"The people who are getting to Tonga and Samoa 3000 or 2900 years ago, are distant cousins if not brothers and sisters with the people from New Guinea."
The fish hook was discovered on the island of Emirau in Papua New Guinea.
"This is the oldest one-piece fish hook intact in the Pacific."
"The people who made this are the ancestors of all Polynesians and people to the east of the Solomon Islands."
"These people lived in stilt houses two metres over the water, so the garbage goes into the water."
Over the years, the water became land and archaeologists digging into it would find broken pottery and other items that had been thrown away.
The fish hook was unearthed by Associate Professor Anne Ford in 2010 when she was a research student on Prof Summerhayes’ excavations.
She said it was a fantastic site and it was a unique experience excavating beneath a stilt house.
"I wasn’t excavating the stilt house so much as what had fallen down from the stilt house into the water, so it was a completely different way of thinking about it," Prof Ford said.
Prof Summerhayes said the fish hook was made out of a trochus shell and he speculated "some poor person made it", got distracted, and accidentally dropped it into the water under the stilt house.
"Have you ever been to the beach and you’ve lost some money or you’ve lost the car keys? Your chances of finding it are next to nil and that’s what they’ve done with this."
It was rare to find an unbroken fish hook from this era, but a second unique aspect was it had a barb on the end.
"The barb is important because we don’t get barbs in the fish hooks of Melanesia."
"It is telling us the fact that the ones from Polynesia were not independently invented, they came across with the initial peopling of the Pacific."
All the items excavated by Prof Summerhayes would eventually go back to Papua New Guinea and would likely be put on display at the Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery in Port Moresby.
"It is fantastic to show people this and say you know if you are Maori or Tahitian or Hawaiian or Samoan or Tongan your ancestors made this and it is the only one of its kind."
Prof Summerhayes predicted the fish hook would be on a Papua New Guinea banknote one day.
"You know, this is a one of a kind, it is extremely rare."
