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Published online 27 September 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news070924-9
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Stone tool reveals lengthy Polynesian voyage
Adzes form the first hard evidence of two-way travel between Hawaii and Tahiti.
The discovery of an adze fashioned from Hawaiian basalt on a Tuamotu atoll in French Polynesia provides the first material evidence that ancient voyagers made an 8,000-kilometre round trip from the South Pacific to Hawaii and back again.
More than 2,000 years ago, seafarers from Samoa and Tonga ventured eastward to settle on more remote archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean, including the Cook Islands, Tahiti, and the Marquesas Islands, colonizing most of these places by 900 AD.
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