Wider World · Polynesian settlement of Hawaii and Rapa Nui · Mangareva, Gambier Islands, French Polynesia
DNA suggests Hawaii and Easter Island were settled by the same Polynesian voyagers
Genomes of 1,050 living Polynesians point to a single seafaring group from the Mangareva islands as the ancestors of both Native Hawaiians and Easter Islanders.
Mangareva, French Polynesia Native Hawaiians and the people of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) descend from the same group of long-distance Polynesian sailors, a genetic study suggests. The researchers think both islands were settled by members of a single "ultravoyager" culture from the Mangareva islands, in what is now French Polynesia.
The team, which includes computational geneticist Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford University, published the results on 8 October in the journal Science. Hawaii and Easter Island are the two Polynesian islands farthest from each other. They lie about 7,200 km (4,500 miles) apart, roughly the distance from San Francisco to Lima.
Read in shared stretches of DNA
The researchers analysed the genomes of 1,050 living people across Polynesia. They included 317 Native Hawaiians and 12 Easter Islanders. The study used DNA from living people. No ancient remains were sampled.
“Each person's genome contains genetic code from both parents, and from all four grandparents, and their parents, and so on. Each genome encodes an enormous number of ancestors. So with even a few individuals, we can get information about an enormous number of people from each island.”
Alexander Ioannidis, computational geneticist, Stanford University
The team compared the length of chromosome segments shared by people from different islands. The longer the shared segments, the more recently two people had a common ancestor. By this measure, the Indigenous people of Hawaii and Rapa Nui are the most closely related to each other.
Mangareva lies about 5,530 km southeast of Hawaii and 2,600 km west of Easter Island. The results suggest the ancestors of both peoples spent time together as one group after splitting from the population of ancient Mangareva. Some members of this group then settled Hawaii. Others sailed to Easter Island.
Ioannidis said the region around Mangareva, including the Austral, Society and Marquesas islands and the Tuamotu Archipelago, "spans an area the size of Europe". In his view, sailing between these islands needed skilled navigation, and those skills would have helped people reach Easter Island and Hawaii.
“Once you know there was this extremely capable long-distance ultravoyaging culture capable of reaching one of these islands, having it reach the other makes more sense.”
Alexander Ioannidis, computational geneticist, Stanford University
In 2020 the same researchers found that members of this voyaging group had mixed with Indigenous people in what is now Colombia. It is unclear whether that happened on an island or on the continent.
Patrick Kirch, an archaeologist at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, did not take part in the research. He said the genetic data linking Hawaii, Easter Island and Mangareva "agrees very well with what we see archaeologically".
“It gives scientists a lot of confidence when independent lines of evidence from different disciplines give similar results.”
Patrick Kirch, archaeologist, University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Small founding groups left strong genetic traces
The team also studied founder effects. A founder effect happens when a small group settles a new place: a rare trait among the few settlers can become common as the population grows. The Polynesian populations in the study often went through several founder effects in a row. Islands settled by a few people later sent out small groups to settle other islands, and so on.
Among Native Hawaiians, the study found a founder effect that had been overlooked. It is more than 10 times larger than in some groups of European descent. These include the Amish, Finns and Ashkenazi Jews, who now have standard screening for certain genetic conditions. Kirch said the founder effect "probably helps explain why the cultures of eastern Polynesia all share a lot in common".
The researchers found three genetic variants that are exceedingly rare worldwide. Between 2 and 3% of the eastern Polynesians they studied carry them. The variants are linked with dislocated lenses in the eyes, progressive vision loss and kidney failure. Ioannidis called for more resources to study such variants among Native Hawaiians, a population he said is twice the size of the US Amish population.
Sources (1)
- Native Hawaiians and Easter Islanders came from same 'ultravoyager' group (Live Science: archaeology)
Paper: Shanks, C., Huang, E. C., Thomassin, C., Emde, A., Rodière, V., Moraga, M., Sandoval, K., Merriman, T., Pascart, T., Moreno-Estrada, A., Castel, S. E., Fox, K., & Ioannidis, A. G. (2026). Message in a bottleneck: Nested founder effects from French Polynesia to Rapa Nui and Hawaiʻi. Science, 394(6820), 216–221. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aec7662
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