ORIGIN OF THE MAORIS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15551, 7 March 1914, Page 1 (Supplement)

ORIGIN OF THE MAORIS.

BY A. A. GRACE. The antiquity of the Maori race has long been realised by those who are acquainted with the Maoris and their traditions, but of others it is safe to say that the limit, which they place to the age of the Maori race is from 700 to 1000 years. But what are the facis? In the first place the Maori, when he was seen by such navigators as Cook and D'UrviLle, was living as did men of the neolithic age. He had no knewledge of metals. He knew nothing even of pottery. He had no knowledge of the bow. He did not understand the use of the wheel. He made fire in the most primitive of primitive ways. Evidently he had been separated from the rest of the human race for a very great while, unless his primitive state was to be accounted for by the fact that his progenitors had come into being spontaneously, after communication between Polynesia and the rest of the world had ceased. The theory of spontaneous genesis is quickly exploded by a study of Maori cosmogony and theogony, particularly by the similarity which exists between the Maori ideas of the creation of the world and of the origin of his gods and those of the civilised Aryan peoples living three and four thousand years ago. Furthermore we have fairly good evidence in New Zealand itself that the country was not always completely isolated, and of course we have the Maori traditions of the many immigrations which brought their ancestors here from the mythical Hawaiki. I should like to compare the Maori story of Rangi and Papa with the account in Genesis i., 6-10, of the separation of Heaven from the Earth. I should like to tell of the Maori version of the War in Heaven; of the Maori account of the Deluge; but I must pass on to the subject with which I more particularly wish to deal, namely, the origin of the Maoris themselves.

By the Maoris I mean the whole race inhabiting these islands prior to the arrival of the white man, not any section such as the Moriori, or Ngaitahu, or Maori, as the Last immigration is named, for doubtless all sprang from a common origin somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. This original people must have left the continent of Asia at a period ante-dating the bronze age, and even the age when the use of copper was discovered. The flora and fauna of New Zealand seem to point to the fact that the islands have always been islands, at any rate subsequently to the glacial period, which affected, the geologists tell us, both this country and Australia. Professor J. MacMillan Brown has enunciated a most ingenious and credible theory as to the origin of the Polynesian race. He points out that in very early times, before t'-ie use of metals was known to mankind, a people existed in what is now known as Mauritania, or the north-western part of Africa, who, antedating the Egyptians and Greeks, spread along the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast of Europe. These people are distinguished by the fact that they raised the strange megalithic remains which, in the form of cromlechs, abound on the shores of the Mediterranean, on •-the Atlantic coast of Europe, in Portugal, Brittany, and the British Isles. They are not found in Central Europe, or anywhere away from the coasts of its oceans and seas, except across the steppes of Russia and Asia, where doubtless in bygone ages an arm of the 'sea extended.

The history of this megalithic race is read in the extraordinary monuments of unhewn stone which it raised wherever it

migrated, and its migrations can be traced by means of the menhirs (monoliths), cromlechs, or circles of monoliths, alignments of monoliths, and dolmens, consisting of two or more monoliths covered with a capstone. Wherever these strange monuments exist there, we may be sure this prehistoric, neolithic, or palaeolithic' race lived its primitive life, thousands of years ago. Taking Morocco as its birthplace, it would seem to have spread northwards along the Atlantic coast to the shores of the Bay of Biscay, to Britain, Holland, Germany, Denmark, and the south part of Sweden. All round the shores of the Mediterranean it has left its megalithic remains plentifully. So that it is evident it was of a seafaring nature. In its migrations it voyaged ; it did not travel preferably by land. - No traces of the race are found in Central Europe east of Saxony: the central plains of Russia are devoid of them, but they are to be found in the Crimea and Circassia. In other words, the race spread from its birthplace wherever its craft could penetrate by sea or by rivers. In this way the stone age people, crossing the isthmus of Suez, voyaged along the coasts of Egypt and Arabia, and as far as Madagascar, as again is testified by the megalithic monuments which It has left to prove the extent of its migrations. From the Black Sea a chain of megalithic remains stretches across Central Asia, past Lake Baikal, through Mongolia and Manchuria, where in the valley of the Yalu truncated pyramids fake the place of circles of stones or of single stones, as they do at several points of the megalithic track. The migration of this strange seafaring race across Central Asia to the Pacific Ocean can best be explained, as I have said, by the fact that in those distant ages an inland sea or a series of extensive lakes, stretched froni the Caspian Sea to Lake Baikal, that the Desert of Gobi was possibly under *-ater, and that an arm of the ocean stretched up to Eastem Gobi. But, however they got there, the megalithic race certainly traversed Central Asia from west to east. . From the eastern coast of Asia it passed into Japan, whence the megalithic track stretches to the Bonin Islands thence to the Ladrones, thence to the Caroline Islands. After this the megalithic route across the Pacific is broken somewhat and incontinuous. Not till we get to Samoa do we again find undoubted signs of the race which has left its trail of stone round three parts of the earth. Between the Carolines and Samoa the islands are of coral formation, and lack that permanence which pertains to country of igneous formation, but near Apia may be seen an immense ellipse of giant stohe columns, which form a megalithic group which is no poor rival of the. famous Stonehenge. At Tonga gigantic truncated pyramids and a colossal trililhon composed of three immense stones, testify to the presence of the dolman-builders, and at Kerikeri, in the Bay of Islands, and at Atiamuri' to the north of Taupo, we have types of stone structure which are undoubtedly the work of the race which built all the other megalithic monuments which are to be found along the lines of its migration. The monument at Kerikeri consists of huge blocks of stone standing 6ft to 7ft above the ground, and forming a miniature Stonehenge : and the group at Atiamuri comprises 50 great stones set erect in the earth.

From the main megalithie track which thus ends in New Zealand, a branch stretches from mid-Asia int-o India, and thence into Indonesia, where it is lost; and another track stretches across the Pacific to South America, with Huahine in the Societv Islands, Tahiti, Rapa, Pitcairn, and Easter Island as steppingstones, for in each of them are unmortared stone monuments characteristic of the megalithie race whose wanderings over the earth are thus indelibly recorded..

That this race was the forerunner and parent race of the Maori people there can be little doubt; from these megalithic folk the Maoris got much of their mythology, as did also the Egyptians and Greeks, and other Caucasian peoples. This solution explains the otherwise puzzling problem presented by the existence in the Maori and Greek mythologies of different versions of the same myths such as those of Orpheus and Eurydice, Arion, and the great Apollo myth. ft explains the complexity of types found in the Maori people, and it most undoubtedly increases the interest which we white folk must feel in a people which we are certainly destined to absorb.