ANCIENT PACIFIC PEOPLES.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3379, 20 June 1927, Page 2

ANCIENT PACIFIC PEOPLES.

It has been said that botanical indications suggest that anciently there was human intercourse across the Pacific—that in far-past days many humanly developed plants went from America to South-East Asia. Recently Professor Eliott Smith has provided further testimony with various correspondence between the two areas, likenesses which strongly suggest olden intercourse. Copper axes similar to those found in Cambodia, Burma, Malaysia, and Southern China, hae been discovered in Peru. Such things os tweezers, barbless fishhooks, needles, hoe blades, and other implements are significantly similar in both areas, and the method of making these implements was the same in America and South-East Asia. There are other relationships. One of the sights of Tonga is the Haamunga, a square stone arch about 25ft high, consisting of three massive stones, two upright and the other laid horizontally across their tops. There is no memory of its erection or its use in Tonga, but its” counterparts may be seen all over Japan. These torn, as they are called, are usually found in the vicinity of temples or shrines, though others are apart from any sacred place. The rude doorway, it is clear, is of itself a religious symbol, need ing no background of temple or altar. There is much in America that suggests old Egypt. For instance, the T-shaped axes of Peru are exactly similar to Egyptian axes. It has been said that more than 300 words of Maori are pure Egyptian. Then Japanese legends claim that their land’s first colonists and the gifts of civilisation, came to them from a now sunken Pacific land that they called Mauri-gashiwa. A hundred people, the Hovna, went across the Indian Ocean to an island off the coast of Africa. The name they gave this new land (Madagascar) is clearly a mutilation of the legendary homeland of the Japanese. And Hova and Java and the first portion of Hawaiki are mere variants of the one placename beloved of the race. There are many pieces to the puzzle; some day they will be placed aright.