigation-Discovery-New-Zealand/dp/1877514152

@no1marauder said
The sky has these things called "stars" in it which can and were used for navigation. The types of "bare minimum tools" that you believe were necessary for navigation didn't exist until the 17th and 18th centuries yet people have been doing voyages of hundreds or even thousands of miles long before then.

From MB's link:

In island culture, the double canoe and its na ...[text shortened]... f miles from island to island.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/polynesia-genius-navigators/

Doing voyages and navigating the ocean are two separate things. If you learned what it does mean to navigate reliably you'd know it's not as simple as looking at the stars with or without instruments.
I'm the one that tried a book, you've googled to find people that agree with your dreams. If you Google enough you'll find some folk believe in a majic friend in the sky too.

Based on DNA analysis of ancient hominid bones, 18,000 years ago, homo sapiens began to migrate from Siberia across the land bridge to Alaska and over the course of the next 4,000 years reached Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. Between 60,000 and 47,000 years ago, hominids managed to sail from SE Asia throughout Indonesia and the Philippines, eventually reaching Australia. These distances are tiny compared to the open waters of the Pacific. Information from "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari. A very interesting read.

@wajoma said
Doing voyages and navigating the ocean are two separate things. If you learned what it does mean to navigate reliably you'd know it's not as simple as looking at the stars with or without instruments.
I'm the one that tried a book, you've googled to find people that agree with your dreams. If you Google enough you'll find some folk believe in a majic friend in the sky too.

All I can say is that these "blokes in canoes" must have all had rabbit feet and four leaf clovers in their pockets to be so "lucky" as to find and populate the thousands of islands in the vast Pacific Ocean. Or maybe what you think are absolutely essential navigational tools weren't so essential (although nice to have):

The islands scattered along the north shore of New Guinea first drew these canoe people eastwards into the ocean. By 1500 B.C., these voyagers began moving east beyond New Guinea, first along the Solomon Island chain, and then to the Banks and Vanuatu Archipelagos. As the gaps between islands grew from tens of miles at the edge of the western Pacific to hundreds of miles along the way to Polynesia, and then to thousands of miles in the case of voyages to the far corners of the Polynesian triangle, these oceanic colonizers developed great double-hulled vessels capable of carrying colonists as well as all their supplies, domesticated animals, and planting materials. As the voyages became longer, they developed a highly sophisticated navigation system based on observations of the stars, the ocean swells, the flight patterns of birds and other natural signs to find their way over the open ocean. And, as they moved farther away from the biotic centers of Southeast Asia and New Guinea, finding the flora and fauna increasingly diminished, they developed a portable agricultural system, whereby the domesticated plants and animals were carried in their canoes for transplantation on the islands they found.

Once they had reached the mid-ocean archipelagos of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, these seafarers - the immediate ancestors of the Polynesians - were alone in the ocean, for only they had the canoes and navigational skills needed to push so far into the Pacific. The gaps between islands widen greatly in the eastern Pacific and the prevailing winds become less and less favorable for sailing to the east. Nonetheless, the archaeological evidence indicates that they sailed eastward to the Cook, Society, and Marquesas Groups, and from there crossed thousands of miles of open ocean to colonize the islands of Hawai'i in the north, Easter Island in the southeast, and New Zealand in the southwest, thus completing settlement, by around 1000 AD, of the area we know today as the Polynesian Triangle.

https://www.pbs.org/wayfinders/polynesian2.html

@no1marauder said
All I can say is that these "blokes in canoes" must have all had rabbit feet and four leaf clovers in their pockets to be so "lucky" as to find and populate the thousands of islands in the vast Pacific Ocean. Or maybe what you think are absolutely essential navigational tools weren't so essential (although nice to have):

The islands scattered along the north shore of N ...[text shortened]... he area we know today as the Polynesian Triangle.

https://www.pbs.org/wayfinders/polynesian2.html

In case you haven't realised I'm disagreeing with you and your links. And I will say again, if you knew what it took ( read a book, you know, like what you told me to do, instead of googling for stuff that agrees with your pre-set notions) to get a bearing once you're over the horizon. Now you've got them navigating by landmarks, have you ever been in a boat out of sight of land,, you'd realise how soon that happens.

Having some idea of what is required to navigate reliably, you'd have all voyages stopped for OSHA violations.

Edit: You like the star theory huh. Clue: Stars are no good for longitude, they're helpful with latitude. The star scape changes every day slightly, and you believe these people had the language, the resources, the tools to make observations, convert these observations to songs and the go out navigating the ocean away from the sight of land.

@wajoma said
In case you haven't realised I'm disagreeing with you and your links. And I will say again, if you knew what it took ( read a book, you know, like what you told me to do, instead of googling for stuff that agrees with your pre-set notions) to get a bearing once you're over the horizon. Now you've got them navigating by landmarks, have you ever been in a boat out of sight of l ...[text shortened]... convert these observations to songs and the go out navigating the ocean away from the sight of land.

You're disagreeing that the islands in the Pacific were found and colonized long before Europeans got there with their fancy navigational techniques like Columbus' dead reckoning?

@wajoma said
In case you haven't realised I'm disagreeing with you and your links. And I will say again, if you knew what it took ( read a book, you know, like what you told me to do, instead of googling for stuff that agrees with your pre-set notions) to get a bearing once you're over the horizon. Now you've got them navigating by landmarks, have you ever been in a boat out of sight of l ...[text shortened]... convert these observations to songs and the go out navigating the ocean away from the sight of land.

They didn’t calculate longitude and latitude they had the equivalent of an itinerary.