Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

The mysterious Kaimanawa wall

I recently attended an interesting science communicators conference in Dunedin. At coffee, someone told me that often people he met at barbeques held that knowing things (or wanting to find out about things) was bad. It’s a belief you occasionally come across. At school, those who get good marks are derided as girly swots, and academics are often accused of living in ivory towers (sometimes with justification).

His example was of someone (at a barbeque) who told him that thunder kills goose eggs. Being a scientist, he was intrigued and asked for an explanation of how this process might work. It was not forthcoming and it seemed that none was necessary, as she knew from experience that this was so.

Someone commented that this was the tall-poppy syndrome. But that’s not quite it – that’s about building people up only to cut them down. This was about not being open minded, or, taking it a step further, not even being curious about the world. It was about belief.

Science is about humility (though scientists themselves are not always humble): if you don’t know how something works (which is the most likely case scenario) you use systematic methods to see if you can find out. Scientists are often more interested in telling you what they don’t know than what they do.

It seems to me that the goose egg believer is on the road to Roswell or perhaps the Kaimanawa Wall. While thunder probably does not kill goose eggs, just as lights in the sky are probably not aliens, they certainly are intriguing explanations. Maybe that’s what mystics are on about – for some, the world is much more interesting if they choose to believe in grand conspiracy theories.

Alternate views of reality flourish on the web, as seen in the case of the Kaimanawa Wall and the umpteen pre-Māori civilisations in New Zealand. (This phenomena of choosing the outlandish over the logical was recently parodied in a South Park episode.)

Maybe the mystics should lower the cone of silence over the goose nests in thunderstorms?

At work in a radiocarbon-dating laboratory

A woman’s skull, found in Wairarapa in 2004, has been carbon dated as being 296 years old – plus or minus 34 years. Forensic scientists can tell from a skull’s morphology whether or not it was a Māori skull and whether it was a man or a woman, and the skull wasn’t that of a Māori.

This challenges New Zealand history, as there were no white settlers (male or female) here then. The first documented white women (Catherine Hagerty and Charlotte Badger, two escaped convicts from New South Wales) are thought to have arrived in 1806.

If the carbon dates and the forensic interpretation of the skull form are accurate, then a non-Māori woman, probably a European, was alive in Wairarapa around 1678–1746. This was 36–104 years after Abel Tasman sighted New Zealand in 1642 (he never landed) and at least 23 years before Cook’s first voyage in 1769!

So how can this be explained? Again assuming that the carbon dates and forensic interpretation are correct – is it possible that a Dutch (or some other) ship reached New Zealand between Tasman and Cook? The Dutch knew of New Zealand from Tasman, but, although they planned a follow-up voyage in 1643, this never occurred. The arrival of a ship between Tasman and Cook is of course pure speculation.

In terms of the recent carbon dating, it is only one skull and there are assumptions made with any analysis – that is why scientists couch their findings with words like ‘possibly a European female’ and ‘was probably Caucasian’.

Earthquake damage in Napier, 1931

The magnitude 7.9 earthquake in China should give New Zealanders cause for pause. The high death toll was due to the intensely populated nature of that country and it seems, shoddy building practices. How will a New Zealand city fare when such an earthquake strikes?

When a large quake (say magnitude 7.4) next occurs on the Wellington Fault during daylight hours, predictions are in the order of 500 deaths, 4,000 injuries and a $4 billion repair bill. Most earthquake deaths are from building collapse and this is why fatality guesstimates are higher for daytime quakes – people are in or around big high-rise concrete structures or old brick buildings. At night most are at home in generally more flexible wooden buildings. Building owners can face prosecution if they fail to reinforce at-risk buildings, which are recorded on a register.

How to reconcile the risk? It seems that Wellingtonians (like everyone else in the world) have optimistic bias – they believe that negative events are more likely to happen to other people. In Christchurch the risk is less, but an earthquake of over magnitude 7 hitting the city and causing fatalities and damage is a definite possibility. Our recent earthquake history may not be representative of our impending future. We have had big quakes since 1840, but only one in a populated area (Napier in 1931, with 258 people killed).

The biggest shake is likely to come from the Alpine Fault. Big quakes (called ruptures, as the ground is ruptured along the fault) have occurred on this fault in 1717, 1620, 1450, and 1100. It does not mean that we are overdue – just that as time passes from the last big rupture (1717) the probability of the big one occurring rises.

I spent a few weeks as a field assistant to my brother, a geologist, in 2000 around Fox Glacier. He was studying the layers of sediment that creeks had exposed along the Alpine Fault.

I asked, ‘What would happen if it ruptured now?’

‘They wouldn’t have to bury us.’

So what can you do? Well, I’ve bracketed all the heavy furniture to the walls, so at least the bookshelf shouldn’t topple onto the children. When it hits remember to drop, cover and hold – and don’t believe urban legend emails about the ‘triangle of life‘.

Reading the past in rat bones

A team of scientists (Janet Wilmshurst, Atholl Anderson, Thomas Higham, Trevor Worthy) have recently published a paper dating Polynesian settlement of New Zealand at around 1280 AD. They radiocarbon dated 30 Pacific rat bones and over 100 rat-gnawed woody seed cases to reach their conclusion, which agrees with other evidence that New Zealand was first settled around 1250–1300 AD. This new research also confirms the conclusions that we came to in our entry ‘When was New Zealand first settled?‘, published more than three years ago.

However, their findings contradict some 1996 research carried out by Richard Holdaway. He radiocarbon dated rat bones, which, in some cases, gave dates over 1000 years earlier. If these dates were correct, then Pacific rats (and so humans as the rats can only have arrived on canoes), first arrived as early as 200 BC. In this scenario, the humans must have either died or sailed away. Given the latest evidence, this much earlier arrival scenario does not hold much weight anymore, although Holdaway is sticking by the accuracy of his dates. There have been questions about the reliability of rat bones in this research, and it seems probable that there are other reasons for the carbon dates not giving the true age of the bones.

Science relies on empirical methods and repeatable observations to arrive at the truth, and no other researchers have replicated Holdaway’s findings. Given the weight of evidence, the current consensus is that Polynesians first arrived in both the North and South islands of New Zealand, around 1280 AD.

Search and rescue volunteers at work

Israeli Liat Okin was last seen alive on the Routeburn Track on 26 March 2008. The track has since been the scene of an an intensive and prolonged search. After the official police search was called off on 23 April, a private search, led by her brother and search and rescue volunteers, has scoured likely areas where she may have wandered.

A rugged area, it is in the locality of one of New Zealand’s great survival stories. Prospector Alphonse Barrington and his mates survived for months in these mountains in the autumn and winter of 1864. Yet, after nearly six weeks missing, there is little hope that Okin is alive.

Possibly the longest anyone has survived in the New Zealand bush in contemporary times is solo tramper Peter Le Fleming. He went missing on the Heaphy Track on 20 January 1980. Searchers in a helicopter, conducting a last-ditch sweep, spotted his orange groundsheet in the upper Burgoo Stream and then saw him draped over a rock. He was within a few kilometres of Fenella Hut, in the upper Cobb Valley, and had last been seen 29 days earlier.

The case of Liat Okin (assuming that she has come to grief on the track) illustrates a worrying recent trend in tramping fatalities – tourists are increasingly represented. People get into trouble all the time in the bush. But if you go alone without a distress beacon and get into trouble there is no way to signal where you are and that you need help. Going solo is a gamble.