By Bruce Bower
The massive stone heads on Easter Island don’t stare out to sea, but perhaps they should. Residents of what’s also known as Rapa Nui sailed back and forth to the Americas hundreds of years before European explorers first reached the isolated Polynesian island in 1722, a DNA study suggests.
Genetic ties between present-day Easter Islanders and Native Americans indicate that members of these populations mated between roughly 1280 and 1495, says a team led by geneticist Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas of the Natural History of Denmark in Copenhagen. Previous archaeological and genetic evidence suggested that Polynesians first settled Rapa Nui around 1200.