A 600-year-old canoe discovered in New Zealand has given scientists and historians new insight into the people of the South Pacific, and how they went about colonizing the most remote islands of Polynesia.
"It was one of those situations where it sort of took your breath away," Dilys Amanda Johns, a research fellow at the University of Auckland, said about the discovery of the canoe. "I’d never seen anything like it."
According to The Los Angeles Times, the 46-foot-long "waka" canoe was carved from a single timber, and radiocarbon dating placed its last caulking at roughly 1400 AD. It was found in a South Island sand dune near the Anaweka estuary partially exposed after a major storm.
Only 20 feed of the hull remains, but that's enough to give experts a host of new insights, many of which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on Monday.
Of particular interest is the carving of a sea turtle design into the hull.
"A sea turtle on a 600-[year]-old Polynesian canoe is a unique and powerful symbol," wrote one of the study's authors.
Depictions of sea turtles are rarely found in the Maori culture of New Zealand, but does figure into Polynesian mythology quite prominently. In Polynesian lore, sea turtles are highly revered, and seen as a symbol of longevity and, fittingly, long journeys through the open ocean.
In another study, scientists looked back at the climate and trade winds of the era in which the canoe was in operation, looking for clues as to which sailing route would have been easier, and which would have been more difficult.
"There are these persistent 20-year periods where there are extreme shifts in climate system," said study author Ian Goodwin, a marine climatologist and marine geologist at Macquarie University in Sydney,
according to Fox News. "We show that the sailing canoe in its basic form would have been able to make these voyages purely through downwind sailing."
Goodwin explained that if the pilots of the canoe had steered it southward from a given island in central East Polynesia it would complete the trip in half the time it would take to make the same trip northward.
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