Opinion
Would The Gisborne Herald, the district council and others cease spreading the misinformation of calling that unnecessary structure a “thousand-year bridge”.
The Polynesian people who became Māori arrived in Aotearoa around the years 1250 to 1275, according to the latest research (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2207609119).
This date has been established by careful scientific and multi-disciplinary methods.
Therefore, until the appropriate decade is reached on the calendar, the utterly wasteful footbridge can currently be only the 764-year (or so) bridge.
Inconvenient for the reshaping of history, perhaps — but Māori have not been here for a thousand years.
Roger Handford
