The article published in 1910 that was shared in a recent post mentioned moa bones in middens that were discovered in New Zealand in the mid to late 1800s. These were attributed to a pre-Maori people. Nowadays such notions are frowned upon, having been effectively silenced by the Maori people. Let's look into this and other information about an "original" ancient population living in New Zealand. People who arrived there long before the 1600s, when the Polynesian Maori people reached these islands.
Julius von Haast in his Geology of the Provinces of Canterbury and Westland, New Zealand A Report Comprising the Results of Official Explorations, published in 1879, mentions these original people which he calls "Moa Hunters". Below is a quote starting on page 424 of his book, I highlighted some parts of the text by underlining them.
"Considering the Moa hunters from an anthropological point of view it is of the utmost difficulty at least for the present to state with any degree of exactness if they belonged to a race different to the Polynesians who according to the traditions of the natives now inhabiting these islands immigrated to New Zealand some six hundred years ago in a number of canoes from Hawaiki or if the mixed character exhibited in the Maoris has been imported with them this having been caused by intermixture with Melanesians and Negritos on their advance towards New Zealand.
It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to bring all the evidence forward which has been adduced from both sides to prove the one or the other some of the principal traditions are however here given The late Rev Richard Taylor states in the second edition of Te Ika a Maui from what he considers reliable traditions that the Hawaiki immigrants not only found when they landed on the coast of New Zealand a black Melanesian population but they also discovered kitchen middens with Moa bones and flint implements.
If these traditions can be relied upon it shows at any rate that the black race before the arrival of their successors had been hunting and probably extirpating the Moa. So, when relating the tradition of Manaia Taylor quotes from Sir George Grey: "-When he arrived at Rotuhu at the mouth of the River Waitara, he stopped there and behold there were people even the ancient inhabitants of the islands but Manaia and his followers slew them. They were killed and Manaia possessed their abode, he, his sons, and his people of those men that Manaia and his followers slew, that the place might be theirs."
According to Taylor the same is recorded of Turi who "went on shore and dwelt at Patea and slew the inhabitants thereof" (page 14). This aboriginal race was remembered as the Maero and Mohoao or wild men of the woods (page 15). Enumerating on page 290 the arrival of the original canoes in New Zealand he adds a footnote to No 12: Te Rangi ua mutu which came to Rangatapu: "On the arrival at that place they saw stones like English flints and Moa bones. It is there that I also discovered a large quantity of the bones of the Dinornis. The stones were the stone flakes used as knives which are still there found by the side of the ancient ovens a proof of their having belonged to a more ancient race than the Polynesian"
The Rev W Colenso FLS in his excellent essay 'On the Maori races of New Zealand' Vol I, Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, on page 394 answers the question, Were there autochthones? -as follows. "Possibly or rather very likely- (a) From the fact that no large island like New Zealand however distant from the nearest land is uninhabited. (b) From the fact that nearly all the numerous islands in the Pacific though vastly smaller in size teem with population. (c) From the fact of a remnant at present existing in the Chatham Islands the nearest land to New Zealand of a race which is allowed by the present New Zealander to be truly aboriginal and before them in occupation. (d) From their traditions and fear of wild men in the interior. (e) From the allusions and even direct statements in their traditionary myths of their having found inhabitants on their arrival in the country both at Waitara on the west coast of the North Island and at Rotorua in the interior. But if there were which appears very probable they have been destroyed or become amalgamated with the present race".
So far for the Northern Island. The traditions of the South Island according to the valuable researches of the Rev James W Stack, published in Vol X of the "Transactions of the New Zealand Institute" are not so distinct. but it is nevertheless evident that before the Waitaha went to dwell in this Island other tribes of people had been in existence. Mr Stack calls the traditions concerning the first fabulous and the second uncertain. He states that the Kahui Tipua or ogre band, a mythical race, are said to have been the first occupants of this land, they are described as giants and sorcerers They were succeeded by Te Rapuwai or Nga ai tanga a te Puhirire, who have left traces of their occupation in the shell heaps, found both along the coast and far inland. Then follows Waitaha one of the original immigrants from Hawaiki, the founder of the tribe who came in the canoe Arawa; he or his immediate descendants peopled the South Island. they are consequently the first inhabitants claiming to have been immigrants from Hawaiki...
To sum up the evidence as to the presence and mode of life of quaternary man in this part of New Zealand the following points may fairly be considered to have been so far proved:-
1. There existed in quaternary times an autochthone race in New Zealand having like the present inhabitants more or less strong affinities with the Melanesian type.
2. This race hunted and exterminated the Moa including in this native word all the different species of the Dinornithiae.
3. Banks Peninsula was at that time either an island or if already a Peninsula the driftsands now fringing the sea shores north of the Peninsula were in some localities several miles narrower than they are at present.
4. The quaternary population did not possess a domesticated dog.
5. A species of feral dog was contemporaneous with the Moa hunters and was killed and eaten by them. No gnawed bones of any kind were ever found in the kitchen middens.
6. The total absence of any bones of Ocydromus Australis Weka in the kitchen middens is very striking.
7. The Moa hunters used both polished and chipped stone implements.
8. They cooked their food in the same manner as the Maoris of the present day do.
9. They were not cannibals.
10. They did not possess implements of greenstone Nephrite.
11. There are some native traditions although of a mythical character that one or several races inhabited this island before the arrival of the first immigrants from Hawaiki if such an immigration is admitted
12. A considerable period of time elapsed as evidenced by an examination of the deposits in the Moa bone Point Cave and in some other localities before the shellfish eating population appeared on the scene.
13. The kitchen middens of the Shellfish eaters following a line nearly parallel to the present coast line are also ascribed to have been formed by a somewhat mythical people."
Genetics and the Maori People. Y-Chromosome, the male lineages
A paper published in 2006 (Manfred Kayser, et al., Melanesian and Asian Origins of Polynesians: mtDNA and Y Chromosome Gradients Across the Pacific, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 23, Issue 11, November 2006, Pages 2234–2244, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msl093) suggests an early Melanesian presence in Polynesia:
"The fact that there is extensive sharing of Asian haplotypes, but not Melanesian haplotypes, between Polynesians and Melanesians today, therefore, could indicate that Melanesian haplotypes were present earlier in Polynesia (perhaps in Fiji), leading to greater divergence between Polynesians and Melanesians for haplogroups of Melanesian origin than for haplogroups of Asian origin".
The typical Y-chromosome haplogroup found in Melanesians and also in Polyesians at high frequencies is C2a-M208, formerly known as C2b (Source).
An article published in 2022 (Tätte K, et al., Genetic characterization of populations in the Marquesas Archipelago in the context of the Austronesian expansion. Sci Rep. 2022 Mar 29;12(1):5312. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-08910-w. PMID: 35351918; PMCID: PMC8964752.) confirms this genetic marker found in Polynesian men, as Melanesian:
"The most abundant Y chromosomal haplogroup in the Marquesas Islands of Nuku Hiva, Hiva Oa and Tahuata is C2a-M208 (37.9%) of Melanesian origin ... considering that C2a-M208 is the most abundant Y-chromosome haplogroup in West and East Polynesian, we performed a Median Network analysis ... In addition age estimations were generated. The Median Network exhibits a star-like topology made up of one central and two secondary major nodes from which individuals from different populations radiate-out in multiple lineages to generate the network ... No intra- or inter-population substructure is seen with the exception of the Maoris in which most of its individuals segregate distinctly into one specific sequential lineage ... The age estimations of the C2a-M208 lineage for the populations in the Network analysis provide equivalent values except for the Maoris of New Zealand, which exhibit values approximately twice or more than the other groups (Supplementary Table 22). The age of C2a-M208 based on Y-STR variability data for the Maori is incompatible with the radiocarbon dating of archaeological sites, which indicate that Polynesians settled New Zealand by about 740 ya. Data indicating rapid spread of populations over 12,000 km of coastline and high diversity in the mtDNA of first generation settlers suggest that New Zealand was the target of a planned mass migration out of East Polynesia during the first decades of the fourteenth century. It is likely that such colonization by large number of individuals may have carry high levels of genetic variability within the Y-chromosomes reflected in the high diversity levels of C2a-M208 chromosomes in the Maori population relative to the other Polynesian and Polynesian outlier groups examined."
The final paragraph tries to explain the highly diverse and old age of the Melanesian haplogroup found in Maoris by suggesting a massive migration with many people (to overcome a founder-effect and bottleneck in the population). A simple explanation is that they met an ancient, diverse population of Melanesian original people. The older age of the New Zealand C2a-M208 confirms the presence of an original population there.
There is additional support for an early Melanesian presence, suggested by a paper published in 2006 (Kayser, M., Stoneking, M., et al. (2006). Melanesian and asian origins of Polynesians: mtDNA and Y chromosome gradients across the Pacific. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 23(11), 2234-2244. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msl093). Below is the relevant information:
"However, no haplotype sharing between geographic regions was observed for haplogroups C-M208 and M-M4, which are of Melanesian origin, and only one haplotype (2%) was shared between one Fijian and one Melanesian for K-M9, suggesting a more ancient spread of those NRY haplogroups from Melanesia to Polynesia."
mtDNA, the maternal lineages
A similar discrepancy was reported by a paper published in Nature this year, but instead of studying male markers, it focused on the matrilineal mtDNA markers (Almeida, M., Gandini, F., Rito, T. et al. Leveraging known Pacific colonisation times to test models for the ancestry of Southeast Asians. Sci Rep 15, 37044 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-20856-3), the authors noticed two sets of data where the appearance of the "Polynesian Motif" is older than expected, for New Zealand the age was calculated at 2,060 years BP, while archaeological sites are not older than 675-700 years (See Table 2 in the paper).
"The two sets of exceptions are in Near Oceania, prior to the Lapita expansion, where the emergence of the motif predates the emergence of Lapita, and Niue, Tuvalu and Aotearoa/New Zealand...
In the case of Aotearoa (New Zealand), the situation is different, as these islands have one of the best-defined chronologies for settlement in Oceania. We suggest two possible explanations for the discrepancy in this case. One is that we lack data from what may have been important stepping-stones between the available genetic source populations and Aotearoa, such as the Kermadec Islands, which could have been a direct source, although archaeological or oral historical information suggests settlement from Central East Polynesia (Cook Islands, Society Islands). There are no genetic data available within a radius of up to 2,000 km around New Zealand. Some diversity might have emerged in an intermediate source, some source diversity might have been lost due to partial resettlement, and specific haplotypes might have increased in frequency due to founder effects when moving south into Aotearoa. Another strong possibility is that the data might contain some sequencing or transcription artefacts (i.e., artificially induced “mutations” introduced by error) that have raised the founder estimate. For example, the rare non-synonymous mutation 6261 A appears twice independently in two different subclades of the Aotearoa dataset of only 22 samples."
When facts are explained away suggesting they are artifacts due to error, or insufficient data, then there is something weird in the theory. The other discrepancy, Niue (2,400 km - 1,500 mi. north of NZ) also has older dates than expected.
Kayser, M., Stoneking, M., et al. (2006) mentioned further up (Melanesian and asian origins of Polynesians: mtDNA and Y chromosome gradients across the Pacific) also noticed an ancient mtDNA of Melanesian origin among Polynesians:
"With respect to mtDNA haplogroups, there is again sharing of haplotypes between Polynesians and Melanesians for Asian haplogroups B4a and PM, whereas there is no sharing of haplotypes between Polynesians and Melanesians for the Melanesian haplogroup M28, suggesting a more recent spread of mtDNAs from Asia into Polynesia and a more ancient spread of mtDNAs from Melanesia into Polynesia."
Closing Comments
Kayser, M., Stoneking, M., et al. (2006) summarize these differences clearly and explain these apparent "discrepancies":
"If Polynesian ancestors did migrate to coastal/island Melanesia from Asia, mixed with coastal/island Melanesians (thereby obtaining Melanesian Y chromosomes and mtDNA types and leaving behind "Asian" Y chromosomes and mtDNA types), and then left Melanesia and colonized Polynesia, then the degree of haplotype sharing should be the same for haplogroups of Asian versus Melanesian origin because there was a single "separation" of an ancestral group of Polynesians from ancestral Melanesians. The fact that there is extensive sharing of Asian haplotypes, but not Melanesian haplotypes, between Polynesians and Melanesians today, therefore, could indicate that Melanesian haplotypes were present earlier in Polynesia (perhaps in Fiji)"
It seems pretty clear that Melanesians reached the islands of New Zealand long before the ancestors of the Polynesian Maoris. When they arrived will remain a mystery until serious research is conducted on the field, looking for remains older than the 17th century. It is exciting to imagine Melanesians reaching NZ on boats 10,000 years ago. They could have also headed east, spreading into the vacant islands of the Pacific, and who knows, continued on to South America.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025by Austin Whittall ©
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