gender difference in the bones

Well how old are they then? "Ancient"? Ya know, ancient. You can't have a news item headed: "Marlborough burial ground 'may be country's oldest'" and then fail to mention how old they are. There's no guide whatsoever apart from saying its ancient and early. Who does that?

My guess - a woman.

Symptoms/diagnosis

I've just seen a story that lacks the crucial and most obviously necessary data.
- There is a 90% chance you are reading a story by a female journalist.

There's no attempt in the article to provide an answer or explanation for what has happened.
- There is a 85% chance you are reading a story by a female journalist.

The author uses first person (I and Me and My) and never lets up, turning the assignment into a story about themselves.
- There is an 80% chance you are reading a story by a female journalist.

The author fails to put whatever has happened, or whatever things they are talking about into any meaningful context or perspective.
- There is an 70% chance you are reading a story by a female journalist.

Are all female journalists like this?
- No, of course not.

Are all male journalists unlike this?
- Pretty much, yes.

This is just a style issue isn't it?
- No, it impacts on substance. Every word in that word count taken up with shit is a net loss, and if crucial information is left out it is sometimes a waste of time to have ever started reading it. The value of the content is undermined. You have to be a good writer to pull off a personal pronoun-laced piece - you have to be very good, male or female - and most aren't. Maybe the senior staff and the editors are actually encouraging these changes - they certainly don't seem to be penalising it - I don't know.

Now it is a distantly remote possibility that maybe there are more female journalists at the inexperienced end than males and that maybe there are just as many males getting it wrong, but at lower total numbers, so that prejudiced males casually perusing news sites might draw conclusions that are false... but I don't think so. I think it's pretty obvious that women have different ways of telling a story than a man - different characteristics, different styles, different priorites etc.

Now it is also possible that the rise of blogging, the competitiveness of online media (and stagnantly low pay) has also lowered the bar somewhat in what is considered acceptable reporting. They may be getting no more than what they pay for.

So the main story seems to be from the Malborough Express' Claire Connell. Quoted in full:

Rangitane officially welcomed archaeologists on to the Wairau Bar with a powhiri as they prepare to excavate the site and return the contents of graves taken from the bar up to 70 years ago.

Three boats made several trips to ferry Rangitane kaumatua and iwi members, archaeologists and other officials to the Wairau Bar this morning for the powhiri under sunny skies.

Archaeologists from the University of Otago will begin a three-week excavation of the sacred Maori burial site on the north end of the site this afternoon. They will map and examine a two-hectare area where Rangitane tupuna (ancestors) once lay.
Fifteen archaeologists will camp on the bar in tents, alongside five Rangitane iwi members.

The excavation is needed before the contents of 44 graves, which were taken up to 70 years ago, are returned. Bones and artefacts were removed by Canterbury Museum for study and display purposes between 1938 and 1959.

According to archaeologists, the Wairau Bar is one of the most important sites in New Zealand because of the age and range of material found there. The tupuna provided the first conclusive evidence to scientists that New Zealand was originally settled from East Polynesia, they said.

Yeah, well when? Duh. You have precise data here: how many hectares the site is, how many graves, the exact years of the display, the numbers of personnel on the site etc. But no age.

Is it because it's not on Wikipedia? It can still be found easily enough by typing in maori bones "wairau bar" age into Google:

American Scientist:
The archaeological and ecological record spanning human arrival in East Polynesia is most detailed and densest in New Zealand. At A.D. 1285 to 1300, Wairau Bar on South Island is the oldest well-dated archaeological site in New Zealand. On that site Maori butchered more than 8,000 moas and consumed more than 2,000 moa eggs; in upper layers, there are huge numbers of seal bones, too. There are postholes from buildings, cutmarked moa bones and broken eggshells, stone tools, and burials of 37 individuals whose graves included such items as perforated moa eggs, real and imitation whale teeth, necklace reels, shark teeth, bird bone tubes and adzes. Moa eggshells placed as grave goods in human burials were dated by the radiocarbon method. Because of Wairau Bar, A.D. 1300 can be used as a dividing line between the time periods before and after proven human arrival.

Article Archives:
Wairau Bar is situated on a boulder bank at the mouth of the Wairau and Opawa Rivers [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Three discrete urupa (burial areas) and associated occupation areas have been located by archaeologists.
[...]
Conclusions

A new series of radiocarbon determinations enables the critical site of Wairau Bar to be brought into discussion about the early colonization of New Zealand. Determinations on moa eggshell from grave contexts and estuarine shell from occupation layers show that the site was occupied towards the end of the 13th century AD. The brevity of occupation is consistent with similar early sites which also disclose rapid depletion of local big-game resources. On that ground, these sites appear to represent the earliest phase of human settlement in New Zealand. In terms of material culture, they contain both the widest range and the greatest abundance of types which belong to Archaic East Polynesian culture, regarded as the colonizing culture of New Zealand.

Te Ara:
The Wairau Bar in Marlborough is one of the oldest known archaeological sites in New Zealand. Researchers Tom Higham, Atholl Anderson and Chris Jacomb, who have radiocarbon-dated it at 1288–1300

So, shall we say:
"maybe over 700 years old"
- is all we wanted in there. That's all. Apparently that's unimportant on a story about old things, archaeologists, excavations and so on.