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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

The Malayo-Polynesian Fallacy fixed the Genesis of — Human Occupation of Polynesia in the Thirteenth — Century

The Malayo-Polynesian Fallacy fixed the Genesis of
Human Occupation of Polynesia in the Thirteenth
Century

(1) It used to be the universal opinion of Maori scholars that the first appearance of man in New Zealand was the arrival of the six canoes, the only epoch recognised in native tradition. And the genealogies seem to fix this in the fourteenth century. But there cropped up sundry stories and legends of canoes that had arrived long before this "Norman Conquest" of the Maoris, and others of peoples that had lived in the country even before the arrival of these earlier migrations. These aboriginals came to be identified with the Morioris, who migrated to the Chatham Islands from New Zealand some time before the fourteenth century.

(2) But this still left the antiquity of man in the tropical islands untouched. Wallace, in his "Malay Archipelago," brought out the close relationships of the Polynesian dialects and those of Indonesia and came to the rash conclusion that the peoples who spoke them were of the same race, which he named the Malayo-Polynesian. And his great scientific reputation has kept the fallacy alive for half a century. The most recent authoritative books on the Pacific still assume it to be a correct and scientific term. Now the Malays did page 231not spread as an empire of navigators till about the thirteenth century. And the name Malayo-Polynesian implied that it was the Malays that, sailing forth from the Straits of Malacca, mastered Indonesia and then peopled Polynesia. It was thus tacitly assumed that this last region was not peopled till the thirteenth century.

(3) Even the early voyagers of the eighteenth century felt that the races were utterly different, and report from Polynesia tall forms, handsome faces, and often fair European-like complexions, with occasional negroid traces like the flattened nostrils; whilst a few, like Crozet, in speaking of the New Zealanders, report three types, one dark and negroid, another yellowish, and a third as European in features as their own sailors. A hesitancy arose about the identity of the Malays and Polynesians from like observations that showed distinct mixture of race. It was then assumed that a negroid population had held Polynesia before the arrival of the Malays. And the fair element was left unexplained.