Māori origins
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Transcript
- Springlands School student
- What research did you do to find out the times that the Māori came to New Zealand and how they came?
- David Filer
-
The experts on when Māori came to New Zealand have done a lot of work recently on looking at DNA, which is the evidence that tells you your ancestry. So they are able to show nowadays that Māori are linked to all Polynesians in the Pacific and that their DNA, over thousands of years, links back through to Asia and possibly all the way back to Taiwan. So there is a lot of modern medical/scientific work being done. There is also work being done by anthropologists about when rats, for example, who arrived with Polynesians, when they were chewing away at the plants of New Zealand. There is still some debate about the exact dates of the arrival of the Māori, or the Polynesians who become Māori, but most people seem to agree that it is in the second half of the 13th century AD.