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The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer more evidence that ancient Polynesians may have interacted with people in South America long before the Europeans set foot on the continent.



"There's been many kinds of evidence – linguistic and archaeological – for contact between these two people," Caroline Rouiller, an evolutionary biologist at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in France who led the study, tells The Salt. "But the sweet potato is the most compelling."

Sweet potatoes originated in Central and South America. But archaeologists have found prehistoric remnants of sweet potato in Polynesia from about A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1100, according to radiocarbon dating. They've hypothesized that those ancient samples came from the western coast of South America. Among the clues: One Polynesian word for sweet potato — "kuumala" — resembles "kumara," or "cumal," the words for the vegetable in Quechua, a language spoken by Andean natives.

But until now, there was little genetic proof for this theory of how the tater traveled.


So how did the sweet potato make the ocean voyage?

Its seeds could have possibly hitched a ride on seaweed or gotten lodged in the wing of a bird. But Pat Kirch, an archeologist at the University of Berkeley, California, thinks the Polynesians were well-equipped to sail right across the Pacific to South America and pick up a potato.

"There's a lot of evidence accumulating over the last 10 years that the Polynesians made landfall in South America," he says. "We think they had sophisticated, double-hulled canoes — like very large catamarans — which could carry 80 or more people and be out to sea for months."