Like owning a VW Bus, when you own your scientific knowledge, you’re comfortable hacking it: painting flames on the front, replacing the engine with pedals, converting it into a submarine.
For decades now, anthropologists have tried (with varying success) to apply quantitative methods from evolutionary biology to explain and predict cultural change. The most compelling of this work has addressed language, a cultural feature that’s almost DNA-like in its structure: linear strings of sound-symbols which can be substituted in and out, etc. Now here’s a study of a cultural feature that’s not at all DNA-like: canoe design. It’s a very cool hack. They code the canoe designs in such a way that a computer can analyze patterns of similarity and infer relatedness. They then build something that looks like a phylogenetic tree:
The resulting cultural tree suggests that New Zealand was at least partially settled from Hawaii, a hypothesis that fell from favor in the early 20th century. It also suggests a course of Polynesian settlement that started in the far western islands, jumped to the far eastern, then worked backwards to the original point of origin.
The study uses a novel method and therefore won’t by itself resolve any debates about the history of Polynesian migrations. That’s of course how science moves along: small steps.
