Looking at a map, one would be challenged to find a more impressive place than Easter Island where people ventured without the benefit of modern navigation. Just three times the size of Manhattan, it is more than a thousand miles from its nearest island neighbor to the west and 2,200 miles from Chile to the east, yet people have lived there for more than 800 years.

Scientists have long wondered how early people sailed to the island — as well as how they built the island’s impressive Moai.

Genetic tests have shown that the modern Rapanui people have a mix of Polynesian, South American and European ancestry. Some scientists have used the modern DNA results to suggest that Polynesians from the west and native South Americans from the east lived and intermingled on the island before Europeans first arrived in 1722. And in the famous Kon-Tiki expedition, a Norwegian explorer named Thor Heyerdahl showed on a balsa wood raft how South Americans could have voyaged to the Polynesian islands during pre-Columbian times.

But that does not mean it was probable, according to Lars Fehren-Schmitz, a biological anthropologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lead author of the study.

Using rib bones from five Easter Island individuals from 1445 to 1945 that had been excavated in the 1980s and stored in the Kon-Tiki museum in Norway, Dr. Fehren-Schmitz and his colleagues attempted to sequence the genome of the island’s earliest inhabitants. The team extracted enough useful genetic information from the remains to analyze and draw conclusions that could be representative of the larger ancient population.