Column: New clues about Hawaii’s first settlers

From whence, and when, the early Polynesian seafarers first ventured into the far eastern Pacific to discover and settle such far-flung islands as Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Hawaii are questions that anthropologists and archaeologists such as myself have grappled with for more than a century. Recently developed analytical tools from the field of computational genetics are beginning to provide new insights into these puzzles.