Now, in the you get into New Guinea and you get over a mountain, and there's another valley, and there's people. Valley after valley and there are hundreds and hundreds of tribes, all speaking completely different languages nothing to do with each other. The minute you get on the land, and the difficulty of getting from here to there, you get really, really separate languages. But these water people all the same language due to the fact that they can go incredible distances on the sea. In the history of the Maori, who had been to Hawaii, and historically it is know that they made several trips from your friend Jim Michener wrote this beautiful book, HAWAII, they made several trips, times they had been up in the Pacific, and then gone back to New Zealand where their headquarters are now. But those have been hundreds of years apart, before they've gone back to for the moment some kind of headquarters.

In the language of the water people of the Pacific, the Maori, they were thought by the Europeans to be extraordinarily ignorant, because they said they could only count up to two. They were using the binary system long, long ago. And later we get into the computer world and we discover that this is the way to carry on, so that so they have to revise their appraisal of people on this basis-instead of that they couldn't do any better.

Also, all these water people are considered to be a very low order of man, because in the first place, they didn't have any literature. Anybody who had any culture would have a literature. Now the fact is, that if you live on the sea you can't have any library out on a raft. The ocean is going to go all over you, and that's not the way you're going to handle your information printed, on paper and so forth. The Maori have kept their history entirely by memory. And they teach their children the history. And when you come to the land, places where the Maori really exist from time to time they have these long houses, and they have columns of the house, and the ribs of the roof which are originally the ribs of the ship, and each of these columns is an ancestor. And they are able to sing their chants about their ancestors they are able to go back about 100 ancestors, and I doubt if you can go back four or five. They really memorize it and the words in their chants say things they don't even know what they mean, but from father to son they have learned to say it that way. So if you do get any kind of key, you can really open it up. But, it has been, then, carried on verbally, rather than being on printed paper and so forth.

These water people, then, being naked, don't have any pockets, and you're going to have to have some important information. I'm getting to these what they call the long ears, where they split their ears, and ears can open like that, and in here these big discs. Those have turned out to be actually cardinal points of the compass. This was a very extraordinary piece. Nothing could get off your neck and your arms so these various rings and things that they are wearing are various ways in which you do calculations and things. These are the only pockets you have if you are naked on the sea that you're not going to lose very important information. Those things have been looked on as so strange to the European, so this is just a wild, wild people. A very mature, very economic, very efficient kind of information controlling devices.

Now, one of the most interesting things, you get into mathematics and NUMBERS, THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE, a beautiful book by (it will come in a little bit), one of the classics, there is a listing of the names for numbers in different languages of all the different tongues of our earth.

In the world of etymology, the world of the science of words, there are some words that are called "old words," that transcend any ability to trace where they came from or what they're all about. Amongst the "old words," there are very few of them, all the names for the numbers are old words they don't know where they came from, except for one word, the name for five is very often identified for the root we have for "hand." But all the other numbers are absolutely, there is no physical experience that is in anyway connected with the word. They apparently are abstractions words for abstractions. But at any rate, if you see the names for these numbers in different languages all around the world Tobias Dantzig is the author of Numbers, The Language of Science if you look at his list of these names, and I'm going to say to you, one of these two words means "one" and the other means "two" in these different languages, and "I want you to tell me which one means "one" and which one means "two," you'll never have any trouble. You suddenly find out that actually there is quite a great similarity. And it goes running through them. The names for the numbers have very important similarities.

And, the difference between "une", "one," the vowel sounds, "two" and "deux," are a very vowelish one and a very consonant one. And this holds true all through them. So that, one of the things you have to say, which is really very surprising in view of something I gave you about this language covering the whole Pacific, and the names for the numbers all around the world having extraordinary interrelationship. Either there was some kind of angel that flew around the world dropping leaflets of the names for numbers, or they somehow or other got around and the only way they could get around was by water; and the waters go everywhere.

So it looks as though the water people had been getting around the world for a very, very long time before we had any record of it. And the more you know about the water, the more you realize the wealth it really could command, you realize how secretive it was kept it is my own working assumption right now that man has known about this, what I call "the great merry-go-round," where the waters and the airs go like that around here take you into the Atlantic, into the Indian, and into the Pacific that this "merry-go-round," where 90% of humanity out here in the ends of the propeller this is unknown except to a very few people. This would get you anywhere you command the world. This is the command of the world! and people are not there to know about it. It was a key to the integration of the earth. And I told you, Admiral Hand startled the United States Navy by point out that the English had discovered long ago that there is only one ocean. And the center of that ocean is here. And at that time we hadn't gotten to the South Pole at all, so we knew very little about this.

Captain Cook went around it and he saw ice, but he didn't know the continent was there. That was the time when Hawaii gets rediscovered. So this is the, I want you to notice, then, here is New Zealand, it's where the Maori's come to. I've gone to see quite a little of them, and I've been down there to New Zealand three times, and the head of the, an anthropologist who is in the University of Aukland is a Maori, and he is what they call the "Keeper of the Chants." And I said, I wish he would tape recorders had just come, and they'd never had tape recorders before and I thought it would be a good idea if the chants were recorded, instead of having to be memorized the way they are. And he said, "No, that would be very much against our principles to have it done." You could only do the chants for other Maori and he said "You're not a Maori."

And so I got up a little joke and so forth, and I said that I really was a Maori, but I hadn't been back home for a couple hundred thousands years, and In New Zealand, one of the very interesting things, there is an island way down here, do you see? almost to the Antarctic? And there they have a very extraordinary mother-of-pearl. And the Maori have been taught to go down there and get that mother-of-pearl. And in all their houses where they have their ancestors these wooden statues, the eyes of the ancestors must be this particular mother-of-pearl. So I explained to the Maori that the reason that these are the eyes of the ancestors was that the ancestors knew about the merry-go-round of the water. The Maori themselves hadn't really realized it, by this time they had lost track of that fact. But if you were here and you had a ship. If you could stay afloat on a raft and not fall off, you could get around to all these places. And so I said, "A couple of hundred thousands years ago, I got stuck in the Atlantic for all these years, and I just got back, so would he let me make a tape recording but he wouldn't let me do it (Audience laughs).

I'm introducing to you what I am quite convinced about now, which is that the life really began the life began out here on this water, and that it comes into the land. I gave you about that, and about the tribes going, and the colors and so forth.

The anthropologists and the archaeologists have been assuming that life began here in some kind of Garden of Eden around here, and there has been gradually somebody went they went east to China and so forth, and then from China down here to India they said. And all of the assumption has been always that the arts and everything came from China into Southeast Asia was very last.