Detectability-ordered Polynesia

Claim (verbatim)

Detectability-ordered Polynesia. The Polynesian settlement of the Pacific is the greatest search problem ever solved by a preindustrial society, and optimal search theory says how a rational searcher orders targets: not by raw distance, but by how easy each target is to find. An island's effective size to a voyager is its detectability radius — the halo added by the ranges of land-nesting birds, the standing cloud over high islands, the shadow an island prints on the swell pattern — which can multiply a speck of land into a target hundreds of kilometres wide. The conjecture is that the radiocarbon-dated order of island settlement follows this detectability radius rather than simple distance: big-halo islands found early even when far, small-halo islands late even when near. If it holds, Polynesian expansion was not diffusion but optimal search — navigators sweeping the ocean in the order the targets advertised themselves.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

For each island group with defensible radiocarbon settlement dates, compute a detectability index (land area plus the halo contributed by bird range, cloud formation and swell shadow) and a distance-only alternative measured from the ancestral departure region. Primary clause: settlement order correlates more strongly with detectability rank than with distance rank, the detectability model's Spearman correlation exceeding the distance model's by at least 0.15. The verdict follows the primary clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

radiocarbon settlement dates vs a detectability index.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

Island detectability/target size as the structuring variable of Pacific colonization is established: Irwin's navigation-strategy models are built on target angle and screen effects (bird range, cloud, swell), and modern seafaring simulations (shortest-hop PNAS work) model settlement order computationally. The harvest's radiocarbon-versus-detectability-index regression would be an incremental test of a published theory, not a new connection.

• Irwin, The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific (1992) — target angle/detectability models — The core join; standard reference
• Montenegro et al., 'Using seafaring simulations and shortest-hop trajectories to model the prehistoric colonization of Remote Oceania', PNAS 113 (2016) — Simulated settlement order

Its literature citations feed the frontier as source leads (2 leads below the evidence/publication boundary, not yet reviewed).

Predictions

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