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How Early Palaeolithic Culture entered is the
Fundamental Problem

(11) And this touches the most serious problem of all that confronts the observer and investigator in this region of the world. It is this: Why do we here encounter the strangest medley of culture to be found on the face of the earth? In analysing the industries, we saw that alongside arts that almost equal in their advance those of the most civilised of modern times, there are arts and practices that are primeval, and, in fact, palaeolithic. The Maori arts of fortification and siege are absolutely abreast of modern Europe; yet here is a people that is not so advanced as the Australians and Fuegians in fire-making, and not so advanced as the Melanesians and Papuans in the making of vessels out of clay. Their textile art showed great facility in the manipulation of both bark and fibre, and yet they had only the beginnings of a loom; nor had they reached a spindle in making the thread, an exception to all other primitive peoples. Why should this early palaeolithic culture belong to the same people as shows itself so modern in other phases? This is the fundamental problem of Polynesia, and no one can face satisfactorily its other problems who has not solved this.

(12) The solution attempted in this volume is based on an analysis of the culture into the women's and the men's. The palaeolithic elements belong to the household arts; most of the advanced culture belongs to the sphere of the men. Fire-making, spinning, and the art of pottery all belong to the women's department in primitive times. We may therefore infer that there has been unbroken continuity in the Polynesian household since early palaeolithic times, when the artificial production of fire by the rubbing together of two sticks had just been discovered, when there was no spindle page 261and no pottery. Now, the isolation of the region far out in the ocean makes it unique as an abode of man. As long as it was isleted, with vast distances between the islets themselves and between them and the mainland, none but far-voyaging canoes could reach it, and that meant only masculine expeditions, only masculine colonisation. A few hundred miles of sea were sure to daunt primitive woman from venturing her children and her household gods upon so dangerous an element; the thousands of miles between resting-places in Polynesia made such ventures impossible for them.