How did People get to Easter Island

..and warned that the fate of Easter Island could one day be our own."

Old Americans assisted in the settlement of Easter Island long before the Europeans arrived.

The Easter Island is the most isolated place the people have ever colonised, and the fact that we have arrived there is a wonder. It now looks as if this island has not been colonised once, not twice, but three completely separated colonisations.

There is now speculative proof of further colonisation of Easter Island between the two: especially by the people of South America. It is not a new concept that the old Americans were involved in the colonisation of Easter Island. Mythical (and controversial) adventure archeologist Thor Heyerdahl was certain that the Easter Island's origins lie in South America and not Polynesia, a deduction he came to because of alleged resemblances between the celebrated Easter Island sculptures on the heads and old Bolivian relics.

In order to show that the old Americans may have arrived on Easter Island, he made the famed Kon-Tiki trip on a float from Peru to Polynesia, using similar material to that available to the old Americans. Later on, more rigorous research showed that Easter Island was primarily, if not entirely, inhabited by Polynesians.

The Oslo scientist Erik Thorsby gathered sample from the Easter Islanders in 1971 and 2008. People he was dealing with had no story of crossing with Europeans or other non-indigenous people on the island, which means that their bloodline was practically the same as that of those who were living on the island before the exposure to Europe.

Torsby studied the HLA gene, which is useful in elucidating the geographical origin of his forefathers. The majority of the island dwellers participating in the survey had HLA transgenes that showed an apparent Polish inheritance, but a few also had HLA transgenes that are only known in indigenous Americans. As the carriers of these HLA gene were from the same large gene group, Thorsby was probably able to detect the first bearer of these uncommon gene.

Its name was Maria Aquila, and it was borne in 1846, more than a century before the arrival of European slavers and the crossing.

This took a long while and Thorsby suspected that the flow of US genetics must have taken place before Jacob Roggeveen, a researcher from the Netherlands, came to the island in 1722. That doesn't mean Heyerdahl was right - he was still seriously mistaken - but Thorsby says he was right about an old US there.

Now the only questions is how did these families get there? It is possible that the Indians made a trip to Easter Island, similar to Heyerdahl's Kon-Tikixpedition. More likely, the Easter Islanders headed east to Chile and then came back with the American natives' people.

However, we can see this as further proof of the fact that Polynesians and Americans made contacts long before Columbus.