Since publishing Tongariro Skulduggery the “mockumentary” has been subject to much closer analysis in many ways. We appreciate all the nice comments the devious plot has attracted but they were tempered by unexpected abuse and threats, particularly for suggesting that there must have been settlements in New Zealand long before the modern Maori tribes arrived. After patiently enduring all the criticism for daring to write about such an extreme DNA coincidence for over two years, all readers now deserve a response to answer their most common question as to where the idea or conceptual basis originally came from…
This explanation is particularly needed by all those cynical readers lacking an angler’s sense of humour and who experienced difficulty interpreting fact from fiction and who questioned the fundamental basis of the DNA plot in the Tongariro Skulduggery yarn. Everyone is now aware of the impact of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) on changing history. Murderers, rapists and even poachers have been convicted on DNA evidence.

Photo above of Mesolithic Britain’s Cheddar Man skull.

In 1951 Francis Crick, a scientist at Cambridge University, met a young American geneticist, James Watson. They explored and shared the key research that DNA unlocked the identity of living organisms that explained what is life and how is it passed on. The big breakthrough came when a bio-chemist from King’s College in London, Maurice Wilkins, showed them the X-ray diffraction images which he had made with his colleague Rosalind Franklin. It showed a coil, or double helix, a winding spiral staircase, each side reflected the other, a key feature of the molecule.
Their discovery was announced in the journal “Nature” and nine years later Crick and Watson were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery, along with Maurice Wilkins. (Franklin died in 1958)

In 1997 Oxford University’s Institute of Molecular Medicine extracted mitochondrial DNA material from the tooth cavity of the famous Cheddar man.

On one of our many trips to England we inspected the Cheddar Gorge, near Bristol in Somerset, so we could claim the plot basis has been thoroughly researched. Even though he died about 9,400 years ago, England’s oldest complete skeleton – discovered in a cave with his legs curled under him – was used as our model and the upper Tongariro River physical environment replaced Cheddar Gorge. The Oxford University boffins advised he was about 23 when he was a murder victim, killed by a violent blow to the forehead.

Another gruesome discovery by the archaeologists was that these early ancestors were cannibals!

Excavated in 1903, Cheddar Man is Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton. The remains are kept by London’s Natural History Museum, in the Human Evolution gallery. Analysis of his nuclear DNA indicates that he was a typical member of the Western European population at the time, with lactose intolerance, probably with light-coloured eyes (most likely green but could be blue or hazel), dark brown or black hair, and dark/dark-to-black skin.

But perhaps just as fascinating was during their research to prove that DNA is inherited in an unbroken genetic lineage, they identified a direct match, a blood relation approximately four hundred generations later.

He was a history teacher who lived less than a mile from the caves. For the Tongariro Skulduggery plot, he was renamed Sonny Jim. Perhaps the mockumentary fiction could have been factual after all…?