Playing Chinese card
It was a journey, all in, of 5000 or 6000 years, and the sailors who eventually arrived here looked nothing like the ones who set off many thousands of years before.
As Auckland University anthropology professor Geoff Irwin points out: "They changed and adapted as they came. So they weren't Polynesians until they were in Polynesia a while and then they came down here and adapted to this place and adapted it to them."

The China connection, he says, "is very shadowy and vague and a long time ago, and there was nobody looking like Winston living in south China 5000 years ago".

 

Peters a politician to the end, but Chinese at the start?
He also cites a book by archaeologist Nigel Prickett, Maori Origins: From Asia to Aotearoa, published last year, which says 5000 years ago Austronesian speaking ancestors of Polynesian and other Pacific peoples moved from Taiwan and South China into Southeast Asia.

 

Young Nicks row grows
The number of protesters occupying Young Nicks Head continues to grow with the arrival of a further 40 people yesterday.
The land is the site of a 600-year-old Maori settlement and contains 15 archaeological sites.
It is also the first land sighted by Captain James Cook in 1769.

Monday, July 15, 2002