Reading — 2026 Jan–Apr Recall Set 6

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.

Most species use camouflage to some extent. If they are convincing, they survive to pass their genes on to future generations. After generations of natural selection, animals can develop astonishingly complex camouflage techniques, manipulating shape, colour and movement. ‘The principle of camouflage is to make it economically unviable for a predator to pursue a particular species of prey,’ explains Professor Mark Elgar, of the University of Melbourne. ‘Camouflage increases the search time and, as a consequence, the predator will simply target another species, either because it doesn’t see the camouflaged individual or it just finds something more obvious to do.’ The easiest way for an animal to disguise itself is to be invisible in its surroundings. To that end, stick and leaf insects have evolved complex camouflage to hide themselves from predators. Many have the texture of sticks or dry leaves, while others imitate living foliage, even the veins in a leaf. Some insects develop blemishes to match the spots caused by disease. A convincing appearance only works if its owner also acts the part, so during the day the creature using this type of camouflage keeps motionless, or sways like a dead leaf in the breeze. If disturbed, it falls to the ground and stays still. Entomologist Paul Zborowski, who has spent decades photographing inconspicuous creatures, rates the desert insects of Central Australia as the most convincingly disguised creatures he's seen. "It's an incredibly old habitat so the creatures have had a long time to adapt," Zborowski explains. Most of them behave like stones and don't move all day, feeding only at night. A tawny frogmouth sitting motionless on a stump also illustrates the importance of pairing a persuasive costume with behaviour. Professor Gisela Kaplan of the University of New England, in Australia, says the frogmouth's skill at camouflaging is learned behaviour. While adopting a pose may be a reflex of the bird, and can be observed in a hatchling’s first week, the ability to choose a backdrop which matches its colouration does not develop for 4-6 months. When the chicks land they are usually highly conspicuous, and their parents try to signal to them to move to a safe location. Fixed camouflage is only good against a relatively unchanging environment, so some animals, such as the cuttlefish, have evolved an adaptable disguise. The cuttlefish can almost instantly change its colour, pattern and texture to match its surroundings, using specialised cells and muscles. On Queensland's reefs, scientists have been studying another ocean dweller that uses colour change, although not to blend into the surroundings. Dr Karen Cheney, from the University of Queensland, says the bluestriped fangblenny alters its colouration to mimic other species of fish, allowing it to travel with them and benefit from safety in numbers. Its most impressive impersonation is of the black-with-neon-blue striped cleaner wrasse which eats the parasites on larger fish. Not only does the fangblenny benefit from the reduced predation that comes with the wrasse’s beneficial relationships with other fish, but the disguise also lets it get closer to prey. It darts out from the safety of the wrasse’s cleaning station to nip at unsuspecting fish passing by but doesn't attack those coming to be cleaned. The most famous form of mimicry, however, is for defence, not attack. Batesian mimicry refers to animals that gain protection from predators by imitating a dangerous organism, often using conspicuous colours. The nineteenth-century naturalist Henry Bates first suggested this camouflage technique after noticing that several Amazonian butterfly species looked the same. The technique was later called after him. In Australian waters, the harmless harlequin snake eel sports the same black and white bandings as the highly toxic, yellow-lipped sea krait, ensuring no predator will attack. However, the success of Batesian mimicry depends on the ratio of mimics to originals. If a predator encounters too many that are edible, it will just assume none of the animals with those markings are dangerous, explains Martyn Robinson, an educational naturalist with the Australian Museum. An imitation of a more dangerous creature needn’t be exact, just enough to make potential predators hesitate. The hawk moth caterpillar has markings resembling a snake’s eyes on its abdomen. When confronted, the caterpillar pulls its head in and the ‘eyes’ flash open. Whether the potential predator thinks it has seen a snake, or is simply startled is unclear, but the outcome is that the caterpillar lives to see another day. In Queensland's tablelands, the chameleon gecko has another way of making predators hesitate. Its body is brown, but its tail is banded in black and white. Robinson explains that if attacked, the chameleon gecko will drop off its tail, which will wriggle around on the ground. Many lizards do this, but in the case of the chameleon gecko the tail bones actually rub against one another, so it squeaks. ‘The predator is, of course, thoroughly absorbed by this black-and-white-striped, wriggling, squeaking thing on the ground, and the gecko can sneak away,’ Robinson says. It's a one-time-only trick: the regrown tail is brown, the same as the gecko's body. Such precise disguise and elaborate trickery illustrate the limitless possibilities of nature. But, as Robinson points out, only the most successful illusionists are here to tell the tale.

Prior to 1960, most inquiries into pupils’ learning skills explored the relationship between factors such as children’s social background, personality or measured intelligence and their achievement in various school subjects. Studies of teachers were largely a quest for criteria of effectiveness, and numerous investigations sought links between personality or attitude and ‘success’ at teaching. By 1950, Domas and Tiedeman were able to survey 672 such studies of teacher effectiveness. Yet there was widespread disappointment with such research, partly because so little of value seemed to emerge. First of all, there was little agreement about what constituted ‘good’ teaching or who the good teachers were. Secondly, there were numerous conflicting and contradictory findings. No sooner had one investigator found a relationship which appeared to be significant, than another discovered the opposite effect. For example, in 1945, two American researchers, Rostker and Rolfe, both using standardized testing techniques and broad samples of teachers, reached exactly opposite conclusions. Rostker concluded that the intelligence of the teacher is the most important single factor conditioning teaching ability, and that there is no significant relationship between personality and teaching ability. Rolfe, however, found no correlation between intelligence and teaching efficiency: he claimed that the teacher’s personality was what produced good teaching. Another American writer, Barr (1961), summarized a massive amount of American research and underlined the chaos in the research literature on effectiveness: “Some teachers were preferred by administrators, some were liked by the pupils, and some taught in classes where there were substantial pupil gains, and generally speaking these were not the same teachers.” One of the earliest pieces of research dates from 1912, when Stevens made 100 random observations of lessons in a variety of subject areas, in order to analyze the number and nature of questions being asked by teachers. Stevens’s overall total was 64% teacher talk and 36% pupil talk, figures which are remarkably similar to a number of findings half a century later. For many years in the first half of the 20th century, so-called ‘formal’ teaching was the norm. Teachers taught their classes as a whole group, gave out information, asked questions which predominantly required factual recall, and frequently set a common written task for the children to complete in a prescribed period of time. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that one focus of classroom interaction research in the decades following Stevens’s inquiry was on the phenomenon of ‘attentiveness’. A number of studies in the 1920s and 1930s, by Morrison and others, sought relationships between the degree of attention being paid by children and the amount they subsequently appeared to have learnt. Such research was usually based on observing teachers at work, a technique which was also employed extensively by United States administrators in the 1920s and 1930s, in order to assess teachers’ competence and allocate merit payments to so-called ‘superior’ teachers. As the 1930s came to an end, it was partly the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe which led to a shift in interest in the United States away from attentiveness, with its emphasis on the authority of the teacher, and towards a scrutiny of authoritarianism itself. A number of people began to feel that if dictatorship were to be avoided, children must learn in school how to handle democracy. Several investigators examined the processes taking place within small discussion groups, and tried to establish superiority for discussion groups over lecture classes, but with conflicting results. The movement towards what was becoming known as child-centred education was gathering momentum, and as interest in child development increased, investigators began to discover the usefulness of direct observation and the categorization of child behavior. This was when systematic observation of teacher-pupil interaction began in earnest. Anderson (1939) studied what he called ‘domination’ and ‘integration’ amongst kindergarten children. Dominative acts by children included blaming and snatching toys, and such acts by teachers included restricting children’s activities; while children’s integrative acts included sharing facilities and playing harmoniously, and those of teachers included expanding opportunities for self-direction and co-operation. Anderson then attempted to measure what is now commonly called ‘classroom climate’. Lewin, Lippitt and White (1939 and 1943) studied the effects of different teaching styles. They arranged for three groups of five boys each to be taught in very different ways: these were labelled ‘authoritarian’, ‘democratic’ and ‘laissez-faire’. The first two of these were similar to Anderson’s concept of dominative and integrative teachers. Beginning with Withall’s work in 1949, there was much greater interest in interaction within the classroom. Withall used the term ‘social-emotional climate’ to describe the emotional tone created as a result of face-to-face interaction in groups, and, like many who followed him, concentrated his analysis of this climate on the study of teachers’ verbal behavior. Withall also made efforts towards increasing the reliability of analyses, and this important pioneering work in the development of classroom observation methodology was followed by many others during the 1950s. Partly because of the disappointing results of the teacher-effectiveness research, and partly because of the general neglect in earlier work of the variables of actual classroom behavior, the decade 1960–70 produced a large number of studies of classroom processes, based on observation of teachers at work.