of Hōkūlea attracted the interest of young students such as Milton "Shorty" Bertelmann and later Nainoa Thompson. Mau not only led Hōkūlea to Tahiti, but reconnected the people of the Pacific to their cultural roots. Revived interest in preserving traditional culture and navigation methods reinvigorated the art of canoe building and cultural studies in Hawaii, New Zealand, Rarotonga, and Tahiti, as well as Mau's homeland of Satawal. Two centuries before Mau and the Hōkūlea, Captain James Cook, with the help of Tupaia, gained knowledge that otherwise would have been closely held. Before his death in 1779, Cook hypothesized that Polynesians shared common ancestry; he even pinned their origin to Asia. However, Cook's theory did not prevent debate among scholars. Before the Hōkūlea voyage in 1976, academic debate about the settlement of Polynesia was divided between several schools of thought. Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl hypothesized that the Pacific was settled by voyages from South America and set out to prove that with his Kon-Tiki expedition. Scholars did not take Heyerdahl's hypothesis seriously. New Zealander Andrew Sharp proposed the accidental voyaging hypothesis in 1957, which (erroneously) argued that Oceania was too vast to have been settled by intentional voyaging so migrations must have happened by accidental drift voyages. Sharp granted that Polynesians likely settled the Pacific from Asia, but held the opinion that their crude vessels and navigational tools were not reliable for intentional sailing from Tahiti to Hawaii or New Zealand. He stated that voyages of more than 300 miles were likely accidental voyages, with landfall at the mercy of wind and current. A 1973 study and computer simulation by Levison, Ward, and Web investigated the probability of Sharp's hypothesis but found it improbable. Finney disagreed with the accidental voyaging portion of Sharp's hypothesis. To investigate the problem, he founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society with Herb Kane and Tommy Holmes in 1973, intent on building a voyaging canoe to sail from Hawaii to Tahiti to test whether intentional two-way voyaging throughout Oceania could be replicated. With the help of Mau's navigational knowledge guiding Hōkūlea, the Polynesian Voyaging Society demonstrated that intentional voyaging was not only possible, but also the ancestors of the Polynesians could have settled the Pacific on similar voyages using non-instrument wayfinding techniques such as Mau's. Finally, linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that the history of the Polynesian people does not originate in the East Pacific but in the