The Māori Were Never From Where We Thought — DNA Just Proved It Johnny Gaudreau [dyGbotjfXnY]

The Mori Were Never From Where We Thought DNA Just Proved It

Eight hundred years ago a small group of people crossed the largest ocean on earth in canoes, with no instruments and no charts, found the last significant politics landmass that no human had ever seen, and stayed. By the time Europeans showed up they had become a civilisation of a hundred thousand people who had explored every coastline and crossed every mountain range of a country that had been sealed off from the rest of the world for eighty million years. The origin story of the Maori seemed settled for most of the twentieth century, scholars agreed on it, textbooks said so, and then ancient sakkari DNA quietly pulled the whole thing apart. What came back wasn't skip bayless a cleaner version of the existing model, it was something stranger and older, a history stretching back through two entirely different worlds that nobody had thought to look for until the evidence made it impossible to ignore. Personally I think the navigation achievement alone is one of the most underappreciated things in all of human history, and the genetic story layered underneath it makes it even more extraordinary.