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Maori Legend of Man-Eating Birds is True
jerryatrix writes "Legends of the New Zealand Maori tell of giant man-eating birds. New scientific evidence proves that these birds did exist and were around the same time as humans in New Zealand. From the article, 'Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast's eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago.'"
Well, it was DIRECTLY the dingo, but then the eagle got the dingo. It's called the food chain, and we're not always at the top!
Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
The primary reason that they went extinct was due to a loss of food. The Maori hunted all of the moa species of bird (large and flightless) to extinction. Another prime example of natives living "in tune" with nature...
Some species of Terror Bird would chase down their prey and literally peck it to death. They had an interesting feature about these things on Discovery last night; with this story it just seemed appropriate to mention it.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
You totally forgot New Zealand's only native land mammal, the bat. There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
But, the Haast Eagle was unconfirmed before this? I've been brought up and it's always been a fact to me.
Yeah I also understood they did better than us because of the Maori being fighters - but more because the arriving whiteys realised they couldn't just walk all over the natives and had better cut some deals. In Australia we just hunted them down, poisoned their flour, etc etc
I think, from what I've read somewhere, that another reason the Maoris didn't come off as badly as some of the other indigenous people the British came across is that they were excellent fighters. Since they did spend most of their spare time fighting each other they had had a lot of practice when it came to fighting the British.
Despite the fact the colonists had naval guns and firearms the Maoris were able to devise tactics which completely negated the advantage they would have otherwise provided and dealt out a couple of fairly comprehensive beatings to the colonists so much so that during WWI the British actually recruited Maori elders to advise them how to conduct effective trench warfare.
My grandfather fought in 5 WW2 campaigns. Whilst lined up waiting to be evacuated (australians, scots, canadians, I think greek) from *somewhere* via a beach, British redcap's on horseback arrived and announced that all the colonial troops would have to stand aside while the British troops were evacuated first.
The battle hardened Australian troops responded by killing all 12 MP's, queue jumping is disliked to this day in Australia.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Not really quite the case. Maori and the British fought tooth and nail for most of the 19th century. In fact, some British officers wanted nothing more than to completely wipe Maori off the face of the planet, and in some areas pretty much succeeded.
NZ's history as far as the colony is concerned is far from peaceful. Maori didn't stop fighting each other, maybe. But they didn't just ignore the British either. They used the British technology against each other, and also against the British.
The major issue with the Treaty of Waitangi is that the Maori version and the English version are not identical. The translations were pretty rough. So even after it was signed by all the tribal leaders across the country, there are still disputes going on between the Crown and many of the Maori tribes today. The only difference is that the weapon of choice is now money and land. Or the expenditure of former, and prolonged occupation of the latter.
http://www.newzealandwars.co.nz/ is a good place to find out about the wars that raged in the 19th century.
Actually there is no evidence that there was ever any land animals whatsoever in NZ except for lizards, insects and spiders. Unless you count flightless birds.
I think the usual claim is no mammals except for bats. There were other animals that you didn't mention, such as worms and centipedes.
So we knew they existed and we knew that the Maori told stories of and painted pictures of something remarkably similar yet we decided that the Maori knew about it because of all the Maori archeologists? I don't get why it would just be assumed that the stories and paintings were about snuffleupagus
IANAK (I am not a Kiwi.) but as I recall hearing on our vacation there, NZ had the highest WW2 death toll as measured by percentage of population. Of course I have no citation for that though...
It wouldn't be the first time a "long-extinct" creature had been discovered to be not quite so long-extinct as we'd thought.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Fire breathing isn't hard to explain. Fish control their depth using a swim bladder, which contains air (providing buoyancy) and is squeezed to increase the fish's density. A few species of fish generate electricity for communication and attack. If you pass electricity through salt water, you can separate it into hydrogen and oxygen. A fish that stored hydrogen in its swim bladder, instead of air, would be able to fly, using its flippers for directional control, rather than lift (although it would need to return to the water quite quickly if it didn't also evolve the ability to breath air). It would have an obvious evolutionary advantage, because it could escape predators by launching itself into the air for a little while. The oxygen produced by this process would be a dangerous waste product that the fish would need to expel. If you increase the oxygen concentration by a few percentage points on a warm day, wood and a number of other common materials will spontaneously combust. This wouldn't technically be fire breathing, but the burning people probably wouldn't argue the difference.
It doesn't take a huge evolutionary leap to go from large fish to flying, fire-breathing dragon. Dragons in different cultures look quite different. Chinese dragons look like large eels, which is quite feasible, from an evolutionary standpoint. Western dragons look more like balloons so, if they existed, would be most likely a mutation that increased the size of the flight bladder allowing longer periods in the air (and possibly storage of the oxygen as well, so that they could use it for attack; the fire-breathing attributes of dragons are more commonly highlighted by western myths than eastern ones).
Of course, no one has found a skeleton of a dragon. Given that they would be mostly aquatic, with lightweight bones and contain a bladder full of hydrogen that would relax when they died and probably cause them to burn, that isn't entirely surprising, but without such a skeleton (or a live specimen) there's no compelling evidence that they ever did exist. Didn't exist and couldn't exist are not the same thing though; in evolutionary terms dragons are mere likely than some things that do exist, like bombardier beetles and the duck-billed platypus.
It is highly unlikely that a dragon could evolve via the same route as a bombardier beetle; the chemicals that they use for attack evolved as a toxin secreted over their exoskeleton that made the poisonous to things that tried to eat them. Anything not covered in chitin that developed this mutation would die in screaming agony before it was able to reproduce.
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