Climate at the time of the Human settlement the Eastern Pacific

The migration into the Pacific Ocean and the settlement of island archipelagoes by the ancestors of modern pacific islanders is contested, yet remains one of humankinds greatest achievements. Evidence for when and why people chose to undertake hazardous voyages in large wooden voyaging canoes is uncertain, however recent hypotheses developed in part by the Supervisory team, point to a coincidence with a widespread regional drought - the largest I the past 2000 years (Sear et al., 2020). What we are less certain of is what role climate played in driving the migrations east into Polynesia and how it supported those migrations - were they in effect "chasing the rain" east as drought developed in the west? What is also unclear is the extent of this drought and the detail of its duration around the region settled by the Polynesian voyagers. To understand this requires robust dated sediment archives containing both unequivocal evidence for human arrival and presence, and hydroclimate proxies. This project will seek to develop these for three islands in French Polynesia and combine the new records with existing evidence from other regions of the Pacific to understand the temporal and spatial coincidence of climate and human migration.