Polynesia is completed
Voyagers reach Hawaii, Rapa Nui and finally New Zealand.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 400 years
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
The last phase of Pacific settlement carries people to Hawaii and Rapa Nui, and around 1280 to New Zealand — the last substantial landmass on Earth to be reached by humans. On Rapa Nui they raise nearly a thousand moai; the island's deforestation, long told as ecological self-destruction, is now widely attributed substantially to rats eating palm seeds and to later European contact and slave raiding. In New Zealand the moa are hunted out within about a century.