- IJ
Sidestep: Racial migration to Vanuatu
Study of Lapita skeletons on Vanuatu suggest that the older people were of Asian and Polynesian origin rather than Melanesian. This would mean populations and races were transient. This is also why our own ancient history suggests a different reality than what the textbooks and official stories tell us.
The headless skeletons of one 3000 year old site are unusual in that the skulls are buried in a secondary site. These skulls reveal Asian roots with some Polynesian influence. However this goes against the flow of races from the east to the Pacific.
The cemetery, on Vanuatu’s Efate Island, is 3,000 years old, and the skeletons of the earliest settlers, the Lapita, were discovered there in 2004. Australian researchers compared the Lapita skulls to those of living adults in Vanuatu and other parts of Polynesia and Melanesia, and concluded that the cranial structure was closer to that of present-day Polynesians and Asians. Yet the current inhabitants of Vanuatu resemble Melanesians, said Matthew Spriggs, an archaeologist at the Australian National University and one of the study’s authors. He and his colleagues speculate that Melanesians arrived in the area 2,800 to 3,000 years ago, intermarrying with the Lapita. There was little interaction with populations outside the region after that period, Dr. Spriggs said. “The only time that Melanesian migrants could have come and ‘outmarried’ the original Polynesians would have been during the couple of hundred years during Lapita times,” he said. He and his colleagues reported their findings in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Skeletons of the Lapita were discovered as long ago as 1960 in Papua New Guinea. Dr. Spriggs said he hoped to study bones from other parts of Polynesia, like Tonga and West Samoa, to better understand their origins.
"The people of Vanuatu today are descended from Asia first of all. Their original base population is Asian. They were straight out of Taiwan and perhaps the northern Philippines," said Professor Spriggs. "They travelled past places where people were already living, but when they got to Vanuatu there was nobody there. These are the first people. "Only some time later did they intermarry with Papuan peoples to produce the genetic mix we see today in Vanuatu, and indeed across the Pacific. Today all Pacific Islanders are a mixture of these Asian and Papuan populations. The differences are simply in the percentages. Ancient DNA of a sample from a Tongan cemetery confirmed that the same group of people became the first inhabitants of Tonga only slightly later. We know this because testing conducted by two different laboratories in the United States and Germany confirm that the samples are of the same people," he said.
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Tonga is on the route to French Polynesia from Melanesia. In Tonga the new arrivals developed into pure Polynesian stock. But did some from Vanuatu ever get down to NZ? It is certainly true that the Asian origin Lapita people are not of tall stature, so where did our 'tall ones' come from? If what we know of the Lapita is that gained by DNA analysis, the same can and will be done with those inside Kūwaha Tāwhetaana (our cave)
Those we collectively know as Maori, are of both Polynesian and Melanesian ancestry. Some are pure Polynesian and some are a mix, depending on your caste status and location. But collectively, they are now all termed Maori even though they never were a single united group. Hang on though...the Melanesians were here? Yes. They travelled direct and proof of it remains even now in facial features and even stronger in old photographs of the late 1800's. There were here before the Polynesian. And if they could get here without the fleet migration (by the way this did not happen in any organised fashion, more at the same time), they could carry Asian DNA and maybe the most earliest of inhabitants here came down direct when climate, land and currents were slightly different. After all, many things have been found under volcanic ash from a very long time ago.
The below photos shows Polynesian and Melanesian differences from the same time period. The 3rd is mixed. (Click to enlarge)
