No Immigration from the South of Asia since the
Beginning of the Iron Age, None from the East
of the Continent since the Beginning of the
Copper Age

(1) By the aid of indications in Maori legends, and in the remains of ancient man in the refuse mounds and alluvial drifts of New Zealand, we have been able to trace human occupancy of Polynesia back several thousand years. But there are indications of far greater antiquity in the strange medley that makes up Polynesian culture. In some of its arts, and especially in its art, it treads on the heels of the earlier civilised races. In some directions it seems as if it only needed a step to be within the pale of civilisation.

(2) Here, in fact, Ave have evidences of an immigration in comparatively late times, from some one or other of the semi-cultivated countries of Asia. The absence of iron in any shape or form from the whole region fixes the date of this migration from Southern Asia as not later than the beginning of our era. For then began the iron age in Indonesia. The absence of all other metals might lead us to put back the closure of the Pacific to immigration still further, till, in fact, the beginning of the bronze or even the copper age. But there was no bronze or copper age in Indonesia. There was, page 245as in trans-Saharan Africa, a sudden transition from stone to iron.

(3) But the other route by which Asiatic peoples might have migrated into Polynesia, that by way of the Japanese, Ladrone, and Caroline Islands, must have been closed since the beginning of the copper age on the east coast of Asia, and that was not later than the third millennium before our era. This is confirmed by the absence of the epidemics of crowded districts. Had the east coast of Asia been as congested with population before immigration ceased thence into the Pacific as it has been for the last three or four thousand years, the immigrants would have carried with them the epidemic diseases of the Chinese and Japanese coasts, diseases that arise as soon as the soil becomes impregnated with the bacteria that flourish on the debris of vast masses of humanity.