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The First People Of New Zealand

Butler is a well known anti maori writer and is part of the right wing be think tank NZCPR

The Maori legends of ancient tall and dwarf people inhabiting New Zealand may well be complete bunkum, but wouldn't it be amazing if credible evidence were found to support them?
If these claims are nothing more than Von Dänikenish pseudo-science, then please let them be debunked.
If there is genuine evidence to support the claims though, then this should not be suppressed due to political sensitivities.
 
If there is genuine evidence to support the claims though, then this should not be suppressed due to political sensitivities.

One wishes that it could be so, but unfortunately such discussion usually ends up being hijacked by unsavory characters. Or, the people trying to discuss this get tarnished with the same brush as those far right characters.

It never made sense to me that it took so very long for NZ to be populated, and the Maori legends may well have a grain of truth to them. Hopefully at some stage in the future it will be possible to discuss this in a rational manner.
 
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Moa on this story.

New Zealand Giant Hunters Spend Four Years Digging for Giants, Find Moa Bone
2/19/2020

With the launch of my new book, The Mound Builder Myth, yesterday, I have much to do and too little time to do it. I had rather little time for writing thanks to book launch work, but I wanted to give notice of the disturbing situation unfolding in New Zealand, where believers in a lost race of giants are coming under fire for the very real damage that their efforts to excavate what they believe to be giants’ bones may be doing.

According to RNZ, for the past four years, a group of people who believe that the original inhabitants of New Zealand were giants who lived before the Māori came to the country have been tunneling beneath a road, excavating a tube-like cave where they hope to uncover the bones of the giants. As RNZ reported:
The group has determined one is the leg bone of an 8 foot tall human and could be up to 2500 years old. "This here, my friends, is a human bone of a pre-Polynesian inhabitant," a male voice says in a video of the hollow bone posted online by the group. "You can tell by the triangular shape. It's most likely a tibia, which would make this… individual 8ft 4 inches tall… Regardless of its length, this is an older bone than any human being in New Zealand. What do our detractors say now, we wonder?"

Experts say the bone probably belongs to a moa.​

 
Moa on this story.

New Zealand Giant Hunters Spend Four Years Digging for Giants, Find Moa Bone
2/19/2020

With the launch of my new book, The Mound Builder Myth, yesterday, I have much to do and too little time to do it. I had rather little time for writing thanks to book launch work, but I wanted to give notice of the disturbing situation unfolding in New Zealand, where believers in a lost race of giants are coming under fire for the very real damage that their efforts to excavate what they believe to be giants’ bones may be doing.

According to RNZ, for the past four years, a group of people who believe that the original inhabitants of New Zealand were giants who lived before the Māori came to the country have been tunneling beneath a road, excavating a tube-like cave where they hope to uncover the bones of the giants. As RNZ reported:
The group has determined one is the leg bone of an 8 foot tall human and could be up to 2500 years old. "This here, my friends, is a human bone of a pre-Polynesian inhabitant," a male voice says in a video of the hollow bone posted online by the group. "You can tell by the triangular shape. It's most likely a tibia, which would make this… individual 8ft 4 inches tall… Regardless of its length, this is an older bone than any human being in New Zealand. What do our detractors say now, we wonder?"
Experts say the bone probably belongs to a moa.​


The bone needs to be subject to proper scientific analysis.
Bird bones - even those of large flightless birds, tend to be of a far lighter composition, even honeycombed, compared with human bones. So it shouldn't be that difficult for experts to determine the bone's provenance with a fair degree of certainty.
Finally, spare a thought for the poor old Moa. Wiki estimates there were some 58,000 when the Polynesian settlers first arrived, some time before 1300. By 1450, they had been hunted to extinction.
Humankind's motto ought to be "We endanger species".
 
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