quote:
Originally posted by HereOnThePrimalEdge
There is very little information about the Menehune. Why?
You got fixated on the Menehune as humorous in the beginning and now it has diverged into PW rambling.
There is no information about the Menehune because they are legend, not proven fact, so far. The Micronesians that came first, passed on that they found existing fish ponds and rock walls on Kauai. These sites are massive.
It is about the archaeology. There is evidence of the Micronesians, the Tongans and the Tahitians. Since the Polynesians used almost all natural resource utilization, there is very little that remains physically. The plant matter has long decayed. The subtropical climate with high temperatures, salt spray in the air, sulfuric acid from the volcanoes, other environmental factors, tend to make human remains disintegrate. There is no sedimentary soil, so bone, skin, hair are not preserved. The Hawaiians also used open air "burials", very similar to North American Indians.
Also, the Menehune legend is only for Kauai. The possibility that the Menehune legend has some basis in fact is the recent discovery of Homo floresiensis in Indonesia. There is still a lot of controversy whether this was another human species or just a group of pygmy types that went extinct. The main thing that stands out about Hawaiian legends is that as time goes on, science starts finding possible correlations. Also, an archaeologist commented recently that prehistoric peoples were traveling much further and wider than established western conventional science had thought. There is a really wonderful story of migration developing but the findings are raising a lot of "why" questions relating to climate change, volcanic actiivty, disease and possibly human aggression that caused people to move from where they were to someplace else. The finding that the Beringians (those peoples that crossed the Bering sea from Asia to North America) stopped migrating across the ice sheet for 10,000 years, before some finally left and arrived in North America about 15,000 years ago.
"Aloha also means goodbye. Aloha!"
