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by teruakohatu
1000 days ago
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Kiwi here, I haven't heard that before. New Zealand is very isolated and far south. Polynesian explorers went from the North to the South, so New Zealand was last. I am unsure why there wasn't earlier immigration from Australia, possibly technological or cultural. Australia is huge, so maybe there wasn't population or resource motivation to explore and settle new lands. |
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Indigenous Australians were not mariners, they reached australia by island hopping, and at a time when the sea levels were even lowers and thus the distances between islands were lower (Tasmania was a peninsula at the time).
While NZ is close to Australia by air, the Tasman sea is 1700km of open unforgiving ocean. This is not a distance you can reasonably cross as a people with little history of navigation, or even a lot of it. Scandinavia to Iceland is 2/3rds that distance and Iceland was only colonised in the 9th century, by a reasonably maritime culture (mid-era norse).
Indigenous Australians never reached New Caledonia either even though it’s much closer to Australia (~1200km), as far as I know the earliest arrivals were circa 1500~1000BCE at the earliest and from the other side (the Lapita reached New Caledonia from through).