Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

An Earlier Caucasian People before the Ainos

An Earlier Caucasian People before the Ainos

(3) But these people of the half-underground dwellings were evidently not the first inhabitants of the archipelago. For neither they nor the Ainos that absorbed them had megalithic burial habits; the latter bury in the ground and plant an oar on the grave. And there are all over Japan great burial mounds that, like those of Siberia and Europe, cover colossal stone chambers or galleries. Now the Japanese in their annals speak of subduing the "Stone Men." And these are doubtless the megalithic race that, when the "People of the Hollows," and after them the Ainos, crossed from the continent, went off in their canoes southwards over the stepping-stones of island-groups, and carried their colossal art into Polynesia; and that must have been four or five thousand years ago.