Reading — 2026 Jan–Apr Recall Set 29

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 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 re-evaluation of history.

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was a carnivorous marsupial (a meat-eating mammal which carries its young in a pouch). It was given the name ‘tiger’ because it had striped fur, and because it was ferocious. Between 24 million and 15 million years ago, many types of thylacine roamed across Australia, their powerful jaws playing a role in maintaining a balance in the ecosystems of their day. Some species were fox-sized, while others were barely the size of kittens. But when a period of climate change cooled Australia about 12 million years ago, the numbers of these ancient thylacines began to decline. By about 3 million years ago, only one species was left. About 4,000 years ago, these vanished completely from the Australian mainland, so that Tasmania, a large island to the south of Australia, became the last remaining place where thylacines existed. They ruled the island’s animal life unchallenged until Europeans—with sheep, dogs and a great indifference to native flora and fauna—seem to have brought about their extinction. In 1936, the last captive Tasmanian tiger died in Hobart Zoo. Since then, many expeditions have searched for tigers in the Tasmanian bush, but no definitive evidence has been found. Despite this, there are many who keep searching. In 1981, Dutch-born zoologist Hans Naarding was in Tasmania conducting a survey of Latham’s snipe, a species of endangered bird. One night, he saw an animal in the light from the searchlight mounted on his vehicle. He described it as about the size of a large dog, but with slightly sloping hindquarters and a fairly thick tail continuing straight on from its backbone. He said that it had 12 distinct stripes on its back, running down to the point where the tail began. He reported the sighting to the Director of Tasmania’s National Parks. “When the news broke,” said Naarding, “I was besieged by television crews, including four or five from Japan, and others from the United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand and South America.” Government and private search parties combed the region, but no further sightings were made. The tiger, as always, had escaped to its lair—a place that many insist exists only in the imagination. Others disagree: there have been more than 4,000 claimed sightings of the animal since it supposedly died out, and the average number of claims reported to the authorities each year is now 150. So is it out there? Even experts differ in opinion. Randolph Rose, Associate Professor of Zoology at the University of Tasmania, says that he once dreamed of seeing a thylacine, but is now convinced that his dream will go unfulfilled. The consensus among conservationists is that any animal with a population base of less than 1,000 is headed for extinction within 60 years. “Sixty years ago,” he says, “there was only one thylacine that we know of, and that was in Hobart Zoo. Take it from me, the tiger is gone.” But Dr David Pemberton, curator of zoology at the Tasmanian Museum, states that, despite scientific thinking that a relatively large population is required to sustain a species, “the Florida panther is down to a dozen or so animals, and, while it does have some inbreeding problems, it’s still ticking along! After all, animals can be notoriously elusive. The strange fish known as the coelacanth, with its ‘proto legs,’ was thought to have died out with the dinosaurs 700 million years ago, until a specimen was dragged to the surface in a shark net off the coast of South Africa in 1938.” Wildlife biologist Nick Mooney has the unenviable task of investigating all so-called sightings of the tiger. It was Mooney who was first consulted in late February 2005 about the authenticity of new digital photographic images of a thylacine allegedly taken by a tourist. “On face value,” Mooney says, “this particular account of a sighting and the photographs submitted as proof amount to one of the most convincing cases for the species’ survival that I have seen.” Many other ‘sightings’ have been hoaxes, and many sincere seekers are victims of obsession. “It is a blind optimism that something is, rather than cynicism that something isn’t,” Mooney says. “If something crosses the road, it’s not a case of ‘I wonder what that was?’ Rather, it is a case of ‘That’s a thylacine!’” However, Mooney treats all sightings at face value. “I never try to embarrass people,” he says, “but the fact that I don’t pack the car immediately after they telephone can often be taken as ridicule. Obsessive characters get angry that someone in my position is not out there when they think the thylacine is there.” Hans Naarding, whose sighting of a striped animal two decades ago was the highlight of a lifetime of animal spotting, remains puzzled by the time and money people waste on tiger searches. He says resources would be better applied to saving another endangered animal, the Tasmanian devil, and helping declining migratory bird populations. Could the thylacine still be out there? “Sure,” Naarding says. “I know the vast south-west wilderness of Tasmania well. They could survive … [But] if this is the case, it will not be long before they do disappear completely.” Naarding believes that any discovery of surviving thylacines would be “rather pointless.” “How do you bring a species back from extinction?” he asks. “What could you do with it? If there are thylacines out there, they are better off right where they are.”

Seymour Papert looks at the work of the pioneering Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget, who spent much of his professional life listening to children, watching children, and poring over reports of researchers around the world who were doing the same. He found, to put it most succinctly, that children don't think like grown-ups. After thousands of interactions with young people often barely old enough to talk, Piaget began to suspect that behind their cute and seemingly irrational utterances were thought processes that had their own kind of order and their own special logic. Einstein called it a discovery 'so simple that only a genius could have thought of it.' Although not an educational reformer, Piaget championed a way of thinking about children that provided the foundation for today's education-reform movements. It was a shift comparable to the way modern anthropology displaced stories of primitive tribes being 'noble savages' and 'cannibals'. One might say that Piaget was the first to take children's thinking seriously. He has been revered by generations of teachers inspired by the belief that children are not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge (as traditional pedagogical theory had it) but active builders of knowledge — little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own hypotheses about the world. And though he may not be as famous as Sigmund Freud or even B F Skinner, his influence on psychology may be longer lasting. In 1920, while doing research in a child-psychology laboratory in Paris, Piaget noticed that children of the same age made similar errors on intelligence tests. Fascinated by their reasoning processes, he began to suspect that the key to human knowledge might be discovered by observing how the child's mind develops. On his return to Switzerland he began watching children play, scrupulously recording their words and actions as their minds raced to find reasons for why things are the way they are. In one of his most famous experiments, Piaget asked children, 'What makes the wind?'. A typical dialogue would be: Piaget: What makes the wind? Julia: The trees. Piaget: How do you know? Julia: I saw them waving their arms. Piaget: How does that make the wind? Julia: (waving her hand in front of his face): Like this. Only they are bigger. And there are lots of trees. Piaget recognized that five-year-old Julia's beliefs, while not correct by any adult criterion, are not 'incorrect' either. They are entirely sensible and coherent within the framework of the child's way of knowing. Classifying them as 'true' or 'false' misses the point and shows a lack of respect for the child. What Piaget was after was a theory that the wind dialogue demonstrates coherence, ingenuity and the practice of a kind of explanatory principle (in this case by referring to body actions) that stands young children in very good stead when they don't know enough or don't have enough skill to handle the kind of explanation that grown-ups prefer. Piaget was not an educator and never laid down rules about how to intervene in such situations. But his work strongly suggests that the automatic reaction of putting the child right may well be counter-productive. If their theories are always greeted by 'Nice try, but this is how it really is...', they might give up after a while on making theories. As Piaget put it, 'children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them something too quickly, we keep them from inventing it themselves.' Disciples of Piaget have a tolerance for — indeed a fascination with — children's primitive laws of physics: that things disappear when they are out of sight; that the moon and the sun follow you around; that big things float and small things sink. Einstein was intrigued by Piaget's findings, especially by the idea that seven-year-olds insist that going faster can take more time — perhaps because this, like Einstein's own theories of relativity, runs so contrary to common sense. Although every teacher in training still memorises Piaget's successive stages of childhood development, the greater part of Piaget's work is less well known, perhaps because schools of education regard it as 'too deep' for teachers. Piaget never thought of himself as a child psychologist. His real interest was epistemology — the theory of knowledge — which, like physics, was considered a branch of philosophy until Piaget came along and made it a science. Through epistemology, Piaget explored multiple ways of knowing. He acknowledged them and examined them non-judgementally, yet with a philosopher's analytic rigour. Since Piaget, the territory has been widely colonised by those who write about women's ways of knowing, Afrocentric ways of knowing, even the computer's ways of knowing. Indeed, artificial intelligence and the information-processing model of the mind owe more to Piaget than its proponents may realise. The core of Piaget is his belief that looking carefully at how knowledge develops in children will elucidate the nature of knowledge in general. Whether this has in fact led to deeper understanding remains, like everything about Piaget, controversial. In the past decade, Piaget has been vigorously challenged by the current fashion of viewing knowledge as an intrinsic property of the brain. Ingenious experiments have demonstrated that newborn infants already have some of the knowledge that Piaget believed children constructed. But for those, like me, who still see Piaget as the giant in the field of cognitive theory, the difference between what the baby brings and what the adult has is so immense that the new discoveries do not significantly reduce the gap, but only increase the mystery.