179: Melanesian/Polynesian differences

All the official evidence is that Polynesians got to NZ first. Most artifacts shown in museums seem to support this and it is very clear they came here about 700 years ago. But they came from one culture, one pattern, one design, one style of tools and suddenly changed, on a whim they wandered to the West Coast across the dangerous Southern Alps to find pounamu on rugged beaches and rivers...in less than 100 years - when the earliest found (Wairau Bar) were proven to be in poor health? Why would a people who are only on foot search every inch of a rugged place to find a new stone? Why would they do that? Think really really hard about that one. What reason would they have to go on that distant and dangerous journey.

Maybe they learned of this stone from those who had been here for hundreds of years prior. Where did they learn the spiral design from - because they did not have it in Hawaiiki! Where did they learn to make new shaped weapons - did they have a creative school of arts? No, they learned these things from those scattered tribes already here. At least that is what we propose. Let's have a look at some distinct differences between Melanesian and Polynesians. Keep in mind that the Maori also have legends of those they say were here before them.

Melanesian generally. vs. Polynesian generally.

Wide flatter nose vs Narrow noser

Frizzy hair vs Straighter hair

Some blonde vs Only black

Both have a Rocker Jaw (1)

Oval shape vs Pentagonal skull

Oval femoral entry point vs Round femoral entry point

Prominent Brow vs Not so prominent

Dried heads vs No dried heads (2)

Spirals designs vs No spiral designs

Nocking and linear marks vs Rounded designs

850 languages vs Mostly generic

Shell artifacts vs Stone artifacts

1. Some think Melanesians don't have a rocker jaw but most do

2. Polynesians never had dried heads. Melanesians do. Where did Maori learn this?

The differences above are so obvious that racial breeding involves more than just Polynesian stock. The brown skin, the hair, the nose, the lips, the bridge of the nose, even the face shape.

De Bougainville states he saw two distinct races in Tahiti - one tall with almost European like features and the other shorter, frizzy hair and flatter noses. Why did he state that? Well, that is obvious. It is because he saw it with his own eyes. Academics ignore this because... well, they are academics and know better. Cook remarked on the same thing but regarded them as classes rather than races. That makes sense because Maori treated them as a lower class generally. Many were slaves and others noted the Polynesians as akin to Cambodians and it is true the original Polynesians peoples came from Asia. Dr Toopinyard suggests Polynesian skulls are similar to Tasmanians, yet Tasmanians are not that different to Australian and Melanesians. But the Polynesians aren't.

However, are these differences correct? We always believed so - that the Polynesian rocker jaw was not a Melanesian or Micronesian trait. But it turns out it gets more complicated than that. The oldest we know of are the Lapita thought to be descended from Papuans. But it turns out they came from Taiwan (ie Asian) some 5000 years ago. Then later Papuans did arrive and then some of that mixed race moved into Polynesia.

The first people to reach Tonga and Vanuatu in the South Pacific, descended from a mystery group from East Asia it was taught. Instead they appear to have come from another mysterious Neolithic East Asian population that is thought to have originated in Taiwan. Researchers have sequenced the genomes of four individuals of the Lapita culture who lived between 2,300 and 3,100 years ago on the islands of Vanuatu and Tonga. They compared these to DNA from 778 people who currently live on the islands as well as elsewhere in East Asia and Oceania. They found that Pacific islanders have a mix of ancestry from Papuan people of New Guinea and the ancient East Asian population. The scientists say there was almost no Papuan ancestry in the genomes of the four ancient remains they analysed.

The researchers took DNA from the remains of three ancient members of the Lapita culture that lived in Vanuatu. These included a 3,000-year-old skull which was found buried in an ancient pot after having being separated from the rest of the skeleton This suggests that the Papuan people must have arrived on the islands at a later date and mixed with the people who were already living there around 500 to 1,100 years ago.

Writing in the journal Nature, Dr David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, said: ‘Our study has shown that many of the first humans in remote Oceania had little, if any, Papuan ancestry, in stark contrast to the situation today.

‘The scenario emerging from ancient DNA analysis is radically different from that suggested by previous genetic studies, which have generally posited that the first people in Remote Oceania and Polynesia had substantial Papuan ancestry.’

The first modern humans who are thought to have spread from southeast Asia to the islands of Indonesia, New Guinea and then onto Australia around 40,000 years ago. However, outlying islands in the Pacific remained uninhabited until around 3,000 years ago. These people are thought to have used the first boats capable of long distance sea travel. They also brought several species of domesticated animals and plants to the islands. Distinctive earthenware pottery has been found at many sites inhabited by these pioneers. It has been previously assumed that these people who formed the Lapita culture were part of the Papuan people of New Guinea – who are descendants of the first wave of humans who spread from southeast Asia 40,000 years ago. But modern people living in the Pacific islands owe just 25 per cent of their genetic heritage to the Papuans of New Guinea. Dr Reich and his colleagues analysed DNA from the remains of three skeletons found in a large cemetery on Efate Island in Vanuatu and one from the Talasiu site on Tongatapu island, Tonga.

The Lapita culture made distinctive earthenware pottery (pictured) and were thought to have originally been descended from the Papuans from New Guinea, but the new research suggests they were actually formed from a separate wave of migration of Asia. They found that the ancient skeletons were not have any ancestry from the Papuans and instead appear to descend from another unknown group from East Asia. Traces of these people can still be found today in the genomes of nearly all Pacific Islanders today - from Vanuatu to Hawaii. Professor Matthew Spriggs, an archaeologist at the Australian National University who was one of the co-authors of the research, said it provides new insights into these people’s ancestry. He told Mail Online: ‘In this new paper we have basically cracked the problem of the origin of Pacific Islanders, often posed as the 'origin of the Polynesians'.

Pottery for the Lapita culture has been found along the coast of New Guinea and on the Pacific islands from Vanuatu to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. ‘Some archaeologists such as myself have argued that the Lapita culture of the Western Pacific is primarily the easterly expansion of the Island SE Asian Neolithic, that originates in Taiwan perhaps 5500 years ago as pottery using farmers. ‘It then spreads through the Philippines and Eastern Indonesia shortly after 4000 years ago, and just over 3000 years ago appears in the Western Pacific as the Lapita culture. ‘This spreads from the islands off New Guinea's eastern end through Solomons, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji and on to Tonga and Samoa. There is then a major pause until just over 1000 years ago in Western Polynesia before descendant groups spread to places such as Hawaii, Easter Island and finally to New Zealand about 700 years ago.’The research also suggests some members of the Lapita people formed colonies along the coasts of new Guinea and nearby islands where they began intermingling with long settled Papuans.

The new study also highlights that the majority of the Lapita East Asian ancestry appears to come from female rather than male ancestors. This suggests the Papuans who arrived on the islands were mainly men who mixed with females from the Lapita culture who were already living there. Professor Spriggs said the findings may also lead to some changing ideas about the ancestry of other groups living in the Pacific Ocean. He said: 'In fact the difference between a 'Polynesian' and a 'Melanesian' is simply a question of the percentage of Asian as opposed to Papuan genes. 'If you have 26 per cent Papuan then you are called a Polynesian, when it gets up towards 50 per cent or more you are called a Melanesian. 'I think it is time to abandon these terms and just talk about 'Pasifika' people and their origins from two great gene pools - the Papuan and the Asian First Remote Oceans.'

There is an island in Melanesia, very close to Papua New Guinea where remains show various skeletal features weigh heavily toward asian, while others toward Polynesian while yet others have no comparison elsewhere. Melanesia is a spring from which the differences in all the pacific islands flow. A genetic study published by Temple University in 2008 was based on genome scans and evaluation of more than 800 genetic markers among a wide variety of Pacific peoples. It found that neither Polynesians nor Micronesians have much genetic relation to Melanesians. Both groups are strongly related genetically to East Asians, particularly Taiwanese aborigines.

Melanesians of some islands are one of the few non-European peoples, and the only dark-skinned group of people outside Australia, known to have blond hair. The blonde trait developed via the TYRP1 gene, which is not the same gene that causes blondness in European blonds. Naturally blond hair is rare in humans and found almost exclusively in Europe and Oceania.

The mutation, which has no obvious advantages, likely arose by chance in one individual and drifted to a high frequency in the Solomon Islands because the original population was small, says Jonathan Friedlaender, an anthropologist emeritus at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study. “This whole area seems to have been populated by very small groups of people making it across these stepping-stone islands, so you do have very dramatic effects in fluctuations of gene frequency.”

(this is also why a tall race developed….because the original population was small.)

Recent years have revealed genetic evidence that has changed our thinking. However, DNA can change according to environment and even upbringing…which would be a shock to many we guess.