The group of stone monuments at Heketa mark this as a possible royal capital on Tonga, with one chief having won power over all the others. The Tongan term for such a high chief is Tu'Oi. By 1200, a so-called Tongan maritime empire had developed. The capital shifted from Heketa to the Mu'a lagoon, where a harbour with wharf facilities was built as a base for the royal fleet of huge, ocean-going canoes. A stone-slab monument at Kanokupolu, in an isolated part of Tonga, might be a sign there was a rival power centre in competition with the royal clan based at Mu'a.

The traditional date for the Maori settlement of Aotearoa (New Zealand) was about 1350, but it is now thought the Polynesian ancestors of the Maoris had arrived in at least small numbers by 700 AD. The home island of the Maoris is not known for certain, but appear to have been the Society Island group or the Marquesas Islands. In any case, the human impact on the islands became noticeable by 1350, for shortly after animal species such as the moa, a family of very large emu-like birds, became extinct. There were a number of different species of moas, the largest standing three metres tall. Moas were not only hunted, but animals introduced by the Maoris, such as dogs and rats, preyed on chicks and eggs. Birds which primarily preyed on the moas, such as Haast's eagle, afterwards became extinct. Among the largest flying bird known, this giant eagle had wing span of up to three metres and talons 75mm long.

The most important use the Aboriginals made of the Australian mulberry, a shrub growing in the mountains, was as a kind of match. The straight sticks made excellent fire-drills. A fire-drill was twirled between the hands with the point pushing down on another flat piece of wood, often the dry flowering stalk of the grass-tree. Within two minutes fire could be produced. The sticks were so highly prized that they were traded from tribe to tribe, from the mountains to the Murray River.

Moa