New genomic evidence indicates early contact between Easter Island and the Americas. The new evidence suggests that people may have been crossing over from Easter Island to the Americas for a prolonged period of time before the Dutch commander Jakob Roggeveen arrived in 1722 with his ships. According to these recent findings, the genomic evidence shows that the Rapanui people inhabiting the most isolated islands had significant contact with Native Americans hundreds of years earlier.

The findings are reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on October 23, introducing the first genetic support for an early trans-Pacific route from Polynesia and the Americas, a trek that spans over 4,000 kilometers, or nearly 2,500 miles.

Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas from the Natural History Museum of Denmark’s Centre for GeoGenetics said in a statement that the findings are a reminder that “early human populations extensively explored the planet.” She continued, “Textbook versions of human colonization events—the peopling of the Americas, for example—need to be re-evaluated utilizing genomic data.”

A second article is set to appear in the same issue of Current Biology by Malaspinas as well as Eske Willerslev and their colleagues. The researchers examined two human skulls from the indigenous “Botocudos” of Brazil and discovered a Polynesian genomic ancestry without any detectable Native American traces.

According to Genetics Home Reference, a genome is an organism’s complete set of DNA, including all of its genes.