Native Hawaiians’ closest genetic relatives are the people of Rapa Nui, more than 4,000 miles away

Native Hawaiians are most closely related to the people of Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, according to a genome study led from Stanford University. The two populations live more than 4,000 miles apart, with the open Pacific between them, and no other Polynesian pair in the dataset sits closer genetically. Alexander Ioannidis, a Stanford computational geneticist and co-senior author, led the analysis alongside Keolu Fox of the University of California, San Diego.

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The result points to a founding voyage from the southeastern Pacific to the most isolated island chain in the Northern Hemisphere, and it comes with a medical side effect for living descendants.

Genome matches between Hawaii and Rapa Nui

Archaeology magazine summarized the study on Nov. 2, reporting that Native Hawaiians are most closely related to the people of Rapa Nui and that both groups are also related to people on Mangareva Island, which may have been their launch point in French Polynesia. The team drew on more than 1,000 people living in French Polynesia and 12 genomes from Rapa Nui. It added genomes of Native Hawaiians, Samoans and Tongans held in a National Institutes of Health research biobank. Machine learning separated the Polynesian segments of each genome, and an identity-by-descent method then traced common ancestors shared by living and past people.

The measured gap is large. Stanford puts Hawaii about 7,000 kilometers from Easter Island, the most distant Polynesian island from it, and the Archaeology report says the two are more than 4,000 miles apart. Ioannidis noted that Hawaii is the only Polynesian island in the Northern Hemisphere and a long way from everything.

The Mangareva step and the founding voyages

The data point to a chain of crossings rather than a single leap. Stanford’s news release on the study says Native Hawaiians share the most Polynesian ancestry with people on Easter Island, followed by people on Mangareva, nearly 3,000 kilometers to the east of Easter Island. Because Mangareva is less closely related to either, the authors read it as the launching point for both. BusinessDay’s account of the study says Rapa Nui was settled in the 1200s by voyagers from Mangareva, and that Ioannidis places the Hawaii voyage in the same century, though no more precise date is given. The study’s authors attribute the voyages to a seafaring population they call Holomoana Nui.

Ioannidis said the paper reveals where the native people of Hawaii came from. Fox, who is Native Hawaiian, said the team checked the result four different ways because the finding was so unexpected, and added that it may be time to rethink who counts as an explorer.

Founder effects and three rare recessive variants

Small founding groups leave genetic bottlenecks. ScienceAlert’s report on the work states that Tahiti’s founding generation was about 800 people of reproductive age who arrived around 1070, roughly 34 generations ago. Ancestors of Native Hawaiians went through a series of these bottlenecks on long voyages in small double-hulled catamarans. Stanford says the founder effects in Eastern Polynesians, Native Hawaiians included, are more than 10 times larger than those in European-descent populations such as the Amish, Ashkenazi Jews and Finns.

Three autosomal recessive variants stand out: ADAMTSL4, linked to a dislocated lens; PDE6B, linked to progressive vision loss; and FAN1, which can lead to kidney failure. Stanford reports that each is very rare globally and carried by 2 to 3 percent of the Eastern Polynesians studied, a level that meets standard thresholds for genetic screening. ScienceAlert adds that the FAN1 variant was absent from every individual in gnomAD, a database of more than 800,000 genomes and exomes.

Open questions in the Science paper

The paper, published in the journal Science (DOI 10.1126/science.aec7662), does not turn the variants into a screening program. Ioannidis said there are no recommendations for genetic testing and no insurance reimbursement for it, and argued that the population should be getting research resources and attention from geneticists even more urgently. The Archaeology magazine report, which relies on ScienceAlert, names only Ioannidis among the authors and does not give the journal, a gap that BusinessDay and Stanford fill. Contributing institutions listed by Stanford include UC Santa Cruz, Variant Bio, the Direction de la Sante de Polynesie francaise in Tahiti, Hopital Saint-Philibert in France, the University of Chile, Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the work was funded in part by National Institutes of Health grants. Ioannidis also pointed to the algorithms’ ability to find DNA sequences that match perfectly between people on different islands, which is what lets the method link a living Hawaiian to an ancestor on Rapa Nui.

Open questions remain about timing. The sources give a 1070 estimate for Tahiti and the 1200s for Rapa Nui, but none states a firm date for Hawaii, and the number of Native Hawaiian genomes in the biobank data is not given in any of the accounts reviewed.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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