Based on the writing of Percy Smith and Elsdon Best from the late 19th century, theories grew up that the Māori had displaced a more primitive pre-Māori population of Moriori (sometimes described as a small-statured, dark-skinned race of possible Melanesian origin), in mainland New Zealand – and that the Chatham Island Moriori were the last remnant of this earlier race. These theories also favoured the supposedly more recent and more technically able Māori. This was used to justify racist stereotyping, colonisation, and conquest by cultural "superiors". and – from the view of European settlers – of undermining the notion of the Māori as the indigenous people of New Zealand, making them just one in a progression of waves of migration and conquest by increasingly more civilised people