The elusive redheads of Easter Island

French editionHere’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia page Rapa Nui National Park 

The earliest inhabitants of the island called it "Te Pito o TeHenua" (the navel/end of the world). The first European to discover the island was Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen on Easter day, 1722. As a result, he named it "Easter Island". He observed that the inhabitants were of three groups: "dark skinned, red skinned, and very pale skinned people with red hair".[15]

As you can see, after “red hair” there is the footnote 15, where this article is linked. I quote from it: 

In 1722, a Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeveen, sighted and visited the island. This happened to be on a Sunday, Easter Sunday to be precise, and the name stuck: Easter Island (Isla de Pascua in Spanish).

What he discovered on Easter Island were three distinct groups of people, Dark skinned, Red skinned, and very Pale skinned People with red hair.

So, I began researching the original source of this statement and I found out something quite surprising. It turned out that this excerpt is not from Roggeveen’s writings, but from a book written by Carl Friederich Behrens,  a corporal during Roggeveen’s expedition. The book is Reise durch die Süd-Länder und um die Welt, published in 1737. 

Carl Friederich Behrens

Here’s the original book (click on the cover). As you can see, it was printed with the old book hand Fraktur, so it is not very easy to decipher. Anyway, it is important that we see the original. If you go to book page 87, you’ll find this passage: 

Der Coleur nach waren sie braunlich, wie ungefehr ein Spanier, doch findet man derselben einige schwarzer, auch theils ganz weiß; wie nicht minder derselben auch einige roth, gleich als wären sie von der Sonne etwas stark verbrannt.

That is:

The complexion was brownish, about the hue of a Spaniard, yet one finds some among them of a darker shade and others quite white, and no less also a few of a reddish tint as if somewhat severely tanned by the sun.

So… no mention of red hair! Here the author is clearly talking about the indigenous’ complexion, not about their hair colour, and I’m really surprised that Wikipedia cited a source with wrong information in it. Anyway, it is interesting that on Easter Island there were so many different shades of complexion.

Map from Behrens' travel report

Now, as far as this book by Behrens is concerned, something very strange happened. As you can read here:

The first edition was published in 1737 followed, among others, by a re-published edition made by German anthropologist Hans Plischke that was published in 1923. The important thing is that this version differs from the original to a great extent and the editor did not account for the changes he had introduced into the text: besides grammar and orthography modernization, he omitted certain portions, misinterpreted other ones and added some comments without marking them as his own. As a result, the narrative gives an impression of having been written by another author; Behrens appears as a person with a different character and attitude, weaker, less convincing and even less trustworthy than he really was. This article presents numerous examples of the distortions as a warning against making a scientific or an anthropological use of unreliable editions of source texts, as this may wield a negative infuence upon our view and interpretation of the culture we are analyzing.

This is very worrying, because one wonders how much we can trust modern editions/translations of old books.

So, I checked the French edition, to see if the sentence about complexion was translated correctly. Here it is (page 133 of the book): 

Ils sont en général bruns, comme les Espagnols; on en trouve cependant qui sont assez noirs, & d’autres qui sont tout-à-fait blancs. ll y en a encore, dont le teint est rougeâtre comme s'ils étoient brulés du soleil.

The sentence is exactly the same of the first German edition, so, probably the introduction of red hair instead of reddish complexion is something recent, maybe done by that website linked on the Wikipedia page of Rapa Nui National Park. 

Pakomio Maori

However, there are other sources about redheads in Easter Island.

Here’s an article written in the 90s by Robert Langdon from the Australian National University (not to be confused with Dan Brown’s character 😁), where the author talks about an alleged bue-eyed, red-haired Easter Islander called Pakomio Maori, born between 1816 and 1826 and dead in the first 1910s. Langdon writes that in 1971 he discovered 18 Easter Islanders with no known non-Easter Island ancestors who were carriers of the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes A29 and B12, that are especially common among Basques. All 18 islanders were the children of Pakomio Maori through his two wives. 

Pakomio Maori (source)

In his article, Langdon posits that Pakomio Maori was not a descendant of early Europeans visiting the island, although he doesn’t bring any defintive evidence, since at that time ancestry DNA tests had not yet been developed. As a consequence, we don’t know where the “Basque” genes of his children come from.

In any case, we know that traits such as blue eyes and red hair, in order to show up, need to be inherited from both parents, which would mean that Pakomio Maori would have to be the descendant of Europeans from both sides of his family. And not whatever Europeans, but Europeans carrying the mutations for red hair and blue eyes. 

Langdon also quotes early explorers describing isladers with light-coloured hair and skin and “European” facial features and in the article you’ll find photos of some European-looking Easter Islanders. One is Maria Garcia Pate Pakomio, a grand-daughter of Pakomio Maori’s, while the others are the cultural informants Juan Tepano and his mother Viriamo.

Thor Heyerdahl

Here’s the Wikipedia page about the Hanau epe, a semi-legendary people who are said to have lived in Easter Island, where they came into conflict with another people known as the Hanau momoko. I quote from the page: 

Various theories have been put forward to explain the alleged ethnic difference between the two groups. Thor Heyerdahl popularised the view that they were a South American indigenous people, who were pale skinned with red hair. Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki expedition was designed to show that migrants from Peru could have reached Polynesia. He believed that the Hanau epe were the earliest inhabitants of the island; they created its unique monuments, which resemble similar sculptures found in the Americas, but were eventually killed off by either the Polynesians or a later wave of migrants from the Northwest coast of America.

Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian adventurer, ethnographer and author, know for conducting experimental voyages to test hypotheses about ancient human migrations and cultural diffusion using replica primitive watercraft.

Here’s how Wikipedia introduces him: 

Heyerdahl is notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he drifted 8,000 km (5,000 mi) across the Pacific Ocean in a primitive hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. The expedition was supposed to demonstrate that the legendary sun-worshiping red-haired, bearded, and white-skinned "Tiki people" from South America drifted and colonized Polynesia first, before actual Polynesian peoples. His hyperdiffusionist ideas on ancient cultures had been widely rejected by the scientific community, even before the expedition.

However, Grokipedia adds: 

Although Heyerdahl's specific diffusionist theories faced significant academic rejection for lacking corroborative genetic, linguistic, and archaeological consensus—often prioritizing independent invention narratives—his hands-on replications provided causal evidence of navigational capabilities that later findings, like transpacific crop transfers, have partially vindicated.

We’ll get back to this later.

But why Heyerdahl posited the existence of South American indigenous people with red hair? 

One reason are the mummies of Peru and Chile we have seen in this article, but we have to keep in mind that, as of now, we don’t know whether these individuals were really red-haired or not.

Another reason are the legends of red-haired and fair-skinned mythological beings in New Zealand and the uru-kehu, that we have seen in this article.

One more reason are accounts of voyagers and explorers describing red-haired people in Polynesia, as you can read in Heyerdahl’s book American Indians in the Pacific (1952), particularly in Part IV (The Complexity of Polynesians Origin). 

Clealry, in order to be sure Heyerdahl correctly translated and copied all these citations, they should be checked in their original versions. 

I copy here some of these citations.

Page 194: “A very beautiful native sat near Doña Isabel, with such red hair that Doña Isabel wished to cut off a few locks; but seeing that the native did not like it she desisted, not wishing to make her angry.” (Santa Cristina Island - Tahuata)

Page 195: “Five natives came in a canoe, the middle one vigorously bailing the water out of the vessel. His red hair came down to the waist. He was white as regards colour, beautifully shaped, the face aquiline and handsome, rather freckled and rosy, the eyes black and gracious, the forehead and eyebrows good, the nose, mouth, and lips well proportioned, with the teeth well ordered and white.” (Peregrina Island)

(both citations from The Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros)

Page 197: “… Forster (1778, p. 229) speaks of a native Tahitian who had "perfectly red hair, a fairer complexion than the rest, and was sprinkled all over with freckles". (Tahiti)

According to modern genetics, Polynesians come from two groups: Austronesians from South-East Asia and Taiwan, and Melanesians (especially Papuans).  

These “European-looking” indigenous are explained with: normal inner variation of Polynesian people, mixing between Austroneasian and Melanesian groups, independent evolution of traits such as fair skin and hair, and (obviously) subjective interpretation by European explorers.

As we have seen, both Wikipedia and Grokipedia wrote that Heyerdahl’s ideas have been rejected by the scientific community, but… it turned out he was right about contacts between South America and Polynesia, as you can read in the 2020 study Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement, by Ioannidis and colleagues, and in the article from the National Geographic DNA reveals Native American presence in Polynesia centuries before Europeans arrived. 

I won’t get into this matter, because it falls outise the topic of this post, but I want to end with this quote from Grokipedia, which, in my opinion, gives you food for thought. 

Particularly in the context of post-colonial shifts, Heyerdahl viewed the intensified rejection of diffusionism as entangled with decolonization agendas that privileged autochthonous origins to bolster indigenous self-determination, even at the expense of causal realism in migration dynamics. Mainstream institutions, exhibiting systemic preferences for narratives aligning with political sensitivities, have critiqued diffusionist claims—including his—as undermining local agency, yet Heyerdahl countered that such politicization obscured the advanced navigational prowess of ancient non-Western societies, as empirically shown through reed boat replicas navigating from Africa to the Americas in 1969 and 1970. In interviews, he underscored pursuing unvarnished truth over diplomatic consensus, warning that deference to orthodoxy stifled inquiry into humanity's interconnected prehistoric seafaring heritage.