Polynesian Civ?

[ScottVib]

Anyone have any ideas for what parameters to use in the creation of a polynesian Civ? (combining it with melanesian and micronesian is likely necessary) They managed to colonize millions of the islands of the Pacific and I thought it could be cool to have a Polynesian Civ in the game (especially if you're playing archipelago).

Anythoughts?

[Optimizer]

Too bad there is no Maritime Special Ability...

Polynesians would be Expansionist and Commercial. Their UU should be ome kind of ancient ship, maybe one that requires no tech. A problem is that ships are not often in battle, so they cannot trigger Golden Ages. (Wish that Golden ages could be triggered by exploration!)

Haven't got a clue about great leaders. Maybe they can "borrow" Thor Heyerdahl from Norway?

In general, I want to favour sea travel. As soon as I get hold of the game, I will add more ships, at least one of them being very low-tech. But, that is another story.

[Ribannah]

An alternative Polynesian UU could be the Bard: a Warrior that increases the power of OTHER units on the same square.

A possible Polynesian leader could be King Pomare III of Tahiti, who intruduced the first flag (red with a white star) which was also used on several other islands.

[Dr. Nick]

Toussaint L'Ouverture?

We also need a Latin American civ for dear god's sake!

[Stefu]

*froths at mouth*

[Rasbelin]

Polynesia was actually populated from South America by balsa rafts. So a South American civ would be more justified than the Polynesians.

[pithorr]

Balsa raft!!!
It sounds nice for a special unit, pre-trireme one...
If they manage to build many of them and land in the English beaches maybe Americans would be speaking Aloha-kind language...

[Dr. Nick]

Originally posted by Rasbelin
Polynesia was actually populated from South America by balsa rafts. So a South American civ would be more justified than the Polynesians.

*bashes shield with sword*

Hear the words of the mighty one!

[Rasbelin]

El Awrence, what's the point with that?

[Dr. Nick]

No one wants to listen a Latin American going on about the need for a Latin American civ... we need more furriner support.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Rasbelin
Polynesia was actually populated from South America by balsa rafts. So a South American civ would be more justified than the Polynesians.

I don't think so. The migration was from South east Asia outwards, and not South America. Linguistically, genetically, agriculturally, Polynesia's origins are to be found in the East:

www.pbs.org/wayfinders/polynesian6.html

news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_254000/254602.stm

www.pbs.org/wayfinders/polynesian8.html

[Oerdin]

Why is there a sudden interest in making a Polynesian civ? About the only justification I have heard so far is that they are not Europeans and they would fill in a portion of the world that is uninhabited.
Of course what this doesn't take into account that most games will be on a random map and not on Firaxis's sorry excuse for a world map. So it hardly matters...

[History Guy]

I'd have to agree with Oerdin, a Polynesian Civ is somewhat hard to fathom. Maybe the special unit will be the hula dancer, and it requires breadfruit to build.

[Rasbelin]

Originally posted by molly bloom

I don't think so. The migration was from South east Asia outwards, and not South America.

Actually I can tell you that I have read two books about Polynesia and the South Pacific, and one about Easter Island, so I can tell you that the their ancestors came from east South American cost. They also used similar rafts in Peru as in Polynesia. If you have read these books, then I suppose you would change your opinion.

But I don't want to argue about this with you.

[Rasbelin]

I agree with History Guy and Oerdin, and I also add that the Mongols, Spanish and the Celts would be much more urgent to be included. Of course I don't want to say the Polynesia wouldn't be interesting, but I assume that other civs would be more appriciated in Civ III.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Rasbelin

Actually I can tell you that I have read two books about Polynesia and the South Pacific, and one about Easter Island, so I can tell you that the their ancestors came from east South American cost. They also used similar rafts in Peru as in Polynesia. If you have read these books, then I suppose you would change your opinion.

But I don't want to argue about this with you.

I'm sorry to have to reiterate, but you are wrong. If the settlement of Polynesia came from South America, then there would have to be more evidence, in the form of agricultural products, pottery, culture, farm animals, plants, wildlife, and there isn't. All Thor Heyerdahl proved was that contact was possible, not that mass settlement or emigration occurred. If you regard the cultural of Polynesia, you can see an eastwards drift, not a spread from South America. Look at the main food items of Polynesia, pre-European contact: they are all Asian related, except for the sweet potato, which is one of the items offered as evidence that migration happened from South America outwards.
It remains inconceivable that the potato, quinoa, the guinea pig, and other basic South American foodstuffs, easily transported, would not have been taken. There is no genetic or linguistic evidence to support the South American theory, simply a desire to make the facts fit the theory, and not vice versa.

"The findings of the archaeological work subsequently conducted throughout Polynesia and in Melanesia have not been kind to Heyerdahl's theory of American origins. Through their excavations and analyses of artifacts and other recovered materials, archaeologists were able to develop a model of Polynesian settlement that demonstrated the eastward movement into the Pacific of ancestral Polynesians, located the "true" homeland of the Polynesians on the western edge of Polynesia itself, outlined population dispersion within the Polynesian triangle, and demonstrated the lack of evidence of any noticeable population movement from the Americas to Polynesia.

The discovery of a distinctively decorated type of pottery called Lapita provided the first solid evidence of the general route by which the ancestors of the Polynesians migrated into the Pacific. The Lapita cultural complex, made up of his pottery and associated artifacts, began turning up in excavations from islands extending from the islands off the northeast coast of New Guinea to archipelagos at the western edge of Polynesia. These sites, with their distinctive artifacts, not only demonstrated that the ancestral Polynesians sailed through Melanesia, and not Micronesia as some had proposed, but also indicated that it probably took them no more than a few hundred years to move from island to island through Melanesia to Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, some 2,000 miles east of their starting point off New Guinea.

There followed the realization that the long-sought Polynesian homeland was not outside the Pacific, but was really within Polynesia itself. The Lapita voyagers were seen as ancestral to, but not yet identifiably Polynesian. Not until they began to adapt to life in the isolated mid-Pacific archipelagos of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa do sites there indicate that the distinctively Polynesian cultural complex begins to emerge from its Lapita roots. "

and:

"The distribution of domesticated plants and animals across Polynesia at the time of European contact, and archaeological evidence of the early introduction of these, lends credence to the idea that this migration was intentional. All the Polynesian food plants except the sweet potato - notably taro, bananas, yams, breadfruit, and sugar cane - and the three domesticated animals - the pig, dog, and chicken - come from the Asian side of the Pacific. Most Polynesian islands have these domesticates, which suggests that colonization was intentional since accidental drift voyagers were not likely to have carried all the plants and animals with them on short inter-island trips or fishing expeditions. "

[Rasbelin]

But how would you explain that the Polynesians are biologically much more closely related to South American Indians? Heyerdahl also listed some reasons why the Polynesians wouldn't have immigrated from the Indonesian archipelago or Down Under. He also said that the Polynesian myths are closely related to the ones found on the Easter Island and South America (mostly Peru). I suggest that you would at least read Fatuhiva and Kon-Tiki.

Rasbelin, a Thor Heyerdahl fan

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Rasbelin
But how would you explain that the Polynesians are biologically much more closely related to South American Indians? Heyerdahl also listed some reasons why the Polynesians wouldn't have immigrated from the Indonesian archipelago or Down Under. He also said that the Polynesian myths are closely related to the ones found on the Easter Island and South America (mostly Peru). I suggest that you would at least read Fatuhiva and Kon-Tiki.

Rasbelin, a Thor Heyerdahl fan

I have read them; they are interesting but speculative. Polynesians are closely related to each other, Hawaiians to Maoris, to Solomon Islanders and so on...and not to Quechua indians, for instance.

"According to such reasoning, a voyage from Pitcaim or any other Polynesian island to Rapa Nui would seem out of the question; even the colonization from the west of the main Polynesian archipelagos would look improbable because of their position to windward. Indeed, Heyerdahl (1978:332) largely based his argument against the orthodox theory of Polynesian settlement from the west on his assertion that canoe voyagers could not have sailed across the tropical Pacific against "the permanent trade winds and forceful companion currents of the enormous Southern Hemisphere."

and:

'The easterly trade winds are, however, anything but permanent. Periodically they die down, and the winds blow from the west, not from the east. This monsoonal pattern is strongest in the western Pacific; in Indonesian waters the alternating seasons of winter easterlies and summer westerlies are still exploited by commercial sailing vessels to carry cargo back and forth from one end of the archipelago to another. The regular extension of these summer westerlies virtually to the edge of Polynesia was undoubtedly exploited by the immediate ancestors of the Polynesians, the makers of the famous Lapita pottery, to expand so rapidly into the central Pacific. Although these summer westerlies become much more episodic in the eastern Pacific, spells of westerly winds apparently were frequent and long-enduring enough to enable the Polynesian descendants of the Lapita pioneers to spread beyond Samoa and Tonga to the archipelagos directly to the east (Finney 1985:11-15).'


See also:

www.ancestry.com/library/view/ancmag/1480.asp

leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu/org/pvs/migrationspart1.html

and: www.faseb.org/genetics/ashg99/f436.htm

[Oerdin]

It looks like these dispute could be solved by doing a linguistic analysis of Polnesian languages. Speaking of language did any of you know that the Island of Madegascar is linguistically Polynesian? Well it is. Apparently the Island was either originally settled or later conquered by people of polynesian decent because even though most of the people are ethnicly black Africans their native language is clearly derived from a proto-polynesian.

I haven't done any studying on the topic but the location of Madigascar would suggest Polynesians originally came from Asia and not south America. However this doesn't rule out that some small amount of contact could have occured (thus explaining the sweet potato) but the primary means of cultural defusion would have been west to east.

[Trifna]

I have many reasons to say Polynesians should be in Civ III as a general civilisation. Of course, I think that some are coming fist, such as Celts, Arabs, etc. But stil, Polynesians seem to have what it needs to me: a distinctive and elaborated culture. Here's just two quotes from Britannica (but there's a text of a few pages with lots of exemples):



"Traditional Polynesian cultures were complex, highly specialized, and diversified, and the environment was not always benign."


"This mastery did not extend merely to the technology involved in ship building, to the techniques of navigation, and to other obvious nautical aspects of the culture but permeated social organization, religion, food production, and most other facets of the culture. The Polynesians could not only sail the seas, but socially they could cope with the human problems of shipwreck, split families, and the sudden loss of large portions of the social group."

These are only two statements, but of course there were some more (a whole text). And about having more civs in Europe, I guess it may be normal since Europe got many mix-up of many different civilisations, making many many cultural divisions that took their own with time, different environments and different events.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Oerdin
It looks like these dispute could be solved by doing a linguistic analysis of Polnesian languages. Speaking of language did any of you know that the Island of Madegascar is linguistically Polynesian?

Absolutely:

archive.dstc.edu.au/AU/staff/andry/language.html

vegetation too: http://www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/biolog...ps/vegmaps.htm

and a counting system:

euslchan.tripod.com/borneo.html


and see this language map for Polynesia and elsewhere:

www.sil.org/ethnologue/ethnologue.html

[Rasbelin]

Originally posted by molly bloom


I have read them; they are interesting but speculative.

That's true. Heyerdahl himself said that he didn't have all the evidence, but he thinks that this theory is more optimistic than those saying that Polynesians would have colonised from west (Indonesian archipelago). But of course we can't give any certain answer too. There just apparently is a link between Peru, Easter Island (as we Europeans have named it) and Polynesia in mythology and naval vessels ( rafts are naval vessels? ).

IMO this theory is at least interesting, even if one day or another it would be proven not to be true.

[ranskaldan]

Well, no one can deny that there's been contact between Polynesia and South America. It's just that most of the evidence that has been heaped up over here (language, vegetation, agriculture, geography, ocean currents, etc.) points to an Indonesian homeland for the Polynesians.

[Rasbelin]

I finally still recommend that you should read Kon-Tiki...

[pumph]

Originally posted by Rasbelin
I finally still recommend that you should read Kon-Tiki...

Sorry, but Heyerdahl was completely wrong and his books are merely entirely misleading popularizations. The answer to the question lies in neither archaeology nor in linguistics, but rather in genetic testing. The Polynesians are descended from groupings in SE Asia and are very far removed from Native Americans. Indeed the latter are no longer even mentioned and haven't been for decades now; the most recent debate was whether Taiwan or Melanesia was involved, eg the following abstract:

The question surrounding the colonization of Polynesia has remained controversial. Two hypotheses, one postulating Taiwan as the putative homeland and the other asserting a Melanesian origin of the Polynesian people, have received considerable attention. In this work, we present haplotype data based on the distribution of 19 biallelic polymorphisms on the Y chromosome in a sample of 551 male individuals from 36 populations living in Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. Surprisingly, nearly none of the Taiwanese Y haplotypes were found in Micronesia and Polynesia. Likewise, a Melanesian-specific haplotype was not found among the Polynesians. However, all of the Polynesian, Micronesian, and Taiwanese haplotypes are present in the extant Southeast Asian populations. Evidently, the Y-chromosome data do not lend support to either of the prevailing hypotheses. Rather, we postulate that Southeast Asia provided a genetic source for two independent migrations, one toward Taiwan and the other toward Polynesia through island Southeast Asia.

Polynesian origins: Insights from the Y chromosome
Bing Su, Li Jin, Peter Underhill, Jeremy Martinson, Nilmani Saha, Stephen T. McGarvey i , Mark D. Shriver, Jiayou Chu, Peter Oefner, Ranajit Chakraborty, and Ranjan Deka (2000) PNAS

Earlier papers:

Melton, T., Peterson, R., Redd, A. J., Saha, N., Sofro, A. S. M., Martinson, J. & Stoneking, M. (1995) Am. J. Hum. Genet. 57, 403–414.

Redd, A. J., Takezaki, N., Sherry, S. T., McGarvey, S. T., Sofro, A. S. M. &
Stoneking, M. (1995) Mol. Biol. Evol. 12, 604–615.

[Rasbelin]

Let's stop this bullfight. I recommended the Kon-Tiki book for other reasons. So I assume we have finished this dicussion now.

[Oerdin]

Hmmm, Guns, Germs, & Steel has a large section devoted to the origins and spread of Polynesian culture. It uses things like the presence (or lack of ) certain livestock (chickens, pigs, and what not), the use of farm crops, and the presence of distinctive pottery to trace the spread of Polynesians from Taiwan to the rest of the pacific. He also compares language evolution from various islands to also prove Taiwan was the original location of the proto-polynesian people. It's a great read you should pick it up.

[siredgar]

where would the capital be? Honolulu or Papeete? Both are still COLONIES! Until the Polynesians acheive independence, since they haven't achieved any measure of glory yet, I don't know if they'd even make the top 32 Civs.

[Ribannah]

How about Sri Vijaya or even Jakarta?

[arborman]

Jakarta would be an excellent capital, or if you wanted to ruffle an anthropologist's feathers, how about Taiwan. However, why is the debate about origins mutually exclusive. I find it unlikely, for tons of reasons, that they originated in South America, but I have little doubt there was contact and probably intermingling at some or possible many points. Sweet potatoes were found in Polynesia and the new world, and they don't exactly float on the current. At some point they were moved by people. Those people may have been eaten, or probably just assimilated. I'd rather see an Eskimo (Inuit) civilization, that has extra food and resource bonuses on the polar regions and tundra, than Polynesian. While the Polynesian's have an interesting culture and great location, it's not exactly challenging a civ's every ability to find a way to survive on tropical islands, crawling with food, and perpetually warm. But I'm probably just being ethnocentric, or at least ethnojealous. Why couldn't my great grand pappy immigrate to the Cook Islands rather than the canadian prairies. didn't he know about the sun/ice variation?