Anthropology.net

About 9 months ago, I shared some news of language extinction and the conservation efforts of K. David Harrison and David Anderson. My coverage was far from a thorough treatment of the subject, partially because I know little about the problem and the ways to remedy it. Fast forward to today, where I come across this video posted by Simon Greenhill on his blog HENRY.

The video is an interview of well spoken linguistic anthropologist K. David Harrison, by host Mark Molaro. In the video, David touches on many aspects, such as ownership of a language and what he considers ‘the greatest conservation challenge’ of humans. For anyone interested in the subject, I recommend you check out this 26 minute interview. Harrison integrates cultural issues as well as the importance of knowledge locked in unknown languages that can be useful to other disciplines such as botanists and zoologists.

Ownership of a language is a critical concept to understand. Speakers of widely spoken languages such as English, French, Chinese, Spanish, may not consider much ownership to their language. But to those who are one of the few speakers of a dying language, such as Chulym where only 30 or so speakers are alive, feel more attached to their language — it is something they identify with.

Harrison also outlines ‘the greatest conservation challenge’ of humans. See, every 2 weeks or so a language dies off. In contrast, species are going extinct at a much slower rate and yet a monumental conservation effort is put into saving this from happening. But studying, saving and/or curating languages aren’t given the same dedication as ecological or archaeological conservation. It is ironic that language, perhaps the most complex monument to human genius, has been ignored in our efforts to conserve the rest of the world.

Support is required from outside to conserve language, and with that a change in the ways we approach language is needed. Harrison suggests that while curating a language is critical to the conservation, understanding the folk taxonomy, a.k.a. the folksonomy, is also imperative. He brings up examples of different single word terms to refer to different reindeer in some Siberian languages. When translated, these single words unravel into elaborate, information packed phrases. He uses that to explain how often times there is a lot of local knowledge hidden lesser spoken language, that can span millennia. Harrison advocates that other researchers entertain the possibility that languages are an untapped resource for knowledge.

But to do that, a restructuring of how we consider discovery is needed. We, as academics, are largely stuck in this colonial paradigm of how discovery is approached. Many zoologists, botanists, even anthropologists and archaeologists discover new things without absorbing native knowledge. It is an awfully imperial way of looking about it, if Western culture doesn’t know about it the rest of the world never know about it! But who’s to say local peoples didn’t know about a certain plant or animal for ages prior to the “Western discovery”? We need people to acknowledge the vast body of knowledge out there, locked in indigenous, endangered languages.

Harrison wraps up his talk emphasizing how language is an infinite system, and I couldn’t agree with him more. He’s put particular consideration on local knowledge, but there is also a lot of knowledge that can be extracted from language — such as human migrations, which will have gaping holes if languages are allowed to erode at the rates they are now.

Have you heard about the upcoming movie based upon prehistoric life?

I didn’t, until today.

It is called 10,000 B.C. and I had no idea about it until I caught news of it this morning off of Paleoblog. I guess I’m completely out of the loop. I’ve watched the trailers and understand the movie will be highly fictionalized. That’s okay because the mammoth hunt completely sold me. It is not often that Hollywood decides to make a movie based on prehistoric life.

Seems like to today is turning into the film Fridays that I always looked forward to early on in my education. You probably deserve a break from this week’s blogging. This video that I’ll be sharing with you has many flaws, but it is a creative way to visualize the evolutionary processes. I don’t particularly appreciate how little to no effort was made to show the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event nor the dearth of mammalian evolution, instead they literally fast forwarded millions of years of evolution to show an ape walking bipedally in the trees… which is a somewhat dangerous interpretation.

Anyways, its flawed but it is entertaining, especially since I brought up limb evolution during the Devonian. The video also gets plus points because it plays a favorite Nine Inch Nails song of mine,

If you read the overview on limb evolution that I wrote yesterday, I think you maybe interested in watching this 51 minute conversation between Carl Zimmer and Neil Shubin that the Panda’s Thumb pointed too.

This short comical clip got me to think if anyone out there has considered digitizing dance? This is can be more than a new type of ethnographic research. One could not only digitize dance as a sort of cultural preservation but one could begin to do really interesting statistics and comparisons of cross cultural dances since data is plotted in physical space. Hell, it could even become a form of phylogenetic analysis, who knows?

Aaron Filler published a very hard to accept paper about three months ago stating bipedalism could have originated 20 million or so years ago and all of the other great apes lost this adaptation whereas the human lineage kept it. Last night, he sent me three emails to share a new video where he describes,

“the details of knuckle walking in chimpanzees and gorillas, the graceful “quadrumanual” climbing of orangutans and the dramatic bipedalism of the siamang apes. These are contrasted with footage of human arm swinging and movement technology. The video also captures the various ways in which hominiform mothers carry their infants and children. “The definition of humanity can be found either in the upright bipedal hominiforms of the early Miocene, or in the dynamically inventive modern species we are now. The conflict between the biological and intellectual definition of humanity is a critical modern challenge for biology and philosophy” Filler says.”"

He’s provided some low resolution clips here and there on the internet, but has also put out a high resolution file for us to view. To make it easier on y’all, I rather not have each and everyone of you guys download a 260mb file to find out you may not have the right hardware or software to view it, so I’ve embedded the Google Video Filler provides here:

Again, Filler hopes that this video new video documents evidence of an upright bipedal ancestor for both the apes and humans existed way before what is commonly accepted. I remember learning in Adrienne Zihlman’s anthropology of movement class about different ape locomotion strategies, and of course we touched on how chimpanzee, orangutan, gorilla, and other apes like siamangs and gibbons move about. Almost all apes have bursts of bipedalism, however none have persistent bipedal locomotion like us. And from what I can tell, Filler says this clip of a 8 month old captive siamang learning to be bipedal fits his hypothesis… except the baby siamang is clearly learning, and even the older siamangs in the video walk bipedally in short bursts.

Despite this shortcoming, he cites this as definitive, ground breaking, evidence that the most primitive great apes were bipedal. But he completely skirts a discussion about siamangs and other gibbons being arboreal in the wild. In the dense jungles of Malaysia, Thailand, and Sumatra, these primates rarely have a need to come down onto the ground… and their bodies are a testament to this environment, with long arms to brachiate branches with. And this was all filmed in a much less dense zoo…

Yesterday, I got sent a video of paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged‘s talk at this year’s TED conference. Last year we all got introduced to Zeresenay Alemseged when he and colleagues published their report on Selam a.k.a. Dikika fossil. Selam is a 3.3 million year old Australopithecus afarensis child.Here’s some of the stuff I wrote about that fossil:

• Little ‘Lucy’ fossil found
• A critique of the juvenile Dikika fossil publication
• A faint whisper of reason on Dikika

In the TEDtalk, Zeresenay talks about looking for the roots of humanity in Ethiopia’s badlands, what he has found, and how Africa holds the clues to what makes us human. TED has a lot content on his talk, and why you should listen to him.

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.

Guys, I hate to break it to you but I have been misinforming you all along. I have been giving you an uninformed summary of human evolution. I have been wrong, John Hawks has been wrong, Afarensis and the guys of Gene Expression have been wrong — your professors have also been wrong and you have been wrong… everyone except for the enlightened people of North Korea have been wrong when it comes to understanding human evolution.

North Korea (maybe just Kim Jong Il? has rewritten history and stated that Pyongyang is the birthplace of man,

“Ever since humanity originated, it was centered around Pyongyang. The Korean people have lived for centuries around the Teh Don Gan Basin. Korean people did not migrate from other regions to the Peninsula. Evolving through several anthropoids … Humanity finally reached the ancestors of modern Koreans: “The Black Mountain Grape Humanoids.”

Don’t believe me?

Well please, inform yourself of the correct version of human evolution by watching the following public service announcement kindly provided to you by communist DPRK: