have you ever looked at hawai'i and wondered "how the fuck did people FIND that place, let alone get there??"
Mau Piailug - about a traditional navigator who helped preserve the knowledge in the face of capitalist colonialist cultural homogenization, and made academics take polynesian traditional navigational techniques seriously. also he was probably autistic, fuck yes, we love to see it
edit from @yrn-te-ao:
polynesian coming to say put some respect on Mau Piailug's name, he is micronesia, this is important because it is a rampant problem among polynesians but also outsiders of the nesias to erase or ignore their place among these many islands.
Micronesian Navigation Techniques
Polynesian Navigation Techniques
this shit is fucking incredible. they developed a complex science of navigation and oceanography, without even needing paper maps or writing or navigational instruments like magnetic compasses or sextants. and then they fucking applied it!!! to find and inhabit TINY ISLANDS in the utterly IMMENSE expanse of the pacific fucking ocean
holy shit holy shit
also the other thing i'm once again learning is that anthropologists with internalized colonialist and racist views are, on the whole, fucking really stupid, because of those views. the prevailing theory before this was that they just kind of aimlessly drifted through the enormous pacific ocean and found islands by accident with most of them just fucking dying. this is such a dumb theory and i don't understand how anypony took it seriously after thinking it through for more than a few minutes. the ocean is too fucking big, the chances of hitting something accidentally are too low, let alone hitting the sheer number of islands inhabited by polynesian travelers, and in order for this to even be possible you would have to have truly enormous number of voyages most of which end in death, and there's just like not enough people to do that kind of careless throwing yourself to the wind approach.
literally when i was wondering how people even got to Hawai'i this morning, "was it accidental?" passed through my mind and even i, a complete idiot with no knowledge of this stuff, knew intuitively that that didn't make any fucking sense. it's like if you found a spacefaring civilization spread across planets in a sparsely dotted expanse of void, and your primary theory was "well they probably just randomly wandered around in space until they either died or found a planet".
anyways this stuff is pretty fucking incredible and i highly recommend reading about it