1 post tagged “canoes”

It is very interesting phenomenon: mostly all Austronesian people, Including Polynesian trace their origin to some mystical land that they call Hawaiki. While doing my research for web analytics company, I found something else. Polynesian cultures have ancient oral traditions that say that they migrated from their homeland Hawaiki to the islands in the Pacific Ocean in open canoes. Maori people of New Zealand also trace their ancestry to groups of people who traveled from Hawaiki in open canoes.

In the same oral traditions the legendary land of Hawaiki also serves like some kind of place where the spirits of Polynesian people return to after death. In New Zealand Maori people even give possible pointers to the direction in which Hawaiki may like.

Before the advent of DNA analysis many anthropologists doubted that a deliberate migration in open canoes ever happened. They preferred to believe that the migration occurred accidentally when seafarers became lost and drifted to uninhabited shores.

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