A new study on the DNA of ancient bones from domesticated chickens may provide definitive proof that Christopher Columbus beat the Polynesians to South America.

According to ABC Science, the new findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have contributed to a long-standing debate of who made it to South America first.

"We have identified genetic signatures of the original Polynesian chickens, and used these to track early movements and trading patterns across the Pacific," lead author Dr. Vicki Thomson, of the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), said in a press release. "We were also able to trace the origins of these lineages back into the Philippines, providing clues about the source of the original Polynesian chicken populations."

Also from Adelaide's ACAD, professor Alan Cooper was part of a team that, in 2008, challenged a study published a year earlier. Cooper, who was also involved in the new study, and his team argued that the mutation pointed out by the previous study was actually quite common and could not link the Polynesians to South America.

"We found instead this quite distinct Pacific genetic signature - with four particular markers - that we only find in the Pacific and seems to be in all of the ancient Polynesian birds," Cooper told ABC Science. "You don't see this Pacific sequence in South America in modern chickens."

Cooper said the objective of this new study was to re-affirm the ACAD's 2008 study.

"We were able to re-examine bones used in previous studies that had linked ancient Pacific and South American chickens, suggesting early human contact, and found that some of the results were contaminated with modern chicken DNA, which occurs at trace levels in many laboratory components," Cooper said in the release. "We were able to show that the ancient chicken DNA provided no evidence of any pre-Columbian contact between these areas.

"Remarkably, our study also shows that the original Polynesian lineages appear to have survived on some isolated Pacific islands, despite the introduction of European domestic animals across the Pacific in the last couple of hundred years," he said. "These original lineages could be of considerable importance to the poultry industry which is concerned about the lack of genetic diversity in commercial stocks."