Chicken Bones

Which came first, chicken bones in South America or chicken bones in Polynesia? In trying to show that so-called European animals were in the Americas before Columbus and the Spanish is a difficult issue since anthropologists and their minions (critics of the Book of Mormon) refuse to accept any facts to the contrary. 
    Take the chicken, for example.
    Anthropologists have long held that chickens were introduced into the Americas by Spanish and Europeans who came after Columbus arrived. Chickens, it is claimed were native to southeast Asia, and it has always been maintained that the Spanish explorers and the Europeans who followed, introduced chickens to the Americas as they are claimed to have introduced horses and other so-called European animals.

However, while this hypothesis has long been popular, historians have long known but rarely mentioned a perplexing problem with the hypothesis—early accounts revealed that when the Spanish conquistadores led by Francisco Pizzaro first entered the Inca Empire in 1532 (the first Europeans to encounter the Inca), in what is now Peru, they found the Incas already raising lots of familiar-looking domestic chickens. Inca religious rituals also featured chickens, a breed today referred to as Arauana Chickens (left) of Peru, which lay pale blue eggs. It is hard to reconcile this familiarity if the Incas had obtained chickens by long-distance trade only a few decades earlier, after Columbus and other Europeans first made landfall, especially when none had ever been to the Andean area of South America.
    Yet, was there any indication that the Book of Mormon account of the Jaredites and/or Lehi bringing chickens with them when they arrived as the means of the chicken reaching the Americas? No, of course not. It was not even considered by anthropologists. Instead, they looked around for some acceptable rationale and what did they decide?
    That the chicken might have come from Polynesia!
    They hypothesized that the Inca chickens were the descendants of birds transported across the Pacific much earlier by Polynesian, or perhaps Chinese, sailors. This has been a controversial and often maligned idea in archaeological circles, in part because of the long history invoking highly-questionable (to anthropologists) long-distance insertion of animals and plants from one civilization to another from one continent to another.

Huahine in Tahiti is considered the cradle of Polynesian civilization and is an important archeological site.  It is home to the largest concentration of ancient Marae (sacred Polynesian temples), some of which are believed to date back to the original ancestors of the Polynesians, the Lapita people, around 700 AD. Note the poor stonework compared to that of South America even though Polynesia built more than a thousand years later
    Yet, the idea of Polynesia origin persists, and has recently been reinvigorated by the finding of the remains of a 600-year old chicken dinner excavated from an ancient rubbish dump in Chile. Archaeologists now claim this find solves the mystery of how the chickens reached the Americas long before the earliest Europeans. You see, the idea of long-distance connections among the major human civilizations on different continents has always been rejected by the archaeological and anthropological communities, therefore, the idea of such a leap from pre-Columbus movement from Europe or Asia to the Americas by the chicken, or any other European animal, simply was not feasible.
    Now, it is claimed, the solution is known.

El Arenal (red dot and red arrow) along the Chilean coast where chicken bones have been found dating to before Columbus)
    While excavation the archaeological site called El Arenal, situated about two miles from the coast of central Chile on the Arauco Peninsula, chicken bones, along with archaeological dating of the artifacts with which they were found, firmly date them to no later than 1425 A.D., and probably earlier—decades before Columbus first landed in America, and a century before the Spanish arrived in Peru, far to the north.
These bones resemble the DNA of a fowl species native to Polynesia—“Chickens could not have gotten to South America on their own—they had to be taken by humans,” said anthropologist Lisa Matisoo-Smith (left). Of course, to the anthropologist, there is no possibility that the Jaredites or Lehi brought them—but that it had to be the Polynesians that made contact with the west coast of South America as much as a century before any Spanish conquistadors.
    While chickens have not been considered native to the region of Chile, it was believed the local Araucana species found there had to have been brought to the Americas by Spanish settlers around 1500; however, tests on the bones exploded that idea, since they indicated the birds arrived well before any European made landfall in South America.
Matisoo-Smith, a professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, and Principal Investigator in the Allan Wilson Centre, along with her colleague Alice Storey found and studied the bones. “We had the chicken bone directly dated by radio carbon, and the calibrated date was clearly prior to 1492,” Matisoo-Smith told LiveScience, noting that it could have ranged anywhere from 1304 to 1424. “This also fits with the other dates obtained from the site (on other materials), and it fits with the cultural period of the site.”
    Isn’t it interesting, despite the long history of advanced civilizations in Andean South America, and the obviously advanced abilities of people who built the numerous advanced archaeological sites, and developed the advanced cultures that are claimed to have rivaled the Egyptians, are never thought to have traveled to Polynesia?
     Isn’t it also interesting that these same Polynesians, who have no history of advancement in any field as evidenced by a total lack of civilization development, cities, empires, etc., are always believed to have been the ones to have reached South America centuries after the rise of such advanced sites as Sacsayhuaman, Tiahuanaco, Ollantaytambo, Chan Chan and Choquequirao, as well as the cultures of Moche, Caral, Chavin, Paracas, etc.? In addition, anthropologists maintain a Polynesian to South American migration, yet the winds and currents move in the opposite direction, as Thor Heyerdahl in his drift voyage Kon-Tiki so obviously proved.

The ocean currents west of South America all move in a counter-clockwise movement in the South Pacific Gyre, from Antarctica up the coast of South America and then turning westward and out across the Pacific, the southern (or inside) edge of the Gyre turning down into Polynesia. To move from Polynesia to South America would be against these strong currents that are driven by gravity and the Coriolis effect. The Blue line shows Heyerdahl’s drift voyage from east to west
    “We cannot say exactly which island the voyage came from,” Matisoo-Smith said. “The DNA sequence is found in chickens from Tonga, Samoa, Niue, Easter Island and Hawaii. If we had to guess, we would say it was unlikely to have come from West Polynesia and most likely to have come from Easter Island or some other East Polynesian source that we have not yet sampled.” Stated differently, the chicken came from near South America—so why not South America? It sounds very much like it came from the mainland and spread across Polynesia as far west as Samoa and Tonga, as did the Sweet Potato and other findings prove.
    Despite all this obvious understanding, however, and the clearly understood difference between the highly advanced South American cultures and the primitive Polynesian cultures, anthropologists, against all reason and the very obvious facts, cling to the notion that advancement took place across the Pacific from west to east, from Indonesia to South America. Thus there is no change that anything, no matter how rationale, reasonable and obvious, like South America advancing across the Pacific into Polynesia, will ever be accepted. Yet, the connection between the chicken, as well as that of several indigenous South American plants, such as “the Sweet Potato, which shows movement from South America to Polynesia, but not how it happened or who was involved,” says Atholl Anderson, an archaeologist at the Australian National University in Canberra. Yet, despite all the evidence showing such westward movement, the skeptics abound: “We should be pursuing other lines of evidence,” says Terry Hunt, an archaeologist of the University of Hawaii, Manoa. “Such as Polynesian settlements in South America and ancient DNA—human evidence would be the key.”
    How disappointing it is, that the Book of Mormon, which answers all these migratory patterns of “human evidence” is so beyond the mental reach of the archaeologist and anthropologist. But it does show us the very reasons why the Book of Mormon has not been shown to lead to archaeological/anthropological research nor ever considered as the solution of the archaeological/anthropological problems with which science struggles--and why it is so strongly claimed by these same scientists that there is no proof of Book of Mormon through artifacts found in the ground. Obviously, when they are found, they are credited to some other source as the chicken so vividly proves!