EUGENE, OREGON—The New York Times reports that geographer and climatologist Alvaro Montenegro of Ohio State University, anthropologist Scott Fitzpatrick of the University of Oregon, and archaeologist Richard Callaghan of the University of Calgary created computer simulations using recent satellite data sets of winds, ocean currents, land distribution, and El Niño and La Niña patterns to study possible routes for the colonization of the South Pacific. Archaeological evidence suggests that people left the Solomon Islands some 3,400 years ago, and traveled to other islands, such as Tonga and Samoa. But then they waited 2,000 years before traveling on to Hawaii, Tahiti, and New Zealand. The simulations suggest that for the first leg of the migration, the wind had been at the travelers’ backs. But when they reached the area around Samoa, the migrants had to develop new boating and navigation technologies to move against the wind before they could proceed to the rest of Oceania. To read more about Oceania, go to “Letter From the Marshall Islands: Defuzing the Past.”