DNA shows some South American tribes are actually descended from Pacific Islanders

It has always baffled me how, in a relatively short span of human history, humans crossed the Bering Strait and then traveled southward through North America, down through Mexico, through Central America, and then through the Amazon and Andes to reach Patagonia.

But it turns out that not all the tribes in South America arrived this way.

DNA shows some South American tribes are actually descended from Pacific Islanders i.e. they floated over to South America from Polynesian islands. One of those tribes is the Surui, the same tribe that have been publicized for working with Google to preserve their homeland.

It makes intuitive sense that Polynesians could float over--hey, if they could make it to French Polynesia or Easter Island, they could make it all the way to South America. And they certainly look physically similar. It marks a second founding group that "discovered" the Americas thousands of years before Columbus, in addition to the First Americans who are thought to have crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia.

Genetic studies link indigenous peoples in the Amazon and Australasia
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150721134827.htm


"We've done a lot of sampling in East Asia and nobody looks like this," said Skoglund. "It's an unknown group that doesn't exist anymore."

"About 2 percent of the ancestry of Amazonians today comes from this Australasian lineage that's not present in the same way elsewhere in the Americas," said Reich.