For most of you, this probably isn’t news but National Geographic News is buzzing this week with this “discovery!” According to a June 4, 2007 article by Mason Inman, a team of scientists from New Zealand,Australia and Chile have discovered chicken bones on the central coast of Chile that have been DNA-matched to chickens of uniquely Polynesian stock. Using carbon dating and thermoluminescence technologies, the team estimates that the bones were buried between 1320 and 1410 A.D.

The discovery of Polynesian chickens in the Americas is consistent with the discovery of sweet potatoes – a uniquely American crop – that have been found in Polynesian settlements on the Cook Islands. Taken together, these discoveries suggest that the South Pacific islanders made intentional round-trip journeys to the Americas rather than accidentally drifting across the Pacific on a wayward raft.

Of course authors Ivar Zapp and George Erickson (Atlantis in America) have been trying to convince academia of this “Polynesian connection” for nearly ten years, and their evidence is much more compelling than a few chicken bones. Still, these small cracks in the academic armor may eventually lead to a better understanding of the true history of the “New World.” My guess is that civilizations in the Americas aren’t so “new” and they certainly won’t conform to the Euro-centric version of history currently preached in our collages and universities.