What you've bypassed ....

The tree pictured below is the twelve year old miro that you would have seen if you had followed the direct route. The specimen you will see at the foot of the incline that you are about to descend is only a year or two old, and not the best of "cover plants" at the moment. so pause to look at the information here, before proceeding on into the Central Pacific.

"Time travel walk" - Stage 4

"Proto Eastern Oceanic" (about 3,200 years ago)

This period marks the arrival of Austronesian speakers at the end of the known world. Up until that time, no human being had gone further east in the Island Pacific than the islands now known as the Solomons. About 1200 BC the Austronesian explorers started sailing towards the terrae inognitae of Vanuatu (the course followed by those who became the ancestors of the Polynesians) and New Caledonia. Further linguistic change took place at this time, but it is difficult to attribute many of the new words to a single hypothetical ancestral language, which is why I have put quotation marks around the proto language name in the heading of this paragraph. Our word representing this period is *milo, inherited in that form by Proto-Polynesian, and therefore reflected in Mäori as miro. As will be clear from the comments on the linked pages about the New Zealand miro (Prumnopitys ferruginea) and its pan-Oceanic counterpart (Thespesia populnea), which is very distant from it botanically, the Miro is one of my favourite trees, and there is good reason to suspect that the early Polynesians and their ancestors were equally fond of its namesake the Thespesia.

The important thing, historically and linguistically, about this period is that it was the time when "Near Oceania" ceased to be the eastern edge of the known world. It also marked the beginning of an age when speakers of what would become a substantial group of Austronesian languages would have no contact for centuries and in fact for millennia with people who spoke other languages unrelated to their own.