Many islands have indigenous peoples who settled using canoes and navigational tricks, developing distinct cultures. Some islands lack indigenous populations due to remoteness, terrain, or lack of resources. Uninhabited islands serve as microcosms of human behavior. Examples include the Seychelles, Crozet Islands, and Azores. Antarctica is too cold for trees to grow and has no indigenous population. Most Pacific islands were settled a long time ago due to their abundance and mild climate.
Many of the world’s islands have indigenous peoples who occupied them for hundreds or thousands of years before the arrival of European and other seafaring cultures, who spread throughout the world in the period approximately between 1400 and 1800, depending of the location.
Islands with indigenous peoples include Madagascar, which is located off the southwest coast of Africa; New Zealand, southwest of Australia; the Hawaiian Islands, located in the center of the Pacific Ocean, nearly a thousand miles away from other island systems; the Canary Islands, off the east coast of Africa; Easter Island, one of the most isolated islands in the Pacific Ocean, and many more. Most were settled between 1500 BC and AD 500, with some of the latter (such as New Zealand) settled around AD 800-1000. The indigenous people arrived using simple canoes and a variety of navigational tricks, including reading stars and follow the flight patterns of birds. As some islands are very isolated from each other, they often develop distinct cultures, languages and customs. Many of these have been lost due to dilution with global cultures.
However, not all islands have an indigenous population. Some have been lost for whatever reason, such as being too remote, intimidating terrain, a lack of plants and animals, or being too close to the poles. Some of these islands are so remote that prior to artificial introduction they lacked mammals and/or reptiles and possessed only plants, invertebrates such as insects and birds. These remote islands may not have been inhabited by any animal larger than a seabird since their creation millions of years ago.
There are many islands with no indigenous people, and their stories are interesting because they are generally fully known, serving as microcosms of human behavior in small areas with limited resources. Examples in the Indian Ocean include the Seychelles just north of Madagascar, which were not sighted until 1502; numerous islands in the southern Indian Ocean, which are part of the French Southern Territories, including the Crozet Islands, the Kerguelen Islands, l’le Amsterdam and Île Saint-Paul; and the Cocos Islands, southeast of Indonesia, now part of Australia. Some of these islands, especially the southernmost ones, are completely treeless or are constantly cold and windswept due to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
There are a handful of islands in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, caused by cooled magma released from the seafloor that has spread over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, that were uninhabited until their discovery by European mariners. This includes the Azores, about a thousand miles west of Portugal, which appeared on 13th-century maps but wasn’t settled until the 13th; St. Helena and Ascension Island, equidistant between Africa and South America, among the most isolated in the world, used as staging areas for the Allies in World War II; and familiar Iceland and Greenland in the north, which were reached by Scandinavian sailors around the year 1427.
Many of the other islands with no indigenous people are close to those listed above, or in the far north where it is too cold for trees to grow. Sure, Antarctica is a continent without an indigenous population, being too cold. Most of the Pacific islands were settled a long time ago, due to their abundance and mild climate.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
