The canoe paper "is very exciting," says Andrew Lorrey, a paleoclimate specialist at New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Auckland. The study enriches the "prewritten history of [New Zealand] and Pacific archaeology in general," he adds. And the paper on wind patterns presents "a very important result and has implications not only for when settlement might have occurred, but also for return voyaging [of explorers] to tropical Polynesia," says Bruce McFadgen, an archaeologist at Victoria University of Wellington.
They both caution that questions remain. For one thing, the wind patterns paper claims the climate window for sea voyaging to and from New Zealand closed well before 1300, though the canoe is dated to 1400. "There is a timing discrepancy," says Dilys Johns, an archaeologist at the University of Auckland, who is first author on the canoe paper. She says there is a possibility that the New Zealand canoe builders used traditional techniques passed down through generations long after they lost contact with Polynesia. Lorrey also notes that there could be uncertainties in the radiocarbon dating.
Still, the papers don't settle the question of whether the Polynesians of that age could sail into the wind. Answering that question, McFadgen says, "will test the ingenuity of future archaeological research.â€
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