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Pre-Māori settlement of New Zealand theories


Since the 18th century, Europeans have been interested in the origins of human migration and the settlement of New Zealand. Captain James Cook, who arrived in 1769, believed that the Māori were Polynesian and had come from southeast Asia; however, some other early visitors speculated that they might be descended from ancient Greeks, Romans or Egyptians, and some Christian missionaries thought that the Māori ancestors belonged to the lost tribes of Israel.

During the 19th century, ideas about Aryan (or Caucasian) migrations became popular and these were applied to New Zealand. Edward Tregear's The Aryan Maori (1885) suggested that Aryans from India migrated to the southeast Asia and then to the islands of the Pacific, including New Zealand.

In the early 20th century, the Moriori people were thought to be possibly of Melanesian rather than Polynesian origin, but they are now regarded as descended from early Maori of the Archaic or Moa-hunter period.

Although modern archaeology has largely clarified questions of the origin and dates of the earliest migrations, some writers have continued to speculate that what is now New Zealand was discovered by 'Celts', Greeks or Egyptians, before the arrival of the Polynesian ancestors of the Māori.

Maori oral traditions speak of people already living in parts of New Zealand when they arrived. They are known by various names, but most commonly as Patupaiarehe and Turehu.

Martin Doutré argued in a 1999 book that New Zealand had a pre-Polynesian Celtic population, and that boulders with petroglyphs on a hill in Silverdale in Auckland are artifacts left by those people. An earlier presentation of the theory of pre-Polynesian white settlement of New Zealand was Kerry Bolton's 1987 pamphlet Lords of the Soil, which states that "Polynesia has been occupied by peoples of the Europoid race since ancient times".


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