A Maori chief as seen by James Cook and his crew during his first Pacific voyage in 1769
When Abel Tasman arrived in New Zealand in 1642 he found the land inhabited… but the people that were here, the Maori, were not aboriginal; they had traveled here and settled.
So where had they come from?
The answer to that question troubled historians for a long time, but the convergence of oral traditions, Archaeology and most recently DNA analysis has removed doubt.
The Maori are descendants of migrants from Eastern Polynesia. But the islands in that remote region of the pacific are small and widespread, and humanity hadn’t independently evolved on each of them… they too had been settled by immigrants. So where had those Eastern Polynesian people come from?
We need to look further back into ...