BIKINI atoll and the other ring-shaped coral islands of the tropical Pacific Ocean are far younger than previously thought, contradicting Darwin’s ideas about how atolls form – and possibly solving a long-standing puzzle about one of the greatest human migrations in history.
Anthropologists have long puzzled over why, roughly 3000 years ago, the ancient Polynesians abruptly stopped their eastward sweep across the South Pacific, only island-hopping across the coral atolls about 1500 years ago. But if the atolls did not exist until then the mystery is solved.
“There’s been a lot of debate about what has been called ‘the long pause’,” says Patrick Kirch, director of the Oceanic Archeology Laboratory at the University…
