Some of the best brains in the world are pondering how to get humans to Mars and back safely.
We'll stay on the planet for a story of long-distance travel that also featured great challenges. That would be the settlement of all those islands in the Pacific Ocean, by people who had no modern technology, and only open boats to travel thousands of miles.
This is the story anthropologist Nicholas Thomas takes up in Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific.
Archeology, sociology, linguistics, genetics, and more help assemble the puzzle of how people living in primitive conditions traveled so far.
Milt Radford is the guest host.