[somenameforme]

I have to say I'm not entirely following your argument here. I mean I completely agree with what you're saying, but I think this supports my view? I'm unfamiliar with Maori history, but following with what you're saying it sounds as though their decision to not proactively advance until introduced to technology many eras ahead of their own, was indeed just that - a decision. And I think that's, more or less, the gist of the argument that I'm making.

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On the invention aspect, it seems that metal working is a pretty logical and natural path for an experimental mind. Like when you were a child and first got to play with firecrackers, didn't you do all the typical things? Place one in a bottle and see what happens. Place one under a bucket and see what happens. Bury one and see what happens. And so on. Similarly when playing with fire.

And when people early people were experimenting with fire they no doubt realized that fire has an ability to do very different things, at different heats, to different substances. Heat wood and make charcoal, heat food and its flavor and texture changes, heat dried grass or straw and it's effectively disintegrated. Heat metals and...? All you need to imagine is that perhaps you might need a hotter fire, which is far from difficult when many metals start to change color and consistency even at relatively low heats. And the knowledge that fires fed 'air' grow hotter is something that is also trivial to discover. Things like billows and ever more sophisticated setups follow relatively naturally.