A mixture of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Bacteria, and Metal and Simon Winchester’s Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective tale that appears deep in to the past to discover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.

For greater than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching out from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of Western explorers these were the about Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia only people to possess ever resided there. Both most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the globe before the period of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their origins to several epic voyagers who ventured out in to the unknown in another of the greatest escapades in history.

How did the earliest Polynesians get and colonize these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the biggest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which had become referred to as the Issue of Polynesian Roots, emerged in the eighteenth century among the great geographical mysteries of mankind.

For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori hubby and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the exciting story of the ancestors, as well as those of the numerous sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who’ve puzzled over this history for 3 hundred years. A masterful mixture of background, geography, anthropology, as well as the research of navigation, Sea People combines the excitement of exploration using the play of discovery in a brilliant tour of one of the very most captivating locations in the globe.