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'Sea People' Examines The Origins And History Of Polynesia

Christina Thompson deftly weaves her fascinating narrative of European travels and attempts to understand the Polynesian puzzle in her new book, though European colonization is not fully addressed.

Humans are curious creatures, seekers of new lands and new knowledge. But the results of our shared explorations have often been destructive.

The first people to arrive and settle in the many islands that lay in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — the largest watery basin on earth — were certainly harmful to the ecology of those places, where species of both flora and fauna went extinct quite quickly after human settlement. Worse, however, is the destruction wrought, both purposefully and accidentally, by the arrival of humans to already peopled

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