In our current woke world, where we are all so careful about using certain words to avoid hurting sensibilities, trying to be correct about issues of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, etc., it is refreshing to be able to read something written one hundred and fifteen years ago, which with frankness and the crudeness of that era describes facts and knowledge, without worrying about being politically correct or the censorship of cancel culture.
I am sharing a link to an interesting article written back in 1910, and highlighting its comments about the peopling of Polynesia.
Source: W. D. Alexander, (1910). The Origin of the Polynesian Race. The Journal of Race Development, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Oct., 1910), pp. 221-230. https://doi.org/10.2307/29737859. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29737859
Below is the full quote from Alexander:
"Antiquity of Man in Polynesia.
Many considerations combine to prove the great antiquity of man in Polynesia. Prof. Macmillan Browne has ably presented the evidences of this, as seen on the one hand in ancient traditions and relics, and on the other hand in the New Zealand traditions mention a number of aboriginal tribes. In a similar way the Hawaiian had numerous legends about the "Menehunes," described as a race of industrious and skillful dwarfs, who were said to have built the great fishpond walls and to have dug extensive irrigation ditches.
In the South Island of New Zealand there are vast shell mounds containing bones of the extinct Moa birds, and ancient Maori ovens and stone implements have been found fourteen feet below the present surface of the ground, under an ancient forest. In an article entitled "First Wells of Honolulu," by James Hunnewell, in Hawaiian Club Papers, p. 31, it is stated that the first wells in Honolulu were dug in 1822. "They passed through eight or ten feet of surface soil and volcanic sand, when a coral bed eight feet in thickness was met with and cut through, under which fresh water was reached. In this coral stratum a human skull and sundry human bones were found imbedded." In 1858, in dredging the harbor of Honolulu, near the Esplanade, in about twenty feet of water, it was found that underneath the mud and sand there was a stratum of hard coral rock about two feet in thickness, beneath which there was a thick layer of black volcanic sand. Embedded in this black sand were found the lower part of an ancient spear, about three feet long, and a slingstone of a red, close-grained lava, such as is not found anywhere in that vicinity. In 1859, as Fornander relates, "Mr. R. W. Meyer, of Kalae, Molokai, found in the side of a canyon on his estate, some seventy feet below the surface of the upper level plain, in a stratum of volcanic mud, breccia, clay and ashes, several feet in thickness, a human skull, compactly filled by the volcanic deposit surrounding it, as if it had been cast in a mould. As that stratum spreads over a considerable tract of land, at varying depths below the surface, andas the ravines and canyons which now intersect it were formed by erosion, the great age of that human skull may be reasonably inferred."
There are other indications of antiquity in the extremely primitive stage of Polynesian culture. The race was still in the Stone Age. The total absence of pottery is a significant fact, for, as Prof. Macmillan Browne observes : "All around the Pacific, on both the Asiatic and American coast, pottery has been made from time immemorial, and so it is in all the island world from the Malay peninsula south-east to the New Hebrides and Fiji." "The absence of pottery and of the use of the bow in war makes it certain that the pre-existence of a Melanesian and Papuan substratum of population in that region, assumed by some writers, is a fiction." In the art of making fire, as has already been stated, the Polynesians and Melanesians stand alone. With the exception of the Easter Islanders, the Polynesians did not possess even the most rudimentary forms of writing.
The above considerations would exclude the idea of any intercourse with the East Indian Archipelago within historical times. At the same time there is no sufficient evidence of a pre-existing race in Polynesia proper."
The text mentions "ancient" skulls and remains in Hawaii, and the Menehune. In New Zealand it reports "Maori" tools in shell middens which could belong to the aboriginal tribes encountered by the Maori in New Zealand (More on these aboriginal New Zealand people in our next post). It also points out that the Polynesians, unlike the Melanesians did not make pottery and did not use bow and arrow. So it questions a Melanesian origin. It also says there is not enough evidencer to support an aboriginal pre-Polynesian race in the islands of Polynesia.
But, an original wave of Melanesians into Polynesia would have abandoned the use of bow and arrow because they, like the later Polynesian migrants would have adopted fishing as a food resource using nets, hooks, and spears for that purpose. Furthermore, wood suitable for making bows and arrows would be hard to come across in the islands of Polynesia. Regarding ceramics, clay is the key raw material, abundant on large islands like New Guinea or New Zealand, it isn't found in volcanic atolls, where basalt, lava, and coral are the main components of soil.
The Melanesian presence in Polynesia before its current inhabitants isn't only something from 115 years ago, 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) says the following (underlined is mine):
"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. However, there are large gaps in the sampling of coastal/island Melanesians, which would need to be filled in before one could be certain that there is truly a difference in patterns of haplotype sharing between Polynesians and Melanesians for haplogroups of Asian versus Melanesian origin... The striking difference observed here between Asian and Melanesian contributions to the paternal and maternal gene pool of Polynesians suggests an admixture bias toward more Melanesian men, perhaps as result of uxorilocal (matrilocal) residence and matrilineal descent in ancestral Polynesian society."
Why more Melanesian Y-chromosomes than Asian, and the opposite for mtDNA? The explanation given above seems weird. There was admixture in the islands, the Polynesians with Asian genes arrived and met Melanesians who prevailed and took Polynesian women (with Asian mtDNA) as their wives resulting in the current Polynesian admixture.
Our next post will look into the aboriginals of New Zealand, a pre-Polynesian people there, and some odd findings in the field of Maori genetics.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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