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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

Polynesia remained in the Stone Age

Polynesia remained in the Stone Age

(2) First of all it remained in the Stone Age till Europeans broke into its isolated seas with their metal implements and weapons. It had no trace of any metals, and the romance of it all is that the last migrations from the coast of Asia must have missed first copper or bronze, and then iron, by the page 148merest accident. The last Stone Men that were driven south in their canoes from the Japanese Archipelago must have seen the bronze weapons of the newcomers who drove them out. And if, as the indications of language and religion seem to point out, the final migration from South Asia left either the north-west or the north-east of India some centuries before our era, then they must have seen the copper that the conquering Aryans knew. Nay, they were within an ace of taking iron with them into the far islands of the Pacific; for the iron culture of Madagascar comes, not from the African continent, but from Indonesia, their type of bellows for smelting the metal being much the same as that employed by the Malays, and quite unlike the African. Probably they failed to get it, because they took into their veins none of the new Mongoloid blood that was flushing the archipelago. The Malagasy migrants, we can see from their features, had absorbed or been absorbed by the conquering Malays; and so they took the new and masterful metal with them on their long voyage to the south-west. The Polynesian immigrants doubtless saw and felt the power of the new and incisive weapons of the strange race from the north; but they were driven off in their canoes without learning their use or the art of making them. And these dominant sea-brigands, as they spread southwards through the archipelago, set up the most formidable of barriers, that of piracy, to all return, to all further immigration from either India or Java, and to all peaceful or commercial intercourse between the Pacific immigrants and their birthlands. Nor were they drawn farther afield into the great ocean than the limits of mercantile adventure. It was the coast and island traffic of Asia they preyed upon; and there was no rich prey farther east than Gilolo or Ceram, and farther south than Timor. The piracy of the new masters of Indonesia fixes the limit of Malaysia, and explains the isolation of Polynesia for so many centuries.