I read last week in a newspaper about pre-Columbian contacts between Australia and South-America. Since I met Caro on the BBC board many years ago I am increasingly  interested in New Zealand, Australia and all subjects around, as indeed the Maori.
Doing research for the question I became for the first ime in my life aware that the Pacific wasn't so empty as I thought. I knew from WWII of course about Hawaii nearly in the middle between Japan and the US. But what I saw then on my lighted world globe, was that in the South Pacific there were a lot more islands even nearing South America
https://puawai2011.wordpress.com/tag/easter-island/


And I learned now about Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia.
And New Zealand seem to belong to Polynesia.

As I read it now it is just about that Polynesia that all the theories start, and more specific to Easter Island.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6130&context=etd
https://www.newshub.co.nz/world/polynesians-definitely-reached-south-america---study-2014102406
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20703019?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

As I see it there is a lot of controversy, even among scientists?
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/did-early-easter-islanders-sail-south-america-europeans
I find this the best and most neutral article of all those here mentioned.
To show how difficult it all is for a conclusion, here an excerpt
There are a few ways to explain the discrepancy, researchers say. The most likely, says Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, a population geneticist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who led the 2014 research, is that when the pre-Columbian individuals Fehren-Schmitz analyzed were alive, contact with Native Americans was recent and their genetic signature hadn’t yet spread to the whole population of Rapa Nui. “One would like to see more individuals … before you really say there was no contact,” agrees Hannes Schroeder, an ancient DNA researcher at the University of Copenhagen who wasn’t involved in either paper.
But Fehren-Schmitz proposes another possibility. Some of the colonial slave traders who targeted Rapa Nui were from Peru, where European and Native American genes had mixed since the 16th century. When they arrived on the island in the 18th and 19th centuries, they already carried short bursts of Native American DNA, and they could have passed those on to the still purely Polynesian Rapanui. That might have made it look like contact between Polynesians and Native Americans happened long before it actually did, he says.
Malaspinas says her team tested a scenario like this, and it didn’t fully explain their results. But she says it’s possible her model couldn’t precisely capture the myriad ways colonialism and the slave trade affected the Rapanui’s genomes. On the often surprising gaps between scientific models and what actually happened in the past, she and Fehren-Schmitz agree: “When it comes to human behavior and human history, there’s so much more complexity to it,” he says.

Kind regards from Paul.