"The Last Navigator"

This is a book by Stephen Thomas that I am rereading. I plan to post occassional excerpts.

Some six thousand years ago seafarers left islands in eastern Indonesia and the Phillippines to branch into the western Pacific... Scientists call these early seafarers the Lapita people... about 1300 B.C. Lapita navigators left the northern New Hebrides to voyage a thousand miles north to the Marshall, Gilbert, and Caroline islands... all of Oceania, an area nearly a quarter of the earth, was populated by a single race. Navigators using just the stars, the ocean swells, and the flight paths of birds were making epic ocean voyages in handhewn sailing canoes while Europeans still lived in rude huts...