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New dating on the stone buildings of Nan Madol suggests the ancient coral reef capital in the Pacific Ocean was the earliest among the islands to be ruled by a single chief.
The discovery makes Nan Madol a key locale for studying how ancient human societies evolved from simple societies to more complex societies, said archaeologist Mark D. McCoy, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. McCoy led the discovery team.
McCoy deployed uranium series dating to determine that when the tomb was built it was one-of-a-kind, making it the first monumental scaled burial site on the remote islands of the Pacific.
The discovery enables archaeologists to study more precisely how societies transform to more and more complex and hierarchical systems, said McCoy, an expert in landscape archaeology and monumental architecture and ideology in the Pacific Islands.
"Pacific Islanders Invented New Kind of Society." So, abundant fish and fruit, sparkling beaches, crystalline water, mild weather, and half-naked Polynesian women weren't enough?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday October 20 2016, @01:15PM
It was "new" for them. I agree the headline is misleading. It's about studying social evolution in a different part of the world and locating where transitions happened there (and perhaps how that evolution is the same or differs from other parts of the world), not claiming that it was "new" for the entire world.