Since the early 1900s the theory that Polynesians (Māori) were the first ethnic group to settle in New Zealand (first proposed by Captain James Cook) has been dominant among archaeologists and anthropologists. Before that time and until the 1920s, however, a small group of prominent anthropologists proposed that the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands represented a pre-Māori group of people from Melanesia, who once lived across all of New Zealand. While this idea lost favour among academics, it was widely published and incorporated into school textbooks which has extended its life in the popular imagination.