Ahead of its time
A chance discovery in New Zealand has challenged the country’s recorded history.
One October afternoon, a young New Zealander, Sam Tobin, called his dogs and went for a walk down to the nearby Ruamahanga River. Having been very high for days, the river had at last fallen, and Tobin was eager to see what changes the floods had brought. The family farm borders the river, and a four-metre-high flood bank testifies to its natural tendency to flood.
Tobin stepped out onto a broad shoulder of river sand, where he noticed what he initially took to be a whitish rock, lit by the sun. Then, getting closer, he realised it was a bone. Such a thing was not uncommon in these parts—he had often come across bone fragments, or even whole skeletons, of cows and sheep. But as he scraped aside the stones, he realised it was a human bone, something quite new in his experience. As he picked it up, he saw it was a skull, discoloured with age.
Tobin replaced the skull and hurried home to tell his mother what the river had delivered to their doorstep. It would prove to be a spectacular find, setting in motion an investigation by some of the country's most respected specialists, and ultimately challenging our most firmly held assertions about the human settlement of New Zealand.
The police were immediately called, but despite a thorough search could find nothing that might shed light on the identity of the Ruamahanga skull, or the circumstances of its sudden appearance. The skull was then taken north to be examined by forensic pathologist Dr Ferris, at Auckland Hospital. Despite being hampered by its damaged and incomplete condition—the jawbone and lower left portion of the cranium were missing—Dr Ferris determined that the skull was that of a female. He then consulted with a colleague, Dr Koelmeyer, who believed that the deterioration of the bone placed the time of death ‘before living memory’ and, most significantly as it would turn out, the skull appeared to be European in origin.
Wellington-based forensic anthropologist Dr Watt also examined the skull, and suggested it belonged to a 40–45-year-old. He believed that it could be the remains of an old farm burial, but was not certain, and proposed the use of radiocarbon dating to make sure it wasn't a recent death. As a result, the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences (GNS) in Lower Hutt was contacted and provided with a sample of bone that had originated in the top of the skull. In a little over three weeks the seemingly astonishing results from the GNS laboratory came back. Cutting through the bewildering complexity of the scientific analysis was a single line reading: conventional radiocarbon age approximately 296 years. This was staggering, for the skull was about 200 years older than Dr Koelmeyer had believed.
Of course, a skull of this age wasn't particularly unusual in New Zealand. The Maori people have been living in the country for at least 800 years and scientists frequently come across human remains of considerable age. The fascinating question, however, was how a skull of this race, let alone this gender, had reached these remote islands in the South Pacific at such a time, long before the arrival of the explorer Captain Cook in 1769, and perhaps even before the very first European landfall—the fleeting visit of the Dutch explorer Tasman in 1642—neither of whom had women among their crews.
The first known European women in the Pacific came with a doomed colonising venture which sailed from Peru in 1595 under the command of Spanish captain Mendana. However, it is unlikely the Ruamahanga skull originated from this expedition because no evidence of Mendana's ships has ever been found in New Zealand, while a team of archaeologists working in the Solomon Islands in 1970 did discover the remains of European vessels dating from the 16th century.
Two centuries were to pass before the first recorded European females arrived in New Zealand, both having escaped from prison in Australia. Kathleen Hagerty and Charlotte Edgar are known to have reached the country in 1806. How then do we account for the Ruamahanga skull, which appears to be about 100 years older than that? It is impossible to say with certainty, but the most likely explanation is that a Spanish or Portuguese trading ship was washed onto these wild shores as a result of a shipwreck and a woman got ashore. Implausible, perhaps, but the Ruamahanga skull, today resting in the Wellington Museum, could be the kind of concrete evidence that demands such a drastic re-evaluation of history.
Coral reefs
A Coral reefs are found in shallow waters throughout the tropical world, and dominate the coastlines of many countries in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. It has been estimated that over half a billion people live within 100km of coral reef, with over 200 million living near reefs in South-east Asia and nearly 100 million living near reefs in the Indian Ocean (Bryant et al., 1998). While these figures are often quoted in the literature, it is not known exactly how many people depend on reefs, or what their level of dependence is. We do know, however, that there is a wide diversity of stakeholders.
B National and international interest in coral reefs is growing, for example as a focus for research studies by marine biologists; reefs are also increasingly seen as part of a national heritage, as a dumping ground for waste or a source of pleasure for tourists. Many of the people who live in adjacent coastal areas are, however, economically dependent on the reefs. Some of these local inhabitants are able to develop strategies that make full-time, regular use of the reef and its resources. Others can use the reef as a crucial safety net in difficult times. Still others use the reef as a resource that they tap into at certain times of the year, when they cannot earn a living from other resources. For these groups, coral reefs provide a complex range of benefits.
C The reefs are formed from the skeletons of minute sea creatures, and provide cover for a wide variety of plants and animals. Raw materials include seasonally stable supplies of food, building materials and medicines. As well as an immediate resource, these can also act as a medium of exchange, or a source of income and status. In addition, reefs often give rise to islands that provide habitats for people and lenses of fresh water for drinking and agriculture. They also provide a defence for coastal villages from storms and wave action, and protect lagoons and other productive areas, such as sea grasses and mangroves, which, in turn, provide a reserve of food in all climatic conditions. Furthermore, the physical structure of the reef dictates that many activities are done communally, and this means that work on the reefs can be socially unifying.
D Reefs offer multiple opportunities for direct exploitation by people with many different skills, as well as access to a wide range of different markets, including high-value export outlets. The structural and species diversity of the reef prohibits large-scale, industrial production, and favours small-scale production, thus preserving opportunities for those with few financial or physical resources. Furthermore, the fact that many reef resources are collectively owned means that people who are displaced from other sectors are able to share in them, especially in times of emergency, although the high degree of skill required to fully understand the reef limits the uptake of certain activities which require more complex harvesting strategies.
E For poor coastal households, particularly female-headed households and vulnerable groups such as the elderly, shallow coral-reef resources are often their principal source of subsistence and income. Unlike many other types of fishery, where women are excluded from working, coral reefs offer opportunities for women and the elderly because reef products can be collected on foot. This has significant benefits in empowering women in the household, and different reef-based occupations between men and women spread household risk. However, the ability of coral reefs to continue to provide benefits to the poor is now changing. Throughout the world the capacity of coral reefs to buffer risks and provide livelihood stability is eroding as a result of the diminishing availability of resources. This change is driven by a complex web of direct and indirect factors, over which the coastal poor have only a limited degree of control.
F One of the principal factors responsible for declining reef benefits is reef degradation: coral reef ecosystems are extremely sensitive to change, and easily suffer from disturbance. As coastal areas become ever more populated, increasing numbers of reef stakeholders compete for access to reef benefits. This situation has led to increasing pressure on reef resources, typically resulting in over-harvesting and reef decline. In addition, lucrative markets for reef species often drive unsustainable and destructive extraction regimes. The reefs are also degraded by coastal and inland developments and the pollution these produce, as well as by the natural impacts of storms and predator outbreaks. However, perhaps the most significant large-scale cause of reef decline in the longer term is climate change, which threatens to damage large areas of reef worldwide.
G For the poor, these changes have resulted in an increasing reliance on reefs, as larger coastal populations, widespread development, and increasing global-market forces overwhelm and degrade alternative resources such as farmland. However, in many cases coastal tourism developments, external markets and well-meaning efforts to halt reef decline have excluded them from access to reef benefits too. In these cases, livelihoods have often become criminalised by legislation, increasing the burden of risk and transaction costs on the poor, who typically have few other alternatives.
Conscious and Unconscious Thought
Great scientists and artists have long known about the unconscious mind. The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, argued that most of our real motivation lies below conscious awareness and that we require the services of a psychoanalyst to explain ourselves to ourselves. Even those celebrated scientists who believe that Freud exaggerated the importance of the unconscious argue that it is a part of our minds which we should learn to control and take advantage of.
The great mathematician Alfred North Whitehead seemed to be a supporter of unconscious mental processing when he said: ‘It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case.’ What Whitehead meant by this is that some of the greatest breakthroughs in creativity occur when a problem is consciously shelved for a while—‘don't think about it, just sleep on it’—after which the unconscious mind offers a solution. This is a process which psychoanalysts call ‘incubation’.
Now the latest psychological research confirms that we can all incubate a problem to our own advantage. Ap Dijksterhuis, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, has recently published a series of experiments in which students were presented with complex everyday problems to solve. In one experiment they were given the opportunity to think carefully about a decision; in another experiment they were distracted by an irrelevant task whilst making a decision. The surprising result, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was that ‘unconscious’ thinkers made the better decisions.
Timothy Wilson and colleagues from the University of Virginia's psychology department conducted another experiment. Participants were presented with five posters and asked to choose one to take home. A little later, they were telephoned and asked how satisfied they were with their choice—a measure of whether they had made the right decision from a subjective point of view. Some participants had picked their poster straight away, whereas others were asked to analyse carefully the pros and cons of each poster. It turned out that people who had analysed were less satisfied with their choice than people who had not applied logic. Paradoxically, it seems that those who had consciously weighed up the various attributes had made relatively poor decisions.
The conclusion that has to be drawn from current research suggests the somewhat counter-intuitive idea that the more complex a problem is, the less likely it becomes that conscious thought can contribute much. If a dilemma is particularly difficult, a lot of information has to be taken into account and it appears that conscious thought is not good at this. The message is that when it comes to intricate problems with many variables, you should let the unconscious deal with it.
Using dreaming is one way of doing this. Dreams are the part of sleep most strongly correlated with rapid eye movement (REM) and have been associated with enhanced creativity and novel solutions. The latest research suggests that, if you want to enhance unconscious problem-solving, you should try to think about your problems immediately after dreaming. In a recent experiment, psychiatrist Matthew Walker and colleagues from the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at Harvard Medical School woke up half of their experimental subjects immediately after REM sleep, and the other half just after sleep with no dreams, and then asked them to solve crossword puzzles. REM awakenings provided a 32 per cent advantage in the number of puzzles solved, compared with non-REM awakenings.
But you don't have to be asleep to use the unconscious mind when you are not thinking of anything in particular, which is why daydreams are so useful in the quest for creativity. Daniel Goleman, the famous psychologist who proposed the theory of ‘emotional intelligence’, urges us to be more aware of, and discount, a key obstacle that the conscious mind imposes on the unconscious: that of self-censorship. This is the voice that whispers to you, ‘they'll think I'm foolish’ or ‘that will never work’, keeping you imprisoned within the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable. Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard University, suggests that we free ourselves from the straitjacket of always doing things the same way. In seeking to go beyond the routine and conventional, you will gain confidence in trusting your unconscious, he says.