Yes. New Zealand is supposed to be one of the last places to be settled by humans. The exact date is not clear but could be as recent as 700 years ago. When the Maori arrived the giant Moa birds were still walking around.
> Yes. New Zealand is supposed to be one of the last places to be settled by humans. The exact date is not clear but could be as recent as 700 years ago. When the Maori arrived the giant Moa birds were still walking around.
That’s very true. They can be reasonably sure about approximately when the Maori got here because the Maori kept very good oral records of their ancestry, going all the way back to the canoes that they arrived in New Zealand on from a place called “Hawaiki”. To this day there are Maori who can recite their whakapapa (ancestry) with great accuracy from memory.
We know that these ancestries are reasonably accurate because they cross-check: as you’d expect in a population that is tribal and based on an island, there is a fair bit of marriage between families and complex relationships. For the most part, when the Maori recite their ancestries, these relationships cross-check and agree.
So somewhere between 700 and 900 years is the generally accepted arrival timeframe for Maori in New Zealand.
There have been theories of pre-Maori settlements: the Celts, the Phoenicias, the Vikings, the Chinese, the Maoriori were all supposed to have a turn, but these theories are not generally accepted and lack much evidence (tho there is some).