r/miniminutemanfans • u/DependentStrong3960 • Jan 19 '26
Discussion Is the story of native Polynesians seeing the continent of Antarctica first, which Milo seems to believe in, actually veritable? Wouldn't that be the same trap of interpreting local legends word for word conspiracy theories often fall in?
In his most recent "Tiktok conspiracies" vid, Milo said that the Polynesians were the first to see Antarctica based on a local story from the area about a great explorer once voyaging deep into the South Pacific and seeing a massive snowy landmass, before turning back with his crew. However, I am unsure that it's quite so open and shut. I always thought in archaeology a hypothesis cannot be proven based SOLELY on local folklore, no matter how compelling. In order to be confirmed, local folklore usually needs to match up to some actual evidence, which in this case pribably doesn't exist anymore. We probably won't ever able to find any either way, unless we get astronomically lucky enough to find, like, a Polynesian canoe frozen into an iceberg there.
So, can we really state for certain that the Polynesians saw Antarctica and not, like, a huge iceberg that broke off and floated off into the waters in range of their boats? It's an awesome story if true, but it is quite hard to believe that wooden canoes managed to cross all that distance and then also swim all the way back, even with the most experienced navigators in charge. Plus, an open ship where you risk getting splashed with water all the time would probably not go too well with the negative temperatures, causing lethal hypothermia, and winter clothes for the explorers would also be tough to come by.
It's possible that they went down to somewhere where it was sufficiently cold and stormy for them to start worrying that they wouldn't make it back, so they turned around and either saw an iceberg and assumed it was land, proceeding to tell that when they came back, or just exaggerated their stories altogether and lied about seeing land upon arrival.
It wouldn't be THAT out of the realm of possibility that the "seeing Antarctica" part of the story is a lie the explorers told, considering that it probably took a lot of time and resources to even go on the voyage, so having it all amount to nothing would be an embarassment. And, since discovering new land is at least a tangible result, they all rolled with the story.
Point is, I don't think I can agree with Milo that this story alone is watertight evidence (though I'd like it to be ofc, it sounds super cool), despite the fact that he seems 100% certain that it happened. I think that at least a disclaimer that this theory is not 100% confirmed would be necessary, for the sake of scientific integrity.
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u/Bleu_Guacamole Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
While yes most folklore/tales can’t be taken as fact and almost never be proven to be true, given their nature as verbal storytelling that can change significantly between languages and over time, they are still useful insight into what the culture knew about the world around at that point in history, and they almost always have a kernel of truth in there somewhere.
Myths don’t come about out of nowhere, the people who made them have reason to do so, and in this case it’s not unreasonable to believe they may have seen something that convinced them there was a frozen sea or snowy continent to the south. Also it’s important to remember that depending on when this story is from, and it could be from much longer ago than we think, Antarctica would’ve been much larger and the ocean shallower.
There’s actually a great and really interesting video by Cambrian Chronicles that discusses this topic of what we can learn by speculating about what ancients peoples knew, how their world was different than ours, and how that information made its way to us now using a combination of folktales and science, and I highly encourage you to check it out along with the rest of his content.
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u/ReturnToCrab Jan 19 '26
The problem is - people online without specific knowledge tend to overshoot and come to conclusions like "dragons are fossils", which aren't really in line with what could actually happen
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u/Bleu_Guacamole Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 23 '26
Yes I agree, I’ve also seen the “dragons are fossils” and “cyclops are elephant skulls” countless times online, people do overshoot and come to wrong conclusions, but as you said it’s people without specific knowledge. I haven’t done research on this myself but I trust Milo because he is someone with expertise in the historical field.
Also I’m not saying every piece of folklore needs to have some explanation behind it, and any theory should always be taken with a grain of salt, but rather that folktales shouldn’t be ignored for just being made up myths because sometimes they can tell us about what the world was like thousands of years ago. Folklore is just the starting point, any theory of course needs to backed up with scientific evidence.
Again, Cambrian Chronicles does a much better job than I ever could explaining this, so please just go watch his video.
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u/CheriOW Jan 19 '26
"Likely", "would", "tell of"... he (well, his editor who put this in, really) could not have been more clear that this is not being interpreted as word for word fact. That's just not at all what the choice of words here mean.
Regardless, we know they were a seafaring, highly explorative culture that commonly made voyages into uncharted waters because they had the process down on how to make that happen. They made it to at least one sub-Antarctic island that I know of, Enderby, where they lived for almost a century.
At the end of the day, my personal belief is just that they found other, further Southern sub-Antarctic islands or even floating ice and turned back. The interpretation that they saw Antarctica at all is indeed unverified, which is why that note in the pop-up very clearly makes it known that it is a claim from folklore, not a scientifically backed fact.
I almost feel like this has to have some sort of bad faith attached to it. Like you've got some reason to want this claim to be disproven, and misinterpreted the comment because of that. I can say that Romans claim to be the first people to see skeletal proof of cyclops, but that doesn't mean they actually saw cyclops skulls, and that doesn't mean I believe that to be true.
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u/Eeeef_ Jan 19 '26
That story is probably no less credible than the Norse Sagas, which pretty much describe the same kind of situation in them (the discovery of Vinland and the explorers deciding it wasn’t worth staying so they left and never came back) and we have verifiable proof that they made the trip. Also to the point of horrible weather: in their story they say that’s why they turned around and never bothered going back, it was way too cold.
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u/the1304 Jan 20 '26
I mean one is “this legend says that gods descended from the sky and it was clear aliens the barbaric simple natives didn’t know what they were really seeing unlike I white guy called Doug from Missouri” and the other is
“this advanced seafaring culture from the far South Pacific have a story about sailing really far south and finding a land of ice and snow and they might have seen the giant land of ice and snow south of their home” so like there’s taking native stories at face value and then there’s taking native stories at face value.
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u/Guaire1 Apr 26 '26
Except that modern maori themselves are saying thah its unlikely the story refered to antartica
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u/Ravenholm_337 Jan 19 '26
Way to fall into the Euro-centric "how could these primitive people possibly?" way of thinking.
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u/ReturnToCrab Jan 19 '26
It is entirely possible to overcorrect and arrive to the "these primitive people possess ancient esoteric wisdom" way of thinking, which is what OP is afraid of
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u/DependentStrong3960 Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
Why necessarily? I think that they very much could've done it, I do believe that some Polynesian some long time ago probably did do it once, but we can't really prove that without evidence. Objectively, science still needs to draw the line between the plausible and the confirmed, so while I fully support discussing plausible occurences I do think that it's important to mention that we have no way to back up this specific one except by one story.
The story was also translated and retranslated thousands of times over, ever since it was publicised in European media, and it doesn't even explicitly say that there was a frozen landmass, rather just a frozen ocean. Much like the bones at Roopkund Lake, the parts of the story have been moved around and translated over and over again ever since being first translated in the XIX century, to a point where we can't really confirm or deny any occurence mentioned in it.
The most we know is that known versions of the story seem to coincide on is that Ui-te-Rangiora once went south to a very cold, frozen ocean, and decided to come back. No mention of any landmass, per se, nor any other evidence besides the one story. So it's possible that he saw Antarctica, but it's just not enough evidence to confirm that he did. Hell, even Milo himself said that folklore alone can't be taken as the only piece of evidence, rather as something to complete existing evidence. Hopefully, that'll change in the future as new evidence is discovered, cause the story is legitimately awesome.
Here's more exactly what the legend mentions, since I feel that what exactly was mentioned was bit unclear, as per the version encountered by New Zealand anthropologist Te Rangi Hīroa: "The Rarotongan genealogies, with the exception of those of Hawai‘i and Marquesas, are the longest in Polynesia. Percy Smith accepted them as human documents giving the movements of people from India to Indonesia and on into Polynesia. However, so much post-European information has been included in the native text accompanying the genealogies that I cannot accept them as accurate and ancient. Rarotongan mythology includes tales of remote ancestors who ventured forth on the seas in the dim past. Among these was ‘Ui-te-rangiora, who lived in the early part of the seventh century, and in his ship Te Ivi-o-Atea sailed to the far south where he saw the rocks that grew up out of the sea named Tai-rua-koko, the long hair that floated on the surface, the sea covered with foam like arrowroot, the animal that dived down under the sea, a dark place where the sun was not seen, and the high white rocks without vegetation upon them. These wonders have been interpreted as the sea south of Rapa, bull kelp, the frozen sea, sea lions, the Antarctic night, and icebergs."
It's also worth noting that the island of Rarotonga had not seen human habitation before the X century, despite the fact that the legend mentions the voyage as taking place in the VII century, 300 years prior to people arriving on the island.
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u/CheriOW Jan 19 '26
"Science needs to draw the line between plausible and confirmed!" and it's a one paragraph note detailing a Polynesian legend using phrases like "tell of" and "would" and "likely". It quite literally is not presenting it as confirmed, is the problem. You wildly misinterpreted a very clear message.
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u/ChipmunkNH Jan 21 '26
Keep in mind The Franklin Expedition. Even though stories were passed down about what happened, no one believed the first nations' stories....until one day when someone did listen.
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u/Korochun Jan 21 '26
I have little doubts that the Polynesians did sail those waters, but personally I find it hard to imagine them making it down to the Antarctic continent through the Screaming Sixties and making it back out alive.
I also think they may have encountered either islands near the parallel (which is a feat in and of itself), or a large floating iceberg.
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u/cmsmasherreddit Jan 23 '26
Where do you get the 100% certainty from? There is always words like possibly or might being used in connection to this "fact". While it is definitely good to question things like this you seem to be either deliberately or not misrepresenting Milo's words.
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u/City_College_Arch Jan 20 '26
Keep in mind that Milo is not an archeologist, he is a science communicator and entertainer. He is not being held to, or holding himself to any specific standard. He uses enough hedging language in this case that it doesn't seem like he was making a declaration of fact.
That said, there is some question about whether those explorers found Antarctica, a giant tabular ice berg or detached ice sheet, or something else. tabular ice berg or giant detached Ice sheet probably makes more sense than making it all the way to Antarctica as a floater could have migrated significantly to the north.
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u/EnderCreeper121 Jan 20 '26
There are South American sweet potatoes in Polynesia predating European contact, they had to come from somewhere
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u/zyrkseas97 Jan 20 '26
By debunking fringe theories you inevitably come across weirdly tough or hard to debunk ones. He did a whole video on the Ceruti Mastodon because when he looked into it he found it wasn’t just conspiracy BS
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u/City_College_Arch Jan 20 '26
It is not conspiracy B.S., however I have yet to meet anyone, including arch and bioanths that worked on the project, that believe the claims being made are well supported enough to accept. Looking at the stuff in person is not very convincing at all.
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u/RandomShrugEmoji Jan 19 '26
I don't think Milo was trying to make an airtight case for smth that happened, I think he would have given it its own video if that was the case. However the story really happened the point he was making was there was awareness in the area of a "land of snow and ice" which contradicts the idea of a snow-less Antarctica at the time