Anthropology.net

The ongoing plight of the Hadzabe in Tanzania has caught the attention of the British mainstream press, in the guise of this article from the Daily Mail, on whose behalf Andrew Malone has filed a report. Although many readers of these pages will already be familiar with this story, it’s important to keep it in the public eye, hence this post.

After a four-day quest covering thousands of miles by light aircraft, Land Rover and, finally, on foot, we knew we were on the brink of an unforgettable experience — the chance to reach back in time and meet our living human ancestors from countless millennia ago. We waited in silence.

Suddenly, shadows of human forms started moving around the bush. The noise of sing-song voices floated towards us. Here, in one of the world’s last untouched wildernesses — the dense bush south of Africa’s Rift Valley where the first humans emerged upright more than two million years ago — a group of men from the mysterious Stone Age tribe were ready to make their introductions.

Draped in animal skins and carrying arrows tipped with poison, two slim, wiry characters walked slowly towards us in the clearing. Time has stood still for these men — two of an estimated 400 remaining survivors of the Hadzabe tribe — whose way of life has scarcely changed since human evolution began.

Malony makes the somewhat ironic point that the Hadza are one of the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth, and they just happen to live in a part of the world from where some of the earliest traces of our archaic ancestors have been found – the Palaeolithic starts and ends there, so to speak. He describes an encounter with a Hadza tribesman named Gonga… Read the rest of this entry »

My field season in Ethiopia has ended, and it was very successful. I want to share with you a lot more than I’m able to write at the moment, so you’re gonna hafta sit tight until I summarize all my experiences into a more thorough post.

In the meantime, you can busy yourself with the photos I’ve uploaded onto my Flickr account. Please check them out and tell me what you think of them. Here are some of my personal favorites:

I want to thank everyone for helping me out with keeping the site updated and very active, but a special thank you goes out to Tim and Carl who kept posts active and moderated comments.

Here’s a brief report from New Scientist, discussing research by Markus Pfenninger and Klaus Schwenk, of the Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt, Germany, who have been engaged in a project which aims to ‘barcode’ every living organism on the planet.

Cryptic species – animals that appear identical but are genetically quite distinct – may be much more widespread than previously thought. The findings could have major implications in areas ranging from biodiversity estimates and wildlife management, to our understanding of infectious diseases and evolution.

Scientists had previously speculated that cryptic species were predominantly found in insects and reptiles, and were more likely to occur in tropical rather than temperate regions (see Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol 22, p 148).

“Species that are seemingly widespread and abundant could in reality be many different cryptic species that have low populations and are highly endangered,” says Pfenninger. Until the genetic information of all species in at least one taxon is thoroughly studied, no one will know just how many cryptic species exist. “It could be as high as 30%,” Pfenninger says. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the realities of humans travelling to Mars is the need to confine as many people as possible into the smallest possible craft, obliged to enjoy or endure each others’ company for months at a time – and to that end, many experiments will be carried out here on Earth, in which it is hoped that problems and frictions that could arise can be spotted here, with possible solutions being found that would help avoid or forestall such concerns on a live mission, before it even blasts off…

More than four-and-a half thousand people have applied to take part in a joint Russian-European venture in which six people will be locked inside a mock spacecraft for 520 days to simulate an expedition to Mars.

Russia’s space agency is sifting through piles of applications from would-be astronauts, including Britons, prepared to suffer extreme privation to test endurance levels for a Mars odyssey.

Successful candidates will be locked inside a cramped barrel-shaped spacecraft in central Moscow for a year and a half: 250 days to Mars, followed by a month on the surface, and 240 days to get back. The craft comprises tiny modules – a claustrophobic 550 cubic metres in total that aims to replicate the psychological pressures of an arduous long-distance space voyage. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite headlines proclaiming that it has been ‘definitively’ proven that all humans alive today arose from a single population of south-central Africans from the Rift Valley around 50,000 bp, John Hawks, Erik Trinkaus and others would beg to differ, claiming that the research conducted into skull morphology by Andrea Manica, of Cambridge University, doesn’t indicate what the authors claim. Here’s what National Geographic have to say on the matter…

Scientists who compared the skulls and DNA of human remains from around the world say their results point to modern humans (Homo sapiens) having a single origin in Africa.

The study didn’t find any evidence to suggest that human species living elsewhere in the world contributed to our direct ancestors’ make-up.

A team led by Andrea Manica at the University of Cambridge, England, combined analysis of global genetic variations with comparisons of more than 6,000 skulls from more than a hundred ancient human populations.

The team found that loss of genetic diversity was very closely mirrored by reduced physical variation the farther away people lived from Africa.

Regardless of what morphological or genetic data are offered, I’m automatically sceptical of any research that claims final proof of a single origin for modern humankind, particularly at the date of 50,000 bp, as there are clear indications from Eurasia, Australia and possibly even America, that by this date, modern humans were already living at all these locations, thousands of miles from Africa, and could not possibly have been part of this presumed African exodus. Here’s a look at why Manica et al believe they have identified the origin of their single exodus… Read the rest of this entry »