Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

There is a southern megalithic track; but it was by — the northern that the megalithic people entered — polynesia

There is a southern megalithic track; but it was by
the northern that the megalithic people entered
polynesia

(10) But there is also a megalithic track through Southern Europe and Asia. The great stones are scattered sparsely along the countries on the northern shore of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, through Syria, Armenia and Irania, along the Persian Gulf, through Northern India, over the Khasi and Naga Hills into Burmah, thence along the Malay Peninsula into Sumatra and Java. And that island is its terminus. For, eastwards to Ponape, in the Carolines, and again across Melanesia and New Guinea to Samoa, there is a tract of from four to five thousand miles without a trace of this great stone record except in Lord North Island, about three hundred miles north-east of Gilolo. We may take it for a fact of prehistoric history that the megalithic people came the northern route from Europe and from the North Pacific into Polynesia.

(11) A, striking thing about the northern megalithic track is that it does not suddenly break off at the first group of islands off shore, as it does in the west. It never crossed the Atlantic. For we find no such stone structures on page 6the Atlantic coast of Americanone, in fact, till we nearly reach the Pacific coast, unless we count the Indian mounds in the shape of animals and the cliff-dwellings as belonging to this type of architecture. The track westward terminates in Ireland. The track eastward crosses the Pacific and reappears after an ocean interval of two thousand four hundred miles in Peru, and in Central America. There it stops, in the peninsula of Yucatan and its offshoot the Anahuac plateau in the north, and at Lake Titicaca far up the Andes, in the south.

(12) If these facts indicate anything, they indicate that a section of mankind in early neolithic times, say from ten to fifteen thousand years ago, migrated northwards from the north of Africa, along the Atlantic coast, and was stopped by the unislanded ocean from going farther west than Ireland, but that eastward it was able to find its way to the Pacific coast, and thence across it by the stepping-stones of Micronesia to the south of Japan, and of Polynesia to the south-east of that route on to the coast of Central and South America.