(9) All this presupposes one essential detail, says Atholl Anderson, professor of prehistory at the Australian National University: the Lapita had mastered the advanced art of sailing against the wind. And theres no proof they could do any such thing, Anderson says. There has been this assumption they did, and people have built canoes to re-create those early voyages based on that assumption. But nobody has any idea what their canoes looked like or how they were rigged. (10) Rather than give all the credit to human skill, Anderson invokes the winds of chance. El Nino, the same climate disruption that affects the Pacific today, may have helped scatter the Lapita, Anderson suggests. He points out that climate data obtained from slow-growing corals around the Pacific indicate a series of unusually frequent El Ninos around the time of the Lapita expansion. By reversing the regular east-to-west flow of the trade winds for weeks at a time, these super El Ninos might have taken the Lapita on long unplanned voyages. (11) However they did it, the Lapita spread themselves a third of the way across the Pacific, then called it quits for reasons known only to them. Ahead lay the vast emptiness of the central Pacific and perhaps they were too thinly stretched to venture farther. They probably never numbered more than a few thousand in total, and in their rapid migration eastward they encountered hundreds of islands more than 300 in Fiji alone. *Question: T/F/NG It is now clear that the Lapita could sail into a prevailing wind. 37. Extreme climate conditions may have played a role in Lapita migration. 38. The Lapita learnt to predict the duration of El Ninos. 39. It remains unclear why the Lapita halted their expansion across the Pacific. 40. It is likely that the majority of Lapita settled on Fiji.