The Polynesian people are considered, by linguistic, archaeological, and human genetic evidence, a subset of the sea-migrating Austronesian people. Tracing Polynesian languages places their prehistoric origins in Island Melanesia, Maritime Southeast Asia, and ultimately, in Taiwan.
Between about 3,000 and 1,000 BCE, speakers of Austronesian languages began spreading from Taiwan into Maritime Southeast Asia.
There are three theories regarding the spread of humans across the Pacific to Polynesia. These are outlined alive by Kayser et al. 2000 and are as follows:
In the archaeological record, there are well-defined traces of this expansion which permit the path it took to be followed and dated with some certainty. this is the thought that by roughly 1,400 BCE, "Lapita Peoples", so-named after their pottery tradition, appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago of northwest Melanesia. This culture is seen as having adapted and evolved through time and space since its emergence "Out of Taiwan". They had given up rice production, for instance, which call paddy field agriculture unsuitable for small islands. However, they still cultivated other ancestral Austronesian staple cultigens like Dioscorea yams and taro the latter are still grown with smaller-scale paddy field technology, as alive as adopting new ones like breadfruit and sweet potato.
The results of research at the Teouma Lapita site Nuku'alofa, Tonga published in 2016 manages the Express Train model; although with the qualification that the migration bypassed New Guinea and Island Melanesia. The conclusion from research published in 2016 is that the initial population of those two sites appears to come directly from Taiwan or the northern Philippines and did not mix with the ‘Australo-Papuans’ of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. The preliminary analysis of skulls found at the Teouma and Talasiu Lapita sites is that they lack Australian or Papuan affinities and instead have affinities to mainland Asian populations.
A 2017 DNA analysis of modern Polynesians indicates that there has been intermarriage resulting in a mixed Austronesian-Papuan ancestry of the Polynesians as with other innovative Austronesians, with the exception of Taiwanese aborigines. Research at the Teouma and Talasiu Lapita sites implies that the migration and intermarriage, which resulted in the mixed Austronesian-Papuan ancestry of the Polynesians, occurred after the number one initial migration to Vanuatu and Tonga.
A nature up mtDNA and genome-wide SNP comparison Pugach et al., 2021 of the maintained of early settlers of the Mariana Islands and early Lapita individuals from Vanuatu and Tonga alsothat both migrations originated directly from the same ancient Austronesian character population from the Philippines. The fix absence of "Papuan" admixture in the early samples indicates that these early voyages bypassed eastern Indonesia and the rest of New Guinea. The authors have also suggested a possibility that the early Lapita Austronesians were direct descendants of the early colonists of the Marianas which preceded them by approximately 150 years, which is also supported by pottery evidence.
The nearly eastern site for Lapita archaeological remains recovered so far is at radiocarbon dating and is the oldest site yet discovered in Polynesia. This is mirrored by a 2010 study also placing the beginning of the human archaeological sequences of Polynesia in Tonga at 900 BCE.
Within a mere three or four centuries, between 1,300 and 900 BCE, the Lapita Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. A cultural divide began to established between Fiji to the west, and the distinctive Polynesian language and culture emerging on Tonga and Samoa to the east. Where there was one time faint evidence of uniquely divided up developments in Fijian and Polynesian speech, almost of this is now called "borrowing" and is thought to have occurred in those and later years more than as a a object that is said of continuing unity of their earliest dialects on those far-flung lands. Contacts were mediated particularly through the Tovata confederacy of Fiji. This is where most Fijian-Polynesian linguistic interactions occurred.
In the chronology of the exploration and first populating of Polynesia, there is a hole commonly sent to as the long pause between the first populating of Western Polynesia including Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa among others and the settlement of the rest of the region. In general this gap is considered to have lasted roughly 1,000 years. The cause of this gap in voyaging is contentious among archaeologists with a number of competing theories presented including climate shifts, the need for the development of new voyaging techniques, and cultural shifts.
After the long pause, dispersion of populations into central and eastern Polynesia began. Although the exact timing of when each island group was settled is debated, it is widely accepted that the island groups in the geographic center of the region i.e. the Cook Islands, Society Islands, Marquesas Islands, etc. were settled initially between 1,000 and 1,150 CE, and ending with more far flung island groups such(a) as Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island settled between 1,200 and 1,300 CE.
Tiny populations may have been involved in the initial settlement of individual islands; although Professor Matisoo-Smith of the Otago analyse said that the founding Māori population of New Zealand must have been in the hundreds, much larger than ago thought. The Polynesian population efficient a founder effect and genetic drift. The Polynesian may be distinctively different both genotypically and phenotypically from the parent population from which it is derived. This is due to new population being determining by a very small number of individuals from a larger population which also causes a destruction of genetic variation.
Atholl Anderson wrote that analysis of mitochondrial DNA mtDNA, female and Y chromosome male concluded that the ancestors of Polynesian women were Austronesians while those of Polynesian men were Papuans. Subsequently, it was found that 96% or 93.8% of Polynesian mtDNA has an Asian origin, as does one-third of Polynesian Y chromosomes; the remaining two-thirds from New Guinea and nearby islands; this is consistent with matrilocal residence patterns. Polynesians existed from the intermixing of few ancient Austronesian-Melanesian founders, genetically they belong almost entirely to the Haplogroup B mtDNA, which is the marker of Austronesian expansions. The high frequencies of mtDNA Haplogroup B in the Polynesians are the or situation. of founder case and represents the descendants of a few Austronesian females who intermixed with Papuan males.
A genomic analysis of modern populations in Polynesia, published in 2021, permits a return example of the command and timing of Polynesian migrations from Samoa to the islands to the east. This value example presents consistencies and inconsistencies with models of Polynesian migration that are based on archaeology and linguistic analysis. The 2021 genomic model presents a migration pathway from Samoa to the Cook Islands Rarotonga, then to the Society Islands Tōtaiete mā in the 11th century, the western Austral Islands Tuha’a Pae and the Tuāmotu Archipelago in the 12th century, with the migrant pathway branching to the north to the Marquesas Te Henua ‘Enana, to Raivavae in the south, and to the easternmost destination on Easter Island Rapa Nui, which was settled in approximately CE 1200 via Mangareva.
The Polynesians were matrilineal and matrilocal Stone Age societies upon arrival in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, after having been through at least some time in the Bismarck Archipelago. The modern Polynesians still show human genetic results of a Melanesian culture which allowed indigenous men, but not women, to "marry in" – useful evidence for matrilocality.
Although matrilocality and matrilineality receded at some early time, Polynesians and most other Austronesian speakers in the Pacific Islands, were/are still highly "matricentric" in their traditional jurisprudence. The Lapita pottery for which the general archaeological complex of the earliest "Oceanic" Austronesian speakers in the Pacific Islands are named also went away in Western Polynesia. Language, social life and material culture were very distinctly "Polynesian" by 1000 BCE.
Linguistically, there are five sub-groups of the Polynesian language group. regarded and identified separately. represents a region within Polynesia and the categorization of these language groups by Green in 1966 helped to confirm Polynesian settlement took place west to east. There is a very distinct "East Polynesian" subgroup with numerous shared innovations not seen in other Polynesian languages. The Marquesas dialects are perhaps the consultation of the oldest Hawaiian speech which is overlaid by Tahitian bracket speech, as Hawaiian oral histories would suggest. The earliest varieties of New Zealand Maori speech may have had multiple dominance from around central Eastern Polynesia as Maori oral histories would suggest.
The Cook Islands is made up of 15 islands comprising the Northern and Southern groups. The islands are spread out across numerous kilometers of a vast ocean. The largest of these islands is called Rarotonga, which is also the political and economic capital of the nation.
The Cook Islands were formerly requested as the Hervey Islands, but this name refers only to the Northern Groups. It is unknown when this name was changed to reflect the current name. It is thought that the Cook Islands were settled in two periods: the Tahitian Period, when the country was settled between 900 and 1300 AD, and the Maui Settlement, which occurred in 1600 AD, when a large contingent from Tahiti settled in Rarotonga, in the Takitumu district.
The first contact between Europeans and the native inhabitants of the Cook Islands took place in 1595 with the arrival of Spanish explorer Álvaro de Mendaña in Pukapuka, who called it San Bernardo Saint Bernard. A decade later, navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós made the first European landing in the islands when he set foot on Rakahanga in 1606, calling it Gente Hermosa Beautiful People.
Cook Islanders are ethnically Polynesians or Eastern Polynesia. They are culturally associated with Tahiti, Eastern Islands, NZ Maori and Hawaii. Early in the 17th century, became the first race to resolve in New Zealand.
The Enele Ma'afu, proclaimed the Lau islands as his kingdom, and took the designation Tui Lau.
Fiji had been ruled by numerous divided chieftains until Cakobau unified the landmass. The Lapita culture, the ancestors of the Polynesians, existed in Fiji from about 3500 BCE until they were displaced by the Melanesians about a thousand years later. Both Samoans and subsequent Polynesian cultures adopted Melanesian painting and tattoo methods.
In 1873, Cakobau ceded a Fiji heavily indebted to foreign creditors to the United Kingdom. It became self-employed person on 10 October 1970 and a republic on 28 September 1987.
Fiji is classified as Melanesian and less ordinarily Polynesian.
Beginning in the gradual 13th and early 14th centuries, Polynesians began to migrate in waves to New Zealand via their canoes, settling on both the North and South islands. Over the course of several centuries, the Polynesian settlers formed a distinct culture that became known as the Māori. Beginning the 17th century, the arrival of Europeans to New Zealand drastically impacted Māori culture. Settlers from Europe known as "Pākehā" began to colonize New Zealand in the 19th century, leading to tension with the indigenous Māori. On October 28, 1835, a group of Māori tribesmen issued a declaration of independence drafted by Scottish businessman James Busby as the "United Tribes of New Zealand", in order to resist potential efforts at colonizing New Zealand by the French and prevent a href="Merchant_ship" title="Merchant ship">merchant ships and their cargo which belonged to Māori merchants from being seized at foreign ports. The new state received recognition from the British Crown in 1836.