New seafaring modeling simulating the mass migration to remote Oceania thousands of years ago has yielded several intriguing insights, including the role Samoa likely played as a staging area for colonizing East Polynesia.

A team composed of University of Oregon anthropologist Scott Fitzpatrick, Ohio State University geographer Alvaro Montenegro, and University of Calgary archaeologist Richard Callaghan used computer simulations and climatic data — including high-resolution data for winds, ocean currents, land distribution and precipitation — to analyze ocean routes across the Pacific that may have been used by Pacific seafarers some 3,400 years ago during the population of Tonga, Samoa, Micronesia and Fiji.

The resulting article, “Using Searfaring Simulations and ‘Shortest Hop’ Trajectories to Model the Prehistoric Colonization of Remote Oceania,” was published Monday in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We synthesized a lot of new climatic data and ran a lot of new simulations that are exciting in terms of highlighting and pinpointing where some of these prehistoric populations might have come from,” Fitzpatrick said in a release. “The simulation can assess, at any point in time, if somebody left Point A, where would they end up if drifted? We can also model directed voyages. If somebody knew where they were going, how long would it take them to get there?”

The team developed “shortest hop” trajectories to assess the likely paths of least resistance, accounting for course variations due to wind and currents.

The team included El Nino Southern Oscillation patterns on the assumption that settlers observed, recognized and worked around such climatic variations, likely timing their travels to coincide with favorable conditions.

“What Pacific scholars have long surmised but never really been able to establish very well is that, through time, Pacific Islands should have developed a great deal of knowledge of different (climatic) variations, different oscillations of wind and changes in environments that would have influenced their survivability and their abilities to go to certain places,” Fitzpatrick said.

The analysis suggested that the Samoa was the most likely staging area for colonizing East Polynesia, and that Hawaii and New Zealand may have been settled from the Marquesas or Society Islands. Further, Easter Island may have been settled from the Marquesas or Mangareva, and settlers of western Micronesia likely came from an area near the Maluku (Spice) Islands.