MORE LIGHT ON THE MOA?

Evening Star, Issue 22464, 8 October 1936, Page 8

MORE LIGHT ON THE MOA?

It is unlikely that more light will be thrown on. the history of the moa by the discovery of a fossilised) egg which is announced from Hawke’s Bay. Too many remains of moas have been found before now. Earlier discoveries of fossilised relics had left virtually no doubt that the great bird was an inhabitant of Now Zealand ages before man came on the scene. How long it survived has been the hardest question to answer. Mr T. Lindsay Buick, who has examined all the recorded evidence, writes: “It was a cherished belief of some of the early investigators of moa problems that the bird was wholly extinct before the Maori arrived in these islands. This view, however, was early challenged, and is now universally considered untenable in the face of the evidence found in the kitchen middens of primitive man, the obviously recent character of some of the discovered remains, and in the light of Maori tradition, however slender that tradition may be.” In a double Hue of ovens covered over by sand found by tho Rev. Richard Taylor in Taranaki in 1843, and several times explored at later intervals, the plainest evidence was discovered that at some remote or recent period man had eaten the bird after hunting it. The Natives affirmed that the sand flat where the bones were found was one of the first places dwelt upon by their ancestors. Like ovens, explored by Mr W. B. D. Mantell in Otago, contained none of the most massive types of hones. The conclusion was suggested that the hunters were the Waitaha, an earlier migration of Maoris who arrived, perhaps, about 1470, and that tho larger species of tho bird was then practically extinct in Otago. There have been Maoris, in both islands, who have claimed to have

hunted or seen, tho moa in their youth, but tho Maori is both hospitable and imaginative. His imagination might bo too easily stimulated by his desire to gratify an inquirer. The evidence suggests that there were few, if any, moas for the iirst Ngaitahu (the latest migration of Maoris to the South Island) and perhaps also for tho Ngatimainoe, their immediate predecessors, to hunt. On the other hand, there is nothing to imply that a remnant of the race may not have lingered on, in favoured spots, until a fairly recent period. The discovery of a gourd with tho latest fossilised egg would indicate that the man who placed it there at some forgotten time was of the same race with our Polynesian Maoris. But excavations had already destroyed the fancy that these islands were ever inhabited by a different indigenous race.