Polynesian explorers settled on a group of freezing sub-Antarctic islands in the 13th century after a "mind-blowing" voyage across the Southern Pacific Ocean, archaeologists have discovered.
Scientists found stone tools, waste mounds and dog bones on the small island of Enderby in the uninhabited Auckland archipelago, one of the remotest and most forbidding spots on the planet.
"It's mind blowing... you have this incredible group of explorers sailing in a twin hull canoe and navigating these wild seas," said Christian Turney, the co-author of a new study that has been published in the journal Archaeology in Oceania.
"How they did it is just an extraordinary feat of navigation," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Analysis with carbon dating revealed that the settlement dates to some time between AD 1250 and 1320.
"Radiocarbon ages across the site indicate a single continuous settlement, probably of some decades," the scientists wrote.
"The site was about as far south as prehistoric habitation could be sustained and was probably vacated at the onset of the Little Ice Age in the late 14th century."
The Polynesian pioneers would have encountered weather conditions very different to the lush tropical regions that they came from.
"You're fighting severe cold, fierce winds, the rigging alone would have been really vulnerable to those really strong winds ... and yet they still reached there, they still went there. It's extraordinary," said Prof Turney.
The scholars think that the Auckland Islands, some 300 miles south of New Zealand, mark the furthest south that the Polynesians ever reached. They do not believe, contrary to some claims, that they discovered Antarctica.
Getting even this far would have been a formidable ordeal and a huge navigational challenge.
"Southern Ocean seas are cold, high and breaking. Crew would have been continually drenched and would have had to bail out water almost constantly," the scientists wrote in their paper.
On the Auckland Islands the average temperature is 46F (8C) and it rains 300 days a year.
During the Little Ice Age the islands became colder, windier and wetter than they had been, factors which may explain why the 13th century settlement was eventually abandoned.
Although the islands are remote, the settlers would have found plenty of sustenance from birds such as penguins, ducks and sooty shearwaters; and mammals such as Hooker's sea lions and New Zealand fur seals.
The archaeological evidence also showed that they made fish hooks from seal bones and cutting tools from local basalt.
The Polynesians were among the greatest navigators in history.
Their sea migrations covered an area 6,000 miles from west to east and 5,000 miles from north to south. They settled on islands from Hawaii to New Zealand, Micronesia to Easter Island.