169: Melanesian musings
For the uneducated in ocean going travel and looking at the fact that Melanesia is closer to NZ than Polynesia, you'd be right to at least ask the question as to why Melanesians didn't find NZ first. So who says they didn't? Well, ocean currents and winds don't allow it some would say. Yes, but it's been proved ocean currents in the Pacific have changed a few times in the last 1500 years and even now there is a flow southwest from Melanesia past Australia to NZ on the Eastward Tasman front flow. And Tasmanian Aborigines were different to the mainland counterparts... coincidentally, the same flow goes there as well.
Ocean currents are not evidence, they are just conjecture. But the reason we say (in complete contrast to what academics say), that Melanesians arrived here - direct from Melanesia, not via Polynesia, are the artifacts. Over 5 years we have produced much in the way of circumstantial evidence, artifactual evidence and even a little anthropological evidence to suggest this is very likely the case. Even Maori legends and early European arrivals testify to Melanesian influence within Maori tribes. The ancient Melanesian 'baurua' (below) were among one of the most sophisticated ocean going craft of ancient times, equally as sophisticated as Polynesian craft.
Seasonal winds suggest and support Polynesian ease for sailing to NZ. But ocean currents support wind and drift travel here from Melanesia as being equally possible, but on a smaller scale. Any Melanesian influence has been generally swamped by the mass Polynesian immigration of 700 years ago. And all that assumes the ocean currents and wind patterns have been the same since 400AD. But they haven't. From AD400 and up until AD1400 (when Maori were supposed to have first arrived) the temperatures were warming around the Pacific. Afterward they began cooling until around 1870. Things change all the time - currents, wind patterns and magnetic poles.... The earth is a living being.
Even a Hawaiian study suggested some 'Maori' may have migrated to New Zealand from Melanesia. This connection has largely been ignored and as yet unexplored by anyone of any real influence. Many dispute this connection; mainly academics, yet not one of them have ever explained away all the Melanesian evidential artifacts. Not a single one! You see, as an academic, it seems easier to say 'I'm educated and therefore I'm right', and lets be fair, they are trained professionals, but we suspect many are too afraid to state what they really believe within their professional circles until someone else does. But I would love to have just one try explain away all the evidence we've produced over the last three years. None is capable of doing that with any rationale, not one of them! And they won't be able to explain away other things we have seen that we cannot mention here.
Hawaiian linguistics professor William Wilson has published a groundbreaking study indicating Polynesians used atolls around the Solomon Islands in Melanesia as a stepping point to colonize the Pacific, including New Zealand. As Ian Wishart said once (and we agree with him), such findings fit hand and glove with rock paintings in the South Island of creatures like crocodiles and snakes. Even Julias Haast saw rock paintings of creatures that did not exist in Polynesia yet do exist in Melanesia. There are even archaic carvings attributed to 1150-1300 (because that's when Polynesians arrived here and no one would dare suggest they belong to anyone else) in museums that are not creatures of anywhere but Australia and Melanesia. Can you explain that? The academics can't!
Mounting evidence is hard to ignore, but it being ignored nonetheless. Eventually someone in academic circles has to at least examine it with a scientific mind; not a closed one. Why couldn't an academic break the stoic boring mould? I mean miracles could happen, pigs might yet fly. Well, in fact a few would come forward, but they are too scared to. Believe me, once we produce our indisputable evidence, the floodgates of information and archeological evidence will flood in - flood in!
Notching is more Melanesian in its usage. Early designs in NZ are full of notching, yet Polynesian design from where they came from at the same dates shows none... odd aye! No, not really, it's because that pattern is not Polynesian.
Dumont d’Urville determined that Melanesians were ‘hideous’ in appearance, ‘limited’ in languages and institutions, and ‘generally very inferior’ to the copper-coloured race in dispositions and intelligence. Now, if you first take the racist superority connetations of d'Urville from the 1820's out of it, it is obvious to the naked eye that there was a marked difference in physical appearance between Melanesian and Polynesian - and a lot of that has to do with their origins before migration. Those Melanesian Maori many saw in the early days were of a lower 'caste' - they were treated as such and this is noted in many Journals. Yes, Maori had a class system too and I wonder if they'll teach that in schools in 2022? Polynesians treated them more as slaves and workers, and yet these had been descendants of those here when the Polynesians arrived. Being very warlike, Polynesians would not have accepted those who appeared not to be as sophisticated as they were, after all Melanesia
So there we have a little more to think about while you wait for us to produce what we all wait for.
