Ok. . .another comment about the ancient Celt thing. It is incredible to me that anyone can believe this stuff but they do ??? Anyway here’s a piece of logic that I hadn’t previously thought of but is really obvious.
During the time period that those who believe Celts came and settled in New Zealand they were already adept at finding, mining, smelting and using metals (iron, tin, gold etc) to produce among other things weapons and armour. No-one would ever venture to a new territory without taking with them the most effective weapons at their disposal. . in their case swords, daggers, bows and iron tipped arrows and armour. On reaching their new destination an important priority would be to locate local sources of such metals, of which New Zealand had an abundance, and mine and manufacture more swords etc…the process once discovered is really simple, the Vikings of Newfoundland who were only a few in number managed it but because they were not the first there they couldn’t prevail against the well established natives and lasted only about ten years before retreating to Greenland. Here in NZ without competition Celts would’ve prospered and grown to large numbers of people…powerful and very well armed….Polynesians, great ocean sailors as they were, wouldn’t have had a chance against them. Quite simply they wouldn’t have stayed here. And of course the evidence of these Celts existence, even if by some huge catastrophe they somehow disappeared, would be huge and unmistakable
The Polynesian arrival would’ve also signalled to these Celts (who would’ve also been great sailors, greater than Polynesians because they’d sailed right around the world, and probably colonised Australia too) that there were other lands to conquer and followed the Polynesians back to the islands. Of course then by the time Abel Tasman and later James Cook arrived the Pacific would’ve been teeming with Celts brandishing far more deadly weapons than Taiaha and Mere let alone all the other items of technology enabled by the use of metal
I therefore doubt that New Zealand would now be mostly peopled by descendants of Europeans who arrived only 200 years ago.
You have to be logical.
PS regarding the spiral art forms. . . an artist and scholar has just messaged me that Maori spirals don’t exist in other Polynesian cultures because the Native fern fronds in NZ don’t exist in other parts of Polynesia and they are the inspiration. Also Celtic spirals are based on the intricate patterns of water flow and totally unrelated to Maori spirals. Both are examples of the Fibonacci Sequence which is common in many cultures throughout the world because of it’s simple and logical mathematics that is so common in nature and pleasing to the human eye.
Keith Tonkin 