Out of the islands we now call Indonesia, at some unknown period in the remote past, the Polynesian peoples came to the mid-Pacific. Indefatigable voyagers and explorers, they penetrated the far reaches of the greatest of oceans but do not appear to have found New Zealand until the tenth century of the Christian era. The Polynesians who settled New Zealand, and are known today as the Maori, have a well-established tradition that the first discovery of their islands was made by the famous Polynesian navigator, Kupe. Although other scouting expeditions followed, it was not until the fourteenth century, only six hundred years ago, that a carefully planned colonizing expedition, the "Fleet" of Maori tradition, set out from central Polynesia for New Zealand. The reason generally given for this
Differences among PolynesiansAlthough the inhabitants of the different Polynesian islands have descended from people who belonged to more than one race, their customs and beliefs are much alike. They even have some ancestors in common. From the same revered hero, Olopana, the Maoris and the Hawaiians record twenty-seven generations. But just as in England, Japan, or the United States people in one part of the country speak differently, use different tools, and play different games, so in Polynesia the people in different islands differ from each other. Aloha in Hawaii, aroha in New Zealand, kaoha in the Marquesas, and alofa in Samoa are merely different spellings of the same word. In the Marquesas and in Hawaii the houses were rectangular; in Samoa and Tonga, they were oval. Only the Marquesans and the Maoris carved their house posts. Canoes in the Marquesas, New Zealand, and Hawaii were dug out of logs; in Tahiti, Samoa, and Tonga they were built of planks. The shape of adzes, poi pou
What Polynesians believedTo a Polynesian religion was as much a part of his everyday life as were the stones with which he built his house platforms or the wood of his canoe, or as his eating and drinking. Religious thought and physical effort were parts of all activities. Birth, death, and work had a religious as well as a physical meaning. To accomplish an undertaking it was as necessary to perform appropriate religious rites as it was to have the right kinds of tools. The things in nature were thought to have individual life. Land, sea, stones, stars, and other natural objects grew and changed and moved just as do trees and animals and men. The Maori Rangi, the heavens, was a thinking, living being, having its own peculiar form. In TahitiTaa-roa, the creator, was thought to have human form. The Polynesian recognized the regularity of nature -- day follows night, stars move across the heavens, seeds grow into plants, waves respond to the wind -- and explained it by the belief that th
05 June 2007 (News in Science, National Geographic) - Why did the Chicken cross the pacific? Because the Polynesians brought them there, it seems. A 600-year-old chicken bone from Chile is found to be carrying a rare mutation that can be traced to the Polynesian islands, thus strengthening the idea that the Polynesian islanders were able to traverse the pacific, and overturning the assumption that chickens were imported into the New World by Columbus.
Chickens originated from Southeast Asia, and could have been brought to the Polynesian islands from the Austronesian expansion and migration from between 5,000 and 2,500 BC. Originating from Taiwan, the expansion travelled down to Philippines, Borneo and the Moluccas; some went westwards towards Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula while others headed eastward towards Polynesia by 500 AD.
The tracing of chickens to a Polynesian origin also refutes one of the assertions in Gavin Menzies’ 1421 thesis, who argued that the existence of ch
Chicken Bones Suggest Polynesians Found Americas Before ColumbusExcerpt:"But chicken bones recently unearthed on the coast of Chile—dating prior to Columbus’ “discovery” of America and resembling the DNA of a fowl species native to Polynesia—may challenge that notion, researchers say. “Chickens could not have gotten to South America on their own—they had to be taken by humans,” said anthropologist Lisa Matisoo-Smith from the University of Auckland, New Zealand."http://www.livescience.com/history/070604_polynesian_chicken.htmlAlex
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