Sweet potatoes are a very versatile tuber. You can roast them. You can bake them into a pie.
You can turn them into the third best type of french fry. And apparently, you can make them an integral part of colonizing Polynesian islands. Sweet potatoes are not indigenous to Polynesia, having arisen thousands of miles away in Central and South America.
Even so, the tasty root vegetable has become a staple of the islands’ cuisine. While it was known that the crop had arrived in eastern Polynesia some time after human settlement in 900 CE, and then spread westward towards New Zealand, scientists have debated exactly how and when it got there. Some evidence suggests sweet potato seeds reached the region through natural means , such as birds, wind, and sea currents.
Now, new research hints that the crop’s presence was a major factor in enabling human expansion across the Polynesian islands. A team of archaeologists, led by University of Otago professor Ian Barber, scoured the New Zealand island Te Wāhipounamu for remains of ancient kūmara, as the Maori call sweet potatoes. They found what they were looking for at Triangle Flat, an area that was once home to a Maori farming complex.
In the sand, they located sweet potato granules, which they then carbon dated. Results showed that the crop could have been planted as early as 1290 CE, over 100 years earlier than previously believed on the island, and around the same time that settlers first began colonizing the southernmost Pol.
