32: Origins & Evidence

A group of scientists, who studied a set of skulls from a 3,000-year-old cemetery in Vanuatu, believe that they may have unlocked a vital clue to the origins of Polynesian people. Australian archaeologists discovered the oldest known cemetery in the South Pacific, at Teouma, Vanuatu. The cemetery belongs to the first known culture in Vanuatu and Polynesia, called the Lapita culture. The report says that the shape and contours of the earliest skull in the 3,000-year-old burial ground in Vanuatu suggests a starting point for the great Polynesian migration. And it’s not Asia.

The archaeologists found 68 graves, but only seven bodies with heads. These seven heads turned out to be very significant. They showed that before 3,000 years ago - although people had been in Australia, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands for maybe 50,000 years or so - these first people in Vanuatu were Polynesian, not Melanesian. They were different to those there now. This is like New Zealand where the first ones have been displaced by Maori arriving in 1280.

Polynesian seafarers explored vast areas of the Pacific and settled nearly every inhabitable island in the Pacific Ocean well before European explorers arrived in the 16th century. The predominant theory was that the Polynesian people are a subset of the sea-faring Austronesian people who have their origins in Taiwan, having arrived there through South China about 8000 years ago. From there it is believed that the spread out across the Pacific to Polynesia, a sub-region made up of over 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. Yet the team even found a unique Pacific genetic signature in bone samples, the results revealing that the Philippines is the most likely ancestral homeland of the Polynesians , whose forebears colonised the Pacific about 3,200 years ago. The question about the origins of the Polynesians was framed by Captain Cook. The first person who reported that the ancient Lapita culture is linked to the modern Polynesian settlers was an archaeologist and ethnologist from Nanterre, Frédérique Valentin.

It gets confusing with the Melanesian infusion in the mix, safe to say more is always being learned...except in NZ where acedemics refuse to investigate and do full reasearcgh on suspected ancient sites becuase they can't possibly exist and whenever they have been done the results are embargoed. Our project of presenting skeletal evidence of exceedingly tall people will hopefully push for this to be done elsewhere. Maori vehemently (deliberate use of that word) oppose the idea others were already here before they arrived.

Physical resemblance between Polynesians and Asian populations has been detected, but in between were the islands of Melanesia, inhabited largely by people of different phenotype. However, the Lapita culture bridged this geographical divide 3,000 years ago. The recent discovery helps show that the Polynesians migrated from the Phillipines through Melanesia and into Polynesia, with little or no mixing in the early generations with the Melanesian populations of Papua New Guinea and the Solomons that had been in the region for the previous 50,000 or so years, writes ABC News.

“You’ve got this problem,” Professor Spriggs said. “You’ve got South-East Asia and then you’ve got Melanesia in the middle with darker skinned people of different appearance, and then you’ve got Polynesians in the east. You have to get Polynesians out of Asia somehow , You’ve got some people who have them going up through the north and coming down through north America, and then coming that way, from the Americas. Others had them coming by various routes, either from the north through Micronesia or perhaps coming later or earlier. What we’re able to show is that in fact, for places like Vanuatu and New Caledonia and Fiji, they do arrive before there’s anybody else here.” Professor Spriggs who headed up the excavations said the other major research finding was that not long after the arrival of the Polynesians in places like Vanuatu, Melanesians from further west began to arrive. “People in the New Guinea and Solomons area also jumping on these Lapita canoes and getting excited by the culture and travelling to new parts,” he said.“Over time, and this is just over the first couple of hundreds of years in Vanuatu, the appearance of people changes from looking like Polynesians people look today, to looking like Melanesian people today. We work with specialist biological anthropologists … they’re the ones who’ve been doing all the measurement on what skulls we do have to compare … in a forensic way, with modern populations today,” he said.“What we found, which was a surprise for a lot of people, was that these first people in Vanuatu were Polynesian. Whereas today if you come to Vanuatu, the people are obviously generally of Melanesian appearance. Darker skinned, and not as tall as Polynesians would be. These [the people buried in cemetery] were very tall Polynesians.”

Knowing that Polynesians went up into Melanesia 3000 years ago has some interesting ramifications. They are if they can travel up from Polynesia that long ago, then by corresponding argument, they could also travel down. And this could be where the Waitaha/Urukehu and others may have come from, as well as from Rapanaui, thousands of years before modern Polynesian arrived. It proves they had great seafaring skills millennia before accepted.

All this would help give some credibility to stories in NZ about inhabitants such as those like the axe marked tree stump under eruption material found deep underground in Auckland. However there is another more interesting story from a famous NZ’er called Julius von Haast, (where we get the area called the Haast from today). It involves the find of a stone implement deep in the soil. It was a partially finished chert adze and its sandstone sharpener, found by a party of gold-miners in Bruce Bay, in the south of Westland, a few days before Haast arrived on the spot in the year 1868. They were lying on a bed of pebble-studded clay. Usual enough...but more than fourteen feet of humus, sand and shingle had to be cut through before this layer was reached. Before they could dig, Totara trees four feet in diameter had to be felled even before the surface could be broken; there were also huge trunks that had lain prostrate for generations. The location itself was 500 feet above high-water mark, with the usual three belts of driftwood, sand without vegetation, rush-and-manuka-covered sand, and low scrub. It had clearly passed through these three stages, and its foot of humus must have taken many generations, if not centuries, of herbage to form before the forest giants could root themselves in it. The various accumulations and the ancient growth of the forest belt could take us back thousands of years. Below is a sketch of the items and below that Haasts comments.

From the Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, page 110, "I have described two stone implements, a polished stone adze and a sharpening stone, found in Bruce Bay, fifteen feet below the ground, in an undisturbed deposit, over which a forest, consisting of large trees, was growing; since then I have received another adze made of sandstone, possessing a well polished cutting edge, found at Hunt's Beach, West Coast, eighteen feet below the ground, amongst the roots and stumps of an ancient forest, which last June, during the progress of gold mining operations, was laid bare. Plate IV. fig. 1 gives a drawing of this stone implement, now in the Canterbury Museum, of the considerable age of which there can be no doubt."

Of course many still maintain he made the story up. If you had an opposing view that would be the logical thing to say, but why do so many tales keep occurring in NZ that are 'obviously' false. Even some Maori believe these stories based on what they were told by their forebears. Maybe these 'discoveries' point to something occurring we have yet to accept. But there is more: yet another story involves the Manuherikia plains (near Alexandra in Central Otago) where a native oven was found some fourteen feet below the surface. There is the white stone bird unearthed in Fiordland - and there are many other examples.

So we can see that traditions, genealogies, and relics all seem to point to human occupation long before the arrival of the six canoes, if not to a time thousands of years before the beginning of our era. The origins of the first ones in NZ could have come from anywhere north or east. But evidence certainly points to people being here before Maori. We cannot prove Haast was not lying, but tall skeletons that Maori say do not exist will prove something political Maori do not want exposed…that the tangata Whenua are not the tangata Maori. Nothing else will do.