Summary at Science.  It's not directly surfing, but Polynesians deserve a place of honor for navigation.  

 

the people of Patagonia claim to be of polynesian descent

What total badasses those guys were

just sailing all around the Pacific

colonizing far off island groups like Hawaii and Easter, visiting South America, wherever.

Makes Columbus look a little lame.

Think they surfed Chile while they were there?

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add a signature since I'm here in profile anyway

I've always thought that, since seeing the Peruvian surfers & fisherman in their reed boats and many Peruvians look Polynesian!Felipe Pomar on the ancient origins of surfing in Peru

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Life is a garden*Dig it!

So many secrets of our past are being opened up by studying genetics.
Our real history isn't written in our books, it's inside all of us.

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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill

Tom, duuuuude, sic pic!
where to line-up?
Shred the inside beach break for a few hours, then log the point!

Herb Kane has many books of Polynesian voyaging, open double hulled canoes searching for the most remote set of islands in the world and they found them.

The Makah people of Britsih Columbia, nothing Asian about their looks, broad noses, wavy hair, carvers of totems, look just like tikis, built boats from huge trees, same as the Hawaiian koa canoes and the language is nearly the same as Hawaiian.

The ancient peoples of Hawaii knew there was land to the north, Haleiwa, home of the Iwa bird, it never lights down on water, but would leave the north shore each spring flying north and return in late fall. If they sailed from the Marquesas, which is where historians belive the Hawaiians originated to Hawaii, then another voyage of a mere 2,500 miles was a cake walk.

The Piri Reis map that was discovered in the possession of a Turkish sea captain in the 13 hundreds shows Antarctica in detail, ice free, the coast of South America and it's major rivers. Antarctica was last ice free over 4,000 years ago

 

Kon Tiki! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29waAjmbO2w

Edited: 10/25/2014 at 07:06 PM by IamSAW

Awesome Video IamSAW!

good plan- 'cept outsides' probably 15-18+ !

I doubt there was Hawai'i-North America contact before the Europeans showed up.  There could have been occasional Japanese boats with survivors, as there were in the post-European era.  Here's a refutation of claims that the Chumash indians of southern California (high-end hunter-gatherers) didn't invent their own boat technolongy (pdf).

Sweet potatoes pretty definitely migrated from South America (likely Ecuador) through the Pacific to New Guinea and Asia pre-Europeans.  There's some record of Polynesian voyaging from the plants they took with them.  University of Hawai'i Press has a recent book titled "Canoe Plants."  Of course the pre-eminent one was the coconut, in many cultivated varieties, some with lots of water, others fiber or meat.