So I've seen the concept of a Polynesian settled Australia talked about on the site but what about the other way around, an Aboriginal settled New Zealand. The biggest problem I see if how you would get a society without a strong maritime tradition to get across the Tasmanian Sea but once they got to New Zealand the Aborigines would have a major advantage over the Maori, time. In OTL, Maori people settled New Zealand between 1250 and 1300 but once we get rid of the problems of getting Aborigines over to New Zealand in the first place they could be there centuries earlier. How would their society look like? Could they build the sort of empires in New Zealand that they weren't able to in Australia?
WI: Aboriginal New Zealand
- Thread starter SeaBos
- Start date
By being able to get the Aboriginals there, they'd need some sort of maritime tradition they completely lacked OTL. They walked across dry land from New Guinea to Australia, and later from Australia to Tasmania. I believe an Australia - New Zealand migration would be by far the greatest distance of ocean crossed by prehistoric man.
But ignoring that, I can't see the Aboriginals doing much differently in New Zealand than in Australia (unless that maritime tradition causes them to eventually evolve like the Lapita). They'll hunt the moa to extinction before long, they'll alter the landscape, but as with any hunter-gatherer culture, the population density will be low. Are there any good potential founder crops in New Zealand? I'm not sure if there are, and in any case, I can't see why the New Zealand Aboriginals would develop agriculture and not the Australian Aboriginals.
But ignoring that, I can't see the Aboriginals doing much differently in New Zealand than in Australia (unless that maritime tradition causes them to eventually evolve like the Lapita). They'll hunt the moa to extinction before long, they'll alter the landscape, but as with any hunter-gatherer culture, the population density will be low. Are there any good potential founder crops in New Zealand? I'm not sure if there are, and in any case, I can't see why the New Zealand Aboriginals would develop agriculture and not the Australian Aboriginals.
You realize that significant portions of northern Maori diet included braken root and the stems/taproot of cordyline australis; there was even a stable non-flowering domestic variety that was grown.
South Island relied on bracken fields burned from forests and cordyline australis (not the sterile domesticate) near exclusively save for the northern tip that partook in sweet potato the size of fingers.
It's possible, a tsunami could strike a coastal corraboree and the "rafts" of tree trunks and such could bring a dozen or even a few dozen to New Zealand.
The Maori in old texts spoke of particular fern varieties whose roots grew thicker, had more starch and less fibres than "normal" ferns. Clearly a heavy fire regime, fire terraforming of hillsides to add soil to the valley and intentional harvesting/transplanting/caretaking -already found in aboriginals- could create hybridizing and mutation events to domesticated fern roots.
Without rats or other animals that were predatory to birds, chicks and eggs you'll have very high chances of smaller moa and other birds surviving.
I could see the development of Lake Condah tier communities form around eel rich waters, the burning of bushland for grazing their moa, as well as a host of other possibilities if it's early enough.
Coal rich with significant amounts of iron sand could create tamagahane by accident though making large cooking fires that bind bits of iron together that can be coldsmithed and refined through the generations. Meteoric iron was used widely amongst Greenlandic Inuit so clearly a tradition can form without metallurgical knowledge before hand.
Rich gold fields, large amounts of wood, new zealand flax cloth, sugar from cordyline australis, exotic birds, feathers and feather mantles, jade, kawakawa etc.... All make for excellent trade opportunities much later on.
It won't be a second Japan like some TLs jump too but I could see something like Hawaiian island chiefdoms and Pacific Northwest societies that were highly organized with larger populations centered around vegetable horticultural by the time Southeast Asia maritime civilizations come about.
From there I think a lot could be expanded upon by the time Europeans arrive.
Honestly you're not gonna get much from AH posters. Most don't know about the geology, botany and societal development of places outside of Europe and Japan beyond wikipedia and basic Google search.
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Riain
Banned
Yes, I do realise that. Do you realise that they imported several agricultural crops that the Aborigines from Australia didn't have and thus couldn't import if they reached New Zealand at some time prior to 1000AD?
Yes. Do you realize how reduced their horticultural crops were and how they became tenderers of man made bracken fields and that knowledge around plant reproduction and care taking is known throughout the Australian continent?
Seems like you could do some more reading regarding Plant and Human relationships; I recommend The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage, Future Eaters by Tim Flannery and also Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson which speaks on California Indigenous practices of food raising as well as
Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Volume 1 and 2 by Nancy Turner exploring PNW indigenous horticulture.
Clearly it is because your response seems to have come off in a way that suggested Maori practicing horticulture influenced their ability to interact with plants outside of the initial domesticates.
That is incorrect
Riain
Banned
Cleary? I'm not concerned about initial domesticates influencing their ability to interact with other plants. Our Aborigines were great at exploiting what they had, but what they had wasn't enough to build military power sufficient to coerce the British to sign a treaty with them. Moving the same culture to New Zealand won't make it magically more powerful just because it has a longer occupation.
If it had nothing to do with agriculture why did you mention it in the first place.
Secondly why are you making large sweeping claims of Aboriginals when we know for a fact there was a wide variation of organization given the environmental pressues they were effected by?
Lake Condah produced stonework because their environment and the resources exploited provided the impetus for greater organization and population numbers.
Greater populations, greater degrees of specialization, greater chances of innovations and greater degrees of cultural diffusion necessitating change and cultural and material evolution.
twovultures
Donor
Very good post, though I am skeptical that introduction by tsunami would bring in enough Aborigines to establish a permanent and growing population. For pursuing fern management and/or domestication, I think the question we have to ask is where in the world have fern roots been used as food? This could be useful for establishing an estimate of calories per acre you could reasonably expect to get from ferns.
As for the rats, a New Zealand without them would be quite a paradise even with humans mucking it up. However, any event that could bring Aborigines to New Zealand could also bring Australian rats; whether these rats would be as destructive as the Polynesian one is debateable, but I think that any mammal will do a number on the birds.
I could see Cook Islanders opening up trade with these Aborigines instead of settling. Your suggestions for limited metalwork could result in a trade based on that; even without any metalwork, jadeite could be a valuable item for trade.
Riain
Banned
The OP suggested that the Maori lacked time and thus Australia Aborigines with more time might do something different. However time wasn't the difference between the two societies, the difference was founder crops and the material culture and society those enable. Time without crops doesn't equal power nearly as much as having crops for a comparatively short time.
Sweeping generalisations are of general utility, eg jut because I know a 6" tall women and a 5" man doesn't invalidate the generalisation that women are on average shorter than men. Condah and other places like it allowed for very different lifestyle patterns from the norm based on outlier conditions rather than what can be expected if the people were moved holus bolus to New Zealand. Another sweeping generalisation of general utility is the Polynesians ability to generate enough food to feed larger populations is a few crops that were far more portable than the volcanic swamp of Condah proving the topography, ecology and building materials in the right combination. Illustrating outlier conditions is not a helpful argument in AH.
twovultures
Donor
From the perspective of Australian prehistory though, New Zealand would be an outlier allowing much denser populations than almost anywhere in Australia. The fact that it's a lot wetter is very helpful.
Now without sweet potatoes hypothetical Aborigines would not be able to match the size and organization of the Maori at the north shore of North Island; but outside of that, they could indeed match Maori population densities IOTL, and in ATL with some extra centuries (maybe even a millenia or two) of settlement they could expand into inland areas that the Maori did not permanently settle IOTL, since IIRC the Maori largely stuck to the coasts.
Riain
Banned
Wouldn't that just replicate in NZ what happened in wetter parts of Australia? What happened in those circumstances wasn't enough to coerce the British into signing a treaty.
twovultures
Donor
It very well could just be Australia except colder.
Alternatively, the infrastructure building necessary for eel farming, the need to defend that infrastructure, and the presence of multiple, relatively densely populated aquacultural polities too geographically disparate to be one society but close enough to come into conflict could result in more centralized societies, where authority figures can mobilize people for special projects related to war and work. These centralized societies would appear to European eyes to be countries, defending borders and managing land, and their ability to wage protracted war using what appear to be soldiers could make Europeans see the New Zealand Aborigines as worth signing a treaty with.
The founder effect also dictates that Aboriginal New Zealanders would be less diverse than Australian Aborigines. While they almost certainly would not have the cultural cohesion of the Maori since they would be in New Zealand longer, they would potentially be more able to unite and cooperate against a foreign invader than their mainland relatives. As a bonus, they might get a practice run at repelling invaders through an invasion from the Cook Islands similar to OTL's settlement of New Zealand before the Europeans arrive.
So you're presuming a New Zealand full of Gunditjmara-type societies? It didn't do the Gunditjmara themselves very well when whalers slaughtered them in the Convincing Ground massacre (granted, they had been wrecked by smallpox first, but I'd presume foreign visitors to New Zealand--those same whalers, for instance, might help in spreading disease). And in much of North Island, I don't see how these Aboriginals would equal Maori population density (South Island's a different story). Further, the depth of time since settlement would make them linguistically far more diverse compared to the Maori. I think we're looking at something at least similar to Tasmanian Aboriginals in diversity, if not more so (depending on how long ago New Zealand is settled).
It might be enough for the British or whoever to sign treaties, though. They're still gonna get dispossessed of their lands, it just depends how. And the linguistic and cultural diversity that would arise would contribute to letting the Europeans to divide and conquer much more easily and prevent the rise of a pan-Aboriginal movement to counter them until much later. The one thing they have going for them is that they're literally on the other side of the world (the antipode) from Europe, which would prevent the same sort of depredation given to the American Indian from occurring here.
I also disagree they'd be capable of repelling the Polynesians. More likely the Polynesians will carve out settlement where its best suited (the north of North Island) and blend with the native peoples.
OMG everything I wrote didn't go through and I fucking lost it, so here is a more terse response
Montane southern China, Japan, Pacific Northwest nations. If we extend to tree ferns we have Tasmanians (who didn't use fires and with much slower dicksonia in forests), Maori yet again and Eastern Polynesians as a whole.
In montane china 55lb of roots (daily single person harvest) in denuded and stripped/leached soils can be processed down into 4.4lb of starch (which using potato starch is about 6783 calories). In all likelihood well drained and deep fertile soils could almost double it but looking only at this 4.4lb average its actually quiet high if you take into account there being no labor usage involved in preparing soils, no active application of fertilizers, no livestock necessary. Its quiet efficient for a broadscale managed food.
Bracken roots can have as much as 27,280 lbs per acre in the wild, this is rhizomes alone not fronds. My math got 852,375 calories, much less than the 6 million food calories per acre of potato grown irrigated and heavily fertilized in the west but certainly this can be altered with better clones and superior environments conducive to plant root growth.
TBH Homo Florenesis is believed to have arrived on the island as an accidental migrant on natural rafts, I think of a ceremonial event combined with a feasting of sorts being washed away then the idea of large tree trunks and palm trunks in "islands" could sustain some people out at sea. Eating any animals that are floating with you like potential rates, sea turtles (which have kept many, many sea drifters alive) floating around, seagulls and other sea birds etc... could reduce the likelihood of introducing other animals.
Aboriginals were limited by two primary things; 1.the limitations of their modifications of the land i.e. how much they could calorically take and 2. "The Law", totemic associations that limit the degree with which a person or group can eat a particular food with implications of seasonal migrations, inability to or "illegality" of storing foods.
There are also a number of environmental variances between New Zealand and Tasmania. I would also say that food preferences shifted aboriginal food communities away from forests and more so the swamp/plains/forest edge mosaics they maintained for kangaroo. Beyond that their carbohydrate was Tree Fern for the most part which especially Dicksonia was EXTREMELY slow, a fraction of calories compared to bracken.
Montane southern China, Japan, Pacific Northwest nations. If we extend to tree ferns we have Tasmanians (who didn't use fires and with much slower dicksonia in forests), Maori yet again and Eastern Polynesians as a whole.
In montane china 55lb of roots (daily single person harvest) in denuded and stripped/leached soils can be processed down into 4.4lb of starch (which using potato starch is about 6783 calories). In all likelihood well drained and deep fertile soils could almost double it but looking only at this 4.4lb average its actually quiet high if you take into account there being no labor usage involved in preparing soils, no active application of fertilizers, no livestock necessary. Its quiet efficient for a broadscale managed food.
Bracken roots can have as much as 27,280 lbs per acre in the wild, this is rhizomes alone not fronds. My math got 852,375 calories, much less than the 6 million food calories per acre of potato grown irrigated and heavily fertilized in the west but certainly this can be altered with better clones and superior environments conducive to plant root growth.
TBH Homo Florenesis is believed to have arrived on the island as an accidental migrant on natural rafts, I think of a ceremonial event combined with a feasting of sorts being washed away then the idea of large tree trunks and palm trunks in "islands" could sustain some people out at sea. Eating any animals that are floating with you like potential rates, sea turtles (which have kept many, many sea drifters alive) floating around, seagulls and other sea birds etc... could reduce the likelihood of introducing other animals.
Aboriginals were limited by two primary things; 1.the limitations of their modifications of the land i.e. how much they could calorically take and 2. "The Law", totemic associations that limit the degree with which a person or group can eat a particular food with implications of seasonal migrations, inability to or "illegality" of storing foods.
There are also a number of environmental variances between New Zealand and Tasmania. I would also say that food preferences shifted aboriginal food communities away from forests and more so the swamp/plains/forest edge mosaics they maintained for kangaroo. Beyond that their carbohydrate was Tree Fern for the most part which especially Dicksonia was EXTREMELY slow, a fraction of calories compared to bracken.
The Gunditjmara communities dealt with diseases, guns, dogs, horses and agrarian societies. I don't think you know enough about population and societal development, nor the processes of horticultural societies to speak broadly. Personally I suggest reading more before speaking.
Okay, guns, dogs, disease, sure. But they were still massacred, and horses were not needed for these particular massacres. The Gunditjmara were killed because they opposed a society bent on taking their lands. New Zealand Aboriginals do not have to deal with people taking their lands (at least not at first), so they have one advantage.
So could you tell me more about where I'm wrong before insulting me? Please, I'm always eager to learn.
If you find it insulting that I said You should read and study before posting authoritatively about something you don't know about then that's you're own ego. I posted books above, read into them.