Genetic Study Tracks the First Hawaiians

Science Alert reports that Alexander Ioannidis of Stanford University and his colleagues analyzed the genomes of more than 1,000 people who live in French Polynesia; 12 genomes from individuals on the island of Rapa Nui; and the genomes of people native to Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, and Tahiti. First, the researchers isolated segments of Polynesian ancestry with machine learning, and then they applied an identity by descent method, which can identify common ancestors of living people and people from the past. The study shows that people traveled across Polynesia in small populations, sometimes resulting in a genetic bottleneck of reduced genetic...