Maori and Polynesian, Their Origin, History, and Culture;
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i>V5rt.'r«-.<'.,.<1'^-.> :-' \ ^ 67$ HI MAORI AND POLYNESIAN MAORI AND POLYNESIAN THEIR ORIGIN, HISTORY AND CULTURE J. MACMILLAN BROWN US London: HUTCHINSON & CO. Paternoster Row jw^ jar^ 1907 ^ s- ^ 9 SUMMARY OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I The Footprints of Primitive Man in Monumental Stone Paragraph ( i ) Written history is ephemeral. (2) Earth-preserved history lasts longer. (3) The record of man in the rocks of Java has lasted nearly a million years. (4) Palaeolithic man spans hundreds of thousands of years, neolithic man only tens of thousands. (5) Neolithic man specialised into megalithic man thousands of years ago. (6) Megalithic man started from Mauritania along the Atlantic and Baltic coasts of Europe, and crossed to Korea through the north of Central Asia. (7) From Korea he went into Micronesia ; (8) thence into Samoa and Tonga. (9) In Eastern Poly- nesia he has left more traces. (10) Another megalithic track goes along the south of Asia into the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Java, and there stops. (11) The northern route is fairly continuous across the Pacific into Central America and Peru. (12) It is the track of one division of mankind. (13) This division is Caucasian, not negroid or Mongoloid. (14) For it is also maritime and long- voyaging. (15) The track probably proves a line of inland seas from the Caspian to Lake Baikal. (16) A maritime and Caucasian people therefore found its way into Polynesia, and thence into America. CHAPTER II The Meaning of the Colossal-stone Record . • Paragraph (i) The myth-making faculty interprets the mega- lithic monuments with great variety. (2) But they originate in ancestor-worship, (3) which first abandoned the primeval cave-dwelling to the spirit, and afterwards built a colossal house for it in imitation of the cave. (4) Hence they were the primitive altars and temples. (5) The viii SUMMARY OF CONTENTS PAGE art of colossal-stone architecture ceased on the intro- duction of iron and mortar ; (6) and later peoples used the monuments for inscriptions and other purposes. (7) There are two megalithic tracks across the Old World from the Mediterranean, one southern and the other northern, (8) and it is the Caucasian medium-head that follows both. (9) It isheadform that permanently marks race. (10) But in addition to the medium head, the Caucasian is generally marked by much and wavy hair, light complexion, and sea-migratoriness, as contrasted with the Mongoloid and the Negroid. CHAPTER III European-like Races on the Colossal-stone Route . 18 Paragraph (i) Asia is not wholly Mongoloid, Caucasians having early appeared on the south and south-west of the Mongoloid breeding-place. (2) The desiccation of the Central Asian plateau hived off the Mongoloids, the negroids are broken into three divisions by the sinking of the Indo-African land-bridge. (3) The Mongoloid movement took place comparatively late in the history of mankind (4) The breeding-place of the Caucasian was the Mediterranean region. (5) But there were blonde Caucasians sprinkled over North Africa in pre-Roman times, (6) These must have come from the north, the breeding-place of light colour in animals as well as man. (7) The advancing ice- sheet must have shepherded them south, whilst also evolving in them the migratory habit. (8) The Caucasians found their way all over the south of Asia during the old Stone Age. (9) In the new Stone Age blondes appear amongst these immigrants into Asia. (10) The neolithic wave spread over Indonesia, and as far as Madagascar. (11) The blondes naturally predominated along the northern route. (12) Even in the far north-east, which has been so thoroughly Mongolised, there are many traces of Caucasians, and many of them blondes. (13) Did the Pacific stop their migration ? CHAPTER IV Traces of European-like Peoples in the Pacific . 26 Paragraph (i) The Ainos retain Caucasian hair, head, and face, but are evidently not pure Caucasian. (2) They had absorbed peoples before them, and were themselves ab- " sorbed by their Japanese conquerors. (3) The Stone Men," a megalithic race before them, had been partly SUMMARY OF CONTENTS ix PAGE absorbed, partly driven into migration. (4) The coastal ring of islands to the south reveals traces of fair Caucasian immigrants. (5) In the Ladrones the race-problem is complicated, but there are striking megalithic remains. (6) In the Carolines it is still more complicated by later Malayan and Papuasian invasions. (7) Long-headed skulls were found in the megalithic tombs of Ponape, whilst the natives are medium-headed. (8) The Spaniards reported two types, a tall, aristocratic, canoe-building, megalithic race, whom they called Blancos, and a dark, short, subject race, who were probably Papuasian or Melanesian. (9) There are many megalithic graves and other remains all over Ponape. (10) They are chiefly to be found in the east and south-east islands of the group. (11) The inhabitants of these are more Polynesian than to the west, and the affinity to Polynesia increases in the Gilbert and Marshall groups. (12) In Polynesia proper the European appear- ance of the islanders has struck all travellers ; the head- form is either long or medium. (13) In New Zealand the urukehu or red-headed Maoris indicate a cross with a blonde race. ( 14) Even the fairy peoples of Maori tradition had come over the ocean. (15) And the fairies are repre- sented as fair-headed and fair-skinned like Europeans. (16) Their abhorrences reveal traits that do not belong to South Asiatics. (17) When absorbed they mellowed the fierce instincts of the Maori immigrants, (18) and taught them their arts of ornamentation, (19) the art of digging out the great single canoe, (20) and that of their spiral wood-carving. (21) The Maoris had several names for white sea-traversing races long before they saw Europeans. (22) New Zealand, as the farthest south, would be a refuge for exiles from the islands, and as of considerable size would preserve many types of aboriginals. (23) In the tropical islands a fair-haired race was known to tradition and prejudice before Europeans. (24) Father-right reigns throughout Polynesia, though mother-right is universal east and west of it ; and this was an early mark of a Caucasian race. (25 ) This feature affiliates it with the North Pacific, whilst the matriarchate of Indonesia separates it from the patriarchate of India. CHAPTER V When did the Caucasians migrate into the Pacific, and WHEN WAS the Pacfic Closed ? . -39 Paragraph (i) The time of a prehistoric people is generally calculated by the layers of humus over their relics but ; (2) we can also calculate it from historic movements. The X SUMMARY OF CONTENTS PAGE northern great-stone route must have been blocked when the Turks and Finns migrated from the Altai Mountains. (3) On the desiccation of the central plateau of Asia the Mongoloid emigrants would first press south and east to richer lands and warmer climates ; the northern issue would be the last to be chosen. (4) The northern route from Europe to the Pacific would be open later than the southern, hence the fair and even blonde Caucasians that, being absorbed, blanched the Turks and Finns. (5) The time when it was closed will be approximately fixed by the time of southern migrations. (6) The Akkadian Mongoloids must have issued from their plateau some eight or nine thousand years before our era. (7) The northern issue was later, and the northern route to the Pacific for the mega- lithic people remained open later ; some of that people reached Micronesia and Polynesia without copper—in other words, some four or five thousand years before our era. (8) But some of the kurans of this people show copper in their graves. (9) But bronze, as taking the keener edge, spread more rapidly, and defines an age better, and in north-east Asia it began between three and four thousand years before our era. A bronze-weaponed people came into Japan about 1240 B.C., probably the Japanese, and drove off various aboriginal peoples, among them megalithic peoples, into Micronesia and Polynesia, and probably also into British Columbia. (10) But no migration could have taken place from Japan into Polynesia after the foundation of the Japanese empire in the seventh century before our era, else it would have taken bronze. (11) The absence of iron from pre-European Polynesia defines the backward limit of immigration into it more exactly. (12) Iron closes the Stone Age, though great forests of timber close the mega- lithic age earlier. (13) In Indonesia there was no copper or bronze age ; the entrance of iron into it about the beginning of our era indicates that the last expedition into Polynesia had gone through before this. CHAPTER VI The North Pacific and the Polynesians . .47 ( Paragraph i ) Migrations usually keep up a sentiment that looks to the original home. (2) In early times this tended to idealise it into a paradise. (3) The route the spirit is supposed to take after death often indicates the direction in which this lies. (4) In all Polynesia, except Hawaii and New Zealand, the spirits go west ; in these two they go north-west. (5) In them, \vith their large areas and mountain forests, the aboriginals would survive, and certain of their — SUMMARY OF CONTENTS xi beliefs would be adopted into the households of the new- comers from South Asia with the women, who have to do there with the dead. (6) Some of these aboriginals there- fore must have come from the north. ( 7 ) Cultivated though the Japanese are, they have customs that show some affinity with the Polynesians, especially the eastern Poly- nesians, probably through absorption of some aboriginal pre-Aino element, (8) and in Japan this must have been ; for the Ainos, though they have striking ethnological resemblances to the Maoris, that show some common racial element, differ largely from them.