New research shows Māori adapted quickly in the face of rapid climate change
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
(And the people who would become the Moriori migrated from the South Island to the Chathams)
But this isn't surprising, the crops they brought with them from Hawaiki grew better in the North Island, so when the moa population collapsed (entirely due to hunting) it makes sense that population density would shift from the areas good for moa to the areas good for agriculture.
There's no evidence that I've ever seen that ties the extinction of moa to the Little Ice Age.
Strange article.
It's like they're taking the noble savage trope to the craziest ends and just running with it; public outcomes be damned. Some really unhinged ideologues are in positions of power right now.
At least go on Wikipedia for five minutes on this stuff, eh?
I feel that trying to rename culturally-specific things that don't have a neat translation, like folkloric beings, is generally always poorly fitting. It's like when the qilin is called a unicorn, when a qilin is a fish-scaled deer or ox with lizardly facial features and no affiliation with femininity or maidenhood. So basically almost nothing like a unicorn.
Isn't it funny how people can draw these various mythical creatures but only after another person has shown them how.
It is puzzling that those individuals feel the need to attempt to suppress what they elect not to agree with.
Yes this may be true, but Jacinda won the election fair and square
It's political correctness gone mad!
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/09/10/has-politic...
> At best, the notion of political correctness having gone too far is intellectually dishonest; a fallacy similar to a straw-man argument or an ad hominem attack. At worst, it serves as a rallying cry to cover up the excesses of the most illiberal in our society.
Look at Australia for example. The indigenous people figured out thousands of years ago how to manage native bush.
I'm not saying we should replace science with traditional knowledge. But indigenous practices are absolutely worthy of study, and can guide science.
You mean apart from this link that specifically talks about use tradition harvesting practices and local knowledge to find the kōura to study?
https://niwa.co.nz/our-science/freshwater/research-projects/...
> Maori are not indigenous to New Zealand
Completely untrue. They are absolutely indigenous to NZ.
I'm so tired of this stupid myth being brought up again and again. Yes, Maori arrived in NZ. They were the first people to do so. They are the indigenous people of NZ.
Unless you want to argue that to be "indigenous", you literally need to have evolved in that place, which is a nonsense argument as far as humans are concerned.
So you don't count as indigenous if you weren't the first? That's bad news for all the Clovis-descended peoples we now call Native Americans, since they were the second major wave of human migration. That is of course ridiculous, because time of inhabitation is a significant part of being indigenous. If it were discovered another group had beaten the Maori to New Zealand, would that suddenly make them not indigenous in your eyes?
Wikipedia - Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original peoples
By what measure are Maori not indigenous to NZ? If another group arrived first, they certainly didn't stay, and even by your own measure of "time of inhabitation", Maori have been here the longest (at least 350 years before Europeans).
It says the settlers could no longer hunt them as it was uneconomical. Its well known Moa were hunted in large numbers until their were none left. They left that out because its common knowledge to the target reader.
> But then the Little Ice Age interfered with this lifestyle. After 1350, conditions became significantly colder in the south. By around 1400-1420, moa hunting became uneconomic and put these fledgling communities under immense pressure. Once again, people had to adapt quickly.
This is plainly misleading. It implies without explicitly stating that the Little Ice Age interfered with their moa-eating lifestyle by making moa hunting uneconomical.
NZ today is a tough place to stay alive. One of my closest brushes with death happened there in a rapidly rising river that trapped me on a small island for 3 days without a shelter. Once I extracted myself out, the general feeling from the rangers and locals is what happened to me wasn't so rare, except somehow I managed to survived.
Source - former ranger.
This might be a low effort reply, but a bunch of us manage too :)
In all seriousness every country has it's own unique things that locals are very much familiar with and outsiders it's just foreign to.
Australia - predisposed to critters that want to kill you. Checking your shoes for spiders is a thing.
America - well I'll leave the obvious out, but there's some pretty nasty deserts you'd not want to be caught out in, or the odd cat 4 Tornado, or my favourite from last visit, walking past a tree that had head high claw marks all through it (either Cougar or Bear, wtf, that was like a 20min walk from the hotel in boulder!!)
Then there's Canada -40c anyone? That's really not meant for human survival.
There’s nothing here that can kill you.
No bushfires. No snakes. Very few sharks. Spiders are rare, and white tails don’t kill. It doesn’t get hot enough to kill you. There’s water everywhere, but it doesn’t seem to flood.
I’m assuming your rising river was on the South Island. Definitely plenty of opportunities to get yourself in trouble down there, but you’d have to go well out of your way.
Earthquakes are the only new danger, and they’re mostly in the south / Wellington.
No crocodiles. No camels (car accidents).
Both countries have bikie/gang violence, but I’m not sure that’s a real danger for gen pop.
We don't have many deaths from hikers and trampers. Most are from falls, others from drowning. I'm sure you prepared for the hike, many tourists do not and it's often national news when someone goes missing off a trail.
If you go for long tramps, you take your own food and shelter. And hopefully either an emergency beacon or check the area for cell service.
The fact you were there for 3 days, I assume you either never told anyone where you were - and they weren't aware you were stranded, and you didn't have any method for contacting emergency services.
If you did have a method for contacting them, if you have food, they'll quite happily let your suffer for up to 5 days as they know hypothermia is unlikely, you'll either be a little dehydrated or hungry - but provided you're not injured, they'll let you trek back on your own - they'll only send people out if you don't come back after a few more days. If you were injured, they'd have sent the Westpac helicopter to you within a week (when it's convenient or you're on a flight path convenient to other rescues). Most of the time that helicopter is used for immediate evacuation scenarios (strokes, heart attacks, etc) - and hikers usually aren't in that bucket.
They might be miserable, but being hungry with a shattered ankle, you're not a priority.
I actually didn't bring a tent, as I was on my way to a hut.
> The fact you were there for 3 days, I assume you either never told anyone where you were - and they weren't aware you were stranded, and you didn't have any method for contacting emergency services.
I checked into a ranger station. It was Easter Weekend, so no one was there.
> If you did have a method for contacting them, if you have food, they'll quite happily let your suffer for up to 5 days as they know hypothermia is unlikely,
It rained and snowed the entire time. I was without shelter, and the island I was on was quickly disappearing as the water level of the river kept rising. I attempted to make a shelter out of sticks and grass, only to find the ground waterlogged, so I instead laid on top of it. I woke up in the middle of the night completely surrounded by water. I was so cold, I prayed for death. At the end of the last night, I was clutching onto a tree trunk on the only patch of ground sticking above the water, as waves licked my feet, waiting to be washed away into the river, as I watched logs like the ones next to me float into, and quickly escape the beam of my head torch.
So when I say,
> except somehow I managed to survived.
Believe me.
For anyone else who's worried about making a similar trip, please use this govt-made website which talks about what's recommended, as well as has an online service for logging your walks. If there isn't anybody to tell that you're going on one of these hikes, that means you shouldn't go. It isn't optional.
https://www.adventuresmart.nz/
For anyone in other countries without this service - if you're backpacking in hostels, or have a booking at a hotel after - ring and tell the staff before you go. If it's through AirBnB.. Well, I hope you make friends with someone who can check in with you before you leave!
What we do know is that they survived on a rather small island in Indian ocean with stone age technology for ... well we don't know because they don't want to talk to us. But they did get trough 2004 tsunami just fine.
> Models developed from radiocarbon dates and the distribution of archaeological sites indicate the population shifted back to the north and grew between 1350 and 1450. In the north, soils were ideal for agriculture and temperatures were warmer.
does that mean that people literally migrated, or merely that the northern population grew predominately through, e.g., a greater reproductive rate while the southern shrank in-place according to similar dynamics? If the latter, is that actually adaptation in the sense you mean?
Migration as adaptation is really less interesting for me, while learning new practices, tools and even management styles without migrating means higher levels of adaptive behaviour.
You could just as well draw a circle around all of human civilization and write about how supremely adaptive humans are. Or you could draw a narrower circle around just that southern population and tell a story about how hopelessly rigid human cultures can be even in the face of impending doom.
Maybe the actual paper has some substance capable of supporting a more concrete claim of extraordinary adaptation (i.e. beyond what we typically see in human populations), but if so it's not apparent from the abstract.
But the movenement of the freshwater/saltwater line is something we cannot control and it has severe impacts on fishing and the ecosystem now.