Anthropology.net

In light of all the physical anthropology I’ve barraged upon you this last week, balancing it out with some cultural issues seems fitting.

From Kamangir, I found about a new website called Kurdish Rights. The Kurds, as you may know, are an ethic group lodged between Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and some parts of Syria. They are the world’s largest ethnic group without their own country, roughly 30 million people. The Kurds have been struggling for a long time to keep their identity, culture, and lifestyle autonomous. Far too often has this struggle resulted in mass executions, such as Saddam’s ‘Bloody Friday’ in March of 1988. For more information on the Kurds, check out this 7 minute video.

The main stream press hasn’t been giving them a fair shot, ignorantly choosing what the rest of the world considers genocide. And now with Kurdish blogs and sites being blocked by middle eastern ISPs, their voices are even further silenced.

Kurdish Rights, the website I linked above, aims,

“…to prevent Kurdish blogs and sites from being blocked by Middle Eastern ISPs. Throughout our history, Kurds were never given a powerful voice in the mainstream media, and we believe that new technology can effectively change that. However, for that to happen, we first need to allow bloggers and administrators to blog safely and without any censorship.”

Check out this video they made, the music and the message are awesome :

They’ve setup a petition that demands that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) within the Middle East unblock Kurdish blogs and websites in order to ensure the rights to freedom of speech and freedom of information for all Middle Easterners. They will this petition to the send to the Ministries of Information and ISP companies of Turkey, Iran, and Syria once they reach 10,000 signatures.

Knowing how stubborn the governments of Turkey, Iran, and Syria are, I don’t know what good the petitions will do as far as coaxing them to unblock the blogs. If these regimes really gave a rats ass about freedom of speech and information, we wouldn’t being seeing half the problems we see come out of that area of the world. Nonetheless, it is a worthy cause, and I implore you to sign — I can’t rain on the determination this organization has already shown, and I see nothing but good things come out of spreading awareness about the situation of the Kurds.

As far as anthropology goes, the plight of the Kurdish ethnic population is something that will always occupy the cannon. For as long as people try to forcibly wipe out ethnic minorities there will always be those of us that do something to resist.

Afarensis has chimed in on the Ilert fossils, as well as Ann Gibbons of Science. Please check out both their pieces on these two fossils.

To make this a more complete post, I’m also shamelessly plucking a well-illustrated diagram of hominin evolution from Afarensis’ post. I don’t know where he got it from… But, I’m using it to make a point that if anyone ever thought that paleoanthropologists propose that human evolution is entirely anagenetic, then they are wrong.

Of course, one branch of human evolution was ultimately anagenetic — hell, it led to us, H. sapiens! However, as Afarensis mentions, both cladogenesis and anagensis have played a role throughout human evolution. It really is a matter on how narrow you want to view the scope down in on… and at the point it comes down to says H. erectus versus H. habilis, then I consider it futile even foolish to debate one or the other.

Elizabeth Culotta’s news focus on the Liang Bua conference got trapped by my radar as I checked the RSS headlines this morning, but because the gods have not blessed me with easy access to Science, I couldn’t report on the one sentence teaser Science gives us. Thankfully, John Hawks has. A disclosure, since I don’t have the article, what I’ll be sharing with you is a third hand account.

Hawks nails the paedomorphosis theory being brought up by Christoph Zollikofer. For those not in the know, paedomorphosis is biological term for the retention of traits, previously seen only in juveniles, in full grown adult organisms. An example of paedomorphosis is some salamanders retain the gills, which in most amphibians, are lost upon reaching adulthood. Zollikofer suggests that LB 1, what we call the Flores hominin, really is a paedomorphic Homo erectus. Hawks lays down some of the anatomy that tells us otherwise.

Also,

“Morwood is now arguing for descent from early pre-erectine Homo or Australopithecus, while there is some discussion about whether Dmanisi is a plausible ancestor. These are all attempts to minimize the amount of evolutionary change on Flores; I think that is misguided. If the island really generated a highly derived lineage, then let it be highly derived!”

The article seems pretty thorough, even getting into some discussion on the archaeology recovered from Liang Bua. And since it has been a while since we last heard from the great island of Flores and the Liang Bua cave, it is a welcome little news clip.