Somewhere around 900 BCE, people who made and used a distinctive style of pottery called Lapita reached Samoa and Tonga. They had island-hopped across thousands of kilometers of open ocean to get there, carrying pigs, taro, and the accumulated knowledge of generations of seafarers. Then they stopped.
For roughly 1,700 years, nobody sailed farther east. Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Uvea: these became the edge of the known world, a border that held for longer than the entire span of time separating us from the fall of Rome. Then, sometime around 900 to 1050 CE, that border dissolved. Within two and a half centuries, people had reached and settled nearly every habitable speck of land across the eastern Pacific, from the Cook Islands to Tahiti to Hawai’i to Rapa Nui, in what stands as the most rapid and geographically extensive maritime expansion in human history.
Archaeologists have puzzled over the so-called Long Pause for decades. Why stop? And more strangely: why start again, all at once, after so long? A team led by David Sear at the University of Southampton, working with colleagues at the University of East Anglia and elsewhere, has now built a case1 that the trigger was climate, specifically a multi-decade drought severe enough to reshape the calculus of staying versus leaving.
