We have discussed the American and Australian Neo- Europes topically – weeds, then animals and germs – in order to tease out evidence of the ecological factors underlying the success of European colonies there, but we have not tried to reweave the history of, say, the pampa into a narrative. The stories of all the continental Neo-Europes are too long and complicated to tell within the limitations of this book. Therefore, we turn to New Zealand, insular and comparatively small, whose history is the briefest and most fully documented among all the Neo-Europes. New Zealand is a palimpsest written on by only a few people, and only recently. It would be better for our purposes if New Zealand's indigenes had been Paleolithic or New World Neolithic when the marinheiros first came – purely non-Old World Neolithic, to be clear about it, like those of all the other Neo-Europes. They were not, but they were nearly so, because the long migrations of their Asian and Polynesian ancestors across the Pacific had stripped them of all but a few Neolithic elements, as we shall see later. They almost fit our needs perfectly, and whatever difficulties the said few elements may make for us are compensated for by the fact that the Europeans came to New Zealand so late that they made their first and most important additions to its biota while under the perceptive scrutiny of scientists and scientifically minded men of the generations of Cuvier and Darwin.

New Zealand calved off Australia 80 to 100 million years ago and has been in splendid isolation ever since.