Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Māori settlement of New Zealand represents an end-point of a long chain of island-hopping voyages in the South Pacific.. Evidence from genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and physical anthropology indicates that the ancestry of Polynesian people stretches all the way back to indigenous peoples of Taiwan.
The pacifist Moriori in the Chatham Islands similarly suffered massacre and subjugation in an invasion by some Taranaki iwi. [72] At the same time, the Māori suffered high mortality rates from Eurasian infectious diseases, such as influenza , smallpox and measles , which killed an estimated 10 to 50 per cent of Māori.
Map of Sunda and Sahul, showing the lowest sea level that occurred when island southeast Asia was first settled by modern humans. Island Southeast Asia was settled by modern humans in the Paleolithic following coastal migration routes, presumably starting before 70,000 BP from Africa, long before the development of Austronesian cultures.
Polynesians are an ethnolinguistic group comprising closely related ethnic groups native to Polynesia, which encompasses the islands within the Polynesian Triangle in the Pacific Ocean. They trace their early prehistoric origins to Island Southeast Asia and are part of the larger Austronesian ethnolinguistic group, with an Urheimat in Taiwan.
The Polynesian triangle. Between about 3000 and 1000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages spread through the islands of Southeast Asia – most likely starting out from Taiwan, [9] as tribes whose natives were thought to have previously arrived from mainland South China about 8000 years ago – into the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia, through the Philippines and Indonesia.
This suggests heavy sea traffic took place between these islands and Taiwan at this time. [78] From around 5000 to 1500 BC, Taiwanese indigenous peoples started a seaborne migration to the island of Luzon in the Philippines, intermingling with the older Negrito populations of the islands. This was the beginning of the Austronesian expansion.
The island of Taiwan was formed approximately 4 to 5 million years ago on a complex convergent boundary between the continental Eurasian Plate and the oceanic Philippine Sea Plate. The boundary continues southwards in the Luzon Volcanic Arc, a chain of islands between Taiwan and the Philippine island of Luzon including Green Island and Orchid ...
Due to New Zealand's geographic isolation, several centuries passed before the next phase of settlement, that of Europeans. Only then did the original inhabitants need to distinguish themselves from the new arrivals, using the adjective "māori" which means "ordinary" or "indigenous" which later became a noun although the term New Zealand native was common until about 1890.