People may have emigrated from the iconic Easter Island to the Americas well before Dutch commander Jakob Roggeveen arrived with his ships in 1722.
New genetic data suggests the Rapanui people had contact with Native Americans (who were 2,500 miles away) hundreds of years earlier than expected, Cell Press reported.
"Early human populations extensively explored the planet," said Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas from the Natural History Museum of Denmark's Centre for GeoGenetics. "Textbook versions of human colonization events - the peopling of the Americas, for example - need to be re-evaluated utilizing genomic data."
In another study the researchers looked at two human skulls representing the indigenous "Botocudos" of Brazil and did not find Native American influences, even though their heritage was Polynesian.
Researchers believed between 30 and 100 Polynesian men, women, and children first landed on the remote Easter Island around 1200 A.D. Sailing to the Americas would have taken weeks, but there is genetic evidence that this occurred; there also might have been American crop influences such as the Andean sweet potato.
To make their findings the researchers performed a genome-wide analysis of 27 native Rapanui, which indicated this intermingling occurred between 1300 and 1500 AD. The Rapanui are not believed to have started mixing with Europeans until 1850.
The new findings suggest either Native Americans sailed to Rapa Nui or Polynesians sailed to the Americas and back; the researchers believe the former option is most likely because a trip to the island would be much more difficult and the location is easy to miss.
"All sailing voyages heading intentionally east from Rapa Nui would always reach the Americas, with a trip lasting from two weeks to approximately two months," the researchers stated.
The findings were reported in papers published in a recent edition of the journal Current Biology.
