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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

There must have been a more or less Incontinuous — Land-bridge from the Coast of Asia

There must have been a more or less Incontinuous
Land-bridge from the Coast of Asia

(13) Whence, then, could have come the women into it, unless there was at one time a fairly continuous land-bridge for them to cross from the continent? That could not have been in recent times. But the household culture of the region, being early palaeolithic, gives a hundred thousand years or more, and that should be sufficient to allow of very great changes in the distribution of the land in an area that is subject to comparatively violent and rapid upheavals and subsidences. Now, there is no area on the face of the earth so marked in this way as the western belt of the Pacific. There islands are reported as appearing and disappearing almost every year, their life-history sometimes running only a few months. But in this area there are zones of elevation and zones of subsidence. One of the latter stretches from the Japanese Archipelago south-eastwards through Micronesia and Polynesia, the peaks of its submerged mountains being buoyed by the coral insect. Down along this land-bridge in early palaeolithic times must have flocked a fair-complexioned wavy-haired, long-headed race, or, in other words, a Caucasian page 262race, with their households, only comparatively narrow seas and straits having to be crossed in their frail boats, probably built, like the Chatham Islands canoes and the Peruvian balsas, of reeds and other buoyant materials, with the water washing through them.

(14) This migration could not have taken place without some pressure from behind. In those early ages it could not well have been human compulsion so far north as this, for the waste and uninviting spaces of the world could not have been filled any more than they are now. The only conceivable pressure was that which in primeval times shepherded man northwards and southwards, and produced the highly migratory and adventurous division of mankind, the Caucasian race; and this was change of climate, the shifting of the boundary of the sub-Arctic zone farther south. So far north as the abutment of this broken land-bridge on the Asiatic continent, the ice-plough must have obliterated all temperate and subtropical vegetation and driven animals and their hunters, men, onwards to the south to find subsistence. And this will partly explain the comparative absence of affinity between the Asiatic plant-world and the Polynesian. The submersion of the piers of the land-bridge and the change from a volcanic or alluvial soil to a coralline were doubtless causes that worked in the same direction.

(15) When the ice-sheet began to recede, then sank slowly the bridge, pier after pier, till all ingress into the region became impossible without stout ocean-going canoes. And in Polynesia thereafter lived this Robinson Crusoe of a race, "cribb'd, cabin'd, and confined" within their islets, keeping alive their early palaeolithic culture for tens of thousands of years, uninfluenced by what happened in the rest of the world, unforced by alien pressure or competition, unaided by the new arts other people might be driven in the struggle for existence to find out. Not since there were formed the page 263three great divisions of mankind has there been such long and complete isolation, unless we count that of Australia.