DNA from the kiwi feathers of cloaks made by Maori -- some of them hundreds of years old -- has turned up clues not only to the origin and creation of the cloaks, but a possible trade in feathers before European settlement.
Evolutionary geneticist David Lambert, of Australia's Griffith University, led
a team of researchers which sampled the DNA of 849 kiwi feathers in 109 cloaks housed in museums in New Zealand and Britain, and mapped the results against the present distribution of the nation's five species of kiwi.
Nearly 99 percent of the feathers came from the North Island brown kiwi, but 15 percent of the cloaks were woven partially from kiwi feathers that originated from other birds.
Dr Lambert said a feather ``trade'' may have emerged after the musket wars during the 1800s changed tribal boundaries and caused Maori hunters and traders to look further afield for kiwi feathers.
Maori had already been trading greenstone from the South Island to the North Island for centuries.
The ancient DNA analysis also hints at a potential origin for the tradition of kiwi-feather cloaks, known as ``kahu kiwi'', Dr Lambert told the Nature science journal.
More than a third of the cloaks contained feathers from birds living on the North Island's East Coast, and Dr Lambert said this region could have been start of cloak-making traditions during the 1800s.
One cloak had North Island brown kiwi feathers dotted with feathers from South Island kakapo.
Another kahu kiwi from Te Papa had a chequered border of kaka and kereru feathers which originated from the Hawke's Bay and Bay of Plenty regions.
