Wikipedia says: -
Why so late in history? I thought Australasian and Polynesian indigenous peoples were one of the oldest settled groups - why was it only relatively recently that New Zealand became inhabited?
That should be “some”.
Because it’s far from any major landmass and requires some pretty sophistocated navigational technology to get there. Australia is pretty close to Indonesia, and during glacial periods was actually connected (or nearly so). Take a look at a map.
And keep in mind that Polynesians and Australian Aborigines are ethnically quite distinct, so I’m not sure why you would connet those two peoples in the first place.
What’s intersting is that Hawaii was settled before New Zealand. Probably had to do with prevailing currents.
Same (relative) area, so i’d assume if New Zealand had been inhabited earlier, it would have been by one of these two groups (which it was). I’m not connecting them in any way other than to say they’re near.
I was confused by this statement:
Maybe you can elaborate. What does it mean to be one of the oldest “settled groups”?
None of the Polynesian islands was settled anywhere near the time that Australia was first inhabited. The seagoing expeditions of Polynesia are all within the last few thousand years, whereas Australia was first inhabited at least 50,000 years ago.
“Settled groups” was a poor choice of words. I meant more along the lines of “distinct groups”. And I didn’t mean to imply that Polynesian peoples were a distinct group of a similar “age” to Australian aborigines, only that they were around for a considerable time before some of them settled in New Zealand - or at least, that’s what I thought.
The origins of the Polynesian ethnic group is pretty murky. Coming out of Seatheast Asia (possibly even Taiwan!) sometime in the last 10,000 years, they didn’t start colonizing the Polynesian Islands until about 3,000 years ago. During that time, they probably interbred with the Melanesians to some extent. I don’t think we can trace the Polynesians back much further than 10,000 years or so before they just become “Southeast Asians”.
Look at the huge gap between Australia and New Zealand with nothing in between. Although Australia had humans first settling between 50 and 60 thousand years ago, the Polynesians didn’t start island hopping until mere thousands of years ago. I’ve also heard that the native Australians “lost” the technology to make ocean-going vessles, but then I’ve heard the Torres Straight Islanders actively traded between New Guinea and Australia.
If you look to the north of New Zealand, there are other small islands, so it’s my educated guess that that’s the direction the ancestors of the Maori came from.
Not really lost, more a case of simply never invented. It’s pretty unlikley that the first people to arrive in Australia had ocean going craft.
Kind of. Nobody actually traded between the mainland of the two main islands. Instead there was a process of island hopping that allowed a continuous trade route. As a result no ocean going craft were required.
Below I give the entry in Ethnologue on the Austronesian language family. Polynesian is only a tiny subbranch of that family. (You’re probably wondering where it is in that big table. Go down to Malayo-Polynesian, then to Central-Eastern, then to Central-Eastern Polynesian, then to Eastern Malayo-Polynesian, then to Oceanic. Click on Oceanic and go to that page. Go down to Central-Eastern Oceanic, then to Remote Oceanic, then to East Fijian-Polynesian. Click on East Fijian-Polynesian. Go down to Polynesian, then to Nuclear, then to East, then to Central. Click on Central. Go down to Tahitic and Maori is under that.) The spread of these languages is a reasonably good guide to the spread of these people.
The Austronesian family apparently originated on Taiwan sometime in the last 10,000 years. The Polynesians didn’t even start to settle the area of the Pacific where they live (including New Zealand) until less than 3,000 years ago. Because so many of the Austronesian languages are still around and because they settled over such a wide region, we know the tree structure of this language very well.
On the other hand, the Australian aborigines settled in Australia more than 40,000 years ago. The Australian aborigines and the Polynesians (including the Maori) are not remotely closely related genetically or linguistically. (My apologies if you didn’t mean to say that. I notice that in the OP you say, “Australasian and Polynesian.” You don’t actually mention the aborigines there. “Australasian” describes a geographic area, not a linguistic or an ethnic group.)
Fringe linguists have tentatively suggested that Tasmanian might be connected to the Indo-Pacific language family.
Indo-Pacific itself is a tentative family proposed by Stanford’s fringe linguist Joseph Greenberg, comprised of languages spoken on the island of New Guinea and other islands in Melanesia and the eastern reaches of Indonesia.
Many languages of New Guinea, spoken around the coastal areas, belong to the Austronesian language family, which also includes Malay, Polynesian, Taiwanese aboriginal language, Melanesian, Malagasy, etc.
The other New Guinea languages, spoken more in the interior, are classified as “Papuan.” Greenberg’s contribution was first to classify all the non-Austronesian languages of New Guinea into a group named Papuan, then connecting Papuan with related Indonesian and Melanesian languages into a large family he called Indo-Pacific.
IIRC, he wasn’t sure about including Tasmanian, but penciled it in. I don’t know if he ever figured it out for sure before he died.
Sorry, I misstated that. Indonesian and Melanesian are the names of two branches of Austronesian, a completely different family. I should have said “non-Austronesian languages spoken in eastern Indonesia (like Halmahera) and some islands of Melanesia (like New Britain)” went into Indo-Pacific.
Australian Aboriginal languages have been classified into two main branches: 1) Pama-Nyungan (spoken in a relatively small area of the north) 2) Everything else. The northern central area that includes Pama-Nyungan has lots of language differentiation in a relatively small area. The rest of Australia has relatively few languages in a big area. In historical linguistics, this geographical pattern indicates the area of the family’s origin. People stayed there longest and languages had the most time to differentiate. Then later they spread far and wide in a relatively short time, with less differentiation.
Similar expansion patterns can be seen in the dialects of English. Great Britain has how many English dialects? A lot. Compare with the hugeness of the USA, which has only 3 or 4 basic dialects.
Or the Niger-Congo family which originated in West Africa: all of its many branches are packed into a portion of West Africa. However, just one subdivision of the family called Bantu has spread all through Central Africa, most of East Africa, and clear down to the Cape of Good Hope. The migrations of Bantu-speaking peoples are one of the major themes of African history and happened relatively recently (i.e. in the past 2000 years).
Johanna writes:
> In historical linguistics, this geographical pattern indicates the area of the
> family’s origin. People stayed there longest and languages had the most time to
> differentiate. Then later they spread far and wide in a relatively short time, with
> less differentiation.
This idea is usually called the “age and area hypothesis,” incidentally. Look for the place with the most differentiation of something in the least area and that’s most likely to be the origin of that thing. It can be applied to the spread of cultural and biological things too.
Some general information as to what is both known and theorised regarding the Polynesian migrations to New Zealand can be found at Te Ara. It isn’t so much distance, but the difficulties presented by the oceanic currents in our vicinity, coupled with shifting climactic conditions during the period of the main era of Pacific exploration by the Polynesian descendants of the Lapita people.
This is to correct an error in my post above: Pama-Nyungan languages are the branch that takes up most of Australia. The Non-Pama-Nyungan languages are the more differentiated group in the Northern Territory and the northern end of Western Australia. (That’s what you call a figure-ground reversal). Pama-Nyungan is like the Bantu of Australia, being just one subdivision that took up most of the space. The Australian languages have been classified into 15 subgroups. Fourteen of those are crammed into the much smaller area in the north. The linguistic map alone shows that human habitation of Australia began in the North (well, obviously, the only routes by which early humans could have reached Australia were in the north). This is one of the starkest examples I know of the age and area hypothesis that Wendell explained.
Isn’t there a law of economics that shows how one competitor–like Indo-European, Bantu, or Pama-Nyungan–out of many can overwhelm all the others given a small early advantage? I see this happen in Civilization sometimes when one AI civ totally wipes out another before I even get a look at their continent. You can tell what happened when say the Mongol realm has cities like Tenochtitlán or Trondheim.
I think the term ‘tipping point’ might be apt, if not precisely what you’re looking for. It refers to the point where the inertia behind a movement or change or company is great enough things snowball instead of fizzle, as when a chair is tipped backwards just far enough it falls over instead of going back onto its legs. (Or, I suppose, just staying there on two legs.)