Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 9 (Oceanic).djvu/25

Rh development on the material as well as on the intellectual side of their respective cultures.

The origin, evolution, and affiliation of the various peoples of Oceania is a problem whose complexity becomes more and more apparent with increasing knowledge. While anthropologists are still far from satisfactorily explaining these matters, it is patent to all that the ethnic history of the region involves the recognition of a series of waves of migration from the westward, each spreading itself more or less completely over its predecessors, modifying them, and in turn modified by them, until the result is a complex web, the unravelling of which leads us inevitably back to the Asiatic mainland. It is obvious that, while migrations on land are not necessarily conditioned by the stage of culture of a people, in an island area, especially where the islands are separated by wide stretches of ocean, movement is impossible, or at least very difficult, for peoples who have attained only the rudiments of the art of seamanship. A glance at the map will show that, so far as Indonesia, much of Melanesia, and Australia are concerned, the difficulties in the way of the migration of a primitive people are far less than in the case of Micronesia and Polynesia. In the former areas, indeed, some land masses now separated were in comparatively recent times joined together, so that migrations were then possible which now would be difficult for a people without knowledge of any means of navigation; but to reach the widely separated islands farther out in the Pacific would have been impossible to those unprovided with adequate vessels and skill to use them. Thus we are forced to assume that it was not until man had attained a considerably higher development than that shown by the Tasmanians or Australians that these outlying and isolated parts of the Oceanic area could have been inhabited. It is indeed probable that they were, of all the occupied portions of the globe, the last to be settled.

From what has been said it may be seen how fertile and