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Geo News

The Iron Age menu

Barley and cranberries for breakfast. Spelt and seeds for lunch, with soft cheese and beer. If you were a European salt miner 2700 years ago, that is. Researchers took a close look at salt-cured faeces, preserved for thousands of years in an Austrian salt mine, to identify components of the Iron Age diet. One ancient poo contained the fungal species used to make blue cheese (Penicillium roqueforti) and to ferment beer (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), providing evidence of, perhaps, a cheeseboard and a bevvy. The faecal samples pointed to a carb-rich, plant-based diet: lots of cereals such as barley and spelt, supplemented with occasional broad beans, fruits such as crab apples and cranberries, and seeds such as opium poppy seeds. There was a little consumption of meat from cattle and pigs.
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History

Leap of faith

In WWI, fighter pilots went down with their aircraft. Could a bag of folded silk save them? In 1917, a New Zealander jumped out of a plane to find out.
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Books

Hei Taonga mā ngā Uri Whakatipu: Treasures for the Rising Generation

In December 1918, the politician Āpirana Ngata took time off from revising the Dictionary of the Māori Language to write to the Minister of Internal Affairs. In his letter, Ngata elaborated on a suggestion he had made earlier that day. It was all very well collecting and defining words in a dictionary, he wrote, but that didn’t very well serve a culture that had embedded its wisdom, traditions, and history in the nuances of spoken language rather than in literature. Better to send specialists out in the field to record the songs and oratory of Māori and to undertake “the ‘filming’ of hakas and pois, and of Maori village life, showing ‘tangis’, meetings, life on the cultivations and so on”. There was some urgency in Ngata’s call to preserve tikanga and te reo Māori. The 1896 census revealed that the Māori population had declined to 39,854 people. The First World War, just ended, had taken a further toll, as had the influenza pandemic that was then ravaging the country. Brought back by returning soldiers, influenza had quickly spread. In just two months, more than 2500 Māori died—a death rate eight times that of Pākehā. Among them were many elders, the custodians of much ancestral knowledge. Ngata got his wish. Between 1919 and 1923, the Dominion Museum sent out four ethnological expeditions, nominally led by museum ethnologist Elsdon Best, and including photographer and film-maker James McDonald and sound recordist and musical scholar Johannes Andersen. However, the real drivers behind the project were Ngata and his old Te Aute College schoolmate anthropologist Te Rangihīroa (Peter Buck), who, along with fellow parliamentarian Māui Pōmare and their old mentor James Carroll, were spearheading a Māori cultural reawakening. Inspired by Cambridge University’s 1898 ethnological expedition to the Torres Strait, the Dominion Museum team made use of the latest technologies, including a cinematic camera and a newly imported dictograph that used wax recording cylinders. Their first expedition, in 1919, took advantage of the unprecedented gathering of Māori at the Hui Aroha in Gisborne, held to welcome returning soldiers and to honour the war dead and those struck down by influenza. The second, in April 1920, covered an even larger Māori gathering in Rotorua to welcome Prince Edward, heir to the British throne. The third and fourth spent time with tribal communities along the Whanganui River (1921) and in Tairāwhiti (1923). These ground-breaking ethnographic expeditions were the first in the world to be inspired and guided by indigenous leaders. Hei Taonga mā ngā Uri Whakatipu: Treasures for the Rising Generation is a landmark account of the expeditions compiled by an impressive team of contributing editors, among them James McDonald’s great-granddaughter Dame Anne Salmond. Generously illustrated with McDonald’s photographs, Treasures overflows with detail. There is Andersen struggling to record the intricate arrays of quarter-tones in the Māori songs with musical notation and confessing that they were a revelation: “music of a kind I have never heard before”. The team witnessed fire made using a hika ahi (fire plough), and a demonstration of the cord drill—technology that had long baffled American ethnographers. They heard a canoe landing song, and a lament for a plundered kūmara pit, and learned that along the Whanganui River, the dwelling places of astronomers were marked by pōhutukawa. They filmed whai (string games) and the catching of eels. They listened to Teira Tapunga (Rongowhakaata and Ngāi Tāmanuhiri), a New Zealand Wars veteran and one of the last survivors of the ancient Māori world, reciting old waiata. At one point, a grayling—upokororo to Ngāti Porou—turned up in a weir on the Waiapu River. The freshwater fish had not been seen for 20 years, and the catch caused great excitement. Fresh traps were quickly set and what proved to be the last recorded specimens of the now-extinct fish were caught. Te Rangihīroa was discomfited when the fish were served up for dinner. “It almost seems sacrilege,” said the trained scientist in him. “They ought all be preserved as specimens.” Even the indefatigable McDonald failed to fix the fish on film, or if he did, the nitrate negatives have long since succumbed to the ravages of time. One of the most powerful themes in Treasures is the abiding presence of the past. Of how, in the words of contributor Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou, Clann Dhònnchaidh), photographs and films are far from being dead or lifeless images; they are “constantly in the process of becoming form as things with their own agency and interconnected relations”. They are living taonga, she says, able to connect with the spiritual realm. This is nowhere more apparent than when, in movingly described encounters, descendants come face-to-face with forebears who stood before McDonald’s lens a hundred years earlier. In the book’s prefatory mihi Arapata Hakiwai (Ngāti Ira, Ngāti Porou, Te Aitanga a Hauiti) urges New Zealand institutions not to let the taonga collected by the Dominion Museum expeditions linger as passive artefacts on shelves and in cupboards. Instead, he writes, they should be set free “to be reunited with their descendants to enable language, identity and culture to flourish and grow”. It is a plea increasingly voiced by indigenous peoples the world over.

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Geo News

Tuatara tūpuna

A tiny fossil unearthed in a dusty desert in north-western Argentina provides new clues to the origins of tuatara. The 231-million-year-old skull, measuring just 32 millimetres in length, belonged to Taytalura alcoberi, an ancient member of the scaled reptile family that includes lizards, snakes and tuatara. The skull is an evolutionary puzzle piece: a rare insight into the evolution of scaled reptiles, or lepidosaurs, which diverged from their dinosaur cousins some 260 million years ago. Until now, the early lepidosaurs were represented in the fossil record by just a handful of fragmented specimens from Europe. This specimen is so well preserved in three dimensions that palaeontologists could confidently place it on the tree of life. Taytalura predates the split between the squamates (lizards and snakes) and the sphenodontians—a reptile family with only one living species, the tuatara. Despite being such a distant ancestor, the family resemblance with today’s tuatara is strong. Taytalura has distinctly sphenodontian skull architecture, with anatomical features previously thought to be exclusive to tuatara. The tuatara-type body was the original, with lizards and snakes deviating from this ancestral pattern over time—a finding that could shake up our understanding of reptile evolution. “Taytalura preserves a composition of features that we were not expecting to find in such an early fossil,” says researcher Gabriela Sobral. “It made us question how truly ‘primitive’ certain lizard features are, and it will make scientists reconsider several points in the evolution of this group.”
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Artefact

Gruesome bounty

When the 70 kea beaks slide out of the ancient cloth salt bag onto a table in the Otago Museum, they jingle like a sack full of money. It’s appropriate, because for a century, that’s pretty much what they were. Between 1867 and 1970, anyone could walk into any county clerk’s office in the South Island, dump some severed kea beaks on the desk and walk away with a cash reward. Some hunters handed in a string of kea heads threaded onto a wire like a macabre necklace. The bounty on the kea’s head was due to their reputation as “killer parrots with the taste for flesh”, says Otago Museum natural science curator Emma Burns. The international reporting was sensationalist—the story even reached the New York Times—but there was some truth to it: a few kea were observed killing sheep on Central Otago stations from the 1860s onwards. But the farming and government response was far from proportionate. It’s estimated 150,000 kea were killed: the wholesale massacre of a native bird bankrolled by the New Zealand government. Some farmers baited sheep carcasses with poison. Rabbiters shot kea on the side. Some hunters would break a captured kea’s wing so it would make a fuss and attract the rest of the flock. The smaller size and reduced wear and tear on many of the beaks in the museum’s collection suggests they belonged to juvenile birds. “Which makes sense, because they’re a bit more gregarious and curious,” says Burns. It wasn’t until 1986 that kea were fully protected by law. “It’s amazing to think that in our lifetime they were still considered a pest.” Across the colonised world, wherever sheep have been introduced, “there has often been a local species that was vilified as sheep-killers”, she says. In Tasmania, it was the thylacine. In the Falkland Islands, it was the Falkland Islands wolf. Both are now extinct. Kea almost went the same way—but not quite. Today, there are between 3000 and 7000 left, and the government is still spending money on kea: this time, to save them.
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Books

Te Kupenga: 101 stories of Aotearoa from the Turnbull

Pistons, spark plugs, and small rocks are not objects that you would expect to find in the holdings of a prestigious national library. But the Alexander Turnbull Library, one of New Zealand’s greatest—and earliest—treasuries of culture is far from ordinary. Its varied collections reflect the idiosyncrasies of its namesake benefactor, who donated the fruits of a lifetime of hoarding to the grateful nation in 1918. Turnbull once declared: “Anything whatever relating to this Colony… on its history, flora, fauna, geology and inhabitants, will be fish for my net.” And that principle has steered the collection ever since. Hence the pistons (hand-cast by Burt Munro for his famous racing Indian and Velocette motorcycles), the spark plug (from the first plane to cross the Cook Strait), and, whimsically, the rock (which punctured the tyre of the first motor vehicle to drive to Aoraki Mount Cook). But the heart of the Turnbull is its print material—Turnbull amassed some 55,000 books and that number has now swollen to more than 300,000. The library also holds 82,000 maps and 1,600,000 photographs, along with a comprehensive newspaper archive and manuscript collection and much more (though Turnbull’s ethnographic collection found its way to Te Papa). Te Kupenga is an attractively illustrated selection of personal highlights, as chosen and introduced by library staff. The ‘101’ refers to the number of years since the Turnbull first opened, but also hints at the book’s introductory nature. There are the expected cultural gems, of course, including a notebook page filled with New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield’s outrageously indecipherable handwriting—and, yes, the Turnbull also has her 1920s Corona 3 typewriter (given to her by husband John Middleton Murray, perhaps to spare the eyesight of editors and correspondents). The Turnbull also has her cape, a suitcase, a Japanese fan, a coral necklace, and a folding book stand. Of course it does. Some items speak directly to our own times. A photograph, taken in the late 1930s by Thelma Kent, of Finnish champion ice skater Waino Sarelius practicing on a frozen South Island lake documents the then-new vogue for outdoor recreation. But it also reminds us of our ongoing climate emergencies—natural ice-skating rinks have become a thing of history. Te Kupenga also contains windows into what is a parallel cultural universe. Take, for example, the scrap of paper bearing 80 Chinese characters printed in green ink, 20 of which have been marked with a cross. It is a used Chinese lottery ticket dating from the 1920s. Known as pakapoo tickets, their popularity extended beyond the Chinese community and drew thousands of regulars to Haining Street in Wellington’s Chinatown. Māori are well represented. There is for example the intricate pencil drawing, almost life size, of the moko of Rēnata Kawepō Tama-ki-Hikurangi (Ngāti Te Upokoiri, Ngāti Kahungunu) drawn by Kawepō himself. A rangitira and a Christian missionary, Kawepō was an extraordinary man. We learn that in 1869 his right eye was gouged out by the widow of a chief who had been killed in a battle that Kawepō had been involved in. Deciding that her vengeance was just, he protected her, and she later became his wife. Several of the texts are presented in te reo without translation, which will be a barrier to some readers and a spur to language acquisition for others. More frustrating is the glib note, relating to John Saxton’s 1842 sketch of a toroa/albatross, that “in country after country where indigenous people had long lived in coexistence with their bird populations, new arrivals—visitors and colonists alike—plundered the exotic creatures”. Science disagrees with the first part. A 2013 study, drawing on the fossil records of 41 Pacific islands, suggested that as many as 1300 bird species may have become extinct as a result of overhunting and deforestation by pre-European settlers. Quibbles aside, Te Kupenga is a superb introduction to the Alexander Turnbull Library and an open invitation to engage more directly with its rich and evolving collections.
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Geo News

The moa diet

In the summer of 2015, in a remote valley of Fiordland National Park, two scientists discover fossil poo fragments underneath a limestone overhang. Analysis suggests the fragments are from moa and are thousands of years old, so a team returns—three years later—to excavate. What they find is a rich deposit of moa poo—called coprolites—that accumulated over a period of two millennia, probably between 6800 and 4600 years ago. But what use is old poo? Scientists can carefully examine the pollen, seeds, DNA and plant microfossils in coprolites to determine what kind of food fuelled the nine moa species that roamed the country. The team determined that these nuggets of dietary information were from little bush moa (Anomalopteryx didiformis), a mid-sized species between 50 and 90 centimetres tall and weighing 26 to 64 kilograms that inhabited lowland forests. This made it an exciting find. “Until now, only five little bush moa coprolites have previously been identified, all from Central Otago,” says lead researcher Jamie Wood from Manaaki Whenua–Landcare Research. The poo contained very few seeds, suggesting that little bush moa were not important seed dispersers. But the fossils were rich in ground-fern spores and fronds, suggesting that fern foliage played an important role in this species’ diet, and that the moa spread the plants around. Because the coprolites were deposited over a period of 2000 years, the researchers were able to trace how the plant matter contained within changed over time. This revealed a shift in the prevailing vegetation from conifers such as miro, mataī and tōtara to the silver beech trees that dominate today.
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Features

Evicted from Aotearoa

Nearly 50 years on from the systemic and racially targeted deportations of Pasifika New Zealanders, the scars and shame of this experience linger—as the government prepares to formally apologise for its actions of the past.
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Geo News

The mystery kiwi

The first kiwi sent from New Zealand to Europe arrived in England around 1812. Its insides had been removed, its skin and feathers preserved, and its little body flattened into an un-lifelike shape. It was a tokoeka/South Island brown kiwi, and it became the holotype of the species, the individual animal associated with the scientific name given to it in 1813, Apteryx australis. Where exactly the specimen came from was a mystery. Naturalists assumed it was collected in Fiordland’s Dusky Sound. Now, cutting-edge ancient-DNA techniques have revealed its true origins—which means new scientific names will need to be found for three other groups of tokoeka. In 2017, Canterbury Museum curators Paul Scofield and Vanesa De Pietri visited the holotype at the World Museum Liverpool, where they were given a sample of the bird’s skin the size of a fingernail clipping. Back in New Zealand, Scofield and colleagues mapped the kiwi’s mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, then compared the sequences with the genomes of living kiwi. The results showed the specimen was genetically distinct from the Fiordland tokoeka, meaning it wasn’t from Fiordland at all. Instead, it was from the world’s southernmost kiwi population, on Rakiura/Stewart Island. Researchers checked their finding against the historical record, and it stacked up. When the kiwi specimen was collected in 1811, Fiordland seal populations had been cleaned out, and the few sealing gangs remaining had moved to the northern side of Foveaux Strait. Using shipping data from early newspapers, Scofield’s team established that just one vessel, the Sydney Cove, was sealing near South Cape on Rakiura at the time. One of those sealers probably caught the kiwi. When the sealing crew landed in Sydney, they sold seal and kiwi skins to Andrew Barclay, the captain of a convict ship and former privateer (during the Napoleonic Wars, he obtained a licence from the British monarchy to board and sink French ships). Barclay sailed to China, where the seal skins would be made into leather for top hats, then continued to London. The kiwi specimen ended up in the private collection of George Shaw, keeper of zoology at the British Museum, who bestowed its scientific name. Now that we know the kiwi came from Rakiura, according to the rules of taxonomy, the Rakiura population must now take the Apteryx australis name—an appropriate one, as australis means southern. Research continues into whether the genetically distinct populations of tokoeka on Rakiura and in southern Fiordland, northern Fiordland and Haast are separate species or subspecies. Once that’s been figured out, the three other groups will need new scientific names—an opportunity to use Māori terms for these taonga.
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Geo News

New origin story for seals

The soft mudstone cliffs of south Taranaki hold clues to creatures past. Fossil collectors unearthed seven specimens of an unknown species here, including a complete skull. Close analysis revealed this ancient animal was a monk seal—now extinct, but new to science. The seal would have been a bit bigger than a sea-lion, reaching two and a half metres in length and weighing 200 to 250 kilograms, and would have frequented the waters around New Zealand some three million years ago. Researchers gave it a pop culture-inspired name: Eomonachus belegaerensis, after the largest ocean, Belegaer, in JRR Tolkien’s mythical world of Middle-earth. The new seal has already rewritten history. Before now, monk seal fossils had been found only in the northern hemisphere, and the two living monk seal species are found in Hawaii and the Mediterranean. Monk seals are part of a sub-family called Monachinae, which also includes elephant seals and Antarctic seals. There are several stories explaining seal evolution. The prevailing one goes that Monachinae evolved in the North Atlantic and travelled south. But with the discovery of a South Pacific monk seal, the scales tipped in favour of a different origin story. Perhaps all three types of Monachinae evolved in a “southern cradle”, and then some of the monk seals headed north. Felix Marx, curator of marine mammals at Te Papa, is anticipating more finds. “New Zealand is incredibly rich in fossils, and so far we have barely scratched the surface,” he says. “Who knows what else is out there?”
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Features

A tale of two shipwrecks

Life in the subantarctic is difficult enough for those who arrive prepared. In 1864, castaways from two storm-wrecked ships, the Grafton and the Invercauld, landed on opposite ends of Auckland Island. Survival became a daily challenge. Each group tackled it differently: one fell to violence and cannibalism, while the other became a close-knit brotherhood. Were the wildly different fates of men of the Grafton and the Invercauld down to luck—or leadership?

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