Archive for October 25th, 2007
Hadzabe Tribe’s ‘Great Victory’ Over Commercial Hunters – Adam James
Many thanks to Adam James at freelancejournalists.org, for alerting us to this latest development in the fortunes of the Hadzabe tribe of Tanzania, whom it would appear, despite having the odds stacked against them, appear to have pulled off a spectacular victory in their attempt to retain domain over their traditional hunting grounds, which looked set to be taken over by helicopter-borne Saudi royals, who considered themselves to be in need of new recreational hunting grounds. Here’s some detail from his article…
One of Africa’s last hunter-gatherer tribes has won a “great victory” after an Arab royal family dropped plans to use the people’s ancestral land for commercial hunting.
A company acting on behalf of Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed of the United Arab Emirates has pulled out of a deal made two years ago with the Tanzania government to hunt wildlife in 2,267 square kms of remote bush in the Yaeda Chini region of Tanzania, east Africa.
Campaigners feared if a hunting concession was granted to the company then the 400-estimated Hadzabe hunter-gatherers of Yaeda Chini would have been criminalised as poachers and driven off land their ancestors have lived on for 10,000 years.
The Hadzabe, who live in small groups and are believed to number less than 1,000 in total in Tanzania, are the closest cultural relatives to the San bushmen of the Kalahari in Botswana.
I must admit that after months of seeming silence, I was somewhat pessimistic regarding the final outcome of this battle, as it appeared that the deal had been done, and that in due course the surrounding landscape would have been echoing to the sound of Saudi helicopter-gunships massacring the big game on the ground below. And although there was a considerable amount of opposition expressed on the Web and elsewhere, the overall impression I had was that as there didn’t appear to be a concerted effort to defend the Hadzabe, their days as hunter-gatherers were strictly numbered. But as we can see, the company behind the recreational hunting initiative, UAE Safaris Ltd., have themselves decided to head for the hills, though not without a few parting shots in the direction of the world’s media…
A UAE Safaris statement read: “To suggest or imply that the company operations included restricting or preventing Hadzabe tribesmen from continuing their traditional hunting practices is incorrect – traditional hunting practices are subject only to Tanzanian law.”
“However, a commercially motivated misrepresentation of the company’s intentions and activities has been continuously perpetuated by certain interest groups. This has regretfully caused us to review the long term sustainability of our planned program in the entire region resulting in our reluctant withdrawal.”
Red-haired Neandertals
Razib beat me the the punch on the new news that some Neandertals had red hair. He’s managed to write a very thorough and informative post over at Gene Expression. Check it out. Paul Rincon, a reporter for the BBC also has news of this, here.
This is a very curious finding and the entire study will be published in Science by tomorrow. Here’s an inactive link to the publication. It should start working once Science decides its time. All I have to share with you is the following excerpt, plucked from Razib’s post,
“The melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) regulates pigmentation in humans and other vertebrates. Variants of MC1R with reduced function are associated with pale skin color and red hair in humans primarily of European origin. We amplified and sequenced a fragment of the MC1R gene (mc1r) from two Neanderthal remains. Both specimens have a mutation not found in ~3700 modern humans. Functional analyses show that this variant reduces MC1R activity to a level that alters hair and/or skin pigmentation in humans. The impaired activity of this variant suggests that Neanderthals varied in pigmentation levels, potentially to the scale observed in modern humans. Our data suggest that inactive MC1R variants evolved independently in both modern humans and Neanderthals.”
Based upon Razib’s discussion on the author’s unique discovery a of non-synonymous substitution in the Neandertal MC1R of an A to a G which encodes the amino acid Arginine instead of Glyceine…. A SNP not found easily found in modern humans, I decided to look up what SNPs are known for modern humans’ MC1R. Currently, about 153 SNPS are known for modern humans’ MC1R. I haven’t bothered to translate all 153 sequences to see which ones show up an arginine where a glyceine was, but I’m pretty sure the authors did that, and screened their Neandertal specific SNP to this public data, before they published their paper.
This unique SNP reduces expression of the protein which MC1R produced, and a loss of function on MC1R, which results in fair skin and red hair. The really strange thing is that, like I said, this SNP ain’t found easily in modern humans. But in the two Neandertal samples they found, from Spain and Italy, this SNP was present.
A related curiosity is how this publication comes a week after the findings with FOXP2. One of the lead authors of the Neandertal FOXP2 paper is Carles Lalueza-Fox, is first author of the red haired Neandertal paper. It is somewhat remarkable how the FOXP2 paper got published in Current Biology, while very similar, related study from at least one of the same authors gets published in Science. Some, like myself, consider a study on hair color to be way less impacting than a study on the evolution of a language associated transcription factor. Anyways, not a very astute observation… who really knows why Science went the superficial route.
