Just so you know, that’s an article debunking a bunch of myths about Grinnell College, a small liberal arts college in Iowa.
I’m amazed that the Australian natives even ventured into the ocean with the boats they had. I can’t imagine taking them to islands like they did. The boats were flexable and only floated a few inches above the water.
Were there not two distinctive types of people on New Zealand when the British arrived?
But a zeppelin armed with flamethrowers might blow up in an amusing fashion!
I’m so going to borrow that term for something that’s just totally screwed up by design…
I kind of wonder, though- did any Polynesians ever get to the northern part of Australia in any kind of numbers? If so, why didn’t they settle there?
Here’s a site with an english version of Tasman’s journal. Scroll down about a third of the way to 19 Dec. for his account of the encounter at “Murderers Bay”.
D’oh! :smack:
That is actually a link someone else provided in the “Can cows walk down stairs” thread. One of the drawbacks to tabbed browsing.
Tasman’s journal available here.
Australian natives never ventured into the oceans, being strictly coastal water sailors at best. That might be best demonstrated by the fact that Tasmania was isolated by rising sea levels for over 10, 000 years despite no more than 50 kilometres of open water separating it from the mainland.
Polynesians OTOH were the world’s greatest mariners for over 10, 000 years and made frequent and regular oceanic voyages of exploration and colonisation.
That is true of some Australian boats, primarily in the south. However in the North the technology existed to build more substantial log craft and these were used to reach Islands as much as 30km offshore.
Depends entirely on what you mean by “distinctive types of people”. All the people of NZ and nearby islands spoke dialects of the same language and all were mutually intelligible to one another and to people of Tonga. By linguistic and genetic standards all of NZ was populated by one type of people: Polynesians.
OTOH there were numerous chiefdoms and clans with varying lifestyles. The mainland North Island held the largest chiefdoms and small kingdoms with fortified towns and sedentary agriculture. As the climate became progressively colder agriculture became less viable and towns became smaller. The Chatham Islands and southern tip of the south island were populated by hunter-gatherer groups with no agriculture.
All told the people of NZ were far less distinctive than the peoples Western Europe in terms of language but far more distinctive in terms of lifestyle.
I don’t know whether to be embarassed or flattered. I’ve re-invented the choclate kettle. 
There is scant evidence if they did. The adoption of Polynesian-style shell fishhooks by some people in southern Australia, the use of Maori style battle staves by some people in the NE. A handful of what might be borrowed words. None of the evidence for trans-Tasman contact is very convincing.
One of those enduring mysteries is why nobody settled northern Australia. It’s not just the Polynesians, who may never have found Australia, but Malays and various other groups were perfectly familiar with Australia for millennia, yet none colonised for some reason.
Various explanations have been put forwards, often linked to the unreliable climate in Northern Australia. But quite frankly no explanation is very convincing given the abundance of permanant rivers and the fact that agricultural towns existed in the same climatic zone less than 500 km offshore. I suspect it was a combination of native aggression, poor initial colonisation sites, bad timing and malaria that killed any attempts. Basically just bad luck.
Not sure if its true, but a New Zealander I work with tells me that some rather unscrupulous types were selling folks rowboat trips from Sydney to NZ during the 2000 Olympics. They apparently took quite a few folks who didn’t realize that the distance was roughly the same as going from Philly to Denver.
John, the last I looked into bird taxonomy, which was admittedly quite a while ago, the classification you gave was used by only those “lumpers” who put all the ratites into a single order, and the general consensus was a half dozen or so separate orders, with individual orders for ostriches, rheas, and Malagasy elephant birds, only uniting emus and cassowaries, and kiwis and moas, in the same orders (one for each set). I remain open to being informed that the consensus has reverted to consolidating them again, though.
For what definition of “aborigine”? No one else (including Blake, who is particularly knowledgeable in this field and would correct you if he thought you were wrong, knowing him ;)) seems to take any issue with your statement, so presumably there is an aspect of the definition of “aborigine” that I’m missing.
But I thought “aborigine” basically just means the earliest known inhabitants of a region. If so, why don’t the Moaris qualify?
So who was supposed to do the rowing? Seller? Buyer?
I didn’t object because I think jjimm just screwed up his capitalisation. Jinx asked about Aborigines in NZ. Aborigine with the capital is the term for Australian people, they never lived in NZ. So there are no Aboriginal inhabitants of NZ, but there are arguably aboriginal inhabitants.
This is one of those contentious points, who qualifies as aboriginal. Maori people People have been in New Zealand for less time than Celtic people have been in Ireland, but would anyone realy call Gerry Adams an aboriginal person? How about a French woman from Mauritius? Sure her ancestors only arrived 150 years ago but she is stillin the technical sense an aboriginal of Mauritius. Would you expect to see either of these people at an international conference on aboriginal people? Unlikely, but Gerry Adams at least has more claim to that title than any Maori.
My understanding is that “Aboriginal” refers to the people of a given region who A) Been there pretty much since the word “Go” (even if, like the Australian Aborigines, they arrived from somewhere else before that) and B) Aren’t white.
The Maori showed up fairly late in the proceedings (sometime between 800AD and 1300AD), whilst the Aborigines have been in Australia for something like 35,000 years or so.
Hence, the Maori may have gotten to NZ first, but the British remembered to bring firearms. 
I’m not an Anthropologist, but my understanding is that there’s still a great deal of confusion about where they (the Aborigines) came from originally- apparently they’re not really related to the Indonesians or the Filipinos, but they obviously came from somewhere, in that they didn’t originate on the Australian continent.
No, the capitalisation was deliberate: I was merely choosing my definition of “aboriginal” abitrarily, based on timescale you mentioned. However, I realise this is open to debate.
It’s not so much the distance involved but the ocean currents. Attempting to cross in summer would see you swept down in somewhere into the southern ocean. During winter you would have no chance of crossing without be hit by a storm, even sailing bass straight your practically guaranteed one storm.
No, I wasn’t aware of the lumper/splitter issue on this so I wasn’t meaning to imply that the lumper faction was in vogue. Personally, though, I tend to be a lumper more than a splitter as long as there is a good genetic reason to lump.
Yes, but they are similar to people of New Guinea and Melanesia. My understanding is that most people in Southeast Asia would have looked more like Australian aborigines than Chinese up until several thousand years ago.
Yep, and it wasn’t just one wave of settlers to Australia. There was probably a lot of back and forth migration between there and New Guinea.
Not likely, unless you mean something like 10,000 years ago.