Maori origins

The Maori were the first people to inhabit New Zealand. They are Polynesian. Polynesia means Many Islands, and applies to most of the islands of the Pacific Ocean, all but one of which were inhabited by the Polynesian peoples (an Australoid-Mongoloid hybrid) before the arrival of Europeans.
Australoid and Mongolid are two of the four major ethnic groups - the others being Caucasoid and Negroid (the Bushmen of southern Africa do not belong to any of these groups). Australoid originated in South East Asia and migrated into Australia during the Ice Age, when glaciers mounted up across Eurasia and North America caused the world's sea levels to drop by 300 metres, joining Siberia to Alaska (through which the ancestors of Native Americans wandered), and creating a sub-continent of Malaysia/Indonesia which was separated from Australia/Papua New Guinea only by the narrowest of straits. These man was able to cross, with his dog (ancestor of the dingo), to hunt the innumerable species of marsupial abundant in what were, in the Ice Age, the teeming grasslands of Australasia.
Mongoloid pressed down into South East Asia, there hybridising with Australoid and producing a variety of offshoots. Among the first were the ancestors of the Melanesian. Predominantly Australoid, they migrated out into the islands of the South West Pacific. It seems they never progressed beyond Fiji, an archipelago which obviously satisfied their needs.
They were followed several thousand years ago by the ancestors of the Polynesians. These were a fairly even Mongoloid-Australoid hybrid, using Mongoloid agricultural techniques and speaking an Austronesian language.
Australoid-Mongoloid also migrated west, and were the first inhabitants of Madagascar.
Those who headed east appear to have bypassed Fiji and settled the neighbouring islands of Samoa and Tonga around the two thousand years ago.
Within 300 years the Polynesians had progressed as far as the Tahitian archipelago. Here they developed a highly-stratified, religious society. They pioneered the giant double-hulled canoes, which could carry scores of men hundreds of kilometres a day.
They later settled Hawaii over 2000kms to the North (there remains a point in Hawaii named, in Polynesian, the Path to Bora Bora, northermost island of the Tahitian archipelago), Rarotonga (the Cook Islands) in the West and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the East. It is possible they reached South America, as they were in possession of American crops in pre-European times and called some of them by similar names to the American natives (compare American 'cumer' to Polynesian 'Kumera' for the sweet potato). Contact with South America might also help to explain some of the strange myths of Rapa Nui, which refer to battles between Long Ears and Short Ears, and whose stone statues are reminiscent of the continent.
Around the eighth or ninth centuries the people of the Tahitian archipelago also managed to find New Zealand, a 4000km journey to the south-west.
According to popular legend, Kupe was the captain and Rangi was the high priest aboard the first canoe to reach New Zealand's shores. It is believed the arrivals spied the snow-capped peaks of the mountains , thought they were looking at clouds and thus named the islands Aotearoa, Land of the Long White Cloud. The South Island was later named Te Wai Pounamu, the Big Canoe, and the North Island Te Ika a Maui, the Fish of Maui.
These were the first Maori. Another people, ethnically akin to the Maori but known as the Moriori, remain something of a mystery. It was at one time thought they were there first, but today a view more popularly held is that they were among the first arrivals and broke away from the others.
New Zealand, being two large islands and a group of small ones, had no native animals. There was, however, easily the largest bird in the world, the Moa, which grew up to 3m tall (10ft). This provided an important source of nutrition for the Maori, but was eventually hunted into extinction, just a century or so before Dutchman Abel Tasman became the first European to spy New Zealand.