Re: Humans May Have Come To New Zealand Later Than Thought, 1300 vs. 1000

On Jun 4, 10:27 am, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Carbon-dated rat bones, the marker of choice, suggest 1280-1300.

Humans May Have Come To New Zealand Later Than Thought
WELLINGTON, New Zealand, Jun. 3, 2008(AP) Radiocarbon dating of rat
bones and rat-gnawed seeds reinforces a theory that human settlers did
not arrive in New Zealand until 1300 A.D. _ about 1,000 years later
than some scientists believe, according to a study released Tuesday.

Thanks for posting this. It was on the TV news last night, but so
poorly reported that it was hard to tell what the researchers had
actually done. And of course there was no reference to the PNAS paper.


The first settlement date "has been highly debated for decades," said
Dr. Janet Wilmshurst, a New Zealander who led the international team
of researchers in the four-year study. The team carbon dated rat bones
and native seeds, and concluded that the earliest evidence of human
colonization in the South Pacific country was from 1280 A.D. to 1300
A.D.

Retired Maori Studies professor Ranganui Walker said the findings
supported the oral history of the Maoris who claim they were the first
Polynesians to arrive in New Zealand around that time. The Morioris,
non-Maori Polynesians, have claimed they arrived earlier.

The real Moriori (of the Chatham Islands) do not claim this. Some
European scholars have claimed that various groups (Moriori, Waitaha)
were "here before the Maori", but these theories have no
archaeological foundation and have not been taken seriously for a long
time.


"We now have a clear picture of our country's settlement that lays to
rest once and for all the Moriori myth, and so it is something to
celebrate," Walker said.

The study, published Tuesday in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, contradicts findings from a previous
radiocarbon dating study of rat bones, published in Nature magazine in
1996. That study found evidence that man was in New Zealand from
around 200 B.C.

Wilmshurst and her team re-excavated and re-dated bones from nearly
all the previously investigated sites. They said none of the rat bones
that they studied were from earlier than 1280.

"As the Pacific rat or kiore cannot swim very far, it can only have
arrived in New Zealand with people on board their canoes, either as
cargo or stowaways," Wilmshurst said. "Therefore, the earliest
evidence of the Pacific rat in New Zealand must indicate the arrival
of people."

The new dating of the rat bones was also supported by the dating of
more than 100 woody seeds _ many with telltale rat bite markings _
that had been preserved in peat and swamp sites on North and South
Islands, Wilmshurst noted.

Dr. Tom Higham, a member of Wilmhurst's team and deputy director of
the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at Oxford University, said the
teeth marks could not be mistaken for those of another animal.

He said the rat-gnawed seeds provided strong additional evidence for
the arrival of rats, and therefore humans, and were an indirect way of
testing the veracity of the dates done on the rat bones.

Among the seeds analyzed were some that were intact or bird-cracked,
and the rat-gnawed ones occurred in both islands only after about
1280.

But Prof. Richard Holdaway, a lead researcher on the earlier human
contact theory published in Nature, on Tuesday stood by his 1996 study
that found evidence of rats and humans in New Zealand more than 2,000
years ago.

"Rats arrived, people obviously arrived (but) whether they stayed _ I
have consistently said they didn't," he told TV3 News. He also
suggested that the new research team did not consider all available
evidence in its study, leading to the different results.

But University of Adelaide paleontologist Trevor Worthy, a member of
the Wilmhurst team, was adamant the new carbon dating results proved
the Nature claim wrong.

"There is no supporting ecological or archaeological evidence for the
presence of Pacific rat or humans until 1280-1300 A.D. and the
reliability of the bone dating from that first study has been
questioned," Worthy said. He did not explain why the other study had
been questioned, or by whom.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/03/ap/tech/printable4149698.shtml

Consensus has actually been converging on the 1300 date for a while
now. This is the earliest for which we have good _archaeological_
dates (actual human remains and artefacts). If the rat material
confirms this, fine. Holdaway's findings were an anomaly -- presence
of rats ca. 2000 BP without any evidence of the humans who must have
brought them. One had to suppose an early human population which died
out, or at least left no visible archaeological trace. But what
remains unclear (as the last sentence of the article suggests) is
whether the new researchers have actually confronted Holdaway's
evidence -- his sites, his dates -- and shown that it was wrong.

Ross Clark
.

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