02-16-2014, 06:26 AM
Regarding the date of human arrival in Hawaii - the reason there is conflict over this is because of the poor condition of most of the earliest human habitation sites. The layers tend to be more disturbed and mixed up as well as contaminated with non-human-influenced material, which means that carbon dating charcoal has high error bars. So a study was done a few years ago where they took only the best, cleanest samples with narrow error bars, and found that the earliest ones were from ~1200 AD.
There are several problems with this (aside from contradicting the story of Paao, which is uncertain regardless), namely 1) several of the older sites are unequivocally from between 300-1000 AD even if it's hard to pin down exactly when in that range, and 2) it would require an extremely accelerated rate of population growth, land development, and social evolution to get from a relatively small number of colonists in 1200 to the highly complex feudal and agricultural system that existed by at least 1500 if not earlier.
There are several problems with this (aside from contradicting the story of Paao, which is uncertain regardless), namely 1) several of the older sites are unequivocally from between 300-1000 AD even if it's hard to pin down exactly when in that range, and 2) it would require an extremely accelerated rate of population growth, land development, and social evolution to get from a relatively small number of colonists in 1200 to the highly complex feudal and agricultural system that existed by at least 1500 if not earlier.