For the most part - disease. I've seen the distinction made between virgin land and widowed land. Many of these areas were empty when the first western explorers showed up, as the wavefront of Colombian diseases had swept through multiple times. Native Americans, at least in the North-West, would abandon areas where disease had reached epidemic levels.
If I look at the map in my area (Vancouver, BC) it post-dates those waves of disease quite a bit. In terms of what happened a lot of them still exist, but a lot of others were razed by colonial authorities to make way for European settlement.
New Nature article on Calif. Chumash links to Peru, NWMexico but not Hawaii. https://phys.org/news/2023-11-years-migrations-mexico-california-mystery.amp
The Polynesian import idea ignores the fact that the Chumash inhabited the archipelago islands off the coast of California for over 7,500 years, a good 6,300 years before Hawaiians arrived in Hawaii and thousands of years before any Polynesian lived on an island. Even the technology specific to the canoe similarities predates the Hawaiian population by several hundred years.
With a lack of Polynesian genes in the Americas and having winds, currents and chronology working against a Hawaiian visit to the Chumash coastal region, there may be no connection after all. - As I've speculated, it makes more sense that "Papuans" used metroxylon sago palm canoes to follow the northward then eastward then southward currents to California, White Sands, NM, Per, Brazil, tierra del Fuego, Chile than to imagine Polynesians migrating to California etc.
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What happened to them?
For the most part - disease. I've seen the distinction made between virgin land and widowed land. Many of these areas were empty when the first western explorers showed up, as the wavefront of Colombian diseases had swept through multiple times. Native Americans, at least in the North-West, would abandon areas where disease had reached epidemic levels.
If I look at the map in my area (Vancouver, BC) it post-dates those waves of disease quite a bit. In terms of what happened a lot of them still exist, but a lot of others were razed by colonial authorities to make way for European settlement.
New Nature article on Calif. Chumash links to Peru, NWMexico but not Hawaii.
https://phys.org/news/2023-11-years-migrations-mexico-california-mystery.amp
The Polynesian import idea ignores the fact that the Chumash inhabited the archipelago islands off the coast of California for over 7,500 years, a good 6,300 years before Hawaiians arrived in Hawaii and thousands of years before any Polynesian lived on an island. Even the technology specific to the canoe similarities predates the Hawaiian population by several hundred years.
With a lack of Polynesian genes in the Americas and having winds, currents and chronology working against a Hawaiian visit to the Chumash coastal region, there may be no connection after all.
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As I've speculated, it makes more sense that "Papuans" used metroxylon sago palm canoes to follow the northward then eastward then southward currents to California, White Sands, NM, Per, Brazil, tierra del Fuego, Chile than to imagine Polynesians migrating to California etc.
Very interesting. Thanks for the heads up.
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