Every ancient language that has ever been deciphered needed an anchor. Usually that’s a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, or a known relative to compare it to. Linear A, the writing system of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization on the Greek island of Crete, has neither.

Linear A is described as a “language isolate” because it has no confirmed link to any known language, living or dead. As such, it has posed a significant challenge for linguists over the past century.

Etruscan, a language of Italy that was used before the rise of the Roman Empire, has fared only slightly better. A partial vocabulary has been collected from short funerary inscriptions, but its grammar and deeper meaning still elude linguists.

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The same question drives both the plot of Moana and decades of archaeological research: Why, after centuries of relative stability, did Polynesian voyagers suddenly begin settling islands thousands of kilometers away across the Pacific?

The latest Moana movie is a live-action adaptation of a Disney animated movie of the same name. While the films are fictional, they draw inspiration from the rich seafaring heritage of Polynesian peoples, whose ancestors undertook one of the greatest episodes of maritime exploration in human history.

New climate evidence may help us understand why they embarked on these voyages.

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