C U R I O U S E-BOOK
EDITION : SEPTEMBER 2020 MONTHLY MAGAZINE ON ANTHROPOLOGY
Homo heidelbergensis was Extremely Resourceful, New Research Shows
Gene Editing: Do We Have The Right to Genetically Mapping the ‘Indian’ NEW FOSSIL APE IS Enhance Our Children? genome DISCOVERED IN INDIA “Curious” seeks to enlighten the spirit of anthropology PAPER 1 amongst the students. It provides 1. How 19th-Century Anti-Black and Anti-Indigenous Racism Reverberates Today an opportunity for 2. Homo heidelbergensis was Extremely Resourceful, New Research Shows students to keep 3.Genetics Steps In to Help Tell the Story of Human Origins Africa’s sparse fossil them updated about record alone cannot reveal our species’ evolutionary history the recent 4.Zoology’s Racism Problem A new book explores the history of scientists’ efforts developments in the to classify living things. field of 5.Study shows role of pathogens in shaping human evolution. anthropology in a 6.Married to a ghost. holistic perspective. 7.Sree Chitra to examine gene mutation and carry out gene testing 8. Why Do We Keep Using the Word “Caucasian”? Disclaimer: The 9. Comparing Race to Caste Is an Interesting Idea, But There Are Crucial views expressed in Differences Between Both Isabel Wilkerson's book 'Caste: The Origins of Our the various articles Discontents' uses anecdotes and allegory to advance her thesis, which however does are those of the not stand on a strong structural foundation. authors and they not 10.The Evolution Of Modern Intelligence – When Did Humans Become Humans? necessarily reflect 11.The temporal lobes of Homo erectus were proportionally smaller than in H. the views of Vijetha sapiens IAS Academy. The 12.A 48,000 years old tooth that belonged to one of the last Neanderthals in advertisements Northern Italy apart from Vijetha if 13.Gene Editing: Do We Have The Right to Genetically Enhance Our Children? any added to this 14.Are Humans Still Evolving? Scientists Weigh In document regarding 15.Sex is real : Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every career guidance/ living thing is either one or the other books/institutions 16.Anthropologists compare composite measure of physiological dysregulation to shall be verified by understand how we age. such claims. 17.Stirling expert informs new study on chimpanzee behaviour 18.Inheritance in plants can now be controlled specifically For corrections/ 19.Forensic Anthropology: The Identification of human remains to solve a crime additions kindly 20.New $6.2 million study seeks to define molecular linkages between aging and write to us at www.vijethaiasacade Parkinson’s my.com 21.Is the Term “People of Color” Acceptable in This Day and Age? 22.How Dantu Blood Group protects against malaria—and how all humans could benefit 23.Seven footprints may be the earliest evidence of humans on the Arabian Peninsula 24.A risk conferred by a genomic segment inherited from Neanderthals occurs at the highest frequency among South Asians 25.Early human ancestors may have boiled their food in hot springs 1.8 million years ago — long before they learnt to use fire 26.Study Reveals Sapiens Copulated the Y Out of Neanderthals 27.Modern Human DNA Entered The Neanderthal Population Slowly 28. Were Other Humans the First Victims of the Sixth Mass Extinction? 29. New “Prime Editing” Method Makes Only Single-Stranded DNA Cuts 30. Modern humans and Neanderthals lived in Portuguese caves just THREE MILES apart for centuries and could have swapped technology, tools and mates, study 9.5 Race and racism, biological basis of morphological variation of non-metric and metric characters. Racial criteria, racial traits in relation to heredity and environment;
How 19th-Century Anti-Black and Anti-Indigenous Racism Reverberates Today
A case study for the nation, Minnesota has witnessed racial violence from its inception as a U.S. territory
Minnesota doesn’t typically come to mind when you think about slavery and the Civil War. It’s also not a place that’s figured into the national imagination when it comes to Black activism, either—at least, not until recently. However, as part of the series on “Black Life in Two Pandemics,” this post draws on several events in Minnesota’s history to help us understand the connections between the historic and the current experiences of Black and Native people in the Midwest. And yes, you’d expect a historian to claim that this history matters, but it’s crucial that we understand why it’s important. These encounters matter because they demonstrate the long history of Black and Native people in what’s now the state of Minnesota, and these encounters underscore and explain critical moments in the nation’s history.
There are a number of events I could have included here, such as the establishment of 16 American Indian boarding schools across the state in the late 1800s and early 1900s, or the 1920 lynchings of three Black circus workers in Duluth in the wake of what’s come to be called the “Red Summer.” I could have explained how National Guard troops were deployed in Minneapolis in 1967 when racial tensions in the city led to protests and demonstrations, or how American Indians in Minneapolis formed the American Indian Movement in 1968 to protest police brutality. Instead, I’ve chosen to center this essay around Fort Snelling, particularly in terms of its construction as a military outpost, the experiences of enslaved people at the fort, its role in the wake of the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War, and its use as a headquarters for buffalo soldiers. Fort Snelling stands as a symbol of expansion and exploitation, but it also underscores the intertwined histories of Black and Native people in what is now Minnesota. The history of the fort is one of white supremacy that shapes both Minnesota and national law and history, and it helps us understand the interconnected histories of racist violence, especially during this dual pandemic of police violence and COVID-19.
Curious September 2020 Early Encounters
The Dakota people who have called this land home for centuries have a sacred place they call Bdote, which means “where two waters come together.” Bdote is where the Minnesota River (Mni Sota Wakpa) meets the Mississippi River (Wakpa Taŋka), and it’s what many Dakota consider to be their place of creation. Those who lived near Bdote tended to move with the seasons in order to find food and resources for their communities. European explorers, traders and missionaries reached the Dakota by the mid-1600s. Intermarriage among Europeans, Black people and Native people led to multifaceted kinship connections. George Bonga (1802–1880), who became a fur trader with the American Fur Company and later served as a guide and interpreter for government agents, was descended from enslaved people on his father’s side and Ojibwe people on his mother’s side.
The Louisiana Purchase, signed a year after George Bonga’s birth, included Native lands. In 1805 U.S. Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pike set out to find places to build military posts. Pike encouraged Native leaders to sign the Treaty of St. Peters, also known as “Pike’s Purchase.” The treaty allowed the United States to build military posts and promised that the Dakota could use the land as they always had. Pike also promised to pay the Dakota for their land, but he left the amount blank. According to historian Roy Meyers, the Dakota received “$200 worth of presents” on the spot and the Senate filled in the blank spot when they ratified the treaty.
Construction on the fort began in 1820. The U.S. government had several reasons for wanting to build a fort near Bdote. According to historian Peter DeCarlo, the United States wanted to keep the British out, profit off the resources in the region and stay on top of the fur trade. The government also wanted to try to keep the peace between the Dakota and their Ojibwe neighbors in order to draw more Euro-American settlers to the region. Military officers, government officials and fur traders were among those who would spend part of their lives at Fort Snelling. However, these men forcibly brought other people to the fort. The experiences of enslaved people at Fort Snelling intersected with both the growing Euro-American population and the Native peoples who found themselves on the edges of their own lands.
Curious September 2020 Slavery, Freedom, and the Supreme Court
While the Civil War wouldn’t start until 1861, several pieces of legislation brought arguments over slavery home to Fort Snelling. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory, and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 also banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30’ parallel. However, officers in the U.S. Army were among those who illegally brought enslaved people to Fort Snelling. Lawrence Taliaferro, who served as the Indian Agent at the fort from 1820 to 1839, was the biggest local slaveholder in the region. He also imported enslaved people from Virginia to hire them out or sell them. According to historian Walt Bachman, the only thing Taliaferro lacked was an auction block. Colonel Josiah Snelling, the fort’s namesake who oversaw its construction, also owned enslaved people. While the names of many enslaved people who were brought to Fort Snelling were never written down, enslaved people at the fort resisted their condition in numerous ways, including four who sued for their freedom.
Elias T. Langham, the subagent at the Indian Agency, bought a woman named Rachel in 1830 for Lieutenant Thomas Stockton. Rachel was enslaved at Fort Snelling and at Fort Crawford in what would become Wisconsin. Rachel sued for her freedom in Missouri, and the state Supreme Court ruled in her favor in 1836. Fur trader Alexis Bailly bought an enslaved woman named Courtney in 1831. Her son, Joseph Godfrey, is the only person who is known to have grown up as an enslaved person in what is now Minnesota. Courtney also sued for her freedom, and she was freed after the decision in Rachel’s case.Two others would become famous for their resistance to enslavement. While it is not clear if Lawrence Taliaferro bought or inherited an enslaved woman named Harriet Robinson, he brought her to Fort Snelling around 1835. Dr. John Emerson, aU.S. Army surgeon, came to Fort Snelling the following year and brought with him an enslaved man named Dred Scott.
Scott and Robinson were married in either 1836 or 1837, and Taliaferro either gave or sold Robinson to Emerson. Emerson took the Scotts to St. Louis in the early 1840s, and they sued for their freedom in Missouri in 1846 and 1847. Their case eventually made it to the Supreme Court. In the 1857 decision in Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney argued that enslaved people were not included—and were not intended to be included—under the word “citizens” in the Constitution. Instead, he wrote, they were “considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings…[who] had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.”
Taney also compared enslaved people to American Indians, arguing that the situation of enslaved people was “altogether unlike that of the Indian race.” Even though Native nations “were uncivilized, they were yet a free and independent people…governed by their own laws.” Taney’s decision would have a lasting effect on American history—and particularly on Black and Native history.
Curious September 2020 Wars Within a War: The Civil War and the U.S.-Dakota War
Fort Snelling was temporarily decommissioned in 1858, the same year Minnesota became a state. The Civil War started in 1861, four years after the Dred Scott decision, and the government brought Fort Snelling back into service that same year to train newly recruited soldiers for the Union. In 1862 war broke out in Minnesota. Known as the U.S.-Dakota War, the four-month conflict was, in short, the result of treaty violations by the federal government and the negligence of Indian agents. We tend to think of the Indian Wars as something confined to the American West, but the U.S.-Dakota War highlights the mid-1800s contestations over lands and resources.
The Dakota, like other Native nations across the country, had been interacting with Europeans and Euro-Americans for centuries. They had tried different strategies of cooperation, negotiation and outright resistance to government interference, military operations, religious imposition and growing settlement. When that didn’t work, some argued that they should go to war.
It’s important to recognize that what happened in Minnesota did not just occur spontaneously. Decades of ever-increasing settlement by Europeans and Euro-Americans led to continued conflicts with Native people in the state. The Ojibwe and the Dakota were forced to sign treaties (most notably in 1837 and 1851) that ceded hundreds of thousands of acres of their lands. Missionaries and the federal government also worked to assimilate American Indians. They wanted Native nations to give up their languages, their cultures, their religions, their political systems and their ways of life in order to become what non-Natives considered “civilized.” The push for assimilation also divided Native communities: some believed that assimilation was the best thing to do, others wanted to continue living their traditional ways, and still more Dakota tried to incorporate some new practices into their traditional systems.
The treaties the federal government signed with Native nations like the Dakota promised payments, goods and resources (usually called annuities) in exchange for their lands. In the midst of the Civil War, though, keeping their treaty obligations wasn’t high on the government’s list of priorities. Treaties between the federal government and the Dakota had outlined how the government would provide food and goods for the Dakota in order to stop the Dakota from continuing their traditional hunting and gathering practices.
When the government stopped providing these resources, it meant that many Dakota were hungry. They couldn’t hunt or harvest like before, and there weren’t enough resources to go around. If they were able to get any provisions, the food was often spoiled or unfit for consumption. By the summer of 1862, with no annuities in sight and traders unwilling to extend credit, the Dakota had nowhere to go and no one to turn to.
Trader Andrew Myrick told the Dakota that, if they were hungry, they could “eat grass.” In August 1862, a group of young Dakota men skirmished with some settlers near Acton, killing five of them. The Dakota leader, Taoyateduta (also known as Little Crow), reluctantly agreed with the faction of the Dakota who argued for continuing the attacks in hopes of driving out the settlers. “We have waited a long time,” Taoyateduta told Indian agent Thomas J. Galbraith. “The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. …When men are hungry they help themselves.”
The fighting raged through southern Minnesota for several months, and there were many divisions among the Dakota as the war continued. When the fighting ended, some Dakota moved north and west to escape the army. Many Dakota who had not taken part in the fighting met General Sibley at a place that came to be known as Camp Release, and Sibley took all the Dakota into military custody. A military commission sentenced more than 300 Dakota men to death, and the remaining Dakota were forced to march to Fort Snelling. More than 1,600 Dakota reached Fort Snelling in November 1862, and they were imprisoned there for the rest of the winter. On the day after Christmas, 38 of the Dakota men who had been sentenced by the military commission were simultaneously hanged in Mankato. It was the largest mass execution in the history of the United States, and President Abraham Lincoln signed off on the executions a few weeks before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
The men whose sentences had been commuted were forcibly removed to Fort McClellan in Davenport, Iowa, far away from their families imprisoned at Fort Snelling. The Department of the Interior and the U.S. Army argued over who was responsible for the Dakota at Fort Snelling. The Dakota didn’t have adequate food, clothing, shelter, or access to medical attention and several hundred Dakota died during the winter. Those who survived were forced to move to Crow Creek, a barren reservation in South Dakota, the following spring. Throughout 1863 and 1864, as the Civil War continued to rage across the South and the West, the U.S. Army launched punitive expeditions into Dakota Territory. Fort Snelling became the epicenter of these efforts, serving both as a military outpost and as a prison for captured Dakotas. The effects of the government’s subsequent treatment of the Dakota linger more than 150 years later. Dred and Harriet Scott’s enslavement at
Curious September 2020 Fort Snelling, Taney’s ruling, the outbreak of the Civil War and the U.S.-Dakota War have had lasting consequences in Minnesota and across the country.
Less than 20 years later, the U.S. Army used Fort Snelling as the regimental headquarters for several segregated all-Black units who became known as “buffalo soldiers.” Congress passed the Army Reorganization Act in 1866, and buffalo soldiers were tasked with, among other things, helping control American Indians on the Great Plains and in the American West. No one is quite sure how they got their name, but the buffalo soldiers took part in nearly 200 conflicts, skirmishes, and battles during the era of the Indian Wars. Their legacy is complicated, particularly in terms of reconciling pride in military service with the regiments’ role in the violence against and displacement of Native people.
The Legacy of Fort Snelling
The site of Fort Snelling had been chosen for its importance as a military outpost, and it now sits in the major metropolitan area known as the Twin Cities. Saint Paul, the state capital, was incorporated in 1854, and the neighboring city of Minneapolis was incorporated in 1867. Fort Snelling was decommissioned in 1946. It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1960, and it reopened as Historic Fort Snelling in 1970.
Its initial interpretations centered on life at the fort in 1827, so visitors never learned about enslaved people, the U.S. Dakota War and its aftermath, or buffalo soldiers. However, local Black and Native community members, activists and organizations have encouraged the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) to offer more inclusive and comprehensive interpretations and programming. In 2019, for instance, MNHS updated some signage to read “Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote.” Continued activism has helped lead to a plan to revitalize the fort and increase the number of stories that will be told, including perspectives from Native nations, soldiers, enslaved and free African Americans, and Japanese Americans during World War II. Despite these changes, the historical presence of enslaved people at Fort Snelling and the military’s decision to imprison Dakota families at the fort after the U.S.-Dakota War—two methods of policing and criminalizing Black and Native people—reverberate into the present, highlighting the prevalence of police brutality against Black and Native bodies in Minnesota and across the country.
(Source: Simithsonian Magazine)
Curious September 2020 9.1 History of administration of tribal areas, tribal policies, plans, programmes of tribal development and their implementation. The concept of PTGs (Primitive Tribal Groups), their distribution, special programmes for their development. Role of N.G.O.s in tribal development.
Arjun Munda inaugurates ‘2 Days’ National Tribal Research Conclave’ being held virtually
New Delhi: Union Minister for Tribal Affairs Shri Arjun Munda has said that the Ministry of Tribal affairs is funding 26 Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs) for research under Grant to TRIs and is engaged in quality research in collaboration with reputed Government and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) spread over the country. National Institute for Tribal research is being set up in partnership with IIPA at the IIPA premises in Delhi, the Minister said. These partner organizations are designated as Centres of Excellence. Addressing at the inaugural session of “National Tribal Research Conclave” organized by Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Tribal Affairs, (M/o Tribal Affairs), Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA), New Delhi here today, he said that his Ministry along with such partner organisations design workable models which provide end to end solution, like problem identification, finding solution and execution of the project as part of Action research which can be implemented by policy initiatives.
Shri Munda said that we have to use technology to create path towards progress for tribals. Research by Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs) should become the base to take our tribal developments programs forward. He said that Tribal Research Institutes have a very important role to play and their Research should help to draw road map for future development.
He emphasized that ‘Research for Policy’ should be guiding principle to help identify the gaps between policy and actual implementation. Tribal Research should focus not only on the anthropological aspects of tribal life and culture but should also focus on the progress made by them. Research by TRIs should help to achieve the goal “Mera Van Mera Dhan, Mera Udhyam” since forests are not only important for environment but play a major role in tribal livelihoods.
Shri Munda opined that our tribal development schemes are very dynamic. We have passed through many hurdles in the past but now with the help of new technology, we are moving ahead. How to proceed on Development Plan for tribals, it has to be Research based. Estimation of beneficiaries is the most important aspect and all the benefits should reach to all.
Curious September 2020 He expressed his concern that there is a mismatch between Research for Policy and the Constitutional concept of Tribal administration. We could not do tribal research keeping in view the development plans. We have missed the intervention of Research in policy, the Minister added.
Shri Munda suggested that the proposed National Institute for Tribal Research (NITR) should also have an educational wing to educate students on the tribal development.
In his address, Shri Deepak Khandekar, Secretary, Ministry of Tribal Affairs said that earlier Tribal Research work was being done as a sponsored program in the Ministry of Tribal Affairs but now it is being run in a mission mode. There are around 700 Scheduled Tribe Communities and 75 PVTGs in our country. We have been focusing on what they have done in the past, but now our focus is on what they aspire to do. Ministry of Tribal Affairs wants to do and promote research on all aspects of their lives and cultures.Ministry is not short of Budget but it wants committed persons and organizations to carry out research. IIPA is one of such committed organization, which has willingly come forward to do research on tribal lives. He said that today’s Conclave has more than 100 participants from all over the country including Tribal Affairs Ministers from many States and I thank IIPA for such arrangement.
In his address, Shri S.N. Tripathi, DG, IIPA gave an overview on the role of IIPA in tribal development. IIPA is working on Tribal Talent Pool and on Strengthening of TRIs in partnership with Ministry of Tribal Affairs and 1st such workshop was organized by IIPA in January 2020. The present 2 days review workshop is reviewing the progress on outcome of these projects and the best practices can be show cased to all stakeholders. 10 research partners are sharing their projects in this conclave. The road map of National Tribal Research Institute (NTRI) is also being shared. Ministry of Tribal Affairs is also coming up with NTRI in collaboration with IIPA.
Earlier, Shri Navaljit Kapoor, Joint Secretary, MoTA gave a detailed presentation on various ongoing and forthcoming schemes of Ministry of Tribal Development.
Ministry of Tribal Affairs is funding to 26 TRIs for research under Grant to TRIs and is is engaged in quality research in collaboration with reputed Government and Non-Government Organizations spread over country. These partner organizations are designated as Centre of Excellences. MoTA along with such partner organisations designs workable models which provide end to end solution, like problem identification, finding solution and execution of the project as part of Action research which can be implemented by policy initiatives. The themes are Health, Livelihood, education, digitalisation, water conservation, data sciences and development models for aspiration and model villages.
Centre for Excellence for Data Analytics (CEDA) is analysing tribal data for various schemes and has developed “Performance and Monitoring Dashboard” (dashboard.tribal.gov.in) which was recently launched by Shri Amitabh Kant, CEO NITI Aayog and Sh. Ramesh Chand, Member NITI Aayog. Bharat Rural Livelihood Foundation, an autonomous organisation under RD Ministry is working on gradation of NGOs and improve monitoring for NGO projects.
Piramal Foundation is working for creation of a consolidated health and nutrition data repository for tribal population and for providing data analytics support to facilitate evidence-based policy making and implementation strategies, and has launched Swasthya portal (swasthya.tribal.gov.in).TERI is engaged with MoTA on developing an economical model for Community Rights under Forest Rights Act. IIT Delhi has been given a project for development of a Data driven framework by using Data analytics to identify the villages that are having maximum socio-economic gaps, so that data drive planning can be made.
Likewise NIT Rourkela, Indian Institute of Forest management, NIRTH, JNU, Jamia Milia Islamia, Bhasa, BAIF, FICCI, ASSOCHAM are working on livelihood and Health projects in MP, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and other States. Many other Civil Societies and Corporates have offered partnership with MoTA to work together for welfare of tribal in areas of Livelihood, Education, Health, Water Conservation, Organic Farming, Skill Development, Tribal Culture & Festivals and are keen to become part of “Affirmative Action”.
Ministry of Tribal Affairs has taken unique initiative in solving water problems and Livelihood problems of the area. Action Research project has been given to SECMOL-LADAKH, wherein they would establish Ice stupa in 50 villages and which will solve problem of drinking water and water required for agriculture. SECMOL will also plant trees through community participation. UNDP is working on 1000 springs project with community participation to revive drying streams (https:/ thespringsportal.org/).
Curious September 2020 Himmotthan Society, Uttarakhand, which is managed by Tata Foundation has been given project on sheep rearing, Packaging of Apricot and Peas as these are perishable items and locals do not get remunerative price for their products.
Tribal Healers and Tribal medicines: Tribals have vast traditional knowledge of treating diseases with locally available medicinal plants. In order to protect this knowledge, which is fast vanishing, Patanjali Research Institute has been given pilot project for research on Tribal Healers and Medicinal Plants in Uttarakhand. Similar projects have been given to AIIMS-Jodhpur, Parvara Institute of Medical Science and Mata Amritamai Institute for Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Kerala.
Through CII, FICCI, ASSOCHAM many Corporates and NGOs have also shown interest to support and act as mentor for such talent and offered to give Internships to interested Scholars. Many Civil Societies and Corporates have also offered partnership with MoTA to work together for welfare of tribal in areas of Livelihood, Talent pool, Tribal healers, Tribal Culture & Festivals and are keen to become part of “Affirmative Action”. Philips India has offered scholarship to 30 medical students who could not be accommodated under the Top Class Scholarship scheme of MoTA. GOAL (Going Online as Leaders) is also one such initiative of Facebook, which is funded by Facebook and various organizations working with Ministry of Tribal Affairs are the Institutional partners in this project.
(Source:IndiaEducationlibrary.com)
Curious September 2020 6.2 Problems of the tribal Communities — land alienation, poverty, indebtedness, low literacy, poor educational facilities, unemployment, underemployment, health and nutrition.
‘An institute like KISS should be banned for what it does to tribal children, not celebrated’, says tribal leader Doley in exclusive chat with TCN
The Kalinga Intitute of Social Sciences (KISS) has often been presented as an ideal model for ensuring that tribal children are not deprived of education because of poverty. Over the past three decades, this institute has grown from 250 students to over 27,000 students who are given free education. In return, it has earned a lot of name and fame for itself and its founder, Achyuta Samanta.
But beyond the headlines, there is a darker, murkier truth that has escaped the scrutiny of mainstream media. The fact that thousands of tribal children are separated from their families after birth, or the fact that what part of our constitution allows a private entity to keep thousands of tribal children away from their culture under one roof has escaped the media and the larger society’s attention. This explains why in July 2020, over 200 tribal leaders, academics, activists, etc submitted a petition to The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Studies (IUAES) to express their dissent against KISS being chosen to host the World Congress of Anthropology (WCA) in 2023. The petition was submitted to Junji Koizumi, president of International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) along with vice-chancellors of Utkal and Sambalpur universities, Soumendra Mohan Patnaik and Deepak Kumar Behera, respectively. These two universities were also to hold the event along with KISS. The WCA took cognizance of the matter and decided that the KISS will no longer host the event. This information was shared with the vice-chancellor of Sambalpur University on August 16, 2020.
Curious September 2020 Pranab Doley, who belongs to the Mising tribe in Assam and is the advisor to Jeepal Krishak Shramik Sangha, a farmers’ organisation, played a leading role in this campaign. He, along with renowned tribal author Gladson Dungdung and other academicians and civil society members, exposed the systemic injustices that have been meted out to tribals in KISS in the name of upliftment and education.
TwoCircles.net correspondent Amit Kumar spoke with Doley at length to understand the reasons behind the protests against KISS and why such institutions are dangerous for the tribal community of India.
TCN: Could you tell us about when you came to know about the KISS event and what was your first reaction?
Doley: The event was declared two years back in 2018. It’s been two years now that we have been thinking and sharpening our arguments towards an opposition to the event that was supposed to be held in KISS in Odisha.
TCN: What was the process of building the argument?
Doley: There has been a huge body of work that has gone into this. And in the process, academics, activists, both Adivasis and non-Adivasis have contributed to the same. It also includes more than 50 interviews of students, staff members who have resigned from KISS or are working there still. So, it comes from a knowledge base of not only the larger holistic understanding of Adivasi world view and their knowledge about building the future. KISS as an institute is not eligible to host and organize an event of the stature of World Anthropological Congress. This comes from experiences of more than 50 people within KISS and there are many more who did not want to speak about their experiences. The whole argumentation that comes up against KISS comes out of lived reality, scientific studies and the historical understanding of what such institutes have done in different parts of the world, how indigenous and Adivasi knowledge bases have been annihilated historically. We don’t want this to continue in the modern age, where we talk about science taking precedence over illogical ideas.
TCN: Could you give us a few examples of what were the most distressing testimonies that emerged out of KISS which strengthened your protests?
Doley: A majority of the cases we have seen of the people who have talked about their experiences has been very disturbing. It has impacted them both physically as well as psychologically. It also impacted the individual but also their community. This sums up the kind of trauma that the members who have decided to come out and speak of their experiences. Also, there are references to large-scale violation of children’s rights.
The very existence of KISS is a symbol of colonial apparatus. Where in the world do you find a single house holding more than 30,000 Adivasi children? Is that even human? We would like to ask the Indian government, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, who shamelessly even awarded KISS a few years back for sadly recognizing the ‘grand work’ that the institute is doing. The National Commission needs to go back to the constitution of India which clearly states the rights of indigenous people of this country, the fundamental right to education for every child in this country in a free environment, the right to life, the PESA, the fifth and sixth schedule.
Here, I would also like to include the Ministry of Tribal Affairs. They need to wake up. They need to look into the gross violations of its people. And if they can’t stand up to this, then people like us will, who still have the rationality to think about the future of our children. I mean, just that you are failing to provide our people with the basic standard of education so that they too can compete with others without losing their culture, their knowledge base. It’s your duty so that they too can become doctors, engineers and social scientists. KISS is a Brahmanical institute. The moment you enter the campus, you see replicas of temples, which are not a part of Adivasi culture and heritage. Is this a Sanskritization process? The Indian government and the Ministry of Tribal Affairs need to immediately act on this and provide the people of this country with a transparent report about what is happening in KISS.
TCN: You mention how Adivasi children have almost been ‘herded’ in one place. But KISS is not a new institute. It has received support from the government as well as NGOs. How do we prevent another institute like KISS does not replicate its model?
Doley: It is already happening. We have come to know that KISS is signing MoUs with other tribal states to create similar models. The whole glorification of Achyut Samanta and the kind of patronization he receives as the patron….no I would call him the owner of this institute proves that it is an Adivasi annihilation project. It aims to take away their resources,
Curious September 2020 their land, their forests, their rivers and completely dispose of the communities who continue to proudly showcase their symbiotic relationship with nature. In India, sadly, we know that the majority of resources are still present in the Adivasi territory. A project like KISS cannot be seen in an isolated incident. It’s a designed process to take away their resources and this is substantiated by the fact that multiple corporations, mining companies fund KISS. It is a design to annihilate the Adivasis and take away their resources from them.
TCN: What were your experiences with regards to the petition and the response of the World Congress of Anthropology?
Doley: This attempt by Adivasis and non-Adivasis is the first step towards taking on an inhuman institute like KISS and it’s also a larger global struggle. The discourse, the idea behind this is that no children should be treated like this. Children have their rights and they need to be respected. If people who are considered adults do not take up this fight, then who will?
The struggle against KISS is not a rabble-rousing struggle: it comes from a deep understanding of what is happening in the name of education. It is just the first step into the injustice meted out to the Adivasi people in the name of education. Till the day, institutes like KISS are erased from democratic countries like India. KISS does not have the legitimacy to survive. Our constitution does not allow this kind of an institute.
Regarding the response of the World Congress of Anthropology, I must point out that there was a lot of support for our statement from across the world from people from all walks of life. IACN took cognizance of the fact that there is resistance against their step. KISS is an illegal institute and needs to shut down. We also want the World Congress of Anthropology to take a stronger position. Just saying that they decided against holding the event because a lot of people protested against the same does not give us a complete answer. I am sure the World Congress of Anthropology has studied indigenous societies across the world. I am sure they know what is happening in KISS. We demand that they must come out with a clear stand on this idea. How does KISS have the authority to keep more 30,000 students under one roof? Do they have the right to hegemonize so many children? Do they have the right to take children away from their mothers? All these questions need to be answered by the World Anthropological Congress too else Adivasis will point fingers at them too. It is a matter of our life and death. For you, it may be just an institute, but for us, it is our future. We cannot let Corporate and Brahmanical institutes like KISS to annihilate our future and history.
(Source:twocircles.net)
Curious September 2020
1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following:Homo erectus: Africa (Paranthropus), Europe (Homo erectus heidelbergensis), Asia (Homo erectus javanicus, Homo erectus pekinensis).
Homo heidelbergensis was Extremely Resourceful, New Research Shows New research pieces together the activities and movements of a group of Homo heidelbergensis, a poorly understood species of archaic humans that lived between 700,000 to 200,000 years ago, as they made tools, including the oldest bone tools documented in Europe, and extensively butchered a large horse at the 480,000-year old archaeological site near Boxgrove, Sussex, the United Kingdom.
The Horse Butchery Site is one of many excavated in quarries near Boxgrove, an internationally significant area that is home to Britain’s oldest human remains. During the excavations in the 1980-90s, archaeologists recovered more than 2,000 razor sharp flint fragments from eight separate groupings, known as knapping scatters.
These are places where individual early humans knelt to make their tools and left behind a dense concentration of material between their knees.
Embarking on an ambitious jigsaw puzzle to piece together the individual flints, Dr. Matthew Pope from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London and his colleagues discovered that in every case Homo heidelbergensis were making large flint knives called bifaces, often described as the perfect butcher’s tool.
“This was an exceptionally rare opportunity to examine a site pretty much as it had been left behind by an extinct population, after they had gathered to totally process the carcass of a dead horse on the edge of a coastal marshland,” Dr. Pope said.
Curious September 2020 “Incredibly, we’ve been able to get as close as we can to witnessing the minute-by-minute movement and behaviors of a single apparently tight-knit group of early humans: a community of people, young and old, working together in a co operative and highly social way.” “We established early on that there were at least eight individuals at the site making tools, and considered it likely that a small group of adults, a ‘hunting party,’ could have been responsible for the butchery,” he said.
“However, we were astonished to see traces of other activities and movement across the site, which opened the possibility of a much larger group being present.”The detailed study of the horse bones shows the animal was not just stripped of meat, but each bone was broken down using stone hammers so that the marrow and liquid grease could be sucked out. The horse appears to have been completely processed, with the fat, marrow, internal organs and even the partially digested stomach contents providing a nutritious meal for the early human group of 30 or 40 individuals envisaged for the site. However, the horse provided more than just food, and the detailed analysis of the bones found that several bones had been used as tools called retouchers.
“These are some of the earliest non-stone tools found in the archaeological record of human evolution,” said Simon Parfitt, also from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. “They would have been essential for manufacturing the finely made flint knives found in the wider Boxgrove landscape.”
“The finding provides evidence that early human cultures understood the properties of different organic materials and how tools could be made to improve the manufacture of other tools,” said Dr. Silvia Bello, a researcher at the Natural History Museum, London. ”Along with the careful butchery of the horse and the complex social interaction hinted at by the stone refitting patterns, it provides further evidence that early human population at Boxgrove were cognitively, social and culturally sophisticated.”
Cooperative activity amongst larger numbers of people suggests these temporary sites could have been highly social spaces for interaction, learning and the sharing of tools and ideas. The Horse Butchery Site shows this behavior more vividly than any other site so far discovered in the archaeological record.
(The findings are detailed in the book ‘The Horse Butchery Site: A high resolution record of Lower Palaeolithic hominin behaviour at Boxgrove, UK’ published by Spoilheap Publications).
Curious September 2020 COVER PAGE ARTICLE
1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution of the following: 1. Homo erectus: Africa (Paranthropus), Europe (Homo erectus heidelbergensis), Asia (Homo erectus javanicus, Homo erectus pekinensis). 2. Neanderthal Man- La-Chapelle-aux-saints (Classical type), Mt. Carmel (Progressive type). 3. Rhodesian man. 4. Homo sapiens — Cromagnon, Grimaldi and Chancelede.
Genetics Steps In to Help Tell the Story of Human Origins Africa’s sparse fossil record alone cannot reveal our species’ evolutionary history.
It’s not unusual for geochronologist Rainer Grün to bring human bones back with him when he returns home to Australia from excursions in Europe or Asia. Jawbones from extinct hominins in Indonesia, Neanderthal teeth from Israel, and ancient human finger bones unearthed in Saudi Arabia have all at one point spent time in his lab at Australian National University before being returned home. Grün specializes in developing methods to discern the age of such specimens. In 2016, he carried with him a particularly precious piece of cargo: a tiny sliver of fossilized bone covered in bubble wrap inside a box.
The bone fragment had come from a skull—still stored at the Natural History Museum in London—with a heavy brow ridge and a large face. It looked so primitive that the miner who had discovered it in 1921 at a lead mine in the Zambian town of Kabwe, then in the British territory of Rhodesia, first thought it had belonged to a gorilla. But later that year, museum paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward noticed what he interpreted as typically human features, such as the skull’s thin and relatively large braincase, that motivated him to designate the specimen as its own hominin species.
In the 1980s, however, museum paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer took another look at the skull and classified it as belonging to the species Homo heidelbergensis, an ancient hominin thought to be a human ancestor. Based on its primitiveness, Stringer says, most researchers guessed it was an early individual who lived around half a million years ago, some 200,000 years before the earliest Homo sapiens were starting to emerge. But nobody knew exactly how old the skull was. For decades, no dating method existed that could identify the fossil’s age without the destructive process of grinding up bits of bone for analysis. But Grün was determined to find a solution.
Grün is one of very few geochronologists proficient in a laser technique that extracts and reduces a barely visible grain of bone—smaller than the bone’s natural pores—to atoms, he says. The laser is coupled with a mass spectrometer, which measures the concentrations of uranium isotopes that undergo radioactive decay at a specific rate over time.
Curious September 2020 Having returned from his trip to procure the Homo heidelbergensis sample, Grün watched as the laser poked two tiny holes into the bone fragment and the particles disappeared into the mass spectrometer. Upon evaluating the mass spec data, he could tell that the fragment was much younger than previously believed. As he, Stringer, and others reported in Nature this past April, their best estimate was 299,000 years, give or take 25,000. That meant that the Kabwe individual had lived not before, but around the same time as the first Homo sapiens–like people dwelled in North Africa. Along with other archaeological evidence, the findings suggest that perhaps Homo heidelbergensis was not our ancestor, but a neighbor.
Together with yet another hominin, Homo naledi, known to have existed in southern Africa at that time, Africa may have been a crowded place. “Ten years ago, I think most of us would’ve thought, well, Africa in the last 300,000 years is just going to show you the evolution of Homo sapiens, and that’s really all—the other species would have disappeared, gone extinct,” notes Stringer. “Now we know that there were probably at least three different kinds of hominins around.” That’s akin to the situation that unfolded in Eurasia, where Neanderthals and Denisovans thrived for hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and at times even interbred with the other hominin groups.
The story in Africa remains murky, however, as researchers have not been able to reconstruct human history in vivid detail, in part because hominin fossils informative about our species’ emergence and coexistence with other species are rare in Africa. As a result, finds such as the Kabwe skull continue to raise more questions than answers. If Homo heidelbergensis wasn’t one of our recent ancestors, then who was? If our species really did overlap in time with Homo heidelbergensis, what role did they play in our evolutionary history?
In recent years, a field that has traditionally relied on fossil discoveries has acquired helpful new tools: genomics and ancient DNA techniques. Armed with this combination of approaches, researchers have begun to excavate our species’ early evolution, hinting at a far more complex past than was previously appreciated—one rich in diversity, migration, and possibly even interbreeding with other hominin species in Africa. “To piece together that story, we need information from multiple different fields of study,” remarks Eleanor Scerri, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. “No single one is really going to have all the answers—not genetics, not archaeology, not the fossils, because all of these areas have challenges and limitations.” A sparse fossil record
Bones easily disintegrate in many parts of Africa, in acidic forest soils or dry, sun-exposed areas. Moreover, the continent is largely unexplored by archaeologists. While northwestern Africa and former British territories in eastern and southern Africa have a long tradition of professional archaeological research, few researchers have looked for fossils anywhere else, notes archaeologist Khady Niang of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal. That’s especially the case for the western and central parts of the continent, where preservation conditions are also poor and excavations difficult at times due to political instability. “We might be missing some really, really important parts of the story,” adds Yale University anthropologist Jessica Thompson.
What African hominin fossils do make clear is the depth of humanity’s roots on that continent. Researchers have found some of the most abundant fossils in sediments between 3.5 million and 3.2 million years old. That appeared to be the heyday of the australopiths (including the genus Australopithecus), apes that walked upright and are believed to have used stone tools, but still climbed trees and had relatively small brains. It’s thought that somehow our own genus, Homo, emerged from transitional ape species some 2.8 million years ago as a clan of hominins with distinctive teeth, probably adapted to an eclectic diet that allowed them to thrive in a wide range of habitats. But there are few sediments, let alone fossils, left behind from that time, making the birth of our genus one of the most poorly understood periods in our evolution, Thompson notes.
The fossil record yields more secrets about the time shortly after the emergence of Homo, revealing a diversity of different Homo species in Africa, of which Homo erectus seems to persist the longest. Homo erectus crops up in Africa’s limited fossil record around 2 million years ago and hangs around on the continent until roughly a million years ago. It was the first hominin that shows evidence of having lived in human-like social groupings and used fire, and it is thought to be a human ancestor. When and how Homo sapiens emerged isn’t at all clear, but what is apparent is that we weren’t alone; fossils suggest that several other hominin species, such as that represented by the Kabwe skull, inhabited the continent at the time our species appeared. Another relatively small-brained hominin, Homo naledi, is also thought to have lived in southern Africa around 300,000 years ago. And inside a Moroccan cave called Jebel Irhoud, 300,000-year-old skeletons were found that carry very early features of Homo sapiens. It’s not yet known how long those different hominin species existed, however, or whether they physically overlapped and perhaps even shared genes with one another, Stringer notes, or whether there were others.
Curious September 2020 By around 160,000 years ago, the constellation of physical features that defines us today—such as a globular braincase and a pointed chin—had begun to emerge in ancient hominin groups represented by fossils found across Africa. Later, some of these anatomically modern humans crossed the thin spit of land that connects Africa to Eurasia, probably on several occasions. On that new continent, they eventually met Neanderthals and Denisovans, which, like two hobbit-size Homo species found on southeast Asian islands, are thought to be the evolutionary products of earlier hominin migrations out of the continent. “Africa was this sort of leaky faucet, and hominins were just dribbling out of it all the time,” Thompson says.
Fossil finds over the years have steadily bolstered a long-held idea that anatomically modern humans first emerged in Africa. This “Out of Africa” model, proposed by anthropologists in the late 20th century, posited that all humans of Eurasian ancestry descended from a single ancestral African population, which then spread throughout the world and displaced all other hominins. The opposing “multi-regionalism” model, by contrast, conceived that multiple human subpopulations—which stemmed from regional lineages of an ancestral species such as Homo erectus—existed across Europe, Asia, and Africa, and through continuous mixing evolved together to form the present human population.
While fossils supported the former theory, it was the advent of genetic research that showed unequivocally that populations outside of Africa descended from a single population in Africa. But the story had a twist: in two groundbreaking studies published in 2014, researchers compared ancient DNA extracted from Neanderthal bones and compared it with modern-day people, and found that 2 percent of the average European genome is Neanderthal in origin. Our species originated in Africa, but interbred with hominins outside of it.
These findings, and many since, have highlighted the power of genetics in resolving questions about human ancestry that fossils alone cannot. Investigations of the genomes of living Africans are now underway to help fill in the gaps of Africa’s fossil record. “[Such studies] are really providing important insights into our population history and African origins,” says Yale University evolutionary biologist Serena Tucci. “We are getting to know and understand processes that happened very early on in our evolutionary history.”
Ghost hominins Even the very first investigations of our genetic ancestry, gleaned from small, bite-size chunks of genetic material, positioned Africa as the cradle of humanity. One widely publicized 1987 study compared mitochondrial gene snippets from 147 people across the world, and concluded that Africans have the highest mitochondrial diversity, suggesting that our species originated and spent most of its evolutionary history there. Specifically, the authors traced all human mitochondrial diversity back to a single theoretical woman who lived in East Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago, whom the media popularized as “mitochondrial Eve.” Later studies estimated that the most recent common ancestor of modern Y chromosome variation (dubbed “Y chromosome Adam”) could also be traced back to Africa.
Subsequent studies of nuclear DNA have validated our African birthplace and refined our knowledge of the human genetic landscape. Several studies of genetic variation among modern-day Khoe and San individuals, two groups of indigenous people in southern Africa known for their click language, have suggested they represent our species’ most genetically diverse lineage. Collectively known as Khoe-San, this group is thought to have split from other populations between 200,000 and 350,000 years ago, making them the most ancient population of modern humans to diverge. Non-Africans, meanwhile, represent a reduced subset of the diversity in Africa, and likely trace most of their ancestry back to just one
Curious September 2020 small population—probably no more than a few thousand individuals—who ventured out of the continent between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago.
Some scientists see the extraordinary diversity in modern Khoe-San people as evidence that our species arose in southern Africa. Along with some archaeological evidence from the region, that challenges the long-held idea of an East African origin, which was based on the fact that many early hominin fossils were found there. However, trying to pinpoint the precise location of our species’ origins from DNA is often criticized for the simple reason that people move around—it’s not known if the populations living in one place today were there hundreds or thousands of millennia ago. In fact, some researchers, including Scerri, Stringer, and Thompson, have recently constructed an entirely new theory of our origins: that anatomically modern humans didn’t arise from a single place, but gradually emerged from a web of interconnected populations sprawled across Africa—a continental gene-sharing bonanza that hominin lineages besides our own may have participated in. “It’s a good way to interpret the data we have right now,” says Niang.
In addition to where we evolved, researchers are interested in how: which genes gave us a selective advantage to survive in particular environments, and which ancestors contributed to our genomes? Unfortunately, modern African DNA is severely underrepresented in genetic research, making these questions particularly challenging to answer. Most sequenced genomes are of European origin, with fewer than 2 percent coming from Africans. This dearth of African genomes is compounded by the fact that the genetic scaffold underlying some frequently studied traits such as skin pigmentation appear to be far more complex in Africans than in other populations, notes Brenna Henn, a population geneticist at the University of California, Davis. “The twelve to fifteen genes [for skin pigmentation] that people cite in Eurasian populations explain less than 25 percent of the variation in Africans.”
African population history complicates matters further. Large-scale migrations pulled people back and forth across the continent for thousands of years. People from Eurasia also migrated back to Africa. Where people moved, they swapped their genes with local populations, shuffling patterns of ancestry across African genomes. This upheaval of ancient population structures creates one of the biggest challenges in teasing out archaic history from modern genomes, notes University of Pennsylvania geneticist Sarah Tishkoff. “It can make it very tricky to distinguish that older history when there’s been this newer wave of gene flow messing with your modeling.”
Still, geneticists have been able to tease out some signals from our distant past, using computational models that ask what kind of evolutionary processes—such as mutation, selection, and interbreeding with other groups—best explain the pattern of variation across modern genomes. One intriguing finding of such studies is possible evidence of mixture with now extinct, unknown groups of modern humans and other hominins: “ghost” populations that, like Neanderthals, left traces in modern genomes. In one analysis of 15 sequenced genomes, Tishkoff’s group investigated the sources of genetic variation in three different modern African hunter-gatherer groups. The team’s models suggested that interbreeding with an archaic hominin species—which seemed as different from modern humans as are Neanderthals—was the most likely origin for a set of unusual sequences they found. “The model that includes a ghost population is always better [to fit the data], basically,” Tishkoff says.
A handful of similar studies have also revealed traces of ghost hominins in modern African genomes, sometimes accounting for up to 10 to 20 percent of the genetic variation. Some research suggests that mixing took place after the ancestors of modern Eurasians left Africa, hinting that other kinds of hominins could have existed alongside Homo sapiens in Africa until very recently. “It’s actually pretty convincing,” says Henn, who wasn’t involved in these studies. “Ten percent of the genome—I’m going to have a hard time invoking one single other process that can explain a signal like that.”
Ultimately, researchers need samples of DNA from ancient hominins to prove whether archaic African species did in fact contribute to modern genetic variation. While scientists have managed to overcome some of the technical hurdles of sequencing highly degraded ancient DNA from human fossils in Africa, the oldest human DNA found on the continent is just 15,000 years old, an age that pales in comparison to some 400,000-year-old hominin DNA found in a cave in Spain with relatively cool, stable temperatures. Archaeologists can only dream of finding intact DNA that old on the African continent, notes Tessa Campbell, an ancient DNA specialist at Iziko Museums of South Africa. “No one wants to say never . . . but it’s very unlikely.”
Because DNA is unlikely to survive very long in the African heat, researchers have largely refrained from drilling into the fossils they’ve found of other hominins in Africa for fear of destroying them. But efforts are underway to study ancient DNA from younger fossils of Homo sapiens to crack other mysteries about human history on the continent, Tucci notes. “This is definitely a new era for African genomics.”
Curious September 2020 Mining bones for ancient DNA
In 2015, an international team of researchers managed to harvest the first ancient DNA in Africa—the genome of Mota, a man who left behind 4,500-year-old remains in an Ethiopian cave. In the five years since that publication, researchers have published nearly 100 other full and partial ancient human sequences from Africa. These genomes have helped scientists better understand the messy signatures from recent migration events that make studies of modern genomes so difficult.
For instance, mitochondrial DNA from the skulls of seven people who lived some 15,000 years ago in modern-day Morocco revealed that they were closely related to Natufians, hunter-gatherers who dwelled in the Near East, as well as people living south of the Sahara desert. This finding suggested that there were far-flung connections between North Africa, the Near East, and sub-Saharan Africa before the dawn of agriculture.
Analyses of ancient DNA have also helped researchers understand how ancient migrations affected the genomes of people alive today. One such migration is the Bantu expansion, which gradually spread West African farming practices across the continent between roughly 5,000 and 1,000 years ago. By comparing DNA from ancient hunter-gatherer remains in southern Africa with modern-day Khoe-San people, evolutionary biologist Carina Schlebusch of Uppsala University in Sweden and her colleagues found that some Khoe-San groups carry DNA that ancient farmers brought with them.
Curious September 2020 They also carry mixed Eurasian ancestry that had been introduced to North Africa with earlier back-migrations into the continent and eventually carried to the southernmost tip of Africa as other migrating human populations moved southward, the researchers found.
(Source:The Scientist)
Decolonizing Studies of Human Evolution
The San people of southern Africa are one of the most intensively studied indigenous groups in the world. Their click language and traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles have long fascinated anthropologists. And the antiquity of their genetic lineage makes them a treasure trove for geneticists studying human evolutionary history.
However, studies on San lifestyles and genomes have not always been conducted ethically. For instance, scientists have sometimes referred to the San as “bushmen,” a derogatory term associated with colonial-era researchers using modern indigenous groups as models of primitive human ancestors, and have taken photographs of children and breastfeeding mothers without permission. “We’re not saying that everybody is bad. But you get those few individuals who don’t respect the San,” Leana Snyders, head of the South African San Council in Upington, South Africa, told Science in 2017. Ethical conduct in genomic research came to the foreground in 2010 following a high-profile analysis of San genomes in Nature in which the authors had, among other transgressions, not asked San leaders for permission to conduct the study.
All disciplines that study human evolution in Africa have at times been criticized for their extractive nature. Archaeological research—a field pioneered by European colonial nations—has long been driven by Western researchers digging up fossils from Africa to study them, sometimes taking them elsewhere to do so. Some hominin fossils are still displaced, such as the Kabwe skull, a famous Homo heidelbergensis specimen that remains in London’s Museum of Natural History, despite Zambia’s multiple requests to repatriate the skull. According to an April press release, the museum has approached Zambian authorities to begin discussing the possible return of the skull following a 2018 agreement between the UK and Zambia to find a solution to the issue.
Some scientists have called for regulations to protect fossil collections from ancient DNA research, whereby African hominin fossils undergo the damaging process of extracting DNA. Now, “African museums are taking a leading role to make sure this [research] happens through collaboration and regulation,” notes anthropologist Mary Prendergast of Saint Louis University’s Madrid campus, as geneticists are working to develop new, less destructive techniques for ancient DNA analysis.
The San, for their part, created a code of research conduct in 2017 that, for example, requires researchers to respect their communities and to allow them to comment on findings prior to publication to avoid derogatory interpretations. Researchers are also required to compensate the community for their cooperation, through financial support, knowledge, or job opportunities, for instance.
A number of scientists have called for a greater role of African scientists in human evolutionary research. To make that possible, Western funding agencies and institutions have an obligation to support African efforts to improve their countries’ antiquities infrastructure, so that “the next generation of African scholars [can] take control of the research in their areas,” notes anthropologist Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute in Germany.
Foreign research teams should also foster stronger collaboration with African researchers, rather than simply seeking their help with fossil excavations, which has sometimes been the case, notes University of Cape Town biological anthropologist Rebecca Ackermann. Research groups have become more diverse, she notes, but the transition is slow. “I do see a change. It’s just not as fast as I would like.”
Curious September 2020 1.4 Human Evolution and emergence of Man: 1. Biological and Cultural factors in human evolution. 2. Theories of Organic Evolution (Pre- Darwinian, Darwinian and Post- Darwinian).
Zoology’s Racism Problem A new book explores the history of scientists’ efforts to classify living things.
The death of George Floyd is having wide-ranging impacts, not just in the US but around the world. It has affected institutions and parts of society which previously believed themselves immune to, or at least removed from, racism.
In my recent work on biological classification, I have been struck by how frequently science has been misused to reinforce existing prejudice. And alarmingly, although most overt racial science has been consigned to history, an inherent human obsession with biological classification has left a pervasive, ugly legacy: many people still believe some “races” to be more primitive than, or inferior to, others. I explore zoology’s history, warts and all, in my latest book, How Zoologists Organize Things. Humans seem driven to classify and organize, and the diversity of animal life around us serves as a perfect outlet for that urge. A particularly malign influence arose with the development in the Middle Ages of the scala naturae, a seemingly innocuous attempt to classify the natural (and theological) world according to a simple graduated system. In the early 14th century, the Majorcan philosopher Ramon Llull wrote Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Mind, in which the elements of creation are allocated to steps on a staircase starting with minerals, then ascending through fire, plants, beasts, men, sky, and angels, ultimately overseen by God.
Harmless as they may seem, the scalae implied a hierarchy of inherent value among natural things. These classifications of nature became progressively more complex, and with that complexity came a veneer of scientific authority, as in Charles Bonnet’s 1745 Notion of a Scale of Living Beings.
As the 19th century started, these value laden worldviews collided with new ways of thinking in biology—especially the idea that humans could be analyzed and classified in the same way as other animals. To be sure, there have been several species of humans in Earth’s history, and science does classify these hominins based in part on physical characteristics, but early researchers took
Curious September2020 this idea too far by applying it to modern humans within the species Homo sapiens. For example, Charles White, in his disturbing 1799 book An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man and in Different Animals and Vegetables, ranks animals and people according to the verticality of their facial profile, from snipe and crocodiles to dogs and orangutans, and from “negroes,” “American savages,” and “Asiatics” to Europeans.
During the first half of the 19th century, many zoologists’ minds turned toward the idea that animal types—and by extension, human types—could change and diverge over long periods of time. Yet this often meant the old hierarchy of nature simply transformed into a concept of evolutionary “progress” toward ever more perfect beings. And this carried the implication that some of those beings, human and animal, had been left behind in a primitive state.
One of the strangest examples of this distortion of evolutionary theory was polygenism, an idea espoused by the pro slavery scion of the American School of Ethnology, Josiah Nott. Although he disliked the concept of evolution, Nott, in his 1854 Types of Mankind, cherry-picked the ideas he needed to claim that the “human races” are distinct species with origins in different animal groups. Nott claimed the evidence showed that white men were justified in dominating Black men, whose attributes render them the perfect slaves.
The respected German über-Darwinist Ernst Haeckel perpetuated the myth of evolutionary progress when he claimed influentially that Judaism is an evolutionary intermediate between primitive paganism and advanced Christianity, and when he asserted that non-Europeans are “physiologically nearer to the mammals—apes and dogs—than to the civilized European. We must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.”
Zoology must fight hard to decontaminate itself from the value judgments and skewed arguments of the past. Already, we no longer speak of animals as primitive or advanced, and those concepts have become meaningless in the context of humans too. Additionally, the human species is no longer considered to be gouped into a number of discrete races, but rather an array of populations, each adapted to its ancestral geographical environment, yet blurring genetically and culturally into its neighbors.
Humans have been the most widespread mammalian species for some time, so it is no surprise that we have ended up diverse. Yet it has taken a depressingly long time for scientists to state explicitly that this variation is messy and overlapping, and did not evolve to suit our prejudices.
(Source: The Scientist)
Curious September 2020 9.4 Chromosomes and chromosomal aberrations in man, methodology. Genetic imprints in human disease, genetic screening, genetic counselling, human DNA profiling, gene mapping and genome study.
Mapping the ‘Indian’ genome The government has cleared an ambitious project to map India’s genetic diversity. What will the project seek to determine, why is the information important, and what are the various challenges ahead?
LAST WEEK, The Indian Express reported that the government has cleared an ambitious gene-mapping project that is being described by those involved as the “first scratching of the surface of the vast genetic diversity of India”. A look at the objectives, scale and the diversity of the project, which will be significant not only in India but worldwide:
What is a genome?
Every organism’s genetic code is contained in its Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid (DNA), the building blocks of life. The discovery that DNA is structured as a “double helix” by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, for which they won a Nobel Prize in 1962, was the spark in the long, continuing quest for understanding how genes dictate life, its traits, and what causes diseases.
A genome, simply put, is all the genetic matter in an organism. It is defined as “an organism’s complete set of DNA, including all of its genes. Each genome contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism. In humans, a copy of the entire genome — more than 3 billion DNA base pairs — is contained in all cells that have a nucleus”.
Curious September 2020 Hasn’t the human genome been mapped before? The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international programme that led to the decoding of the entire human genome. It has been described as “one of the great feats of exploration in history. Rather than an outward exploration of the planet or the cosmos, the HGP was an inward voyage of discovery led by an international team of researchers looking to sequence and map all of the genes — together known as the genome — of members of our species”.Beginning on October 1, 1990 and completed in April 2003, the HGP gave us the ability, for the first time, to read nature’s complete genetic blueprint for building a human being.
What then is the ‘Genome India’ Project? This is being spearheaded by the Centre for Brain Research at Bengaluru-based Indian Institute of Science as the nodal point of about 20 institutions, each doing its bit in collecting samples, doing the computations, and then the research. Its aim is to ultimately build a grid of the Indian “reference genome”, to understand fully the type and nature of diseases and traits that comprise the diverse Indian population. For example, if the Northeast sees a tendency towards a specific disease, interventions can be made in the region, assisting public health, which make it easier to battle the illness.
The other institutes involved are: AIIMS Jodhpur; Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad; Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics; Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology; Gujarat Biotechnology Research Centre; IIIT Allahabad; IISER (Pune); IIT Madras; IIT Delhi; IIT Jodhpur; Institute of Bioresources And Sustainable Development; Institute of Life Sciences; Mizoram University; National Centre for Biological Sciences; National Institute of Biomedical Genomics; National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences; Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology; and Sher-e Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences.
What are the challenges involved? MEDICAL ETHICS: In a project that aims only to create a database of genetic information, gene modification is not among the stated objectives. It is important to note, however, that this has been a very fraught subject globally. The lure to“intervene” may be much more if this kind of knowledge is available, without one being fully aware of the attendant risks.The risk of doctors privately running away with the idea of fixing genetic issues came to light most recently after a Shenzen-based scientist, who helped create the world’s first gene-edited babies, was sentenced to three years in prison. He Jiankui stunned the world when he announced in 2018 that twin girls had been born with modified DNA to make them HIV-resistant. He claimed he had managed that using the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 before their birth.
Curious September 2020 DATA & STORAGE: After collection of the sample, anonymity of the data and questions of its possible use and misuse would need to be addressed. Keeping the data on a cloud is fraught with problems and would raise questions of ownership of the data. India is yet to pass a Data Privacy Bill with adequate safeguards. Launching a Genome India Project before the privacy question is settled could give rise to another set of problems.
SOCIAL ISSUES: The question of heredity and racial purity has obsessed civilisations, and more scientific studies of genes and classifying them could reinforce stereotypes and allow for politics and history to acquire a racial twist. In India a lot of politics is now on the lines of who are “indigenous” people and who are not. A Genome India Project could add a genetic dimension to the cauldron.“Selective breeding” has been controversial since time immemorial, and well before the DNA was discovered. But eugenics acquired a dangerous context with the Nazis deliberating on the theme at length and its mention came up in the Nuremberg trials. Post World War-2, it has been a very touchy issue.
(Source:TheIndiaExpress)
Curious September 2020 7.1 Problems of exploitation and deprivation of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes
The dispensable India: Data shows how DNTs, Adivasis, Dalits, Muslims bore lockdown brunt
These communities have suffered on most social indicators due to a mix of poor logistics as well as prejudice and ostracisation Dalit, Muslim and Adivasi households and neighbourhoods have suffered terribly in the aftermath of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in the months following the declaration of the countrywide lockdown, data collected by a group of civil society organisations has showed.
These communities were not able to avail food often due to government food distribution centres being located farther from their settlements and nearer to those of dominant castes. Communities like Muslims and denotified tribes have also suffered from Islamophobia and prejudice, that has taken a toll on food, education, healthcare and other social indicators, the data showed.The initiative to collect data was led by civil society organisations including Partners in Change and Praxis Institute for Participatory Practices, the National Alliance Group of Denotified and Nomadic Tribes and Gethu Group workers’ think tank.
The initiative tries to get the real picture of the state of India’s poor from the horse’s mouth. Termed ‘COLLECT’ (an abbreviation for Community-Led Local Entitlements & Claims Tracker), the initiative consists of a flow of information between those at the margins, the authorities and wider society.
The users of this information are the people who collect it and who the data is about – communities marginalised by social identity, occupation, gender and age.
Data was collected for the period between April and June 2020 for 476 locations covering more than 97,000 households in 11 states across India by representatives of 69 community-led organisations of Dalits, Muslims and Adivasis.
Curious September 2020 Right to Food
Food ration to the most marginalised communities in India during the lockdown was provided to all households in just 70 per cent locations, according to the data.Worse, four per cent of the locations reported that no household had received the promised dry ration.
What is it that prevents people from accessing the most basic human right?
“In many locations, there is no public infrastructure like ration shops in Dalit hamlets or Dalit-majority hamlets that provide people these welfare schemes,” Ponuchamy, founder of Anal Folk-Art Troupe, Tamil Nadu and one of the data collectors said, while speaking at the Voices from Margins webinar on the state of India’s poor (April-June 2020) organised by Praxis.“Because of this, they do not get regular access to information about schemes and miss out on getting benefits when they need them,” he added.
“Many people are unaware about the Jan Dhan Yojana and they are not sure of the active account where the money is credited. They were informed that their account was dormant so only a few who had an active account received the sum,” Veronica Dung Dung, founder member of Samajik Seva Sadan, that works with Adivasis in Odisha, said.
Among Muslim-dominated locations, the concern was the limited reach of the community to the block office, as a result of which, many households did not have necessary documents, according to Shahroz Fatima, Pragati Madhyam Samiti, Uttar Pradesh.
People from nomadic and denotified tribes do not have ration cards, that require a caste certificate and most families do not have this, Rohini Chhari, an activist from Morena in Madhya Pradesh, said. She noted that in 73 per cent locations, women and children did not get supplementary nutrition. She attributed this to the criminalisation and stigma associated with the community, because of which the families lived away from the Anganwadi centres and hence fell off the radar.
The data (which can be found on www.communitycollect.info) covers locations from the states of Bihar (69), Chhattisgarh (24), Gujarat (70), Jharkhand (20), Madhya Pradesh(61), Delhi (8), Odisha (80), Rajasthan (10), Tamil Nadu (75), Uttar Pradesh (50) and West Bengal (9).
Accessibility and proximity
Besides the Right to Food, the data also looked at what support hamlets received through other schemes earmarked for COVID relief. This included additional ration as part of the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana, the Ujjwala scheme, the Kisan Samman Yojana and the Jan Dhan Yojana.
The data covered access to the disability, widow and old-age pensions for those eligible, the revised wages under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and social factors like child abuse, domestic violence and indebtedness.The proximity to service providers often determined the access to entitlements. And given that these communities are already marginalised, they become invisible to the system. Like Chhari, Blacious Tigga, secretary of Gyan Sagar, Chhattisgarh, noted:
“Due to the announcement of sudden lockdown, children were not able to access nutritious meals even once in a day. It was accessible for households living near the distribution centre.”A National Infrastructure Equity audit conducted by Social Equity Watch in six states in 2011 noted how most services are located in neighbourhoods frequented by or easily accessed by dominant groups. In a pandemic like this, these inequities lead to gross violation of human rights as seen in the cases above.
The inability to access relief being provided by the government, when seen against the 74 per cent locations mentioning an increase in indebtedness, show the implications of social inequities. For instance, 88 per cent of Dalit-dominated hamlets reported an increase in loan-taking.That is not all. Children were able to access online education in only one per cent of the locations. In comparison, 69 percent locations were such where no child was able to attend classes.
While one half of India is debating about how many hours of online classes should be held and what new technologies should aid education in these times, another half is grappling with the reality that education may become a distant dream in a country that is aspiring for a five trillion dollar economy.We are talking about smart phones and laptops in a country where in 58 per cent of locations, no child received free textbooks. Curious September 2020 Prejudice and ostracisation
Blatant Islamophobia led to a deep impact on those already struggling with financial losses.
“Rumours spread about the Tablighi Jamaat by the government and the media led to a lot of hatred against the Muslim community. Boards were put up restricting the entry of Muslim hawkers in some areas. Those who are self-employed, like in tailoring and embroidery work, were anyway reeling under the lockdown’s impact,” Ruksana Vora, team leader at Sahyog, Gujarat, said.
The high courts of Bombay, Madras and Karnataka have already termed the media coverage of the Tablighi Jamaat event in Delhi and the subsequent fracas as ‘unjust and unfair’.
However, the harm has already been done. The data shows that while only 45 per cent Muslim habitations reported that all families got access to additional rations during the month of June, 23 per cent habitations did not have access to it and 56 per cent locations did not receive any supplementary nutrition from the Anganwadi centres.The impact showed on accessing healthcare too. Many people opted for over the counter drugs, rather than visiting the hospitals for fear of discrimination by doctors, Vora added.
What can be done?
The situation cannot change unless there are immediate as well as long-term measures to address these issues.In terms of immediate measures is the demand for a cash transfer of Rs 6,000 per month from October 2020 to January 2021 according to the universal basic income to all poor households.
Pooja Parvati of International Budget Partnership said, “This is not a huge sum. It can be accommodated by taxing the inheritance of the rich and affluent, giving a break to corporate subsidy and even rethinking government projects such as the Central Vista plan.”
In the longer term, it is not just about providing rights and entitlements through equitable channels. To make these channels equitable, a strong representation of marginalised groups in decision-making at every level is a non-negotiable.But that again, is a distant dream at a time when one entire community of nomadic and denotified tribes are demanding that they be counted. Recognition as a rightful citizen of the country is the cornerstone of any progress we have to make out of this pandemic-induced alternate reality.
(Courtesy: Down to Earth)
Curious September 2020 1.1 Evolution of the Indian Culture and Civilization — Prehistoric (Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Neolithic – Chalcolithic). Protohistoric (Indus Civilization): Pre- Harappan, Harappan and post- Harappan cultures.Contributions of tribal cultures to Indian civilization.
New fossil ape is discovered in India The 13-million-year-old gibbon ancestor fills major gaps in the primate fossil record
A 13-million-year-old fossil unearthed in northern India comes from a newly discovered ape, the earliest known ancestor of the modern-day gibbon. The discovery, published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, fills a major void in the ape fossil record and provides important new evidence about when the ancestors of today’s gibbon migrated to Asia from Africa.
The fossil, a complete lower molar, belongs to a previously unknown genus and species (Kapi ramnagarensis) and represents the first new fossil ape species discovered at the famous fossil site of Ramnagar, India, in nearly a century.
The fossil’s discovery was serendipitous. Research team members, including Research Associate Chris Campisano of Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins, Christopher Gilbert, Biren Patel, Rajeev Patnaik and Premjit Singh, were climbing a small hill in an area where a fossil primate jaw had been found the year before. While pausing for a short rest, Gilbert spotted something shiny in a small pile of dirt on the ground, so he dug it out and quickly realized he’d found something special.
“We knew immediately it was a primate tooth, but it did not look like the tooth of any of the primates previously found in the area,” he said. “From the shape and size of the molar, our initial guess was that it might be from a gibbon ancestor, but that seemed too good to be true, given that the fossil record of lesser apes is virtually nonexistent. There are other primate species known during that time, and no gibbon fossils have previously been found anywhere near Ramnagar. So we knew we would have to do our homework to figure out exactly what this little fossil was.”
Curious September 2020 Since the fossil’s discovery in 2015, years of study, analysis and comparison were conducted to verify that the tooth belongs to a new species, as well as to accurately determine its place in the ape family tree. The molar was photographed and CT-scanned, and comparative samples of living and extinct ape teeth were examined to highlight important similarities and differences in dental anatomy.
“What we found was quite compelling and undeniably pointed to the close affinities of the 13-million-year-old tooth with gibbons,” said Alejandra Ortiz, a former Institute of Human Origins postdoctoral researcher now at New York University, who is part of the research team. “Even if, for now, we only have one tooth, and thus, we need to be cautious, this is a unique discovery. It pushes back the oldest known fossil record of gibbons by at least 5 million years, providing a much needed glimpse into the early stages of their evolutionary history.”
In addition to determining that the new ape represents the earliest known fossil gibbon, the age of the fossil, around 13 million years old, is contemporaneous with well-known great ape fossils, providing evidence that the migration of great apes, including orangutan ancestors, and lesser apes from Africa to Asia happened around the same time and through the same places.
“I found the biogeographic component to be really interesting,” said Campisano, who is also an associate professor in ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change. “Today, gibbons and orangutans can both be found in Sumatra and Borneo in Southeast Asia, and the oldest fossil apes are from Africa. Knowing that gibbon and orangutan ancestors existed in the same spot together in northern India 13 million years ago, and may have a similar migration history across Asia, is pretty cool.”
The research team plans to continue research at Ramnagar, having recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue their ongoing search for ape fossils.
Research article: “New Middle Miocene ape (primates: Hylobatidae) from Ramnagar, India, fills major gaps in the hominoid fossil record,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Chris Gilbert Anthropology,
Curious September 2020 Study shows role of pathogens in shaping human evolution
Every human cell harbors its own defenses against microbial invaders, relying on strategies that date back to some of the earliest events in the history of life, researchers report.Because this "cell-autonomous immunity" is so ancient and persistent, understanding it is essential to understanding human evolution and human medicine, the researchers said.
Like amoebae, most human cells can transform themselves to engulf and degrade foreign agents in a process known as phagocytosis, said Jessica Brinkworth, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign who wrote the new report with former undergraduate student Alexander Alvarado.
And the methods that human cells use to detect, pierce or hack up invading microbes are inherited from - and shared by - bacteria and viruses, she said.The authors reject the notion that the immune system is distinct from other bodily systems. "Immunity is literally everywhere," Brinkworth said. "The whole of the organism, from the skin down to the level of the last enzyme floating anywhere in the body, almost all of it is engaged in protection in one form or another."
For that reason, she suggests that medical approaches to fighting infection that try to tamp down evolutionarily conserved immune responses such as pro-inflammatory pathways are misguided. While it can be useful or necessary to use immune-suppressing drugs against autoimmune conditions or in the case of organ transplants, such drugs do not appear to work against severe microbial infections.
"In the context of severe infections, there have been many attempts to come up with ways of reducing the immune response by throwing a bunch of steroids at it or blocking the body's ability to detect the pathogen," Brinkworth said."But targeting these immune mechanisms that have been around for millions of years is potentially counterproductive." In the case of sepsis, which Brinkworth studies, this approach has not been fruitful.
"More than 100 trials of immunomodulatory approaches to sepsis have failed," she said. "And the one drug that made it to market then failed. Most of these drugs tried to block highly evolutionarily conserved defenses, like mechanisms of cell autonomous immunity."
Curious July 2020 Many immunomodulatory drugs now being tested against the new coronavirus are failed sepsis drugs, she said.
Similarly, anthropologists often fail to consider how millions of years of battle against infections at the cellular level have shaped human genetics, physiology and even behavior, Brinkworth said.
"If you're talking about human evolution, if you're in any physiological system, you're going to have to address at some point how pathogens have shaped it," she said.
(Source:medical.net)
Curious July 2020 1.1 Evolution of the Indian Culture and Civilization — Prehistoric (Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Neolithic – Chalcolithic). Protohistoric (Indus Civilization): Pre- Harappan, Harappan and post- Harappan
Climate change likely led to fall of Indus Valley Civilisation: Study The RIT scientist believes the new method will allow scientists to develop more automated methods of finding transitions
NEW YORK: Shifting monsoon patterns linked to climate change likely caused the rise and fall of the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation, according to a study by an Indian-origin scientist which analysed data from North India covering the past 5,700 years.
The analysis by Nishant Malik from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in the US used a new mathematical method to study ancient climate patterns in North India over time, providing insights about past climates using indirect observations.
The research, published in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, noted that by measuring the presence of particular chemical forms in stalagmite mineral deposits in caves in South Asia, scientists could develop a record of monsoon rainfall in the region for the past 5,700 years.
However, Malik said studying ancient climate time series with mathematical tools typically used to understand climate is a challenging task."Usually the data we get when analysing paleoclimate is a short time series with noise and uncertainty in it. As far as mathematics and climate is concerned, the tool we use very often in understanding climate and weather is dynamical systems," Malik said.
"But dynamical systems theory is harder to apply to paleoclimate data. This new method can find transitions in the most challenging time series, including paleoclimate, which are short, have some amount of uncertainty and have noise in them," he explained.
While there are several theories about why the Indus Valley Civilisation declined, including invasion by nomadic Indo Aryans and earthquakes, climate change appears to be the most likely scenario, the study noted.
However, Malik said there was no mathematical proof until the new hybrid approach was applied.
Curious September 2020 According to his analysis, there was a major shift in monsoon patterns just before the dawn of this civilisation and that the pattern reversed course right before it declined, indicating it was in fact climate change that caused the fall.
The RIT scientist believes the new method will allow scientists to develop more automated methods of finding transitions in ancient climate data, leading to additional important historical discoveries.
(Source :The Indian Express)
Curious September 2020 8.1 Impact of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and other religions on tribal societies.
13 NGOs lose FCRA licence over ‘religious conversions’
NEW DELHI: The home ministry has suspended the foreign funding licence of 13 NGOs and associations for allegedly indulging in religious conversion in tribal-dominated areas in violation of provisions of the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act, 2010.
The FCRA licences of the 13 NGOs, granted registration to receive foreign donations for “religious” purposes, were suspended and their bank accounts frozen after intelligence reports pointed to their activities in tribal areas of some states, particularly Jharkhand, aimed at conversion of the locals to Christianity.
Section 12(4) empowers FCRA authorities to suspend licence of an NGO/association that has indulged in activities aimed at conversion through inducement or force, either directly or indirectly, from one religious faith to another. Intelligence agencies are said to have pointed out the past record of these NGOs using foreign funds for religious conversion of tribals.
A home ministry o!cial said the 13 NGOs were served a show-cause notice pointing to the FCRA violations and asked to respond to the charges. However, they did not reply within the prescribed time-limit. One of the NGOs gave a late response and the explanation was found unsatisfactory, said sources.
Accordingly, a decision was taken to suspend the licences of all the 13 entities under review. MHA’s FCRA website, however, lists only six NGOs whose FCRA licences were suspended in February this year. Four of these have an evangelical background— Northern Evangelical Lutheran Church, Ecreosoculis North Western Gossner Evangelical, New Life Fellowship Association and Evangelical Churches Association. The 13 NGOs have been given six months to respond to the suspension notice and depending on their response, the FCRA licence will be cancelled or reinstated.
In the past few years, some of the biggest foreign evangelical NGOs have seen action under FCRA. Compassion International was put on prior permission list, e"ectively freezing its donations to Indian NGOs. Its annual contributions in India at the time totalled several hundred crores. (Source:TimesofIndia)
Curious September 2020 7.1 Problems of exploitation and deprivation of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.
MP: Adivasi activists illegally detained and tortured by forest officials
The malicious attacks on Adivasis are on the rise even as illegal felling of trees and other intimidation tactics by the forest department continue in isolated incidents across the country. The latest incident took place in Madhya Pradsh where some forest officials illegally detained, assaulted and tortured two activists: Kailash Jamre and Pyarsingh Waskale working for Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan in Burhanpur district Madhya Pradesh.
On August 29, two Adivasis- Jabarsing Keriya and Somla Chamarsingh were picked up while going back to their village after buying groceries. No information was provided to villagers until late that night. The next morning, the forest staff called Kailash Jamre and asked some of them to come to court to apply for bail for the two tribals. Pyarsingh Waskale accompanied Kailash as they attended the hearing of Jabarsingh and Somla.
The forest department offered no evidence, nor did they present a chargesheet of the crimes committed by the two, however their bail application was rejected. As Kailash and Pyarsingh were exiting the court, on August 30, they were forcibly picked up by Khaknar Range Officer Abhay Singh Tomar and a few others.
The malicious attacks on Adivasis are on the rise even as illegal felling of trees and other intimidation tactics by the forest department continue in isolated incidents across the country. The latest incident took place in Madhya Pradsh where some forest officials illegally detained, assaulted and tortured two activists: Kailash Jamre and Pyarsingh Waskale working for Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan in Burhanpur district Madhya Pradesh.
On August 29, two Adivasis- Jabarsing Keriya and Somla Chamarsingh were picked up while going back to their village after buying groceries. No information was provided to villagers until late that night. The next morning, the forest staff called Kailash Jamre and asked some of them to come to court to apply for bail for the two tribals. Pyarsingh Waskale accompanied Kailash as they attended the hearing of Jabarsingh and Somla.
Curious September 2020 The forest department offered no evidence, nor did they present a chargesheet of the crimes committed by the two, however their bail application was rejected. As Kailash and Pyarsingh were exiting the court, on August 30, they were forcibly picked up by Khaknar Range Officer Abhay Singh Tomar and a few others.
Kailash and Pyarsingh were then taken to Khaknar Range office, where they were illegally locked up all night, and were allegedly brutally beaten up by around 20-25 staff and officers. According to Kailash, 2 or 3 people would hold their limbs while the others beat them with lathis. Most were drunk, and kept abusing them for ‘talking too much about the law and being the leaders of the sangathan’.
When the news of the illegal detention reached the village, many Adivasis gathered at Khaknar police station late at night and demanded registration of FIR against the forest officials. But, like in so many other cases of recent times, the police refused to file FIR and instead threatened the Adivasis with arrest. They were also allegedly misled by the police that Kailash and Pyaarsing had been taken to Burhanpur and that they had not been mistreated and would be produced in Court the next day.
They were brought to the District Court, Burhanpur, the next day and as Kailash and Pyarsingh were so brutally beaten up in custody, Kailash could barely stand and collapsed in court, whereafter he was hospitalised for 6 days and he is still unable to walk.
Both Kailash Jamre and Pyarsing Vaskale, of Rehmanpur village in Khaknar block are active members of Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan and constantly educate Adivasis about the provisions of the Forest Rights Act and their other legal rights. They have also, along with others, been active in opposing illegal clearing of forests which is happening with the active connivance of forest officials. They were mercilessly beaten up by forest department officials who said, “Tum hi jyaada kanoon karte ho.. dekhte hai teri sangathan kitni mazboot hai” (You are the ones who talk too much about the law.. now let’s see how strong your organisation is).
The region has a history of violence against Barela and Bhilala Adivasis who are claimants under the FRA. The forest staff, for decades has been demanding money from Adivasis for sowing, harvesting along with threats of false charges and cases slapped on them. Kailash and Pyarsingh are activists who for the past two years have been generating awareness about the Forest Rights and other legal rights and entitlements for Adivasis – putting an end to the decades of extortion by forest staff and officials from Adivasis for simply growing food.
Kailash himself and Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan, as an organization have written to the District Collector and Superintendent of police giving a detailed account of the incident and demanding action. They have demanded that strict action be taken against the forest officials and they be booked under sections of the IPC as well as the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act as also the false cases against the adivasis and the activists be withdrawn.
Organisations that work at grassroots level to awaken and strengthen tribal communities seems to have become the new target of forest officials possibly because these activists always come to the rescue and raise their voice along with fellow adivasis whenever any injustice is meted out by forest officials.
(Source:Justicenews)
Curious September 2020 1.1 Evolution of the Indian Culture and Civilization — Prehistoric (Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Neolithic – Chalcolithic). Protohistoric (Indus Civilization): Pre- Harappan, Harappan and post- Harappan cultures.Contributions of tribal cultures to Indian civilization.
The Helpful Harappan Explains How Ancient Indus Valley Technology Could Solve Many of Today’s Problems
What was life like in the Indus Valley Civilization? How could someone who lived so long ago teach us anything about how we should manage our lives today? The following is a historical fiction exploring how a person living 5,000 years ago may have seen their world and inspired change in ours. Ancient Indus Valley technology could solve many modern problems. One day in 2018 Anno Domini, the Lord, summoned a mortal who had lived in the Harappan Civilization , also known as the Indus Valley Civilization, of the 3rd millennium BC.
The man, whose name was Siwa Saqra, sported a well-trimmed gray beard and wore a long piece of cotton cloth which flowed up from his waist to his left shoulder and then down his back. Big indigo trefoils printed on it matched with the intricate design of golden bands on his arms. Holding a golden diadem in his hands, he bowed respectfully.
"Siwa," said the Lord with a smile, "in appreciation of the work that you have been doing in Heaven, I reward you with a trip around Planet Earth. Collect your cell phone and credit card from my secretary. She'll show you how to use them.”
Siwa the Harappan Returns to Earth On his first day on Earth, Siwa the Harappan contacted an international travel agency and got a special home-to-back-home tour package designed for a visit to the ancient Indus Valley archaeological sites of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in Pakistan, and Rakhigarhi, Kalibangan, Dholavira and Lothal in India. It included visa fees, air-fares, day-long taxi service, hotel accommodations, meals, site visits, and the services of professional tourist guides.
Curious September 2020 Ancient Indus Valley Drainage Facilities Avoided Floods
Next, Siwa landed in Shantou city in Southern China. As his taxi crept through knee-deep water inundating the roads, the engine spluttered and died. He had no option but to wade through the water to reach the mayor's office. The balding bespectacled administrator was courteous enough to meet him despite the crisis on his hands. Soaked to the skin, Siwa sneezed violently. “Comrade, your drainage lines have overflowed, and will bring in its wake fatal diseases endangering citizens. Four and a half millennium ago, our Indus Valley Civilization had built cities with drainage facilities that effectively addressed such floods.”
“Indeed, you did!” said the Chinese mayor, “We were taught at school that your civilization disappeared due to widespread floods.”
“Could we discuss that later?” TheHarappan said, sounding peeved. “Nevertheless, the ruins of Mohenjo daro for instance, would show you that houses were constructed with a water chute that drained the roofs from the foot of a vertical channel embedded in the thickness of the wall. Every house had one or more such apertures in its walls through which waste water ran out into the street drain. Every lane and street had one or two water channels with brick or stone covers that could be lifted to remove obstructing slag. These drains, as a rule, were situated below the surface of the street.”
Siwa glanced at the visiting card that he had given the mayor. “I invite you to avail of a complimentary visit to Mohenjo daro and a few other sites of the Indus Valley Civilization. My travel agent will contact you shortly.” The Chinese flashed a disarming smile, and, as he bowed, his hands politely pointed towards the door.
Indus Valley Technology to Solve a San Francisco Sanitation Crisis Hearing strident cawing all around downtown San Francisco, Siwa wondered why all the crows nesting in a nearby park had descended on the streets. He recalled his early childhood, when he played the game of hopscotch with his sisters, for he had to perform a similar feat now in order to avoid stepping on human feces littering the streets.
Immediately, he called on the Mayoress of San Francisco. Her abundant black hair reminded him of his beautiful daughter, Velli. He had commissioned a master craftsman in Mohenjo-daro to cast Velli's likeness in a bronze statuette. To the fond father's exasperation, the foreign archaeologist who discovered that work of art in the 20th century Curious September 2020 named it 'the Dancing Girl' with his preconceived perception of South Asian culture.
“Whether you like it or not, young lady,” he told the American mayoress, “our ancient Indus Valley Civilization was more developed than this most developed nation of yours in the 21st century.”
“Really?” she asked, leaning back in her chair and loosely locking her hands, “How?”
“We Harappans built houses containing a washing platform and a dedicated waste disposal hole. Waste could be flushed through a clay pipe into a common brick drain that led to a cesspit. While the solid matter was regularly removed from the cesspits for use as manure, the waste water was directed to covered drains, which lined major streets. I invite you to visit Harappa to see it for yourself.”
Back at the hotel, as Siwa e-mailed the mayoress' contact details to the travel agency, he wondered why the American lady had smiled rather knowingly and asked, “Sir, I suppose you're talking about the lands which are now called India and Pakistan?”
Proposing Ancient Water Conservation Technology in Brazil Strolling around Brasilia in South America, Siwa entered a small restaurant for lunch. As the owner served him cooked rice and beans, wrinkles on her temple made him ask whether anything was worrying her.
The Harappan decided to meet the president of Federal District water authority, Caesb. “I understand that the world’s largest water forum is currently meeting in Brasilia,” he said when he met the administrator. “However, isn't it ironic that Brazil, the richest country in fresh water reserves on earth, is facing a drought?”
The grey-haired man dressed in a dark suit adjusted his glasses and glared at Siwa. “Our focus is on canalizing the water from distant rivers to urban clusters,” he said. “The results are showing, as we have already got over the severe draught situation in San Paolo that existed there a few years ago.”
Curious September 2020 The Brazilian bureaucrat emanated a grunt. “Por que?”
“To learn how you could harvest and conserve rain water. Dholavira is located in the Rann of Kutch, which gets a miniscule fraction of the rainfall that your beautiful country receives.”
The Harappan saw the man shoving his laptop aside, and eagerly looking into his eyes. With a smile, he continued, “You’d see in Dholavira a network of channels and as many as sixteen reservoirs made completely of stone. Made for storing rain water, as well as the water diverted from two nearby rivulets, they were built along the periphery of the city. In addition, several dams were constructed across a seasonal stream which ran near the site. In fact, Dholavira has the earliest known water conservation system in the world.”
Later, while awaiting his next flight, Siwa quickly typed away on his cell phone to send one more e-mail to the travel agency.
Siwa Goes to South Africa Visiting Mohokare in South Africa, Siwa heard fierce barking, and was terrified to see a hairy black boar blindly rushing straight at him as street dogs chased it. In a reflex action, he leapt, spreading his legs wide apart, and avoided the portly beast just in time. The stench and the sight of sewage flowing on the streets made him spit time and again, forgetting that it was not civil to do so. He had to meet the Mayoress of Mohokare urgently, so he did.
The buxom lady was dressed in a leaf-green frock with a yellow flower design and a matching head-dress, which reminded the Harappan of the wide variety of exotic head-dresses that the women of Indus Valley sported in his time.
Seeing utmost interest on the mayoress' expressive face, he continued. “Individual drains from household latrines and bathing areas were connected to larger underground sewage channels running along the streets. They were built with kiln fired bricks to prevent the seepage of dirty water into the ground. Some sections had removable brick paving or dressed stones on top to enable regular cleaning. Sump pits were built along the drains, allowing solid waste to collect at the bottom, and were cleaned regularly to avoid blockages.”
Seeing her smiling politely, the Harappan added, “In more recent times, an archaeologist named John Marshall thought that a remarkable feature of Mohenjo-daro was the very elaborate drainage system that existed even in the poorest quarters of the city.”
The meeting had to be cut short as delegates of the South African Human Rights Commission had arrived to meet the Mayoress of Mohokare.
How Did the Harappans Avoid Potholes? After landing in Nizhny Novgorod in Russia, Siwa was passing the crossroads of Varvarskaya and Volodarskaya streets when two brawny young men in red and white checkered shirts attracted his attention. One was holding a leather ball roughly the size of a water melon under his arm. They were squatting in a deep cramped pothole in the midst of an otherwise smooth road, happily posing for a selfie.
He tapped on the driver's shoulder. “Change the route. Take me to the Kremlin.”
No sooner was the Harappan ushered in the presence of the Mayor of Nizhny Novgorod, a young man with close-cropped greying hair, when he said, “Please visit the Indus Valley Civilization sites of Kalibangan and Rakhigarhi. Four and a half millenniums ago, their roads were paved with kiln-fired bricks to facilitate a smooth flow of heavily loaded ox carts moving on wooden wheels. Despite the heavy traffic, you won't spot one pothole in them even today.”
Later, back at his hotel, Siwa packed his bags to commence the second stage of his tour, in which he planned to visit all the old places in the Indus Valley Civilization that he knew during his time.
Returning Home Just as the pilot commenced the descent in New Delhi, Siwa looked out the window and had a glimpse of the Red Fort built by the Mughal rulers during mid-17th century. However, it could not hold his attention for long, as he soon saw the adjoining area. A teenaged turbaned boy sitting beside him identified it as ‘Chandni Chowk.’ “All those meandering streets!” the Harappan mumbled. “Have our descendants forgotten how to plan their towns in a grid-pattern as we did? How can they build efficient sewage and drainage systems in such a haphazard layout?”
Curious September 2020 Upon landing, Siwa found that the connecting flight to Chandigarh en-route to his first stop at the ancient Indus Valley site of Rakhigarhi was delayed due to stormy weather. Awaiting the announcement for departure, Siwa ‘googled’ the news of India and Pakistan on his cell phone, and squirmed in his seat as he glanced over the articles which announced:
- Why the Indian Capital faces Waterlogging Crisis year after year
- 569 million People in India still defecate Outdoors
- Will Pakistan have no Water in 2025?
- Rural Community at Receiving End of Hindu Temple Town's Sewage
- 3,500 Deaths & 8,700 Injuries in 2017 due to Pothole accidents in Indian cities
The Harappan looked up from the small screen. Disgust and pain were etched on his face. He felt humiliated as never before because now he knew why all those professionals to whom he had bragged about the Indus Valley technology carried a sarcastic smile.
Just as the boarding announcement for the Chandigarh flight came over the public address system, uniformed security men were seen running all over, searching for a bearded man dressed in white flowing clothes printed with indigo trefoils. He had mysteriously disappeared from the CCTV screens monitoring the area.
(By Vasant Davé the author of ‘ Trade winds to Meluhha ’)
Curious September 2020 7.1 Problems of exploitation and deprivation of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.
Odisha govt launches social security scheme for sanitation workers
The scheme 'Garima' was launched via video-conferencing by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Friday and is directed at promoting livelihoods, security and social dignity of sanitation workers through targeted measures to nearly 20,000 sanitation workers and their families.
The Odisha government on Friday launched a statewide scheme for sanitation workers, institutionalising and regulating core sanitation services to provide social security and financial benefits to the workers and their families.
The scheme ‘Garima’ was launched via video-conferencing by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Friday and is directed at promoting livelihoods, security and social dignity of sanitation workers through targeted measures to nearly 20,000 sanitation workers and their families.
With a dedicated corpus fund of Rs 50 crore, the scheme will be implemented in all the 114 urban local bodies of Odisha, a senior official said.
Curious September2020 At the launch the scheme, CM Patnaik said, “Manual scavenging has been the starkest example of discrimination in the name of caste, practised in India, relegating the less privileged to perform sanitation work. In spite of the nation making several strides in various sectors… these underprivileged people were made to render this invaluable service to the society for generations, deprived of safety, dignity and a decent livelihood, apart from suffering social stigma and exclusion.” He dedicated the scheme to Mahatma Gandhi.
Under the scheme, a survey will be undertaken to identify sanitation workers across the state engaged in core sanitation jobs and to register them under a database on the Swachh Sahar Odisha portal. Registration of private sanitation service organisations (PSSOs) with ULBs for authorisation will also be facilitated, to render sanitation services through certified sanitation workers. “This includes introduction of risk and hardship allowance, priority in educational institutions, provision of health and life insurance, 90 percent grant as housing assistance, 90 percent grant for buying two wheelers, mandatory provision of personal protective equipment and safety devices,” state Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Pratap Jena said.
As stipulated in the scheme, the working hours of sanitation workers will be limited to 6 hours per day, and they, along with their family members, will also be covered under a health insurance scheme and would get periodic health check-ups. The corpus fund will also ensure ex-gratia payment to compensate sanitation workers in case of partial and permanent disability due to accidents and injury, an official from the Housing and Urban Development Department said.
The department has signed an MOU with not-for-profit organisation Urban Management Centrefor providing the technical support to implement the scheme.
(Source:Indian Express)
Curious September 2020 6.2 Problems of the tribal Communities — land alienation, poverty, indebtedness, low literacy.
As cities adjust to new normal, tribal children suffer from lack of devices, connectivity
New Delhi: While urban India is trying to adjust to the new normal triggered by Covid-19, the Centre is struggling with mobile and internet connectivity issues to impart education to children from tribal areas and other socially and economically backward classes.
With Lockdown 1 on March 23, India had closed its schools and educational institutions. With Covid-19 cases increasing, schools continue to remain closed. However, the government is worried that children hailing from remote vilespecially belonging to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, will be worst-hit.
Many tribal students live and get formal education at the centrally-funded Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRS). However, with successive lockdowns, these schools are closed. As per the tribal affairs ministry data, there are 285 EMRS which have 73,391 tribal students (including 36,824 boys and 36,567 girls). The Centre has tried to hold online classes. However, the students do not have devices and hail from remote villages with weak mobile network and connectivity issues.
A tribalaffairs ministry spokesperson told ET, “The newly created National Educational Society for Tribal Students (NESTS), a central society for running EMRS, had been closely following the students’ educational progress. Although there are various challenges reported from the field such as network and connectivity problems and lack of devices, the students and teachers are paving their way through structural challenges in the best possible manner. Schools are witnessing a blend of offline and online modes of learning.” The ministry does not have any data on how many children
Curious September 2020 log in for classes or if these are regularly conducted. When asked how many schools have been conducting classes, the spokesperson said, “Almost all schools are working towards the educational progress of maximum children.”
The ministry had worked out a plan thinking schools will be allowed to reopen from September 1. However, with the unlock guidelines not allowing schools, the plan has been postponed. Secretary (tribal affairs) Deepak Khandekar told ET, “Once schools reopen, we would have to make concerted efforts to bring these children back to our schools. We have tried our best to run online classes and keep them abreast with some form of school education. But there would be an obvious learning gap.”
(Source:EconomicTimes)
Curious September 2020 2.3 Marriage: Definition and universality; Laws of marriage (endogamy, exogamy, hypergamy, hypogamy, incest taboo); Types of marriage (monogamy, polygamy, polyandry, group marriage). Functions of marriage; Marriage regulations (preferential, prescriptive and proscriptive); Marriage payments (bride wealth and dowry).
Married to a ghost
An international tradition Among the South Sudanese the tradition of “ghost marriage” is widely practiced by the Nilotic tribes with the aim of maintaining the family bloodline.
Ghost marriage is nearly exclusive to the Dinka and Nuer tribes of South Sudan, although variations of such marriages also exist in Sudan, China and France. In Dinka and Nuer cultures the names of the dead family members live on from generation to generation to avoid “extinction”.
A brother’s duty David Mading Majok, a 60-year-old chief from Jonglei State based in Juba explains that in his family of six children, there were three boys and three girls and the two older brothers are deceased. Traditionally it is Mading’s duty to marry his brother’s wives. “It is my duty to marry their wives to ensure the continuation of our family linage,” he says.Majok has three wives: the first belonging to his eldest brother, who died as a baby at the age of eight months, the second wife fromhis second brother, killed as a soldier during the 21 years of civil war in Sudan.
Following tradition
Thirty-nine-year-old Adhar Bol Mabil, a mother of three children says that she married a deceased man to follow tradition. “It wasn’t my will to be married to a dead husband, rather the will of my parents.”
“I have seen the picture of the husband that I am married to. I was only informed of his name and told a little bit about his background. All of my children are named after him. Since it’s our culture I have no other option,” she says. “As the Dinka people, we remain a majority because of ghost marriage,” says Peter Deng Manon. “We keep the names of our dead people alive through ghost marriage,” Manon praises ghost marriages.
(Source:TheNiles)
Curious June 2020 Sree Chitra to examine gene mutation and carry out gene testing
The release said that MGNU will also help overcome the cost and speed limitations associated with sequencing benefitting clinicians and patients alike.
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Expanding its scope in diagnosis domain, the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST), has established a Molecular Genetics and Neuroimmunology Unit (MGNU) for genetic testing of selected cardiac and neurological inherited diseases. SCTIMST president V K Saraswath inaugurated the facility on Wednesday.
According to a senior SCTIMST official, the new facility would help test multi-gene panels for diseases such as neuromuscular diseases, movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease, neuro-developmental disorders, epilepsy syndromes, inherited metabolic diseases, and for identification of bacteria from body fluids. As per institute release the diagnostic facility will open new avenues for extensive research in genomics and collaborative research work within and outside the country. The facility will also examine gene mutation that cause specific diseases.
The release said that MGNU will also help overcome the cost and speed limitations associated with sequencing benefitting clinicians and patients alike. The long-term plan of MGNU is to establish a robust bioinformatics platform to provide support for disease diagnosis and management, molecular characterization of diseases for personalized treatment, population screening for disease risk, pharmacogenomics (study of how genes affect a person’s response to drugs), identification of novel genetic biomarkers and genetic counselling. SCTIMST, an institute that comes under the Department of Science and Technology, is o an advanced referral centre for neurological and cardiovascular diseases. The patients are referred to the centre not only from Kerala but also from neighbouring states for the management of genetic diseases.
Long-term plan
The long-term plan of MGNU is to establish a robust bioinformatics platform to provide support for disease diagnosis and management.
(Source:Indian Express)
Curious July 2020 6.1 Tribal situation in India – Bio-genetic variability, linguistic and socio-economic characteristics of tribal populations and their distribution.
Anthropologist Madhumala Chattopadhyay recounts being first woman to establish contact with Sentinelese, Jarawa tribes US national John Allen Chau was killed by the Sentinelese tribe when he tried to enter their island. Madhumala Chattopadhyay, who was the first woman to visit this tribe, as well as the Jarawas and Onges, speaks about how she established friendly contact with them and learnt about their way of life
In the Onge tribe indigenous to the Andaman and Nicobar islands, when a boy turns 16, he is sent off alone to hunt in the jungle. He has to kill enough wild boars so that the length of their severed heads arranged in a line matches his height. The community then washes the boy with boar blood and he is considered ready for marriage. A suitable girl is found, and the young pair is sent to the jungle to live together for a few days. If they agree to marry each other, they become a couple. If not, then another match is found.
This is just one of the many tribes’ practices which then 27-year-old Madhumala Chattopadhyay, who was posted as an anthropologist with the Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI) at Port Blair, remembers vividly. She lived with the Onges for two months and studied them.
But that was 30 years ago. Today, Madhumala lives in a dilapidated government type 4 quarters in south Delhi with her 71 year-old mother. Once a brave young woman who was part of expeditions that made history, she now passes files and overlooks research projects as a joint director with the ministry of social justice and empowerment. The numerous reports she filed from each of her visits to all six Andaman and Nicobar island tribes now remain buried in AnSI’s database.
At her home, she wades through heaps of files, papers and other household material tied up in bundles gathering dust and pulls out photographs from an album. In her salwar-kurtas buttoned to the top, she is seen passing coconuts to one of the
Curious September 2020 most primitive tribes in the world – the Sentinelese. “That was the first and the only hand-to-hand contact anyone had ever established with the tribe,” remembers Madhumala.The North Sentinel Island is in the news again after a 26-year-old American citizen, John Allen Chau, ventured into the territory and was allegedly killed by the tribe’s arrows and spears on 16 November. The Sentinelese have always fiercely protected their territory. Anyone approaching the island is showered with spears and arrows flying high up from the shore.
How it began
Hungry for quality research work on tribal groups, she applied as a researcher with AnSI after completing her Masters in Physical Anthropology from the University of Calcutta. At the job interview, when she requested to be posted at Port Blair, the-then director general, Dr Kumar Suresh Singh, asked her to step outside the room, drink a glass of water, call her parents, rethink and come back after five minutes.
“No one wanted to be posted in Port Blair. Even those who were there were always looking for an opportunity to get out,” she says. But Madhumala was clear about what she wanted from that cluster of 321 islands.
She was 13 years old when she asked her father, an accounts officer with Indian Railways, to take her to see the Onge tribe in the Andaman and Nicobar islands on the family’s annual vacation. The Onges were celebrating the birth of a new baby and she wanted to be a part of it.
The family didn’t take that trip. But in the years that followed, Madhumala found herself sifting through books in libraries and clinging on to university admission windows, enquiring about the right mix of subjects which would eventually take her to the Andamans.
“I didn’t know what anthropology was. I read in the dictionary that it is the study of humans. That is exactly what I wanted to do. I took Botany, Zoology and Anthropology as my subjects,” she says.
Creating history
“I didn’t drink that glass of water,” she smiles, remembering the job interview. In 1989, she landed at Port Blair and in the next six years, not only the Onges, but the Car Nicobarese and even the Jarawas accepted her as their own and took her into their world.
In the first three years of her posting, she conducted several field studies on the genetics, health, hygiene, demography and ethnicity of the Car Nicobarese and Onges. She picked up the language and the tribal women recognised her each time she visited.
The tribe leaders offered her stay in the villages when she was occasionally kicked out of the government guesthouse to accommodate VIPs, the babies urinated on her, and she was granted beautiful insights into their communities.In 1991, as part of a regular gift-dropping trip to the islands to establish friendly contact with the tribals, the Andaman administration organised a visit to the North Sentinel Island, considered the most dangerous and hostile. Two anthropologists could accompany the team headed by the administration. Madhumala knew she had to be on that ship.
“First, the authorities tried to reject me, saying I was a woman,” she says. Such expeditions could turn dangerous and women had never been part of them. But she insisted, and had to give in writing that if something untoward happened on the trip, including if clothes were torn by the tribals, or even death, her family should not claim anything from the government. She submitted a no-objection certificate signed by her parents and was on board.
Little did the crew know that Madhumala’s acquired skills would prove useful. The team of 13 left Port Blair on 4 January, 1991 and reached the shore of North Sentinel early next morning. They anchored their steamer at a safe distance and by 7 am saw smoke rising from one side of the islands, indicating human habitation. The team members sailed closer to the shore in a lifeboat.
The past trips were limited to leaving sacks of tender coconuts on deserted sides of the island. If the tribals ever saw them, the team was attacked. In one such trip, an arrow came flying from the shore and pierced through the lieutenant governor’s chest, missing his heart by a few inches. He took months to convalesce.
Curious September 2020 As the Sentinelese men appeared on the shore, the team started offering them coconuts. Instead of the usual practice of throwing away the gunny bag, the team decided to roll coconuts, one at a time, in the water. “It was like encouraging them to play with us,” Madhumala says. And it worked. There were no arrows or spears pointed at the team. Eventually, the men started coming closer to the boat and touched it.
This was the first time in history that there was hand-to-hand contact with the Sentinelese.
When the team returned in the afternoon with new sacks of coconuts, they saw a young boy aiming an arrow at them. A woman was behind him. Madhumala, in the few tribal words she had learnt, called out to her, asking her to come and collect her coconut. The lady diverted the arrow which the boy unleashed and asked him to take the coconuts, which he did. “I have always believed that women can control violence,” says Madhumala. She feels that the presence of a woman in the team really made a difference.
In Delhi, Singh, overjoyed at the young researcher’s achievement, welcomed her. “Your Sentinelese prince was waiting for you,” he said to her. Their trip was a success.
Her second visit to the island was on 21 February. She wore the same clothes, to be recognised easily. This time, there were temporary huts on the shore and the men had left their bows and arrows in the jungle. But the Sentinelese were in no mood to play. Two men jumped on their boat, picked up the sacks of coconuts and left. “As they jumped onto the boat, they saw the rifles, which to them was mere iron. They tried to take that as well, but the cops on the boat prevented them,” she laughed.
The harmless contact with the Sentinelese suddenly turned tense when one of the crew members tried to snatch a set of leaves hanging from the chest belt of one of the Sentinelese to take home as souvenir. “He became furious and out came his knife from his chest belt. He instructed us to leave,” says Madhumala. The team departed immediately. Soon after, the government stopped the contact trips. It was decided that the tribals shouldn’t be disturbed, unless absolutely necessary.
Jarawa contacts
While the Sentinelese were touch and go, the Jarawas opened their doors to her and took her in.On her first trip to the Jarawa settlement, Madhumala was dressed in five layers of clothes. Contact had been made with the tribespeople before and they were notorious for tearing off visitors’ clothes.
When the team reached closer to the island, all other members boarded a boat and went to the shore. They asked Madhumala, the only woman in the team, to stay back in the ship. They assured her that they would come back to get her once it was safe.
No one returned. Madhumala took another boat and, along with the boatman, started sailing ashore. As she inched closer, six Jarawa men swam towards her boat and climbed on to it. Fearing they would attack her, the boatman asked her to jump into the water.
“I am not a good swimmer, so I decided to stay in the boat,” she says. Soon, they were pinching the exposed skin on her hands, comparing it with their thick, dark skin. They touched her hair, feeling the texture. “I could see that they meant no harm. They were simply curious,” she says.
This was the first time the Jarawas were seeing a woman from the outside world. Their eyes popped and they kept staring at her in awe.
“Soon, a Jarawa woman entered the boat. She sat close to me and started explicitly showing her body parts, in a way, trying to tell me that she is a woman and asking me if I am too,” she says. Madhumala embraced her. That was her gateway into the world of the Jarawas.The woman ordered all the men to leave, and they obeyed. Within minutes, Madhumala was surrounded by Jarawa women. One chubby one even came and sat on her lap. They brought her ornaments for her head and neck, made of jungle leaves, which Madhumala happily accepted. She made several trips to the Jarawa islands after that. Each time, the women would see her boat approaching, and they would start dancing. After her first trip, in anticipation that she would visit again, the tribal women had made ornaments of her size with sea shells and tree barks, which would last longer. These Madhumala later donated to a museum in Kolkata.
She learnt about the Jarawas and most other tribes on the Andaman and Nicobar islands mostly through observation and sign language. She picked up knowledge of local words for gestures like “thank you”, “come”, “take it” and items like
Curious September 2020 “coconut”, which proved useful wherever she went. For instance, the word for coconut in Onge is also understood by obey. And how on a full moon night, Onge couples take turns to stay up and sing to the moon.On both the Jarawa and Onge islands she saw the same couples on different visits, sitting with their children, roasting food, which could mean that they were a family.
When the Onges hunt a wild boar, they mix the fat with clay and apply patterns with the concoction on their faces and body parts. It’s a sign to show that a boar was hunted. This mix also protects them from insect bites and acts as sun protection. The Car Nicobarese would kill the second child if twins were born. They believed that the second baby was an evil spirit. But now they give the second child to a relative who doesn’t have a baby to take care of. She noted that the children who are given away grow up weaker than the twin who is with the mother.
Madhumala fondly remembers how once in a Jarawa settlement, the women would just not let her return. “Their king had to intervene. On his command, the women bid goodbye to me for the day,” she says.In the absence of a common language, it was through their gestures of curling of lips, warm embraces and happy tapping of feet that the tribals expressed how much they liked Madhumala’s presence among them. Madhumala reciprocated
Her forgotten past
Despite her contribution to understanding the tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, Madhumala’s name remains lost. Today, with her timid, wavering speech and slow physical movements, it is hard to guess that in her young days she fiercely defied notions of patriarchy and fought gender discrimination at every step.
She was constantly compared to her male counterparts. In her Master’s programme, she was the only woman in a class full of men. She fought for her space on expeditions, which she feels she rightfully deserved. Even in the ministry, her colleagues sometimes chided her: “You work just like a boy”, alluding to her efficiency. “I would pin up my dupatta and move swiftly to finish the work that was assigned to me,” she says, pointing at the two safety pins holding her dupatta to her sweater.
But perhaps she could never fight the hierarchy at her workplace. Madhumala found a mention in Singh’s People of India survey’s Andaman chapter. But her senior in Port Blair, Dr T N Pandit, never sent her name for commemoration, while the Andaman administration rewarded its team members after the successful North Sentinel trip.She has left the baggage in her past, calling it professional jealousy. She remembers her father's words with a calm smile:“When people don't recognise your work, stay silent and save it. Because if your work is important, it will be relevant even after 100 years.”
Curious September 2020 Dr Pandit, however, claims that Madhumala’s contributions were not sidelined. He says that the achievement on North Sentinel Island is the result of effort put in over several decades. “It is not a one-day story. The outcome of 1991 is a series of visits which she (Madhumala) was not a part of,” he said, referring to the January friendly meet with the Sentinelese.
He adds that Madhumala, though a junior anthropologist in those days, is even a co-author with him in a paper published in one of the well-known journals in Kolkata where we wrote on the 1991 trips. “Her name is very much there in all the reports,” he says.
Dr Pandit was part of several expeditions to the North Sentinel Island since 1967, but he was not part of the team that made the first friendly contact with the Sentinelese in January 1991. He was in the second team which went a month later on 21 February.
Madhumala with the Sentinelese Her mother, a Bengali poet, always insisted that Madhumala go to the US where her work would be recognised. She had offers from three universities, including Cornell and Michigan, but living and travelling would be expensive and she had two younger siblings to take care of after her father passed away in 1993.“When I was leaving for my posting at Port Blair, I told my mother, ‘Forget the US, I will go to places where no one has gone before’,” Madhumala says.
She left Port Blair in 1996 and moved to the Nagpur centre of the AnSI. In 1998, she joined as a researcher with the ministry of social justice and empowerment in Delhi and accompanied the secretary, also a woman, to the Jarawa settlement where a measles epidemic had struck. “A few old tribal women who recognised me tapped on my cheek, as a friendly gesture,” she remembers. In 2001, her book – Tribes of Car Nicobar – was released.
The first friendly contact with the Sentinelese was made at Allen Point. “The American who is killed was also named Allen,” she recalls the strange coincidence. She is sure that Allen force-entered their territory, which the tribals fiercely guard. “Bringing his body back will be risky.There will be more killings if the authorities force their way into the island.The Sentinelese will attack them and the Sentinelese will also be killed,” she says.
Looking back at the days where she would return from each trip, having lost at least 10 kilos of weight, she says, “You feel that you are there to study them, but actually, they are the ones who study you. You are new in their lands.”
(Source: firstpost)
Curious September 2020 9.5 Race and racism, biological basis of morphological variation of non-metric and metric characters. Racial criteria, racial traits in relation to heredity and environment; biological basis of racial classification, racial differentiation and race crossing in man.
Why Do We Keep Using the Word “Caucasian”?
The word “Caucasian” is used in the U.S. to describe white people, but it doesn’t indicate anything real. It’s the wrong term to use! My colleague and one of my longtime writing partners, Carol Mukhopadhyay, has written a wonderful article, “Getting Rid of the Word ‘Caucasian,’” that is still relevant today for how it challenges us to critically examine the language that we use. It’s obvious that language shapes how we perceive and see the world. And we know how powerful the concept of race is and how the use of words related to the notion of race has shaped what we call the U.S. racial worldview. So why do we continue using the word “Caucasian”?
To answer that question, it is helpful to understand where the term came from and its impact on our society. The term “Caucasian” originated from a growing 18th-century European science of racial classification. German anatomist Johann Blumenbach visited the Caucasus Mountains, located between the Caspian and Black seas, and he must have been enchanted because he labeled the people there “Caucasians” and proposed that they were created in God’s image as an ideal form of humanity. And the label has stuck to this day. According to Mukhopadhyay, Blumenbach went on to name four other “races,” each considered “physically and morally ‘degenerate’ forms of ‘God’s original creation.’” He categorized Africans, excluding light-skinned North Africans, as “Ethiopians” or “black.” He divided non-Caucasian Asians into two separate races: the “Mongolian” or “yellow” race of Japan and China, and the “Malayan” or “brown” race, which included Aboriginal Australians and Pacific Islanders. And he called Native Americans the “red” race.
Blumenbach’s system of racial classification was adopted in the United States to justify racial discrimination—particularly slavery. Popular race science and evolutionary theories generally posited that there were separate races, that differences in behavior were tied to skin color, and that there were scientific ways to measure race. One way racial differences were defined was through craniometrics, which measured skull size to determine the intelligence of each racial group. As you can imagine, this flawed application of the scientific method resulted in race scientists developing a flawed system of racial classification that ranked the five races from most primitive (black and brown races), to more advanced (the Asian races), to the most advanced (the white, or Caucasian, races). Even though the five-race topology was later disproven, “Caucasian” still has currency in the U.S.
Curious September 2020 One reason we keep using the term “Caucasian” is that the U.S. legal system made use of Blumenbach’s taxonomy. As early as 1790 the first naturalization law was passed, preventing foreigners who were not white from becoming citizens. But according to Mukhopadhyay, Blumenbach’s category of “Caucasian” posed a problem because his classification of white also included some North Africans, Armenians, Persians, Arabs, and North Indians. The definition of Caucasian had to be reinvented to focus the ideological category of whiteness on northern and western Europe. The term, even though its exact definition changed over time, was used to shape legal policy and the nature of our society.
A second reason the term has had staying power is that, as new immigrants began to stream into the country in the 20th century, political leaders and scientists supported a new racial science called eugenics that built on 19th-century notions of race. Eugenicists divided Caucasians into four ranked subraces: Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, and Jew (Semitic). I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that the Nordics were ranked highest intellectually and morally. These rankings were used by our government to design and execute discriminatory immigration laws that preserved the political dominance of Nordics, who were largely Protestant Christians.
Today, the word “Caucasian” is still used in many official government documents, and it continues to carry a kind of scientific weight. For example, it is found in social science and medical research, and is used by some colleges and universities in their data collection and distribution of student, staff, and faculty statistics. In Mukhopadhyay’s research, she sampled government websites and official documents and was surprised to learn how many government offices, including the U.S. Census Bureau, still use the word.
So “Caucasian” became entrenched in our legal, governmental, scientific, and social lives. And although the U.S. government reluctantly denounced or at least played down racial science after the atrocities of Adolf Hitler’s regime were fully exposed at the end of WWII, the term has not been discarded.
What can we do to change it? We need to acknowledge that the word “Caucasian” is still around and that its continued use is problematic. We should use terms that are more accurate, such as “European-American.” Doing so would at least be consistent with the use of descriptive terms like “African-American,” “Mexican-American,” and others that signify both a geographical and an American ancestry.
The bottom line is that it is time for a modern—and accurate—terminology. The use of an outdated and disproven term that falsely purports to describe a separate race of people has no place in the U.S.
(Source:sapiens.com)
Curious September 2020 CURIOUS SEPTEMBER 2020 VIJETHA IAS ACADEMY
9.5 Race and racism, biological basis of morphological variation of non-metric and metric characters
Manipur: Govt likely to extend SoO agreement with Kuki militants for another six months While the state government and the militant groups have held talks, the final confirmation will be released by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The tripartite Suspension of Operation (SoO) agreement between the Government of India, Government of Manipur and the two umbrella groups of Kuki militants, United People’s Front (UPF) and Kuki National Organization (KNO), is likely to be extended for another six months.
With the agreement set to expire on August 31, officials of the state met representatives of the two umbrella groups in separate meetings. The first meeting was held on August 17 with representatives of the KNO and the second meeting with the UPF on Thursday. Representatives from the Centre did not attend both the meetings owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is learnt that during the meetings, all the parties have agreed in spirit to extend the SoO agreement for another six months, till February 28, 2021. However, the final confirmation will be released by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
“We held rounds of meeting with the representatives of both the umbrella groups and discussed on the matter of the extension of the SoO agreement. But the confirmation of the extension will be done by the MHA”, said Rehanuddin Choudhry, Joint Secretary Home, Manipur.
Of the total 25 armed Kuki groups operating in the state, 17 are under the KNO and eight under the United Peoples’ Front (UPF).
KNO and UPF signed the tripartite suspension of operation (SoO) agreement with the government of India and Manipur on August 22, 2008. Since then, the Government has been extending the agreement.
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Dr Seilen Haokip, spokesperson KNO, said, “We are ready for settlement. Talks with the Governments have been comprehensive. Now, it is only a matter of signing the deal.”
In response to the opposition voiced by civil society organisations of the Imphal valley (the majority meiteis), Haokip clarified that the demand of the outfits is within the ambit of the Indian Constitution and within the state of Manipur.
“We are not demanding something out of the ordinary. We are asking for our constitutional rights within the state and there is nothing to be alarmed,” added the KNO spokesperson.
The Kuki militants began their armed rebellion demanding a separate state for the Kukis, scattered in different parts of the Northeastern states and Myanmar. Later, the umbrella groups stepped down from their earlier demand to a “Territorial Council” (TC). They submitted the outline of the TC during their sixth round of political talks on January 10, 2018.
(Source:IndianExpress)
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7.3 The concept of ethnicity; Ethnic conflicts and political developments; Unrest among tribal communities; Regionalism and demand for autonomy; Pseudo-tribalism
Comparing Race to Caste Is an Interesting Idea, But There Are Crucial Differences Between Both Isabel Wilkerson's book 'Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents' uses anecdotes and allegory to advance her thesis, which however does not stand on a strong structural foundation.
In my early twenties, I was a graduate student working on my doctorate at an obscure but prestigious department at the University of Chicago called The Committee on Social Thought. The programme required all students to read a small list of ‘Great Books’, usually 12 or 13, which we called the ‘Fundamentals’ and our course work was intended to help us master the right way to read these books.
According to our teachers, that way was to read the books in as close to the original as possible (even if in translation) and to avoid (at all costs) the vast secondary literature of commentary, criticism and interpretation which surrounded them. We thus confronted Plato and Augustine, Machiavelli and Marx, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, all in the raw, without any friendly secondary assistance.
This method is what I adopted when I read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, without wading through the luxuriant forest of reviews of it that have already appeared, several by writers I know and admire.
Accompanied by Oprah Winfrey’s hailing of this book as a work for the centuries, the nomination of Kamala Harris as running mate to Joseph Biden, as well as the renewed rage about race and racism sparked by the Black Lives Matter movement, Wilkerson’s book was pre-sold as a bestseller.
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So, let me say right away that reading it was a strange experience. From the very first few pages, which describe the deadly effect of a heatwave on a nomadic population in Siberia, I sensed I was in a genre I knew but did not quite recognise.
As I read on, through a series of allegories about climate, animals, and epic battles between mythic groups, as well as of metaphors about houses, foundations, roofs, sills, and more, I gradually realised that I was experiencing a pedagogic genre of writing. This book is about big, bad things like race, caste, cruelty and torture presented as a series of modern epics. Wilkerson’s book is a guide to race and racial brutality in the US, told through the allegory of caste, the latter viewed as the skeleton under the flesh of black-white relationships in the 400-year history of what became the US. Its primary audience seems to be the mass liberal reading public of the US.
Once I understood the genre, I had no trouble understanding why every chapter, often every page, contained facts, anecdotes, reports and examples with which many of us are already familiar. This is not a book which claims to be based on original research. It is a polemical and pedagogical work, the single-minded aim of which is to show that what we mistakenly think of as race in the history of the US is, in fact, better thought of as caste, an underlying code, programme, skeleton, or structure which accounts for racist behaviour and institutions, which are simply its
The place which exemplifies caste is India, and Wilkerson succeeds in marshalling many descriptive and analytic verities about caste in India that we have heard for a century: its rigidity, its fixity, its tyranny, its permanence, and the quasi- religious foundations which define both its foundation and its reach over daily life.
I cannot resist the temptation to criticise Wilkerson’s book from the vantage point of a specialist in the anthropology of India, who has spent the better part of four decades poring over hundreds of books and essays about caste. That might seem both too easy and somehow beside the point for a book in which caste is mostly a device to offer a new picture of the racialised world of the US.
Yet, it is important to point out a few differences which make a difference, between caste and race. Caste crystallised over several millennia of Indian history, primarily as a cosmology which allowed pastoral and agricultural colonisers from the Northwest of the subcontinent to gradually colonise thousands of groups and communities who were previously not organised into castes. The new framework allowed many locally dominant groups to organise their local subordinates into a system which conflated rank, occupation and purity into a single status system. This is very different from the creation of whiteness as a category of domination in the context of the colonial and later independent US.
Then, there is the matter of purity and pollution, also discussed by Wilkerson, which many of us see as the driving source of caste ideology in India, whereas in the US, the polluting status of black Americans is an effect of racialised ranking and not a cause. Also, the Indian caste system is geared to an infinity of caste ranks, and many Indian villages have 30 or more hierarchically ranked castes (jatis), all keenly aware of who is above them and who is below.
Finally, while the top of the Indian caste system, usually composed of Brahmins, is permanent, closed and unquestionable, the bottom, which is certainly defined by Dalits (Untouchables) is strangely porous, since every Indian caste, including the lowest, has someone or some group, usually in a neighbouring village, who performs polluting services (like cremation, scavenging and hair-cutting) for them, and is therefore lower than they are. In short, no group in India, however low, lacks a group beneath them that lets them feel purer. This is very different from the exclusionary logic of race, which is binary (black versus white) and lacks any cosmological basis for one black person to feel racially superior to another black.
For these reasons, mobility at every level has been part of the history of caste in India, (contra the myth of its rigidity) and here the semiotics of pigment in American race relations is a massive obstacle to such mobility, actual or aspirational. Even in the past 50 years in India, the entry of Dalits into Indian political parties, elections and in the bureaucracy has been both VIJETHA IAS ACADEMY ADDRESS: 7/50, II FLOOR, NEAR ROOP VATIKA, SHANKAR ROAD, OLD RAJENDAR NAGAR, NEW DELHI — 110060 HOTLINE: 011- 42473555, 9650852636 , 7678508541 , DATABASE: WWW.VIJETHAIASACADEMY.COM CURIOUS SEPTEMBER 2020 VIJETHA IAS ACADEMY
numerically impressive and irreversible, even if the upper caste backlash against this mobility, in terms of rape, arson and public humiliation of Dalits has also intensified.
Wilkerson is right to note the flow of ideas between Dalits and African Americans, involving figures as different as Martin Luther King, W.E.B. Dubois, Angela Davis, Ambedkar and groups such as the Black Panthers and the Dalit Panthers. This is one of many cases of such mutual admiration in human history among both oppressors and oppressed. The mutual identification of various kinds of proletariat in the long period of socialist internationalism is a major example of such traffic. But such mutual admiration cannot be the basis for the sort of deep structural comparison that Wilkerson is keen to make.
I must raise one other question, since Wilkerson expends a great deal of effort to show why the similarities between caste in India and race in the US are so striking, so relevant and so much more important than the differences. My question is this: if caste in the US is a kind of code, which is buried deep under the surface of race (and of the brutal etiquette and institutions of race and racism), how can we compare it to a society like India, where caste is both the code and the everyday reality? Put another way, either India has no underlying social programme, grammar and theory, and its social world is simply caste all the way up and down (something I doubt) , or Wilkerson’s dramatic unearthing of caste under the surface of race in the US is just a literary device to tell a familiar American story in an unfamiliar way, and is not based on a genuine similarity.
I lean towards the latter reading. And then there is the joker in the pack, the case of Nazi Germany and its appearance in Wilkerson’s book as the third example of the value of caste as a lens into a story which is not normally discussed in caste terms. The objections here have been made by others but they are crippling: the relative shortness of the dominance of Nazi ideology; the entirely different history of antisemitism in European history, by comparison with colourism in the US and casteism in the Indian subcontinent; the Nazi wish to truly exterminate Jews, rather than to simply exploit, degrade and isolate in the Dalit and African-American cases, as cogs in some sort of economic machine.
The value of Wilkerson’s book is in the dignity of her narration, her refusal to vent excessively about her personal wounds as an African American writer and thinker, her clarity about the ethics of structural racism, and her highly accessible style.
But the biggest challenge that Wilkerson does not address, speaking from my vantage point as a social scientist in 2020, is one about race and caste as social constructions. Wilkerson is at pains to show, in stunning detail, that the ideology and practices of racism in the US are crafted, built, shored up, repaired, restored and updated, on a continuous basis: in short, they are socially constructed.
The puzzle that I and many others would have loved to see Wilkerson tackle is hardly touched on. And that puzzle is why some constructions acquire the sort of durability that resists all counter-evidence, all discovery, all qualification, all falsification, while others are as fragile as a flower and as quick to disappear as a rainstorm. Caste and race are monsters of resilience, and for this we need some third point of leverage for a truly powerful explanation.
Meanwhile, we can be grateful to Wilkerson for reminding us of their affinities.
(Source:JusticeNews)
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1.4 Human Evolution and emergence of Man
The Evolution Of Modern Intelligence – When Did Humans Become Humans?
Scientists tried to discover when did humans capable of modern intelligence start roaming the planet for decades. It appears that it’s a highly debatable question, as there are many missing links to the puzzle.
Fossils and DNA revealed that people who looked a lot like us, the Homo sapiens, evolved about 300,000 years ago.Peculiarly, the technology from various periods of history suggests that our ancestors started manifesting “modernity” between 50,000 to 65,000 years ago.
Some scientists believe that the earliest Homo sapiens weren’t thoroughly modern, and the evolution happened somewhat gradually. However, separate data tracks suggest different things.Skulls and genes reveal a lot about brains, which are often a testimony to culture.It is commonly believed that the human brain became modern before modern culture did.
Great Leap Forward For 200,000-300,000 years after the first Homo sapiens walked the Earth, artifacts and tools stayed mostly simple. Little improvements were made to Neanderthal technology.
More complex technology appeared between 65,000 to 50,000 years ago when our ancestors started using complex projectile weapons like bows and spear-throwers, fishhooks, ceramics, and sewing needles.It was around that time when representational art kicked off.A bird-bone flute suggests that music was slowly crawling its way into existence.
Modern Anatomy Bones of early Homo sapiens date from 300,000 years ago in Africa, with brains very similar in size to ours.The modern, anatomically similar Homo sapiens followed at least 200,000 years ago, and the brain shape became thoroughly modern by at least 100,000 years ago.From that point, the braincases remained mostly unchanged to date. Unfortunately, the data isn’t completely accurate, as the fossil record is too patchy, and fossils only reveal so much information. (Source:phys.org)
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1.6 Phylogenetic status, characteristics and geographical distribution
How Neanderthals adjusted to climate change
Climate change occurring shortly before their disappearance triggered a complex change in the behavior of late Neanderthals in Europe: they developed more complex tools. This is the conclusion reached by a group of researchers from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and Università degli Studi die Ferrara (UNIFE) on the basis of finds in the Sesselfelsgrotte cave in Lower Bavaria.Neanderthals lived approximately 400,000 to 40,000 years ago in large areas of Europe and the Middle East, even as far as the outer edges of Siberia. They produced tools using wood and glass-like rock material, which they also sometimes combined, for example to make a spear with a sharp and hard point made of stone.
From approximately 100,000 years ago, their universal cutting and scraping tool was a knife made of stone, the handle consisting of a blunt edge on the tool itself. These Keilmesser (backed, asymmetrical bifacially-shaped knives) were available in various shapes, leading researchers to wonder why the Neanderthals created such a variety of knives? Did they use different knives for different tasks or did the knives come from different sub-groups of Neanderthals? This was what the international research project hoped to find out.
Keilmesser are the answer
"Keilmesser are a reaction to the highly mobile lifestyle during the first half of the last ice age. As they could be sharpened again as and when necessary, they were able to be used for a long time—almost like a Swiss army knife today," says Prof. Dr. Thorsten Uthmeier from the Institute of Prehistory and Early History at FAU.
"However, people often forget that bi-facially worked knives were not the only tools Neanderthals had. Backed knives from the Neanderthal period are surprisingly varied," adds his Italian colleague Dr. Davide Delpiano from Sezione di Scienze Preistoriche e Antropologiche at UNIFE. "Our research uses the possibilities offered by digital analysis of 3-D models to discover similarities and differences between the various types of knives using statistical methods.”
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"The technical repertoire used to create Keilmesser is not only direct proof of the advanced planning skills of our extinct relatives, but also a strategical reaction to the restrictions imposed upon them by adverse natural conditions," says Uthmeier, FAU professor for Early Prehistory and Archaeology of Prehistoric Hunters and Gatherers.
Other climate, other tools
What Uthmeier refers to as 'adverse natural conditions' are climate changes after the end of the last interglacial more than 100,000 years ago. Particularly severe cold phases during the following Weichsel glacial period began more than 60,000 years ago and led to a shortage of natural resources. In order to survive, the Neanderthals had to become more mobile than before, and adjust their tools accordingly.
The Neanderthals probably copied the functionality of unifacial backed knives, which are only shaped on one side, and used these as the starting point to develop bi-facially formed Keilmesser shaped on both sides. "This is indicated in particular by similarities in the cutting edge, which consists in both instances of a flat bottom and a convex top, which was predominantly suited for cutting lengthwise, meaning that it is quite right to refer to the tool as a knife," says Davide Delpiano from UNIFE.
Both types of knife—the simpler older version and the newer, significantly more complex version—obviously have the same function. The most important difference between the two tools investigated in this instance is the longer lifespan of bi-facial tools. Keilmesser therefore represent a high-tech concept for a long-life, multi-functional tool, which could beused without any additional accessories such as a wooden handle.
"Studies from other research groups seem to support our interpretation," says Uthmeier. "Unlike some people have claimed, the disappearance of the Neanderthals cannot have been a result of a lack of innovation or methodical thinking.”
(Source:phys.org)
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How climate change led to the fall of an ancient civilisation. Indus Valley study, explained : There was a major shift in monsoon patterns at the dusk of the civilisation
What led to the fall of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), one of the greatest and most ancient civilisations in the world? That was a question plaguing scientists and historians for a long time. There were numerous conjectures; it could have been caused by adverse weather conditions, earthquakes, or the arrival of armed, hostile "invaders". Now, we finally have an answer.
Scientists from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in the US, using mathematical methods to study ancient climate patterns in North India, have surmised that shifting monsoon patterns linked to climate change likely caused the rise and fall of the civilisation. Indian-origin Nishant Malik, who headed the study, analysed data from North India covering the past 5,700 years.
What is the Indus Valley Civilisation?
Spread over 2600 and 1900 BCE, the mature IVC—or Harappa—was considered one of the largest urban societies of its time, with Dholavira in Gujarat, Mohenjo Daro in Pakistan's Sindh and Rakhigarhi in Haryana as some of its major centres. Its historical importance cannot be overstated.
British explorers first conducted large-scale excavations of the civilisation in the 1920s. In 2016, researchers claimed the Indus Valley Civilisation began nearly 2,500 years earlier than thought. This meant it began nearly 8,000 years ago, making it older than the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilisations, bringing into the question whether these Middle Eastern settlements can be considered as the 'cradle of civilisation'.
The area was populated by Harappans, considered a mix of Iranian farmers who arrived from the Zagros region and the earliest migrants out of Africa. Harappans built for themselves a highly evolved urban ecosystem—in infrastructure like town planning and drainage systems, the IVC was second to none. It was largely peaceful, cosmopolitan, with distant trade ties, and no outward, overarching influence of religion. It is widely presumed in academia that they spoke a language resembling the now-defunct Iranian Elamite, closely related to the Dravidian languages now spoken mainly in South India.
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What caused its decline?
Some in academia point to traditional literature which claim an influx of central Asian Steppe pastoralists (commonly referred to as the 'Aryans'), who brought with them Vedic culture and Indo-European languages including the first iterations of Sanskrit. There are a lot of holes in that narrative, some of which claim a hostile, military invasion by the pastoralists.
There are yet others, like the Rochester study, which claim climate change and shifting weather patterns as a reason for the decline of the civilisation. Malik analysed the presence of a particular isotope in stalagmites—calcium carbonate deposits that trap surface climate signatures in different layers as they continually grow—in a North Indian cave, which should reveal the amount of water that fell as rain over time; scientists have previously been able to estimate monsoon rainfall in the region over the past 5,700 years. In the new research, Malik was able to identify patterns in this data showing a major shift in monsoon patterns as the civilisation began to rise, and then a reverse shift that matched its decline.
This is not the only study to make similar claims. Researchers at IIT-Kharagpur had claimed that the Indus Valley Civilisation died out as a result of a 900-year-long drought around 4,350 years ago. The researchers had came to the conclusion of the drought after studying variations in the monsoons over the past 5,000 years. They argued that rainfall levels were erratic for 900 years in the north-west Himalayas. This dried up water supply to the Indus. This could have also have led to the disappearance of a Himalayan snow-fed river (quite like the mythological Saraswati river) which once flowed in the Rann of Kutch. The long duration of the drought meant that residents were forced to abandon settlements for areas in the east and south where rainfall was better: modern-day Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh.
According to Malik's analysis, there was a major shift in monsoon patterns just before the dawn of this civilisation and that the pattern reversed course right before it declined, indicating it was in fact climate change that caused the fall. The RIT scientists believe the new method will allow academics to develop more automated methods of finding transitions in ancient climate data, leading to additional important historical discoveries.
"Usually the data we get when analysing paleoclimate is a short time series with noise and uncertainty in it. As far as mathematics and climate is concerned, the tool we use very often in understanding climate and weather is dynamical systems," Malik stated. "But dynamical systems theory is harder to apply to paleoclimate data. This new method can find transitions in the most challenging time series, including paleoclimate, which are short, have some amount of uncertainty and have noise in them," he explained.
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The temporal lobes of Homo erectus were proportionally smaller than in H. sapiens
Emiliano Bruner, a paleoneurologist at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), has participated in a study published in the journal Quaternary International, on the anatomy of the temporal lobes in the brain of Homo erectus, which establishes that they were proportionally smaller than in modern humans.
In H. sapiens, the temporal lobes are relatively more highly developed than in other primates, although little is known about their anatomy in extinct human species, because they are housed in a very delicate region of the cranium known as the middle cranial fossa, which is often not conserved in fossil individuals.
An earlier study by the same team had shown that the size of the middle cranial fossa can be used to deduce the volume of the temporal lobes. In this new study, three anatomical diameters were analyzed in fossils of H. erectus and H. ergaster, and compared with the corresponding measurements for 51 modern humans. The results suggest that both fossil species had temporal lobes proportionally smaller than in humans today.
Moreover, "the Asiatic individuals, namely Homo erectus, had larger temporal lobes than in the African ones, Homo ergaster, although the scanty fossil record does not allow us to tell whether this is due to chance or a paleoneurological difference between the two species," says Bruner.
As the temporal lobe is a brain region involved in the integration of many cognitive functions, such as memory, the emotions, hearing, social relations and language, any change in their sizes or proportions is of transcendent importance, as this could reveal variations in the development of their neurons or their connections, and therefore in the cognitive functions associated to this region of the cerebral cortex.
(Source:phys.org)
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A 48,000 years old tooth that belonged to one of the last Neanderthals in Northern Italy
A milk-tooth found in the vicinity of "Riparo del Broion" on the Berici Hills in the Veneto region bears evidence of one of the last Neanderthals in Italy. This small canine tooth belonged to a child between 11 and 12 that had lived in that area around 48,000 years ago. This is the most recent Neanderthal finding in Northern Italy.
The study uncovering this tooth was carried out by a group of researchers from the Universities of Bologna and Ferrara, who have recently published a paper in the Journal of Human Evolution. "This work stems from the synergy between different disciplines and specializations", says Matteo Romandini, lead author of this study and researcher at the University of Bologna. "High-resolution prehistoric field-archaeology allowed us to find the tooth, then we employed virtual approaches to the analyses of its shape, genome, taphonomy and of its radiometric profile. Following this process, we could identify this tooth as belonging to a child that was one of the last Neanderthals in Italy”.
The genetic analysis reveals that the owner of the tooth found in Veneto was a relative, on their mother's side, of Neanderthals that had lived in Belgium. This makes this site in Veneto a key-area for comprehending the gradual extinction of Neanderthals in Europe.
"This small tooth is extremely important", according to Stefano Benazzi, professor at the University of Bologna and research coordinator. "This is even more relevant if we consider that, when this child who lived in Veneto lost their tooth, Homo Sapiens communities were already present a thousand kilometres away in Bulgaria".
Researchers analysed the tooth by employing highly innovative virtual methods. "The techniques we employed to analyse the tooth led to the following discovery: this is an upper canine milk-tooth that belonged to a Neanderthal child, aged 11 or 12, that lived between 48,000 and 45,000 years ago", as report Gregorio Oxilia and Eugenio Bortolini, who are co-authors of the study and researchers at the University of Bologna. "According to this dating, this little milk-tooth is the most recent finding of the Neanderthal period in Northern Italy and one of the latest in the entire peninsula".
The findings retrieved from the "Riparo del Broion" are still being analysed. However, preliminary results show that this site had been used for a long period of time as there are signs of hunting activities and butchering of large prays. "The manufacturing of tools, mainly made of flint, shows Neanderthals' great adaptability and their systematic and specialized exploitation of the raw materials available in this area", adds Marco Peresanti, a professor of the University of Ferrara who contributed to the study.
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The paper reporting about the results of this study was published in the Journal of Human Evolution and its title is "A late Neanderthal tooth from northeastern Italy". Matteo Romandini, Gregorio Oxilia, Eugenio Bortolini, Simona Arrighi, Federica Badino, Carla Figus, Federico Lugli, Giulia Marciani, Sara Silvestrini and Stefano Benazzi (all from the Department of Cultural Heritage) participated in the study proudly representing the University of Bologna.
This research was carried out in the framework of the ERC SUCCESS project, which is led by Stefano Benazzi and focuses on the bio-cultural changes happened in Italy during the transition between Neanderthal and Sapiens. The ultimate goals of the project are to understand when our species reached Southern Europe, the processes favouring Sapiens' adaptive success and the causes leading to Neanderthals' extinction.
This project has also involved the Departments of Human Evolution and Genetics of the Max Planck Institute (Germany), the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (UK), the DANTE Laboratory of the La Sapienza University and the Bioarchaeology Service of the Museum of Civilization in Rome.
Research at the site "Riparo del Broion" has started in 1998 and is currently under the joint scientific direction of Matteo Romandini (University of Bologna) and Matteo Peresani (University of Ferrara). This site has been made available through the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and thanks to the support of the Veneto region, Longare city council (Vicenza, Veneto), Leakey Foundation, CariVerona Foundation, the Italian Institute of Proto- and Prehistory and the ERC SUCCESS project.
(Source:eurekalert.com)
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Like humans, chimpanzees can suffer for life if orphaned before adulthood
Male chimpanzees who lose their mother early in life are less competitive and have fewer offspring than sons who continue to live with their mothers
Researchers observed three chimpanzee communities of the Tai National Park. They kept full demographic records and collected fecal samples to conduct paternity tests on all new community members, for up to 30 years. Catherine Crockford, the lead author, says: "When we study our closest living relatives, like chimpanzees, we can learn about the ancient environmental factors that made us human.
Our study shows that a mother's presence and support throughout the prolonged childhood years was also likely a trait in the last common ancestor that humans shared with chimpanzees six to eight million years ago. This trait is likely to have been fundamental in shaping both chimpanzee and human evolution".
Major theories in human evolution argue that parents continuing to provide food to their offspring until they have grown up has enabled our species to have the largest brains of any species on the planet relative to our body size. Brains are expensive tissue and grow slowly leading to long childhoods.
Ongoing parental care through long childhoods allow children time to learn the skills they need to survive in adulthood. Such long childhoods are rare across animals, equaled only by other great apes, like chimpanzees.
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Chimpanzees may have long childhoods, but mothers rarely directly provide them with food after ages four to five years when they are weaned. Mostly mothers let their offspring forage for themselves. So then what do chimpanzee mothers provide their sons that gives them a competitive edge over orphaned sons? We do not yet know the answer but scientists do have some ideas.
"One idea is that mothers know where to find the best food and how to use tools to extract hidden and very nutritious foods, like insects, honey and nuts", Crockford points out. "Offspring gradually learn these skills through their infant and juvenile years. We can speculate that one reason offspring continue to travel and feed close to their mothers every day until they are teenagers, is that watching their mothers helps them to learn." Acquiring skills which enable them to eat more nutritious foods may be why great apes can afford much bigger brains relative to their body size than other primates.
"Another idea is that mothers pass on social skills", Roman Wittig, last author on the study and director of the Ta? Chimpanzee Project, adds. "Again a bit like humans, chimpanzees live in a complex social world of alliances and competition. It might be that they learn through watching their mothers when to build alliances and when to fight”.
(Source: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY)
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Narmada valley is the centre of human evolution—Dr A.R Sankhyan
BILASPUR (HP): Research paper of Dr A.R.Sankhyan, renowned anthropologist of Himachal Pradesh on “Evolutionary perspective on Narmada Hominin Fossils” was published on August 20 last. The paper findings confirm the hypothesis of two lineage of culturally and physically distinct hominins (human ancestors)in the region during Pleistocene times (2.50 lakh to 70, 000 years ago). It sheds light on the theory that once the valley had been inhabited by two-type of human ancestors—a large bodies species and hitherto unknown pygmy-size man.
The studyalso distinguished two major morpho-types which reflect the process of humanization in the Central Narmada valley and possible evolutionary scenario for Sough Asia. Dr Sankhyan said that on date there were 15 hominin fossils on record from Narmada valley discovered from various locations.
Since 1830 the Central Narmada valley has yielded innumerable Paleolithic artifacts and Pleistocene vertebrate fauna but finding human fossils has always been a frustration to anthropologists. In 1980s a partial huminin cranium was found that brought the valley to limelight for research on human evolution in South Asia. According to Dr Sankhyan, the ‘large-bodied’ species (Acheulian Man) survived until the emergence of the short-stocky man around 1.50 lakh years ago.
Narmada valley yielded India’s first human fossil—a partial skull cap—in 1982. No new human fossil was found until mid-1990s when he then a senior scientist at the Anthropological Survey of India, discovered three human fossils—two collarbones and a rib similar to the clavicle of Andaman Pygmies. His discovery confirms that these belonged to a human ancestor who was ‘short and stocky.
His research paper has now confirmed by two more fossils he indentified from a collection made during intensive explorations in the same area between 2005-10. “ While one category was short and stocky used to hunt small animals with stone and bone tools the other was of large bodied people who hunted big animals with archaic and big weapons of stones, ” revealed the research.
It further states that larger bodied humans evolved first, they were replaced by the short and stocky people and then migrated to other postures including Africa from here. Short people might have even survived the volcanic winter which followed the world’s largest volcanic activity—Toba super-eruption occurred between 69, 000 and 77, 000 years ago at Lake Toba in Sumatra. It is known as one of the earth’s biggest eruption. It plunged the planet into six to ten year volcanic winter, said Dr Sankhyan.
After a detailed morphometic study done by Dr Sankhyan, has made an attempt to sort out human evolution into three categories. These are large-bodied species, short and stocky—lived during Pleistocene times (2.50 lakh to 70, 000 years ago) and the third one of present human evolution some 40, 000 years ago.
Dr Sankhyan lives in Bilaspur of Himachal Pradesh and has written two books and 10 research papers on human evolution.
(Source:PunjabnewsExpress)
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Gene Editing: Do We Have The Right to Genetically Enhance Our Children?
Technological advancements have blurred the borders of natural biological processes by giving humans more control. One such area is that of gene editing that allows us to modify the child’s genetic make up to not only prevent diseases, and lead to a healthier life, but also personality traits for a more fulfilling life. However, this raises question on ethics, consent of the child and rights of parents. RAGHAV AHOOJA, addresses this issue with the lens of state involvement in controlling the private realm.
E are at crossroads wherein we may be able to customize and design the futures of our future generations. Lawmakers, thus, need to solve the ethical dilemmas brought about by such giant scientific leaps.
Even though it may sound like science fiction, the future is here.Gene editing for therapeutic purposes (namely gene therapy) is being conducted for the removal of diseases in humans and foetuses both. When changes are made to the somatic cells, the modifications aren’t hereditary. However, when the changes are made to the sperm, egg, or embryo, the modifications are transferred on to the next generation. It is done through a process called ‘germline’ gene editing.
It seems like German philosopher Neitzsche’s post-human concept of Übermensch (translated as beyond-man or superman) might become real. Using a technology known as CRISPR, one can not only treat diseases but also customize a baby in terms of intelligence, athleticism, and so on. This can permanently enhance the lineage of the family.
Law and Gene Editing Somatic gene editing has been approved in countries like the United States, although with restrictions. It is for the Courts and lawmakers to decide whether this right to ‘enhance’ children for their own welfare falls within the right to privacy of the parents, or whether the state has a right to curtail such an action.
According to American jurisprudence, there is a private realm of family life which the state cannot enter. Yet time and again the state has entered this realm, claiming a legitimate interest in regulating the family, especially for the welfare of the child. Thus, whilst there exists a right to privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment, it is not absolute.
In the famous case of Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court held that the right to abortion is embedded in the right to privacy of the parent bearing the child. While the judgment was pro-choice, gene editing doesn’t quite fit the bifurcated and antagonistic pro-choice v. pro-life debate. It gives parents the choice to genetically edit their children, and the aim of such editing inter alia is to eradicate disease and enhance children for their own welfare.
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Germany, as opposed to the US, recognises the unborn as an individual with a “genetically determined” identity, which is unique and inseparable. According to German courts, as the unborn baby grows, it does not only develop into a human being but develops as a human being and is worthy of human dignity. Such human dignity would also include the right to live a dignified life, which is free of disease. Therefore, a blanket ban on gene editing would be violative of human dignity.
It is quite clear that therapeutic gene editing is not violative of human dignity, insofar its aim is to eradicate disease. However, such human dignity also includes the right to free development of personality.
A plain reading of the German constitutional text would suggest that non-therapeutic editing for personality factors is violative of human dignity. But to the contrary, heritable gene editing for purposes such as personality building will be permissible for strengthening the autonomy of the child. Furthermore, it must be for the welfare of the child and must not restrict the free development of their personality. A thumb rule could be – whether the child would subsequently consent to such a modification.
In India, guidelines permitting development of therapeutic gene editing products were introduced. Currently, heritable gene editing can only be done for purposes of experimentation and the embryo cannot have a life beyond 14 days. Thus, heritable gene editing is yet not fully permitted in India. However, there is scope as the Indian Supreme Court in K.S. Puttaswamy (2017) recognised that the right to privacy encompasses family affairs and childrearing. This would possibly entail the parents’ right to enhance their child as an extension of their right to choose. Child, State and Parents in Gene Editing It is an established position in law that technology mustn’t be prohibited due to a mere possibility of harm. Rather, a positivist approach must be adopted so as to do the greatest good to the greatest number. In fact, a recent report by a German government-appointed council of experts stated that heritable gene editing is not violative of human dignity.
Further, a joint statement by the councils of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany stated that heritable gene editing is permissible. However, there must be a risk assessment and the risk must be brought down to a minimum acceptable level.
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The question, when looked at more deeply, is whether the personality and well-being of future generations ought to be subjected to medical decisions or not.
Thus, there is a tripartite relationship of the right of the parents to choose the genetic make–up of their children, the right of the state to regulate such an act, and the right of the unborn baby to consent to such editing.
The American Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey has reiterated that the matters involving the intimate choices of a person are central to dignity and autonomy protected under ‘liberty’ enshrined in the American Constitution. And that at the heart of this liberty lies the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life, without the interference of the state.
Where does that leave us? Ultra-modern technologies such as artificial wombs make one think whether a birth is really an event, or a ‘process’, and if so then where does the ‘process’ begin?
Partial ectogenesis (the growth of a baby outside the womb) is already happening. But in time, we might be able to carry out full ectogenesis. As the reliability of such technologies increases, so does their capability. The potential to live outside the mother’s womb as opposed to the usual 24 weeks would begin right from the stage of development of the foetus, which is at 8 weeks. Further, with the help of biotech, the ability of an unborn baby to live outside the mother’s womb might begin right at fertilisation.
The American Courts have held that an individual whether single or married has the right to privacy which the state cannot infringe. Thus, even a single parent, out of wedlock, can bear such a child and the right to genetically edit unborn babies would be extended to them. The mother and father would be on an equal footing while deciding whether to genetically edit the baby or not.
The aim of the process of childrearing is to produce children with favourable traits and personality and allow them to have a dignified life.
In the first such successfully germline edited babies, scientists predict that it might have actually led to having enhanced their ability to learn and form memories. In another case of successful gene therapy, young children were saved from potentially deadly diseases and lives of isolation.
Therefore, the moot question is: Do we fast forward using techno solutionism or do we let evolution do its thing? Where do we draw the line? Should one circumscribe the limits of technology, or let it take a well-designed course?
Believe it or not, the future is here.
Where does that leave us?
It is for us to decide.
(Source:Theleaflet)
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631 people died cleaning sewers, septic tanks in last 10 years: NCSK
New Delhi: A total of 631 people have died in the country while cleaning sewers and septic tanks in the last 10 years, the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK) said.
The figure was provided by the NCSK in response to an RTI query on the number of deaths reported while cleaning sewers and septic tanks from 2010 to March 2020.
According to the data, 631 such fatalities were reported during the period. The highest number of deaths were reported in 2019 at 115.Among states, Tamil Nadu reported the highest number of such deaths in total in the 10-year period at 122 followed by Uttar Pradesh at 85, Delhi and Karnataka each reported 63 deaths and Gujarat reported 61 deaths. In Haryana, 50 fatalities have been reported in the last 10 years. In 2020, two people died while cleaning sewers and septic tanks till March 31. In 2018, 73 such deaths were reported while in 2017 as many as 93 people died while cleaning sewers, the data showed.In 2016, 55 people died while cleaning sewers and septic tanks, 62 in 2015, 52 in 2014, 68 in 2013, 47 in 2012, 37 in 2011 and 27 in 2010, it said.The NCSK said the data is based on the information received by it from various sources and actual information may vary.“Further, this is a dynamic data which keeps changing as it is updated as and when information is received by the commission from any source,” it said in the RTI response.An official said sanitation is a state subject and the NCSK maintains the data it receives from states and UTs.
Activists, however, said that such deaths continue to happen because of poor implementation of the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act.Bezwada Wilson, national convener of Safai Karmachari Andolan, an organisation working to eradicate manual scavenging, said the poor implementation of the law has left the sanitation workers in a lurch.
“A single person has not been punished under the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act since its enactment. An Act should not be a false promise like an election manifesto, an Act should be what we should implement in an unequal society,” the Magsaysay award winning activist said.
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Kumar said in many cases, they don’t have any proper training or equipment.
“No one is taking seriously effective implementation of the Act. There is lack of awareness that making a person entering sewer or septic tank is a crime and for that the law has to be implemented strongly,” he said.
Akhila Sivadas, the managing trustee and executive director of the Centre for Advocacy and Research (CFAR) – a non- profit organisation, said firstly there is a need to recognise the magnitude of the problem and through the National Urban and Rural Livelihood Mission, pursue the issue with determination.
While collaborating with unions and associations of safai karamcharis, take forward aggressively alternate means of livelihood and modernise and regulate fecal sludge and septage management to utmost safety of sanitation workers, she said.
“The government needs to walk the talk. As long as there is poor implementation of the law prohibiting manual scavenging no one will have any faith in the ability of the system to liberate them from the worst form of bondage and servitude,” Sivadas added.
According to data presented by the Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry in February in Parliament, there are about 63,246 identified manual scavengers across the country in 17 states and about 35,308 have been identified from Uttar Pradesh alone.
Parliament had enacted the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 which came in force from December 6, 2013.
The Act makes it clear that cleaning of sewers or septic tanks without protective gear amounts to hazardous cleaning and attracts penal consequences.
In the ongoing Parliament session, the government is likely to bring Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation (Amendment) Bill, 2020 that makes the law banning manual scavenging more stringent by increasing the imprisonment term and the fine amount.
(Source : Telangana Today)
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Are Humans Still Evolving? Scientists Weigh In
As a species, humans have populated almost every corner of the earth. We have developed technologies and cultures which shape the world we live in.
The idea of 'natural selection' or 'survival of the fittest' seems to make sense in Stone Age times when we were fighting over scraps of meat, but does it still apply now?
We asked 12 experts whether humans are still evolving. The expert consensus is unanimously 'yes', however scientists say we might have the wrong idea of what evolution actually is.
Evolution is often used interchangeable with the phrases 'survival of the fittest' or 'natural selection'. Actually, these are not quite the same thing.
'Evolution' simply means the gradual change of a population over time.
'Natural selection' is a mechanism by which evolution can occur. Our Stone Age ancestors who were faster runners avoided being trampled by mammoths and were more likely to have children. That is 'natural selection'. Overtime, the human population became faster at running. That's evolution.
That makes sense for Stone Age humans, but what about nowadays? We don't need to outrun mammoths, we have medicines for when we're sick and we can go to the shops to get food.
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Natural selection needs a 'selection pressure' (e.g. dangerous trampling mammoths), so if we don't have these anymore, does this mean we stop evolving?
Even with no selection pressures, experts say evolution still occurs by other mechanisms. Professor Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist from the University of Illinois, explains that "any change in the proportions of genes or gene variants over time is also considered evolution. The variants may be functionally equivalent, so evolution does not automatically equate with 'improvement'".
Whilst some genes can be affected by natural selection (e.g. genes that help us run faster), other changes in our DNA might have no obvious effect on us. 'Neutral' variations can also spread through a population by a different mechanism called 'genetic drift'.
Genetic drift works by chance: some individuals might be unlucky and die for reasons which have nothing to do with their genes. Their unique gene variations will not be passed on to the next generation, and so the population will change. Genetic drift doesn't need any selection pressures, and it is still happening today. As much as we have made things easier for ourselves, there are still selection pressures around us, which mean that natural selection is still happening.
Like all mammals, humans lose the ability to digest milk when they stop breastfeeding. This is because we stop making an enzyme called lactase. In some countries, the population has acquired 'lactase persistence', meaning that people make lactase throughout their lives.
In European countries we can thank one specific gene variation for our lactase persistence, which is called '-13910*T'. By studying this specific gene variation in modern and ancient DNA samples, researchers suggest that it became common after humans started domesticated and milking animals. This is an example of natural selection where we have actually made the selection pressure ourselves – we started drinking milk, so we evolved to digest it!
Another example of humans undergoing natural selection to adapt to a lifestyle is the Bajau people, who traditionally live in houseboats in the waters of South East Asia and spend much of their lives diving to hunt fish or collect shellfish. Ultrasound imaging has found that Bajau people have larger spleens than their neighbours – an adaption which allows them to stay underwater for longer.
There are always selective pressures around us, even ones that we create ourselves.
As Dr Benjamin Hunt from the University of Birmingham puts it, "Our technological and cultural changes alter the strength and composition of the selection pressures within our environment, but selection pressures still exist." So, evolution can happen by different mechanisms like natural selection and genetic drift. As our environment is always changing, natural selection is always happening. And even if our environment was 'just right' for us, we would evolve anyway!
Dr Alywyn Scally, an expert in evolution and genetics from the University of Cambridge, explains: "As long as human reproduction involves randomness and genetic mutation (and the laws of the Universe pretty much guarantee that this will always be the case at some level), there will continue to be differences from one generation to the next, meaning that the process of evolution can never be truly halted." Takeaway: Evolution means change in a population. That includes both easy-to-spot changes to adapt to an environment as well as more subtle, genetic changes.
Humans are still evolving, and that is unlikely to change in the future.
This expert response was published in partnership with independent fact-checking platform Metafact.io.
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NAGPUR: In a landmark verdict, the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court allowed a daughter to use the caste of her mother. The court clarified that it’s natural for a child to learn the values, customs and practices of her mother’s community after losing contact with her father.
While quashing the Schedule Tribe Caste Certificate Scrutiny Committee’s decision to deny caste certificate of the Halba tribe to the 20-year-old petitioner who studies in Pune, a division bench comprising justices Sunil Shukre and Pushpa Ganediwala remitted the matter back to the sub- divisional officer for reconsidering her application for a caste certificate which would enable her to get a fee concession for higher studies.
“The petitioner’s mother is a tribal woman belonging to the ‘Halba’ Schedule Tribes. She married a non-tribal. The marriage, however, ended soon and made no cultural impact on the girl in the sense that it didn’t result in she getting values, learning customs and practices of her father’s community.
Rather, she was raised in an atmosphere dominated by the customs and traditions of her mother’s community. It was, therefore, natural for her to start claiming the social status professed by her mother,” the judges ruled.
According to counsel Ashwin Deshpande, the petitioner’s parents entered into a wedlock on August 8, 1996 and she was born on July 21, 1997. After differences cropped up between her parents, the tribal mother left her husband’s company and started living with her parents. Their marriage was subsequently dissolved in 2003. Since then, the petitioner has been living with her mother.When the petitioner grew up, she applied for a caste certificate which is mandatory for taking admission via the reserved quota. However, the admission was rejected by the scrutiny committee under the Maharashtra Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, De-Notified Tribes, Nomadic Tribes, Other Backward Classes and Special Backward Category (Regulation of Issuance and Verification of Caste) Certificate Act, 2000. The committee pointed out that the petitioner submitted documentary evidence of her mother, which isn’t allowed under Rule 12 of Rules 2003.
Terming the Caste Scrutiny Committee’s decision as ‘unfortunate’, the judges noted that in spite of producing sufficient documentary evidence for consideration, the authorities continued to harp on the documents from the paternal side. “If we consider the provisions of Rule 12, apparently there’s nothing wrong in such an approach. But when we look at it from a different prospective, which is the background of a distressed family led by a single mother, we are convinced that this case requires a different approach,” they said.
They added that in 2003, there was a court's order whereby the petitioner’s custody, a girl of about six years then, was granted to her mother. Since then, she has been looked after, raised and educated by her mother in the background provided by her parental community. “The petitioner had no concern with her biological father for all these years. Practically, she inculcated the values, practices, customs and traditions of the community to which her mother belonged,” the judges held, before allowing her plea.
(Source:TimesofIndia)
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Sex is real : Yes, there are just two biological sexes. No, this doesn’t mean every living thing is either one or the other
It’s uncontroversial among biologists that many species have two, distinct biological sexes. They’re distinguished by the way that they package their DNA into ‘gametes’, the sex cells that merge to make a new organism. Males produce small gametes, and females produce large gametes. Male and female gametes are very different in structure, as well as in size. This is familiar from human sperm and eggs, and the same is true in worms, flies, fish, molluscs, trees, grasses and so forth.
Different species, though, manifest the two sexes in different ways. The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a common laboratory organism, has two forms – not male and female, but male and hermaphrodite. Hermaphroditic individuals are male as larvae, when they make and store sperm. Later they become female, losing the ability to make sperm but acquiring the ability to make eggs, which they can fertilise with the stored sperm.
This biological definition of sex has been swept up into debates over the status of transgender people in society. Some philosophers and gender theorists define a ‘woman’ as a biologically female human being. Others strongly disagree. I’m addressing those who reject the very idea that there are two biological sexes. Instead, they argue, there are many biological sexes, or a continuum of biological sexes.
There’s no need to reject how biologists define the sexes to defend the view that trans women are women. When we look across the diversity of life, sex takes stranger forms than anyone has dreamt of for humans. The biological definition of sex takes all this in its stride. It does so despite the fact that there are no more than two biological sexes in any species you’re likely to have heard of. To many people, that might seem to have ‘conservative’ implications, or to fly in the face of the diversity we see in actual human beings. I will make clear why it does not.
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I call this the ‘biological’ definition of sex because it’s the one biologists use when studying sex – that is, the process by which organisms use their DNA to make offspring. Many philosophers and gender theorists will protest at making the creation of offspring foundational to how we define sex or distinguish different sexes. They’re surely right that sex as a social phenomenon is much richer than that. But the use of DNA to make offspring is a central topic in biology, and understanding and explaining the diversity of reproductive systems is an important scientific task. Gender theorists are understandably worried about how the biology of sex will be applied – or misapplied – to humans. What they might not appreciate is why biologists use this definition when classifying the mind-stretching forms of reproduction observed in limpets, worms, fish, lizards, voles and other organisms – and they might not understand the difficulties that arise if you try to use another definition.
Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes. They are not born with the ability to use these strategies – they acquire that ability as they grow up, a process which produces endless variation between individuals. The biology of sex tries to classify and explain these many systems for combining DNA to make new organisms. That can be done without assigning every individual to a sex, and we will see that trying to do so quickly leads to asking questions that have no biological meaning.
While the biological definition of sex is needed to understand the diversity of life, that doesn’t mean it’s the best definition for ensuring fair competition in sport or adequate access to healthcare. We can’t expect sporting codes, medical systems and family law to adopt a definition simply because biologists find it useful. Conversely, most institutional definitions of sex break down immediately in biology, because other species contradict human assumptions about sex. The United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) uses a chromosomal definition of sex – XY for males and XX for females. Many reptiles, such as the terrifying saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia, don’t have any sex chromosomes, but a male saltie has no trouble telling if the crocodile that has entered his territory is a male. Even among mammals, at least five species are known that don’t have male sex chromosomes, but they develop into males just fine. Gender theorists have extensively criticised the chromosomal definition of human sexes. But however well or badly that definition works for humans, it’s an abject failure when you look at sex across the diversity of life.
The same is true of ‘phenotypic sex’, the familiar idea that sex is defined by the typical physical characteristics (phenotypes) of males and females. Obviously, this approach will produce completely different definitions of male and female for humans, for worms, for trees and so forth. Incubating eggs inside your body, for example, is a female characteristic in humans but a male one in seahorses. That doesn’t mean that human institutions can’t use the phenotypic definition. But it isn’t useful when studying the common patterns in the genetics, evolution and so forth of female humans, female seahorses and female worms.
Understanding the complex ways in which chromosomes and phenotypes relate to biological sex will make clear why the biological definition of sex shouldn’t be the battleground for philosophers and gender theorists who disagree about the definition of ‘woman’. There might be very good reasons not to define ‘woman’ in this way, but not because the definition itself is poor biology.
Why did sexes evolve in the first place? Biologists define sex as a step towards answering this question. Not all species have biological sexes, and biology seeks to explain why some do and others don’t. The fact that no species has evolved more than two biological sexes is also a puzzle. It would be quite straightforward to engineer a species that has three, but none has evolved naturally.
Many species reproduce asexually, with each individual using its own DNA to create offspring. But other species, including our own, combine DNA from more than one organism. That’s sexual reproduction, where two sex cells – gametes – merge to make a new individual. In some species, these two gametes are identical; many species of yeast, for example, make new individuals from two, identical gametes. They reproduce sexually, but they have no sexes, or, if you prefer, they have only one sex. But in species that make two different kinds of gamete – and where one gamete of each kind is needed to make a new organism – there are two sexes. Each sex makes one of the two kinds of gamete.
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In complex multicellular organisms, such as plants and animals, these two kinds of gamete are very different. One is a large, complex cell, what we’d typically call an ‘egg’. It’s similar to the eggs produced by asexual species, which can develop into a new organism all on their own. Many species of insect and some lizards, snakes and sharks can reproduce using just an egg cell. The other kind of gamete is a much smaller cell that contains very little beyond some DNA and some machinery to get that DNA to the larger gamete. We are familiar with these two kinds of gametes from human eggs and sperm.
There’s no obvious reason why complex multicellular organisms need to have two kinds of gamete, or why these two kinds are so different in size and structure. It’s perfectly possible to make three or more different kinds of gamete, or gametes that vary continuously, just as people vary continuously in height. One question that biologists seek to answer, then, is why those forms of sexual reproduction aren’t observed in complex organisms such as animals and plants.When a species produces two different kinds of gamete, biologists call this ‘anisogamy’, meaning ‘not-equal-gametes’. Some anisogamic species have separate sexes, like humans do, where each individual can produce only one kind of gamete. Other anisogamic species are hermaphrodites, where each individual produces both kinds of gamete. Because they produce two kinds of gametes, hermaphroditic species still have two biological sexes – they simply combine them in one organism. When a biologist tells you that earthworms are hermaphrodites, they mean that one part of the worm produces sperm and another part produces eggs.
Some single-celled and very simple multicellular organisms have evolved something called ‘mating types’. These are gametes that are identical in size and structure, but in which the genome of each gamete contains genetic markers that affect which other gametes it can combine with. Typically, gametes with the same genetic marker can’t recombine with one another. Some species have many hundreds of these ‘mating types’, and newspapers often report research into this phenomenon under headlines such as: ‘Scientists discover species with hundreds of sexes!’ But, formally, biologists refer to these as ‘mating types’, and reserve the term ‘sexes’ for gametes that are different in size and structure.
Why distinguish between these two phenomena? One reason is that the evolution of anisogamy – gametes that differ in size and structure – explains the later evolution of sex chromosomes, sex-associated physical characteristics and much more. But the existence of mating types doesn’t have these dramatic knock-on evolutionary effects. Another reason to keep the distinction is that anisogamy and mating types are thought to have evolved via different evolutionary processes. One theory is that anisogamy appeared when mating-type genome markers somehow became linked to genes that controlled the size of the gamete, or mutated in some way that affected gamete size. These differences in gamete size would then kickstart the evolution of sexes.
The evolution of sex seems to be strongly associated with multicellularity, so the obvious place to look for a shift from mating types to sexes is in organisms that sit at the multicellular boundary – such as algae, which sometimes exist as single-celled organisms, and sometimes as colonies of cells. And indeed, there are species of algae where gametes are just a little bit anisogamous, blurring the distinction between mating types and sexes. There’s much we don’t know about how sex evolved, and how it might have evolved differently across species. But the point is that sexes and mating types are very different phenomena, with different causes and consequences.
The fact that sex evolved in some species but not others tells us something important about how biologists think about sex. Many cultures take the difference between male and female to be something fundamental, and label other natural phenomena such as the Sun and the Moon as male or female. But for biologists, the separation between male and female is no more fundamental or universal than photosynthesis or being warm-blooded. Some species have evolved these things, and some haven’t. They exist when they do only because of the local advantages they afforded in evolutionary competition.
So why did some species evolve two, distinct sexes? To answer this question, we need to forget about creatures with complex sex organs and mating behaviours. These evolved later. Instead, think of an organism that releases its gametes into the sea, such as coral, or into the air, such as fungal spores. Next, consider that there are two goals that any gamete must achieve if it’s to reproduce sexually. The first is finding and recombining with another gamete. The second is producing a new individual with enough resources to survive. One widely accepted idea, then, is that the evolution of sexes reflects a trade-off between these goals. Because no organism has infinite resources, organisms can either produce many small gametes, making it more likely that some of them will find a partner, or produce fewer but larger gametes, making it more likely that the resulting individual will have what it needs to survive and thrive.
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Since the 1970s, this idea has been used to model how anisogamic species might have evolved from species with only one kind of gamete. As mutations introduce differences in gamete size, two winning strategies emerge. One is to produce a large number of small gametes – too small to create viable offspring unless they recombine with a larger, well- provisioned gamete. The other winning strategy is to produce a few, large, well-resourced gametes that can create viable offspring, no matter how small the recombinant they end up merging with.
Intermediate approaches, such as producing a moderate number of moderately well-provisioned gametes, don’t do well. Organisms that try to follow the ‘middle way’ end up with gametes less likely to find a partner than smaller gametes, and more likely to have insufficient resources than larger gametes. When the two successful complementary strategies have evolved, fresh evolutionary pressures make the gametes even more distinct from one another. For example, it can be advantageous for the small gametes to become more mobile, or for the large, immobile gametes to send signals to the mobile ones.
Once anisogamy has evolved, it shapes many other aspects of reproductive biology. Most species of limpet – shellfish that you see on rocks at the beach – are sequential hermaphrodites. When young and small they are male, and when mature and large they become female. This is believed to be because small limpets don’t have sufficient resources to produce large female gametes, but they’re capable of producing the smaller male ones. In some other species, successful males can arrest their growth and remain small (and male) for their entire life.
Sequential hermaphroditism occurs in the opposite direction too. Australian snorkellers love to spot the large blue males of the eastern blue groper, but it’s rare to see more than one. Most groper are smaller, brown females. They are all born female and become sexually mature after a few years, when 20 or 30 cm in length. At around 50 cm, they change sex and acquire other male characteristics, such as being blue. Unlike the limpet, the main problem facing a male groper is controlling a territory on the reef, so becoming male when you’re small is a losing strategy.
Biology aims to understand the extraordinary diversity of ways in which organisms reproduce themselves, as well as to identify common patterns, and to explain why they occur. In general, organisms become sexually mature when they reach an optimal size for reproduction. This optimal size is often different for the two sexes, because the two sexes represent divergent strategies for reproduction. The limpet and the groper are two of many examples. In constructing these explanations, biological sex is defined as the production of one type of viable anisogamous gamete. If we defined sex in some other way, it would be hard to see the common patterns across the diversity of life, and hard to explain them.
So-called ‘sex chromosomes’, such as the XX and XY chromosome pairs seen in humans, are often brandished as something that’s fundamental to sex. It’s partly the inadequacy of this definition that drives scepticism about the existence of two, discrete biological sexes. ‘Molecular genetics is likely to require a shift from binary sex to quantum sex, with a dozen or more genes each conferring a small percentage likelihood of male or female sex that is still further dependent on micro- and macroenvironmental interactions,’ writes the gender scholar Vernon Rosario.
But any biologist already knows that there’s more to sex determination than chromosomes and genes, and that male and female sex chromosomes are neither necessary nor sufficient to make organisms male and female. Several species of mammal, all rodents of one kind or another, have completely lost the ‘male’ Y chromosome, but these rats and voles all produce perfectly normal, fertile males. Other groups of species, such as crocodiles and many fish, have neither sex chromosomes nor any other genes that determine sex. Yet they still have two, discrete biological sexes. The Australian saltwater crocodile, whom we met before, lays eggs that are very likely to develop into gigantic, highly territorial males if incubated between 30 and 33 degrees Celsius. At other temperatures, genetically identical eggs develop into much smaller females.
The reality is that chromosomes aren’t called ‘male’ or ‘female’ because these bits of DNA define biological sex. It’s the other way around – in some species that reproduce using two discrete sexes, those sexes are associated with different bits of DNA. But in other species this association is either absent or unreliable. Medical institutions use a chromosomal definition of sex because they judge, rightly or wrongly, that this is a reliable way of categorising humans. But humans really aren’t the best place to start when trying to understand sex across the diversity of life.
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These mechanisms by which organisms develop or switch biological sex are complex, and many factors can interfere with them. So they produce a lot of phenotypic diversity. Sometimes, organisms grow up able to make fertile gametes, but otherwise atypical for their biological sex. Sometimes, they grow up unable to make fertile gametes of either kind. This is usually an accident, but sometimes by design. In bees, eggs that aren’t fertilised develop into males, so male bees have half as many chromosomes as female bees. Meanwhile, all fertilised eggs start to develop into females, but most of them never complete their sexual development. The queen sends chemical signals that block the development of the worker bee’s ovaries at an early stage. So worker bees are ‘female’ in the extended sense that they would develop into fertile females if they weren’t actively prevented from doing so. Occasionally, worker bees manage to evade these controls and lay their own eggs. They are not popular with beekeepers, who select against these mutant strains.
The diversity of outcomes in individual sexual development doesn’t mean that there are many biological sexes or that biological sex is a continuum. Whatever the merits of those views for chromosomal sex or phenotypic sex, they are not true of biological sex. A good way to grasp this is to imagine a species that really does have three biological sexes. Biotechnologists have proposed curing mitochondrial diseases by removing the nucleus from an egg with healthy mitochondrial DNA, and inserting a new nucleus containing the nuclear DNA from an unhealthy egg and the nuclear DNA from a sperm. The resulting child would have three genetic parents.
Now imagine if there was a whole species like this, where three different kinds of gametes combined to make a new individual – a sperm, an egg and a third, mitochondrial gamete. This species would have three biological sexes. Something like this has actually been observed in slime moulds, an amoeba that can, but need not, get its mitochondria from a third ‘parent’. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut imagined an even more complex system in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969): ‘There were five sexes on Tralfamadore, each of them performing a step necessary in the creation of a new individual.’ But the first question a biologist would ask is: why haven’t these organisms been replaced by mutants that dispense with some of the sexes? Having even two sexes imposes many extra costs – the simplest is just finding a mate – and these costs increase as the number of sexes required for mating rises. Mutants with fewer sexes would leave more offspring and would rapidly replace the existing Tralfamadorians. Something like this likely explains why two-sex systems predominate on Earth.
We can also imagine a species where biological sex really does form a continuum. Recall that some algae have slightly anisogamous gametes, much closer together than sperm and eggs. We can imagine a more complex organism using this system, with some slightly smaller gametes and some slightly larger ones. Successful reproduction might require two actually exist all have just two, very different kinds of gamete – male and female. They’re not merely different in size, they’re fundamentally different in structure. This is the result of competition between organisms to leave the greatest number of genetic descendants. In complex multicellular organisms such as plants and animals, we know of only three successful reproductive strategies: two biological sexes in different individuals, two biological sexes combined in hermaphroditic individuals, and asexual reproduction. Some species use one of these strategies, some use more than one. gametes that, when added together, are big enough but not too big.
But the sexually reproducing plants and animals that Human beings have come up with many ways to classify the diversity of individual outcomes from human sexual development. People who want to apply the biological definition of sex to humans should recognise that it’s ill-suited to do what many human institutions want, which is to sort every individual into one category or another. What sex are worker bees? They are sterile workers whose genome was designed by natural selection to terminate ovary development on receipt of a signal from the queen bee. They share much of the biology of fertile female bees – but if someone wants to know ‘Are worker bees really female?’, they’re asking a question that biology simply can’t answer.
Nor is being a sterile worker a third biological sex alongside male and female. This is easier to see in ants, where there is more than one sterile caste. Workers, soldiers, queens and male ‘flying ants’ each have specialised bodies and behaviour, but there are not four biological sexes of ant. Workers and soldiers are both ‘female’ in an extended sense, but not in the full-blown sense that queen ants are female. There is a human imperative to give everything a sex, as mentioned above, but biology doesn’t share it.
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Juvenile organisms and postmenopausal human females also can’t produce either kind of gamete. Juveniles are assigned to the sex they have started to grow into. But once again, this is more complicated than it seems when we focus only on humans. In almost all mammals, sexual differentiation is initiated by a region of the Y chromosome, so a mammalian egg can become either male or female. In birds, it’s the other way around – the egg carries the sex-determining W chromosome, so sperm can become either male or female. After fertilisation, therefore, we can say that an individual mammal or bird has a sex in the sense that it has started to grow the ability to produce either male or female gametes. With a crocodile or a turtle, though, we’d have to wait until nest temperature had its sex-determining effect. But that doesn’t mean that we need to create a third biological sex for crocodile eggs!
More importantly, nothing guarantees that any of these organisms, including those with sex chromosomes, will continue to grow to the point where they can actually produce male or female gametes. Any number of things can interfere. From a biological point of view, there is nothing mysterious about the fact that organisms have to grow into a biological sex, that it takes them a while to get there, and that some individuals develop in unusual or idiosyncratic ways. This is a problem only if a definition of sex must sort every individual organism into one sex or another. Biology doesn’t need to do that.
In human populations, there are plenty of individuals whose sex is hard to determine. Biologists aren’t blind to this. The definition of biological sex is designed to classify the human reproductive system and all the others in a way that helps us to understand and explain the diversity of life. It’s not designed to exhaustively classify every human being, or every living thing. Trying to do so quickly leads to questions that have no biological meaning.
Human societies can’t delegate to biology the job of defining sex as a social institution. The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare. Theorists who want to use the biological definition of sex in those ways need to show that it will do a good job at the Olympics or in Medicare. The fact that it’s needed in biology isn’t good enough. On the other hand, whatever its shortcomings as an institutional definition, the concept of biological sex remains essential to understand the diversity of life. It shouldn’t be discarded or distorted because of arguments about its use in law, sport or medicine. That would be a tragic mistake.
The author’s research is supported by the Australian Research Council and the John Templeton Foundation. He would also like to thank Nicole Vincent, Jussi Lehtonen, Stefan Gawronski and Joshua Christie for their feedback on earlier drafts.
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Anthropologists compare composite measure of physiological dysregulation to understand how we age
It is well understood that mortality rates increase with age. Whether you live in Tokyo, rural Tennessee or the forests of Papua, New Guinea, the older you are, the more likely you are to succumb to any number of different ailments.
But how, exactly, do our bodies weather with age, and to what extent do people around the word experience physiological aging differently?
In a paper published in a special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, a team of anthropologists that includes Michael Gurven, a professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara and chair of the campus's Integrative Anthropological Sciences Unit, and Thomas Kraft, a postdoctoral researcher in the same department, construct and compare a composite measure of "physiological dysregulation" among human populations and other species. The themed issue explores the evolution of aging among primates.
Physiological dysregulation refers to the wearing down of the body's ability to bounce back from stress, damage or other adversity. Examples include how one's body might gradually become less able to properly regulate blood sugar, or it might more likely mount an inappropriate immune response that doesn't dissipate when the threat is gone (thereby damaging the body's own cells). This decline in resilience is often considered fundamental to aging.
"We're only now able to start piecing together what physiological aging looks like holistically in subsistence populations of foragers and farmers," said Kraft, the paper's lead author. "We first built a comprehensive metric of physiological dysregulation in humans, then compared it to other primates. It's not just the case that adult mortality rates are lower in humans; rates of physiological dysregulation are much slower in humans, too.”
For nearly two decades, the Tsimane Health and Life History Project has been collecting a large number of measures of health and aging (referred to as biomarkers) among the Tsimane, an indigenous population of forager-horticulturists in the Bolivian Amazon. These range from the typical measures that might be taken during a regular physical exam—blood pressure, cholesterol and blood glucose level—to indicators such as grip strength, various immune markers for inflammation and bone mineral density.
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Overall, the current study includes 40 biomarkers among 5,658 adults spread across 22,115 observations. "This makes it one of the only comprehensive longitudinal studies of health in a population living a vastly different lifestyle than the urban, industrialized countries, where most studies occur," said Kraft.
"While any single biomarker gives a snapshot of just one small part of health, what we did was to combine information from many biomarkers simultaneously—both the levels of these markers and the extent to which they are linked together —into a single metric," he continued. "This summary metric gives a holistic portrait of one's 'biological age,' by measuring how 'strange' one's combined biomarkers are relative to a healthy subset of the population."
Noted Gurven, co-director of the Tsimane Health and Life History Project, "In the U.S. and many other countries today, we're more likely to die of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other 'chronic diseases of aging.' But among the Tsimane and other populations living similar lifestyles, these chronic diseases are rare. Does physiological dysregulation occur at the same rate in this very different context?"
To answer this question, the team compared Tsimane with other human populations. "Where adult mortality rates are high, we might expect that aging of our bodies occurs more quickly, tracking closely the higher increase in mortality with age," Gurven explained. "Another possibility—and a goal for many of us—is to maintain healthy bodies for as long as we can, and then have everything fall apart close to the eventual timing of our demise."
The researchers found that despite a lifestyle vastly different from that of urban, post-industrialized populations such as those in the United States and Italy, and despite higher mortality rates throughout adulthood, Tsimane adults show only marginally higher rates of increase in physiological dysregulation among the Tsimane.
"Our first glimpse suggests a broad species-typical pattern of physical aging across environments and cultures," said Gurven. "That's a little surprising because the Tsimane have very low levels of late-age chronic diseases. But the Tsimane are exposed to harsher conditions, including strenuous labor tending fields, tropical diseases and minimal access to health care."
Added Kraft, "We also found similarities in physiological dysregulation among Tsimane women and men, despite evidence in many populations showing that men typically age faster and are more likely to die than women at most ages."
As Gurven noted, it's impossible to understand dysregulation and aging without knowing how different parts of the body function over time. "And to date, we have had little understanding of what that looked like in a population like the Tsimane," he said. "Yet the conditions we find ourselves in today, where over half of the global population lives in cities, is just a minor blip in the long history of our species. Groups like the Tsimane offer some of the best insight for our understanding of aging prior to industrialization and urbanization."
All that being said, the researchers are quick to acknowledge that their index is still just a statistical composite. "It's not a complex network model showing how everything is related to everything else," Gurven said. What's amazing, he added, is that our global estimates of physiological dysregulation don't change much once the information from roughly 15 biomarkers are integrated.
"Additional biomarkers tell you little, and it may not even matter which biomarkers you look at once you hit about 20. That seems to suggest that we're capturing something about the whole system," he explained. "And any single biomarker is only weakly correlated with our global index. But we'll learn much more about what it means and how important it might be once we can link dysregulation to useful outcomes, like functional performance, disease states and the likelihood of dying.”
(Author: Andrea Estrada, University of California)
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Leading NGOs Believe FCRA Changes Will ‘Kill’ Voluntary Sector
The amendments will also hinder the sector’s ability to collaborate and conduct research, activists tell The Wire.
New Delhi: The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2020 introduced in Lok Sabha on September 20 will severely impact collaborative research in critical fields in India as organisations receiving foreign funds will no longer be able to transfer them to small NGOs working at the grassroots level. Leading organisations also say the Bill would initially impact the livelihoods of workers associated with these small NGOs and ultimately lead to the “killing” of the entire sector as caps on administrative expenses would make it impossible for even the bigger NGOs to perform.
The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), 2010 regulates the acceptance and utilisation of foreign contribution by individuals, associations and companies. Under this Act, according to PRS Legislative Research, certain persons are prohibited from accepting any foreign contribution. The Bill adds the category of “public servant” to it. They include any person who is in service or pay of the government, or remunerated by the government for the performance of any public duty. Also, the Bill seeks to intrdouce an amendment to the clause that says foreign contributions cannot be transferred to any other person unless that person is also registered to accept foreign contributions, by prohibiting the transfer of foreign contribution to any other ‘person’ that may be an individual, an association, or a registered company.
It also seeks to restrict the use of foreign contributions for administrative purposes from the earlier 50% to 20%. Another key aspect is that the Bill seeks to extend the period of suspension of registration of a person by the government from the present limit of 180 days by up to an additional 180 days.
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‘Small NGOs destroyed with one stroke’
Reacting to the proposed changes, Poonam Muttreja, executive director of the Population Foundation of India, which works on implementation of gender-sensitive population, health and development strategies and policies, said the Bill will mark the “end of any partnership.”
“If you are getting foreign funding, you cannot work in partnership with anyone, you will now not be able to give the money to an individual or another NGO or collaboration partner. All large NGOs collaborate with smaller NGOs which are there at the grassroots level – they do not have the capability of raising money or writing reports but do the real work. We support them to do the real work and we raise funds and write report and support them as an intermediary organisation. So this would mean the end of the small NGOs,” she said.
Stating that “all the money from the private sector is also going to just one place now – PM-CARES Fund,” Muttreja commented that in any case, for small NGOs to get Indian or international money is “very difficult”. Alliances and collaborations are crucial in the development sector, she said, saying these will now be “destroyed with one stroke”.
Impact on research
With years of experience in working with the sector as also foreign funding agencies, Muttreja said much of the NGO’s budget is for administrative purposes, especially for research. “But with the limit for expenditure under this head being reduced from 50% to 20% of the donations, we will not be able to do any research – be it international or national. We won’t be able to collaborate with universities or research institutes,” she said.
She said since the NGOs have grassroots perspective, the bigger ones collaborate with academic institutions to conduct research. “This is going to get impacted due to the new limit. There must be a logic for having the limit at 50% earlier. But now it has been arbitrarily reduced to 20%.”
Likewise, she said, now the government wants all the FCRA funds to come to just one bank – the State Bank of India in New Delhi. “So will it be reporting to the home ministry? Will everything be decided then? Will the home ministry now look at who is getting what money and decide if it can be released?” she asked, saying it would lead to centralisation.
‘In times of COVID-19, NGOs needed more relaxations’
Muttreja said many NGOs are leading scientific research, especially in health, and so in a time like this – when India is battling the COVID-19 pandemic and so much is at stake, international collaborations should be encouraged. “But this Bill would be an absolute model of control over and above the rules, regulation and certification processes, it would stifle this sector and the spirit of cooperation and collaboration.”
“These amendments also assume that NGOs that are receiving foreign funds are guilty unless proven otherwise. That is the spirit behind the Bill. We are here because of the failure of the executive and government, because they do not do their jobs and we come in to fill the gaps,” she added.
Muttreja said it is very difficult for NGOs to get any government funds, and now “they are also starving us of private sector money”. She added, “NGOs also have a lot of restrictions on using grant money for sub-contracting work to any foreign institution. So no Indian organisation can be a leading institution in an international consortium. But I am proud that our institutions do critical research, especially in the health sector. Yet, additional restrictions are being imposed.”
“These rules, they say, are meant to control the NGOs which engage in dubious activities. There we stand with the Government of India in its efforts to put down such activities. But by failing to recognise the diversity of NGOs, which include world-class organisations that are recognised globally, they will crush their competitiveness and creativity. They want to bring us down to our knees.”
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‘Grassroots activists stand to lose their livelihood’
Muttreja said there is limited domestic philanthropy and much of it is now going to PM-CARES. Her big concern was that the Centre is now trying to criminalise the activities of even those certified as FCRA compliant. “They are endangering the livelihoods of so many grassroots activists who did not become teachers, or enter the health sector or join government jobs or private sector. They stayed with the NGO sector despite the small salaries and yet now they will not have jobs and will be unable to serve the community.”
“Are we a country that wants to make sure that in every sector, we make the jobs disappear,” she quipped, adding that “this is nefarious”.
On the FCRA exemption for the PM-CARES fund, she said it was “ridiculous” as “there are no rules” for it.
“Every rule and regulation is for us and to stop us from getting funds. This, despite even the PM acknowledging the role played by NGOs during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. But after saying we did good work, we get hit. It (this Bill) is a ticking time bomb, you will see NGOs disappearing in India,” Muttreja said.
Is ‘public servant’ clause linked to the Indira Jaising controversy?
Under the FCRA Act, certain persons are prohibited from receiving foreign contribution. The Bill now adds public servants (as defined under the Indian Penal Code) to this list.
In 2016, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) clamped down on Lawyers Collective, an organisation run by senior advocates Indira Jaising and Anand Grover on the ground that Jaising was a holding a government post of additional solicitor general and so her organisation could not have received foreign donations. Jaising later countered this in the Supreme Court, saying she was not a “government servant” but a “public servant”.
Now the Bill debars a “public servant” from receiving foreign funds. To this, Mutreja said: “It is like, ‘You challenge us, we will fix you, the very next day’.” Also, she said, in the Jan Lokpal Bill brought during the UPA regime, even NGOs were identified as public servants.
She said while NGOs were stifled earlier too, “the only difference is that this Bill legitimises that”.
Why can’t MHA identify NGOs misusing funds?
Mutreja asked why can’t the MHA identify those NGOs which “cause mischief” in the country and misuse foreign funding. “Why target all of us? Is this government so incompetent that it cannot distinguish those which are anti-social from the rest? We would like to help the government in this identification. We do not want to be identified with organisations engaged in conversion or other such activities,” she said.
She insisted that there are many existing laws like the Income Tax Act, FCRA regulations which can be used to detect NGOs which are ‘misuinsg’ funds. “Why are these instruments not being used?” she asked.
On major international donors, she said, they will be left with just two choices – either to stop grant-making in India or to redesign their strategies. “But they also have to comply with rules of their countries and that would now be with their hands tied behind their backs. Also, they have strategies and policies which are very well thought out. They spend so much time doing their international strategy. They won’t be doing a special strategy for India,” she said, adding that this would impact critical edge research in India.
This FCRA problem, Muttreja said, did not start with this government, it started with the UPA government and its home minister P. Chidambaram. “It was the fear of a foreign hand behind the anti-nuclear power plant protests at Kudankulum in Tamil Nadu that amendments were brought in to cancel the FCRA certifications of several NGOs who were involved with the protests,” she said.She noted that bureaucrats are generally wary of NGOs because they raise the “failings and gaps” in programmes and issues. “So whichever government is there, the bureaucracy goes after the sector,” she concluded.
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‘Proper consultative process with stakeholders not followed’
President and chief executive of the Centre for Policy Research, Yamini Aiyar, said that due to the lack of consultation in the drafting of these amendments, “We are still making sense of what the fine-print actually means and ultimately the rules will tell us exactly what this is all about.”
“Something as significant as this,” she said, “requires more public debate and consultation, with a range of stakeholders. There is a very wide variety of institutions and organisations that receive foreign funding. So an all-encompassing regulatory structure has to understand that and be responsive to that.”Aiyar said she accepts the overall principle of greater transparency and improved governance of FCRA recipient institutions, but the concerns are around “some of the issues emerging in the Bill”.
“On the administrative expenditure, it isn’t entirely clear to me what the 20% is going to cover. That would be known when the rules are out. But one general principle of administrative expenditure that needs to be understood is better quality reporting, so that the concern that the money meant for public interest is spent in the public interest, and not in private interest, gets addressed,” she said. However, Aiyar also cautioned that the new rules may impact the NGOs’ ability to do research. “Any kind of research or policy work involves long-term intensive work and investing in an institution’s ability to function, a lot of which is about administrative expenses. So better reporting requires having a high-quality finance officer, internal operations and HR. All of which cost. This is how strong institutions are built. So the process of monitoring should not be so constraining that it prevents public interest from actually being fulfilled,” she said.
She also said the curbs on re-granting of funds would impact research. “One of the big challenges that Indian research faces is that an Indian institution which wins a foreign grant cannot subcontract foreign institutions. This in effect prevents Indian institutions to play a lead role in global research. India is home to some of the world’s leading academic research institutions and yet we are not able to perform all the roles of ‘leaders’,” she said.
‘Ability to build networks, collaborative research will suffer’
Similarly, she said, “The provision that constrains recipient organisations from sub-granting to other organisations in India will affect the ability to build networks and conduct collaborative research across institutions. If we can’t generate networks of collaborative researchers then our ability to undertake world class research in India is going to suffer quite a lot. Research has to be done in an eco-system – there has to be a combination of universities, policy research, think-tank and grassroots organisations coming together for it.”
When it comes to public policy challenges, like in public health right now, Aiyar pointed out that there is no single institution that can singularly conduct research to find solutions to “such a challenging and wide-ranging issue”. It requires collaboration, including sub-granting, she said.
On the opposition’s accusation that the Centre is using this law to “stifle dissent”, Aiyar said, “There are a variety of organisations of the societies that are eligible for FCRA. We all should welcome the overall goal that the money should not be misspent. The problem arises when this is done in a non-transparent manner without stakeholder consultation and when it is done in a manner which undermines the goal itself.”
“The larger point,” she insisted, “is the need for pre-legislative scrutiny and that applies to everything that is happening in our institutional procedures.
‘Refer Bill to select or standing committee’
Meanwhile, the Voluntary Action Network India (VANI), an apex body of Indian voluntary development organisations, has urged that the FCRA Amendment Bill should be referred to a select/standing committee in parliament. It has also claimed that the Bill will be a “death blow” to the development relief, scientific research and community support work of the NGO community as it prohibits collaboration. It said the Bill also “throttles the spirit of cooperation that had been ushered in earlier this year by the positive role played by development organizations in mitigating the lockdown and COVID-19 pandemic by virtually making it impossible for NGOs to function”.
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Stirling expert informs new study on chimpanzee behaviour
A University of Stirling academic has informed a new international study researching chimpanzee behaviour and its implications for understanding the drivers of human evolution.
Dr Kathryn Jeffery, of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, is part of the international collaboration behind the 'Environmental variability supports chimpanzee behavioural diversity' study, published in renowned journal Nature Communications. It reveals that the further away from seasonally stable, forest refugia that chimpanzees live, the more likely they are to have developed a greater number and range of behaviours.
The University of Stirling is a pioneer in ape ecological research, having established the Station d’Etudes des Gorilles et Chimpanzes (SEGC) in Lopé National Park, Gabon, in 1983. The centre is now a world-renowned site for research into tropical ecology.The University has continued to collaborate with numerous research institutions to study great ape ecology and behaviour in the region. This includes the Max-Plank Institute’s Pan-Af programme, which looks at the evolutionary drivers of chimpanzee behavioural diversity. This latest research compares differing behaviours among chimpanzee populations at a variety of locations across West and Central Africa.
Dr Jeffery – who was based full-time in Gabon between 2004 and 2017 – said: “We have known for many years that chimpanzees in Lopé National Park use tools to hunt for ants, extract honey, and drink water, but some of the iconic behaviours displayed by West African chimpanzees, such as nut cracking, are absent from the Lopé population. “This study sheds light on why that may be and indicates that, as chimps dispersed away from predictable, stable environments, there may have been a greater need for them to evolve novel behaviours to help them adapt to new, perhaps harsher habitats. Gaining an insight into this area can strengthen our understanding of how resilient remaining chimpanzee populations might be in the face of increasing conservation threats.” The study also provides evidence to support the long- accepted idea that human behaviour has evolved in response to changing environmental conditions, and that moving from rainforests into open, dry habitats was a driving force for evolution.
(Source:UniversityofStirling)
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Inheritance in plants can now be controlled specifically
About 5,000 years ago, genetic information of thale cress was modified. To date, it has spread widely and is of major interest to science. On the chromosome 4 of the plant, a so-called inversion occurred: The chromosome broke at two points and was reassembled again. The broken out section was reinserted, but rotated by 180°. As a result, the sequence of genes on this chromosome section was inverted.
This chromosome mutation known as "Knob hk4S" in research is an example of the fact that evolution cannot only modify the genetic material of organisms, but determine it for a long term. "In inverted sections, genes cannot be exchanged between homologous chromosomes during inheritance," molecular biologist Holger Puchta, KIT, explains.
Researchers Remove Obstacle to Crop Cultivation
Inversions do not only affect thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), a wild plant used as a model organism in genetics due to its completely decoded genome and its small chromosome number. Inversions can also be found in crop plants. They are an obstacle to cultivation that uses modifications of the genetic material to produce maximum yields and a good taste of the plant and to make the plant resistant to diseases, pests, and extreme climatic conditions.
For the first time, researchers from the Chair for Molecular Biology and Biochemistry held by Puchta at KIT's Botanical Institute have now succeeded in undoing natural inversions. "We considerably extended the applications of the CRISPR/ Cas molecular scissors," Puchta says. "We no longer use the scissors for exchanging arms between chromosomes, but also for recombining genes on a single chromosome.
For the first time, we have now demonstrated that it is possible to directly control inheritance processes. We can achieve genetic exchange in an area, in which this has been impossible before. With this, we have established chromosome engineering as a new type of crop cultivation."
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Molecular Scissors Precisely Cut the DNA
Together with researchers from the team of Professor Andreas Houben, Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben, and Professor Paul Fransz from the University of Amsterdam, KIT scientists took the most prominent natural inversion hk4S on chromosome 4 of thale cress and demonstrated how this inversion can be undone and how genetic exchange can be achieved in cultivation. Their findings are reported in Nature Communications. The researchers also think that it is possible to use CRISPR/Cas to produce new inversions, which would be another step towards combining desired traits and eliminating undesired properties in crop cultivation.
Holger Puchta is considered a pioneer of genome editing with molecular scissors using the natural principle of mutation to precisely modify the genetic information in plants without introducing foreign DNA. His current project "Multidimensional CRISPR/Cas mediated engineering of plant breeding," CRISBREED for short, now focuses on the recombination of plant chromosomes by means of CRISPR/Cas technology. CRISPR (stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) represents a certain section on the DNA that carries the genetic information. Cas is an enzyme that recognizes this section and cuts the DNA precisely at that point in order to remove, insert, or exchange genes, recombine chromosomes, and for the first time modify the gene sequence on them.
(Source:Sciencedaily)
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Forensic Anthropology: The Identification of human remains to solve a crime
Forensic Anthropology is the aspect of forensics that deals with the examination of human skeletal remains to help ascertain the identity of the victim (sex, age, race, stature), interpret any trauma to the remain (gunshot wood, stab wound, health condition, etc) and to give an estimated time of death for criminal proceedings or identification of missing persons.
A forensic anthropologist would usually present their evidence about the identity and any trauma or injury found on a skeleton in the court. Their evidence can also help the court understand the circumstances of death.
The first and most important step in the examination of the skeleton in a criminal case is to ascertain if the remains are human or a non-human animal. Because all mammals share a generalized skeletal composition and have bones located in similar positions, it could lead to questions. The structure of the bones and their relationship in the skeletal frame differs between animals. The anthropologist can address this by examining the shape, structure, and size of the bone to determine if it is human.
A defendant that is accused of ritual killing because some bones where found in his/her house can be exonerated if an anthropologist can carry out this analysis and determine if the bone found is human or not. It Is also important that the anthropologist determines how many victims are present if they find bones at a crime scene, this will help determine if it will be a single or multiple homicide charges. This can be determined by carefully analyzing the bones for duplicate or multiple body parts of the same structure, for example, if two right femora (thigh bones) are found in a scene, that explains that the crime involved more than one victim.
In the identification of the skeleton, there are some common markers that aid identification. In identifying the sex of a skeleton, there are some specific features that differentiate a male from a female. The most prominent difference between a male and female skeleton is that the pelvic bone in a female is wider than that of a male because women are created and adapted for pregnancy. The pelvic bone in women is also lower than the pelvic of a male skeleton. To determine the age at death of the deceased, anthropologists look at changes in the degree and location of bone growth and dental formation and eruption in young people. As human progress in age, soft cartilages are replaced by hard bones at different centers of growth at known rates, anthropologists use the pattern of growth to estimate the age of an individual. To determine the size of the deceased, anthologist measure the arm and leg bones and use a formula that checks variation by sex and ancestry group to help determine the height range.
This is particularly useful in missing person cases when the remains are discovered. Anthropologists use different methods to analyze skeletons and record their observations, through CT scanning, photograph, microscopic examination, and x- raying the bones to aid identification. This is also useful in cases of missing persons as a skull could be superimposed onto a picture of a missing person to check for matches between the bone structures and fleshed form.
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In the case of an unknown victim, a face can be reconstructed using the underlying bone structure of the skeleton and known standards of the thickness of known facial tissues. These reconstructions are usually almost precise and have helped a lot of families in other countries identify their missing loved ones and finally get the closure they deserve. Just like every forensic technique and their usefulness in the criminal justice system, forensic anthropology offers answers to cases beyond a reasonable doubt.
(Source:Vanguard)
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New $6.2 million study seeks to define molecular linkages between aging and Parkinson's
A collaborative team between the University of Minnesota Medical School and Van Andel Institute (VAI) will soon begin a $6.2 million study that seeks to define the molecular linkages between aging and Parkinson's disease -- an approach for new treatment targets not yet explored by many researchers.
The group recently earned a three-year grant from the Aligning Science Across Parkinson's initiative, an international collaborative research effort partnering with The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research to implement its funding.
The study will combine four labs -- two Medical School faculty labs led by Michael Lee, PhD, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience, and Laura Niedernhofer, PhD, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics; and two VAI Center for Neurodegenerative Science faculty labs led by Darren Moore, PhD, professor, and José Brás, PhD, associate professor. Lee, who is also with U of M Institute of Translational Neuroscience, is an expert in the cellular mechanisms of Parkinson's disease, which is the most common neurodegenerative movement disorder that affects more than six million people worldwide.
Senescence, or the gradual deterioration of the body's functional characteristics over time, is the expertise of Niedernhofer, who is the director of the U of M Institute on the Biology of Aging and Metabolism. "The National Institute on Aging has championed the geroscience idea that if old age is the number one risk factor for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer and other diseases, let's make drugs that target aging and not the individual diseases," Niedernhofer said. "Senescent cells are one of those aging targets that is quite druggable, and it offers a brand-new approach in treating Parkinson's disease that no one has tried before."
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The team's preclinical studies will investigate three genes associated with late-onset Parkinson's disease -- LRRK2, VPS35 and α-synuclein, or SNCA -- to determine if increased senescence is associated with the disease and whether decreasing senescence can slow or stop the disease.
"Genetic predisposition is critical to defining a person's overall risk for Parkinson's, particularly when combined with other factors, such as age," Moore said. "SNCA, LRRK2 and VPS35 have demonstrated genetic links to Parkinson's, particularly later in life, and as such, offer promising opportunities for the development of new treatments designed to target the root causes of the disease."
Brás will perform single-cell RNA sequencing to determine whether or not senescence occurs in human Parkinson's cases and if Parkinson's disease-associated genes impact senescence at a molecular level. This will help the team identify stronger mechanistic connections between their animal models of the disease and human Parkinson's.
"Although senescence has been investigated in various contexts for many years, few studies have looked at this event in Parkinson's disease," Brás said. "This collaborative project will be the first time that we will be able to take a comprehensive view of the role of senescence in Parkinson's using state-of-the-art approaches and integrating troves of genomic data from models and humans."
If the team discovers that senescence is linked to the progression of Parkinson's disease, their findings could lead to an immediate clinical trial using senolytics as a form of treatment for the disease. These drugs, already under study in many other Phase II clinical trials, are used to clear aging cells, and in preclinical studies, have proven effective in delaying, preventing or alleviating frailty and many other aging-related diseases.
(Source :University of Minnesota Medical School)
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Is the Term “People of Color” Acceptable in This Day and Age?
One day a student approached me after class and asked, “What should I call students who are of Asian descent? Is it OK to just say Asian, or should I say what group they belong to?” He continued, “What if I make a mistake and call a Chinese student Japanese? I don’t want to appear racist.”On the campus where I teach, as well as in community organizations that I belong to, people often approach me with such questions.
In most cases, the questions are posed by white people wondering what they should call African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Pacific islanders, and others. They are generally sensitive to not wanting to be offensive and genuinely want to know what people prefer to be called.
The response I usually give is, “Just ask them.” If done in a respectful way, it is usually fine. Racial terminology is daunting even to those of us who research and write about it.
I am old enough to remember when blacks were called “colored,” especially in the South, roughly from the 19th century to the middle of the 20th. I also remember the use of the word “Negro,” which, for older black folks such as my mother, who grew up in Louisiana, was certainly an improvement over the “N-word.” And I well recall the 1970s when the Black Power movement was in its heyday and the slogan “Black is beautiful” came into popular use, at least among the younger generation of black student activists and scholars. The word “African-American” became common in the 1980s, and today we hear the term “people of color” being used.
Who exactly does the term “people of color” refer to? Is it a throwback to the word “colored,” and is it used solely to describe African-Americans?
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“People of color” is a term primarily used in the United States and Canada to describe any person who is not white. It does not solely refer to African-Americans; rather, it encompasses all non-white groups and emphasizes the common experiences of systemic racism, which is an important point I discuss in more detail below.
Where does it come from? The Oxford English Dictionary says that it derived from a term used in the French colonial era in the Caribbean and in La Louisianne in North America. It traditionally referred to gens de couleur libres, or people of mixed African and European ancestry who were freed from slavery or born into freedom. In the late 20th century, the term “person of color” was adopted as a preferable replacement to “non-white.” Unfortunately, the contrast pits all people who have a “color” against people who do not have a color or who possess “whiteness.” However, the word “minority” has also come to have a negative meaning attached to it, especially in places like California, Texas, New York City, and Florida where people of color are not a numerical minority anymore.
So in the United States in 2016 our language still reflects the continuing racialization hierarchy—with white at the top. The use of “people of color” may be less offensive to some than, say, specifying one’s country of origin (Mexican- American, African-American, and so on). Some people that I have asked say they prefer the use of country-of-origin terms because they provide a connection between one’s ancestral country and where they live now. So a question from me is, if we replaced “white” with “European-American” or “Iranian-American,” for example, could we then do away with the word “white” as well?
Getting back to the issue at hand, the term “people of color” may have an important role precisely because it includes a vast array of different racial or ethnic groups. These groups have the potential to form solidarities with each other for collective political and social action on behalf of many disenfranchised or marginalized people. This terminology is useful in social justice, and in civil rights and human rights contexts. For example, in relationship to the current Black Lives Matter movement here in the United States, many students-of-color groups on university and college campuses support the movement’s efforts.
How widely accepted is the use of the term “people of color” in everyday language? In an NPR blog post titled “The Journey From ‘Colored’ to ‘Minorities’ to ‘People of Color,’” author Kee Malesky discusses the evolution of these terms and observes that “people of color” has gone mainstream. This term may have originated in political circles or social justice arenas, but it has spread to academia and is being accepted in academic writing and in speech.
But it is important to recognize that while “people of color” reaffirms non-whiteness, many people don’t like the term because they feel “it lumps all of us together.” Those who are white or Caucasian (“Caucasian” is itself a problematic word—which I will discuss in an upcoming blog post) are still the standard by which all others are labeled, at least for now.
At this cultural moment in the U.S., we still live in a racialized social and cultural hierarchy, and our language continues to reflect our ongoing attempts to grapple with that reality.
(SOURCE:SAPIENS)
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M/O Tribal Affairs Intends to Establish National Tribal Research Institute (NTRI) at Delhi
Ministry of Tribal Affairs intends to establish a National Tribal Research Institute (NTRI) at Delhi to act as body of knowledge & research and as a think tank for tribal development. However, no proposal for collaboration with NGOs is under consideration of the Ministry.
The NTRI envisages to serve the purpose of mentoring and hand holding support to Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs) located in various States, and to ensure quality and uniformity in research works, evaluation studies, training, awareness generation among tribals, showcasing of rich tribal heritage including languages, habitats and cultivation and production practices such as cloth weaving etc. NTRI may also house auditorium for national level conferences.
Social Security Scheme for Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups
Ministry of Tribal Affairs is likely to make a Social Security Scheme for Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTG). It is also administering the scheme of 'Mechanism for Marketing of Minor Forest Produce (MFP) through Minimum Support Price (MSP) and Development of Value Chain for MFP' under which it is ensured that the gatherers of Minor Forest Produce, most of whom belong to Scheduled Tribes, get fair returns for their efforts in collection of the notified forest produce.
Further, Government has introduced the Van DhanVikasKaryakram under this scheme to improve the skills of the MFP gatherers in sustainable cultivation of MFPs, their Value Addition, providing necessary tools and facilities, etc. which will further improve the returns to the beneficiaries.
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MSP for MFP Scheme has Successfully Strengthened Tribal Economy; Infusing more than Rs 3000 Crore in the Past Few Months!
Record-Breaking High Achieved in Procurement of Minor Forest Produces (MFP) Under
One bright spot in this turbulent and challenging year has been therecord procurement of MFPs under the MSP for MFP Schemein 16 states which has now touchedRs. 148.12 crores.This is the highest-ever in terms of the number of MFPs, the total value of procurement and the number of states involved, since the implementation of the scheme. With this, the total procurement for the year (both Government and private trade) crossed more than Rs3000 crores, proving to be a much needed panacea in these distressing times of the Covid-19 pandemic which has disrupted lives and livelihoods of tribal people.
Over the last few months since April 2020, with the Government push and the Van Dhan scheme proving to be a catalyst and active participation from the States, the Guidelines for the Scheme for ‘Mechanism for Marketing of Minor Forest Produce (MFP) through Minimum Support Price (MSP) & Development of Value Chain for MFP’ initiated to provide MSP to gatherers of forest produce and introducing value addition and marketing through tribal groups and clustershas taken firm roots across the country and found widespread acceptance.
Among the States, Chhattisgarh has taken the lead by procuring 46,857 Metric tonnes of Minor Forest Produces worth a whopping Rs 106.53 crores. Odisha and Gujarat follow with a procurement of 14391.23 MTs of MFPs worth Rs 30.41 crores and 772.97 MTs of MFPs worth Rs 3.41 crores respectively. Chhattisgarh has 866 procurement centres and the State has leveraged its vast network of Van Dhan SHGs from the 139 Van DhanKendras effectively as well. Innovations adopted such as door-to-door collection of minor forest produces by mobile units comprising of forest, revenue and VDVK officials have contributed to these high procurement values.
The unprecedented circumstances caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic threw up challenges and resulted in a severe crisis among the tribal population. Unemployment among youth, reverse migration of tribals threatened to throw the entire tribal economy off track. It is in such a scenario that the MSP for MFP presented an opportunity to all the States.
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The successful implementation of the Van DhanYojana across the 22 States involving 3.6 lakh tribal beneficiaries and continuous engagement & on-boarding of the States by TRIFED has invariably acted as a catalyst for putting theMSP for MFP Scheme on the right track. In addition, government intervention and procurement provided the required boost. With an intention to revivethe sagging tribal economy, a revised set of MSP for MFP guidelines were issued on May 1 2020, which increased the MSP prices of the MFPs by up to 90% and thus helped in ensuring higher incomes for the tribal gatherers. On May 26, 2020, the Ministry also recommended the addition of 23 new items under the MSP for MFP list. These items include agricultural and horticultural produce collected by tribal gatherers.
TRIFED, as the nodal agency working to empower the tribal population, has been supporting and assisting the State in all their efforts during this crisis.With Government of India and State agencies accounting for over Rs 1000 crores at MSP, the private trade has procured over Rs2000 crores above MSP.With the injection of over Rs3000 crores in the tribal economy, the MSP for MFP Scheme has been instrumental in accelerating the transformation of the tribal ecosystem and empowering the people. With systems and processes getting firmly established across the country, the quantum of procurement will definitely increase.
(Source:PIB)
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Why You Need To Know About The Empowering Harappan Sculpture Of Woman Riding Bulls
A remarkable Harappan sculpture, entitled Woman Riding Two Brahman Bulls, provides a glimpse of both the women and the art of India in the second millennium B.C.
It is a rare artefact of the civilisation’s early bronze culture which spanned across northern India and the Indus Valley (Pakistan). The sculpture is the oldest bronze object in New York’s famous Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Indian collection.
Recently the image of the sculpture went viral. Here’s what you need to know about the empowering Harappan Sculpture Of Woman Riding Bulls.
Archeologists unearthed the sculpture, dated 2000–1750 B.C., during excavations in Kausambi, near Prayagaraj (Uttar Pradesh). It has been on display at the museum since 1991.
The sculpture was first loaned to the museum from 1991-2015. However, in 2015, a private collector gifted the artefact to the museum. The sculpture is said to notify the important role of women in Indus cultures.
A Marvel Of Indian Artistry A testimony to the sculpting talent in ancient India, the 14-centimetre-high sculpture is mounted on a small rectangular platform, seemingly cast separately. It includes a woman kneeling on a small platform supported by two humped or Brahman bulls and resting her hands on the bulls’ humps. Notably, riding bulls was a primary mode of transportation in the ancient Gangetic valley and women did it.
The woman’s form and shape provide important clues to deciphering the appearance of the ancient Indian woman. Her sculpture has been chiselled into having a slender physique, pointed breasts, and shoulder-length hair. The face of the woman displays deep eye sockets and an incised mouth. A small circular crown-like fixture sits atop the woman’s head.
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Women-Centric Harappan Sculptures
There are many other Harappan figurines that skillfully depict ancient Indian women and women at work. The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo Daro, a 10.8 centimetre tall bronze-copper statuette found in the ruins of Mohenjo Daro, illustrates a free-standing nude woman with small breasts, long legs, narrow hips, and a short torso.
In the sculpture, the girl has 25 bangles stacked on her left arm and four bangles on the right one. She also sports a necklace with three pendants. The figure’s hair is in the form of a loose bun at the back of the head. The Dancing Girl’s head tilts slightly backward and her left leg bends at the knee.
Certain scholars believe that the Dancing Girl statuette is a miniature of a real woman. Currently, the National Museum, New Delhi houses the sculpture.
(Source:Tarini Gandhiok)
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The favorite pastime of a human being is another human being. The brain size of Homo sapiens it has evolved precisely under the pressure of needing to relate to others. Science suggests that there is an association between the thickness of the cerebral cortex in primates and the size of the group with which that species is able to establish a full relationship. In the case of Homo sapiens, that thickness is a good measure of the effort and time we dedicate to the lives of others. It is clear that a hyper-social species like ours is compensated for all the headaches that trying to understand with their peers entails. That is why studies like the one that the magazine has just published Science on the Y chromosome of extinct human populations fascinate us. Beyond their undoubted scientific value, these analyzes give us specific data with which to imagine the nature of this close interaction between Neanderthals and modern humans, and it is the personal details that in the end, as humans, intrigue us the most.
We knew that our species had hybridized with Neanderthals, and as a witness to this intimate crossing, which happened between 40 and 80,000 years ago, we carry between 1% and 4% Neanderthal DNA in our blood. Without knowing much more about the nature of this close interaction — sporadic? stable? Violent? Spoiled? – the fact that this Neanderthal DNA had survived to our days was an unequivocal sign that these hybrid children were accepted and cared for by the group.
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In this new study, the researcher Martin Petr and his team identify an even older hybridization episode, between 200 and 300,000 years ago, and which as a result would have left, in this case, a sapiens imprint on the Neanderthal genome. Finding that there was a genetic flow in both directions allows us to deduce that both Neanderthals first, and modern humans later, accepted into their families children of mixed inheritance, children who were probably different in appearance, behavior, and abilities. Singular children who were tolerated and even loved; or children, who knows, whose differences were not even perceived by the group because from the beginning they were treated as one more.
In a historical moment of so much interpersonal conflict, even warlike, between individuals of the same species; in which societies and countries build walls of an arbitrary and cultural nature among their fellow men; in which we fight among ourselves over issues that are neither vital nor really matter to us, it produces astonishment and nostalgia to think that there was another time when not even biological barriers were enough to isolate us. Accustomed to ascribing all the positive qualities to us, it is worth wondering if it was from the Neanderthals that we learned to tolerate the one who was different. It is also worth investigating whether it is in that handful of Neanderthal DNA that we still have that the healthy acceptance of diversity that we sometimes forget is encoded.
(Source:Pledgetimes)
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How Dantu Blood Group protects against malaria—and how all humans could benefit
The secret of how the Dantu genetic blood variant helps to protect against malaria has been revealed for the first time by scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Cambridge and the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kenya. The team found that red blood cells in people with the rare Dantu blood variant have a higher surface tension that prevents them from being invaded by the world's deadliest malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum.
The findings, published today in Nature, could also be significant in the wider battle against malaria. Because the surface tension of human red blood cells increases as they age, it may be possible to design drugs that imitate this natural process to prevent malaria infection or reduce its severity.
Malaria remains a major global health problem causing an estimated 435,000 deaths per year, with 61 percent occurring in children under five years of age. P. falciparum is responsible for the deadliest form of malaria and is particularly prevalent in Africa, accounting for 99.7 percent of African malaria cases and 93 percent of global malaria deaths in 2017.
In 2017, researchers discovered that the rare Dantu blood variant, which is found regularly only in parts of East Africa, provides some degree of protection against severe malaria. The intention behind this new study was to explain why.
Red blood cell samples were collected from 42 healthy children in Kilifi, Kenya, who had either one, two or zero copies of the Dantu gene. The researchers then observed the ability of parasites to invade the cells in the laboratory, using multiple tools including time-lapse video microscopy to identify the specific step at which invasion was impaired.
Analysis of the characteristics of the red blood cell samples indicated that the Dantu variant created cells with a higher surface tension—like a drum with a tighter skin. At a certain tension, malaria parasites were no longer able to enter the cell, halting their lifecycle and preventing their ability to multiply in the blood.
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Dr. Silvia Kariuki, of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kenya, said: "Malaria parasites utilise a specific 'lock-and-key' mechanism to infiltrate human red blood cells. When we set out to explain how the Dantu variant protects against these parasites, we expected to find subtle changes in the way this molecular mechanism works, but the answer turned out to be much more fundamental. The Dantu variant actually slightly increases the tension of the red blood cell surface. It's like the parasite still has the key to the lock, but the door is too heavy for it to open."
The Dantu blood group has a novel 'chimeric' protein that is expressed on the surface of red blood cells, and alters the balance of other surface proteins. In Kilifi, a town on the Kenyan coast, 10 percent of the population have one copy of the Dantu gene, which confers up to 40 percent protection against malaria. One percent of the population have two copies, conferring up to 70 percent protection. By contrast, the best malaria vaccines currently provide 35 percent protection.
Because humans have evolved alongside malaria for tens of thousands of years, some people in the worst affected areas have developed genetic resistance to the disease. The most famous example is sickle cell trait, which confers 80 percent resistance to malaria, but can cause serious illness in those with two copies of the gene. There is currently no evidence that the Dantu variant is accompanied by other health complications.
Dr. Alejandro Marin-Menendez, of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: "The fact that we see the most protective adaptations in areas where malaria is most prevalent tells us a lot about how these parasites have influenced human evolution. Malaria is still an incredibly destructive disease, but evolutionary adaptations like sickle cell trait and the Dantu variant may partially explain why the mortality rate is much lower than the rate of infection. We've been fighting malaria parasites for as long as we've been human, so there may be other adaptations and mechanisms yet to be discovered."
Researchers suggest one of the most significant implications of the study stems from the fact that the surface tension of human red blood cells varies naturally, generally increasing during their approximately 90-day lifespan. This means a proportion of all of our red blood cells are naturally resistant to infection by malaria parasites, and it may be possible to develop drugs that take advantage of this process.
Dr. Viola Introini, of the University of Cambridge, said: "The explanation for how Dantu protects against malaria is potentially very important. The red cell membrane only needs to be slightly more tense than usual to block malaria parasites from entering. Developing a drug that emulates this increased tension could be a simple but effective way to prevent or treat malaria. This would depend on the increase in cell tension not having unintended consequences, of course. But evidence from the natural protection already seen in Dantu people, who don't seem to suffer negative side effects, is promising.”
(Source:MedicalExpress)
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Seven footprints may be the earliest evidence of humans on the Arabian Peninsula
Experts say discovery of 120,000-year-old prints could shed new light on spread of Homo sapiens out of Africa
A set of seven footprints made at a lake about 120,000 years ago have been hailed as the earliest evidence of modern humans on the Arabian Peninsula – a discovery experts say could shed light on the spread of our species out of Africa.
The path by which Homo sapiens spread around the world was full of twists and turns. Genetic studies suggested it was not until 60,000 years ago that a migration of modern humans out of Africa led to a successful spread across Europe.
However, it has been suggested that an incomplete skull found in Greece and dating to more than 200,000 years ago is from our species, while an 180,000 year old Homo sapiens jawbone has previously been discovered in Israel.
A previous discovery in Arabia of an 88,000 year old fingerbone has also pointed to multiple early waves out of Africa – with experts saying the fossil, and nearby stone tools, revealed that Homo sapiens set out east, beyond Israel, far earlier than previously thought.
Now the discovery of the seven footprints in the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula in modern Saudi Arabia pushes this exploration to the east even further back in time.
“This is a story about the expansion of Homo sapiens into the heart of Arabia at an early date,” said Prof Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, a co-author of the research. “It is not a story of coastal migrations, which has been the hypothesised route [modern humans took].”
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Writing in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers report how they found the footprints in an ancient lake deposit in the Nefund Desert, with dating of sediment above and below the prints revealing them to be between 112,000 and 121,000 years old. The sizes and spacing of four of the prints, they add, suggest they were made by at least two individuals.
The team argue that the size of the prints, the absence of evidence for Neanderthals in the area at the time and the evidence that Homo sapiens were in Arabia almost 90,000 years ago, suggest the impressions were most likely made by modern humans.
The team also found a plethora of animal prints at the site, including those from ancient elephants and camels – but the animal bones showed no signs of butchery, and no stone tools were found. Taken together, the researchers say the findings suggest that the party made only a brief pit-stop at the lake.
“At the time that humans were moving through this landscape, the area wouldn’t have been hyper-arid,” said Richard Clark-Wilson, a co-author of the research from Royal Holloway, University of London. Instead, he said, at that time – and various other periods in the past – it would have been a grassy savannah with bodies of water, offering opportunities for human migration. “Human movements, and animal movements, tend to be linked to fresh water availability,” he said.
While people who walked by the lake have left their mark on history, their fate remains unknown.
“It appears that people repeatedly dispersed into Arabia during more humid periods, when the region was characterised by expansive grasslands and lakes and rivers,” said Mathew Stewart of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, another author. “In the intervening periods, when the deserts returned, we suspect that people either died out or retreated to more favourable places.”
Dr Matthew Pope, an expert on ancient humans from University College London, who was not involved in the work, welcomed the findings. “Footprints are so incredibly evocative – they are brilliant for dissolving time barriers,” he said.
While Pope said it was not possible to infer many details about the party from the prints, he said the work added to a shifting view of Arabia in relation to the movement of Homo sapiens out of Africa.“This is a landscape that is productive, this is a landscape that can sustain human populations, so can provide a landscape for dispersal to happen,” he said.
(Source:TheGuardian)
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A risk conferred by a genomic segment inherited from Neanderthals occurs at the highest frequency among South Asians
In the remarkably short time since SARS-CoV-2 was identifi ed, in January 2020 in Wuhan, China, and evolved into a pandemic, it has become clear that patients affected with the virus experience a wide range of disease severity and manifestations. A minority of COVID-19 patients require hospitalization, and an even smaller percentage become sick enough to require treatment in an intensive care unit. Most patients suffer mild to moderate symptoms or none at all, while others experience dramatic and unexpectedly serious effects that are, in some cases, life- threatening or fatal.
It is clear that certain groups of individuals are at a higher risk of developing serious complications from COVID-19, such as older adults and people with underlying comorbidities such as hypertension, diabetes, kidney disease, and obesity.
That said, although COVID-19 often has milder effects on younger, healthier people, including children, individuals within this subgroup have become infected and died.
Sex also seems to play a role, as men appear more likely to die of the virus than women. Still, the presence of these risk factors does not fully account for the variations in the clinical manifestation of the virus (Global Health 5050 at University College London).
Recognizing that the response to pathogens always involves an interplay between the pathogen itself, external risk factors, and an individual person's genetic makeup, researchers have been delving deep into human genetics to piece together more of the COVID-19 puzzle.
Identifying the Variant In a recently posted preprint, researchers report that a major genetic risk variant for severe cases of COVID-19 was inherited from an archaic species of human (Zeberg and Pääbo, 2020). Although this particular coronavirus appears to be new to modern humans, or at least had not been specifically diagnosed prior to its emergence in China, the genetic variant of interest is believed to have entered the human population by gene fl ow from the Neanderthals or Denisovans approximately 40,000 to 60,000 years ago.
According to researchers' findings, this genetic variant appears to be fairlycommon in South Asia, where it is present in approximately one-third of the population. In Europe, the occurrence of the variant is 8%, among studied American populations it is 4%, and in East Asia it is still lower. In Bangladesh, however, 63% of the population carries at least one
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In Bangladesh, however, 63% of the population carries at least one copy of the Neanderthal variant, and 13% is homozygous for it. The variant is almost completely absent in African populations. “But the Neanderthal risk haplotype is likely about severity, not susceptibility,” explains study author Hugo Zeberg MD, PhD, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, Sweden, and a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He notes, “Age is the most important risk factor and Bangladesh has favorable demographics, and the pandemic hasn't taken off there yet.” Therefore, although the infection rate is lower among this group, the high occurrence of the variant would indicate that the risk of severe complications may be higher.
“Among Britons, people of Bangladeshi ethnicity have ~2 times the risk of COVID-19 death,” says Dr. Zeberg. “In another study also composed of Britons, higher mortality was seen in people of South Asian descent but not in other minorities, including people of East Asian descent.” Findings in Context A previous study has identifi ed 2 genomic regions associated with severe COVID-19, with 1 region on chromosome 3 that contains 6 genes and 1 region on chromosome 9 that determines the ABO blood group (Ellinghaus et al, 2020). This study found that the odds ratio of having the ABO haplotype and getting severe COVID-19 infection was 1.70, which was statistically signifi cant. The recently released dataset from the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative also showed that the region on chromosome 3 is the only region that appears to be signifi cantly associated with severe COVID-19 infection at the genome-wide level. However, the signal from the region determining ABO-blood group was not replicated (The COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative, 2020).
The current study sought to determine whether this haplotype may have been handed down to modern humans from Neanderthals or Denisovans. For their research, the authors mined data from 3,199 hospitalized COVID-19 and control patients.
They found the variant rs11385942 present in 33 DNA fragments in one of the Neanderthal genomes from Croatia in southern Europe called the “Vindija 33.19 Neanderthal.” Four of the genetic variants were detected in the Altai and “Chagyrskaya 8 Neanderthals” populations who originated in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia, and who are approximately 120,000 and 50,000 years old, respectively. None of the variants were detected in the Denisovan genome.
The authors noted that the risk haplotype was similar to the corresponding genomic region found in the Neanderthals from Croatia and less similar to the Neanderthals from Siberia.
The relationships of the 49.4 kb-haplotype to Neanderthal and to other human haplotypes was also investigated, and all 5,008 genomes in the 1000 Genome Project were analyzed for this genomic region. There were 253 present-day haplotypes containing 450 variable positions, and all risk haplotypes associated with the risk for severe COVID-19 form a clade with the 3 high-coverage Neanderthal genomes. Within this clade, the closest resemblance was to the Vindija 33.19 Neanderthal.
However, much work remains to better understand the potential contribution of this and other variants (as well as other factors) to COVID-19 outcomes. Commenting on the research, Christopher Ponting, DPhil, Chair of Medical Bioinformatics and a Principal Investigator at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine, at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, noted that “this genetic link to Neanderthals predicts COVID-19 symptoms quite poorly… There's also a time disconnect—the COVID-19 virus is incredibly recent, so never had the chance of infecting these archaic humans.” Overall, it is clear that additional analyses are needed to test these and other hypotheses.
(Source:wiley.com)
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Early human ancestors may have boiled their food in hot springs 1.8 million years ago — long before they learnt to use fire
• Tanzania's Olduvai Gorge has produced some of the oldest hominid remains • Experts analysing rocks from the gorge for traces of life found unexpected signs • These suggest that extreme heat-loving bacteria once lived in the large valley • They were the same kind of organisms as in Yellowstone's hot springs today
Hot springs may have been used by early human ancestors to boil food around 1.8 million years ago — long before they mastered cooking with fire, a study suggested. The Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania has produced some of the oldest remains of early human ancestors known to date, along with some of the tools they used. Researchers from Spain and the US have now found evidence that the rift valley also contained a number of hot springs near the sites of the early hominids.
This proximity, the team reported, raises the possibility that our distant relatives took advantage of the springs to boil kills like wildebeest, as well as roots and tubers. 'As far as we can tell, this is the first time researchers have put forth concrete evidence for the possibility that people were using hydrothermal environments as a resource,' said paper author and geobiologist Roger Summons of MIT.
In these settings, he added, 'animals would’ve been gathering and [...] the potential to cook was available.' The researchers had originally set out to understand why a sandy layer of 1.7 million-year-old rock found as a 1.9 mile (3 kilometre) outcrop in the Olduvai Gorge was so strikingly different from the 1.8 million year old layer of dark clay it overlay. ‘Something was changing in the environment, so we wanted to understand what happened and how that impacted humans,' said paper author and archaeologist Ainara Sistiaga also of MIT.
She collected rock samples from the gorge, which she analysed for the presence of certain lipids — a type of large organic molecule — that can provide signs of the kind of vegetation that would have grown in the region at the time. It is thought that — around 1.7 million years ago — East Africa gradually dried up and, as a result, transitioned from a wet, tree-population environment to drier grasslands. VIJETHA IAS ACADEMY ADDRESS: 7/50, II FLOOR, NEAR ROOP VATIKA, SHANKAR ROAD, OLD RAJENDAR NAGAR, NEW DELHI — 110060 HOTLINE: 011- 42473555, 9650852636 , 7678508541 , DATABASE: WWW.VIJETHAIASACADEMY.COM CURIOUS SEPTEMBER 2020 VIJETHA IAS ACADEMY
'You can reconstruct something about the plants that were there by the carbon numbers and the isotopes, and that’s what our lab specialises in, and why Ainara was doing it in our lab,' Professor Summons said. 'But then she discovered other classes of compounds that were totally unexpected.'
The lipids, the team realised, had not been produced by plants, but by bacteria — and in fact were identical to the lipids released by microorganisms in the hot springs within the Yellowstone National Park, in the United States.'Some of the samples Ainara brought back from this sandy layer in Olduvai Gorge had these same assemblages of bacterial lipids that we think are unambiguously indicative of high-temperature water,' Professor Summons explained.
One such bacterium, he said, is called 'Thermocrinis ruber' — and it typically lives in the outflow channels of hot springs.'They won’t even grow unless the temperature is above 80 degrees Celsius [176 degrees Fahrenheit],' he added — suggesting that hot springs were likely present in the Olduvai Gorge, which is known to have been a geologically- active region.
Exactly if and how our distant ancestors used hot springs to cook, however, remains a hard question to answer with certainty, although the team think that the early humans could have dipped food in the springs to make them more palatable.Equally, animals could have accidentally fallen into the boiling hydrothermal waters — allowing humans to later fish them out as a 'precooked' meal.
'If there was a wildebeest that fell into the water and was cooked, why wouldn’t you eat it?' Dr Sistiaga asked.'We can prove in other sites that maybe hot springs were present, but we would still lack evidence of how humans interacted with them.'
'That’s a question of behaviour, and understanding the behaviour of extinct species almost 2 million years ago is very difficult,' she added.
'I hope we can find other evidence that supports at least the presence of this resource in other important sites for human evolution.'
The full findings of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(Source:dailymail.uk)
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Study Reveals Sapiens Copulated the Y Out of Neanderthals
Early human interbreeding with our “cousins” the Denisovans and Neanderthals is an established fact but newly sequenced Neanderthal Y- chromosomes tell scientists that modern humans are the product of a complex history of interspecies sex. Neanderthals had lived in Eurasia for more than 300,000 years, when our modern human ancestors left Africa in the most recent wave some 60,000–70,000 years ago. When the two groups met in Eurasia around 45,000-years- ago they mated and a whole new kind of human was formed. Recent research confirms early human interbreeding but also provides evidence that makes our earliest encounters with both Neanderthals and Denisovans a much more complicated relationship.
However, a new study on early human interbreeding has shown that those Neanderthals already had Homo sapiens’ genes on board from “much earlier encounters," and the new research also suggests the Homo sapiens’ Y-chromosome had “completely replaced the original Neanderthal Y chromosome sometime between 370,000 and 100,000 years ago.”
DNA double helix molecules and chromosomes: the forensic evidence that proves early human interbreeding and when.
A Re-examination Of Early Human Interbreeding Based On Genes
The X and Y chromosomes are the two sex chromosomes in mammals, including humans, and they determine the biological sex of an individual. Females inherit an X chromosome from the father for a XX genotype, while males inherit a Y chromosome from the father for a XY genotype. Only mothers can pass on the X chromosome.
The new paper by evolutionary geneticists Martin Petr and Janet Kelso, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology , presents details of their team’s new method of sequencing Y-chromosome DNA, in their quest to understand early human interbreeding. The study results were based on Y-chromosome DNA sequencing of “two Denisovans and three Neanderthals samples gathered from sites in France, Russia and Spain dating between 38,000 to 53,000 years ago.”
The results confirm early human interbreeding with these two species of hominins. But the results of the study also indicate that these prehistoric sexual encounters resulted in “a really complicated population history spanning thousands of years and several continents.”
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Modern Human DNA Entered The Neanderthal Population Slowly
Archaeologists and anthropologists have discovered several bones, which when gene sequenced, prove that a Neanderthal and a Denisovan had mated. Previous studies of non-sex chromosomes have established that Neanderthals and Denisovans share a branch of the human family tree, which split off sometime between 700,000 and 550,000 years ago.
However, according to this new paper “the Y-chromosomes tell a different story, suggesting our most recent common ancestor lived around 370,000 years ago.” This means that a long time after the three different groups had split up and evolved into different populations, they met up again and mated again. The paper says that “over time, our version of the Y-chromosome genome ended up replacing the Neanderthal version.” Therefore, early human interbreeding first occurred a long time ago, and then, after a very long break, it happened again.
In case you didn’t know already, an “ allele” is one of two or more versions of a known gene mutation identified at the same location on a chromosome. Previous gene studies have mostly all indicated that modern human “alleles” probably entered the Neanderthal gene pool slowly. How slowly? At a speed, determined by Petr, Kelso, and their colleagues, to be “roughly single-digit percentage of the population,” which according to the scientists isn’t enough to become fixed.
Unfortunately, Most Ancient Hominin Bones Are Female This very slow rate of change in the Neanderthal DNA makeup suggested to the researchers that Homo sapiens’ Y-chromosome alleles may have offered some kind “of fitness advantage,” when compared with the Neanderthal versions.
To prove or disprove this theory, a computer simulation was created in which a Y-chromosome allele from Homo sapiens was passed on to one percent of the Neanderthal population. The exact nature of this genetic “selective advantage,” which was written into Homo sapiens ' Y-chromosome DNA, is yet unknown because of a distinct lack of Denisovans and Neanderthal genome samples. As fate would have it, the archaeological record is heavily populated by female Neanderthals and female Denisovans but almost void of Even at one percent, the male remains, and it’s the men that pass on the Y chromosomes. Hopefully, over time, model showed that the more male Neanderthals and male Denisovans will be found and more gene sequencing chances of replacing the can be carried out to solve the selective advantage puzzle. But it is very interesting to older Neanderthal version know that we modern humans carry a complex DNA mixture that could only come from over a 50,000-year period early human interbreeding with other hominins over a very long period of time. only “shot up to about 25 percent, suggesting that (Source: AlienCat By Ashley Cowie) whatever selective edge Homo sapiens alleles offered, it may have been tiny, but that's enough to stick around.”
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Were Other Humans the First Victims of the Sixth Mass Extinction?
300,000 years ago, nine human species walked the Earth. Now there’s just one. The Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis , were stocky hunters adapted to Europe’s cold steppes. The related Denisovans inhabited Asia, while the more primitive Homo erectus lived in Indonesia, and Homo rhodesiensis in central Africa.
Several short, small-brained species survived alongside them: Homo naledi in South Africa, Homo luzonensis in the Philippines, Homo floresiensis (“hobbits”) in Indonesia, and the mysterious Red Deer Cave People in China. Given how quickly we’re discovering new species, more are likely waiting to be found.
Now, they’re gone. The disappearance of these other species resembles a mass extinction. But there’s no obvious environmental catastrophe – volcanic eruptions, climate change, asteroid impact – driving it. Instead, the extinctions’ timing suggests they were caused by the spread of a new species, evolving 260,000-350,000 years ago in Southern Africa : Homo sapiens .
The spread of modern humans out of Africa has caused a sixth mass extinction , a greater than 40,000-year event extending from the disappearance of Ice Age mammals to the destruction of rainforests by civilization today. But were other humans the first casualties?
We are a uniquely dangerous species. We hunted wooly mammoths, ground sloths and moas to extinction. We destroyed plains and forests for farming, modifying over half the planet’s land area. We altered the planet’s climate. But we are most dangerous to other human populations, because we compete for resources and land.
History is full of examples of people warring, displacing and wiping out other groups over territory, from Rome’s destruction of Carthage, to the American conquest of the West and the British colonization of Australia. There have also been recent genocides and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Darfur and Myanmar. Like language or tool use, a capacity for and tendency to engage in genocide is arguably an intrinsic, instinctive part of human nature. There’s little reason to think that early Homo sapiens were less territorial, less violent, less intolerant – less human.
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Optimists have painted early hunter-gatherers as peaceful, noble savages, and have argued that our culture, not our nature, creates violence. But field studies, historical accounts, and archaeology all show that war in primitive cultures was intense, pervasive and lethal . Neolithic weapons such as clubs, spears, axes and bows, combined with guerrilla tactics like raids and ambushes, were devastatingly effective. Violence was the leading cause of death among men in these societies, and wars saw higher casualty levels per person than World Wars I and II.
Old bones and artifacts show this violence is ancient. The 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man , from North America, has a spear point embedded in his pelvis. The 10,000-year-old Nataruk site in Kenya documents the brutal massacre of at least 27 men, women, and children.
It’s unlikely that the other human species were much more peaceful. The existence of cooperative violence in male chimps suggests that war predates the evolution of humans. Neanderthal skeletons show patterns of trauma consistent with warfare. But sophisticated weapons likely gave Homo sapiens a military advantage. The arsenal of early Homo sapiens probably included projectile weapons like javelins and spear-throwers, throwing sticks and clubs.
Complex tools and culture would also have helped us efficiently harvest a wider range of animals and plants, feeding larger tribes, and giving our species a strategic advantage in numbers.
The ultimate weapon But cave paintings, carvings, and musical instruments hint at something far more dangerous: a sophisticated capacity for abstract thought and communication. The ability to cooperate, plan, strategise, manipulate and deceive may have been our ultimate weapon.
The incompleteness of the fossil record makes it hard to test these ideas. But in Europe, the only place with a relatively complete archaeological record, fossils show that within a few thousand years of our arrival , Neanderthals vanished. Traces of Neanderthal DNA in some Eurasian people prove we didn’t just replace them after they went extinct. We met, and we mated.
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Elsewhere, DNA tells of other encounters with archaic humans. East Asian, Polynesian and Australian groups have DNA from Denisovans. DNA from another species, possibly Homo erectus , occurs in many Asian people. African genomes show traces of DNA from yet another archaic species . The fact that we interbred with these other species proves that they disappeared only after encountering us. But why would our ancestors wipe out their relatives, causing a mass extinction – or, perhaps more accurately, a mass genocide? The answer lies in population growth. Humans reproduce exponentially, like all species. Unchecked, we historically doubled our numbers every 25 years. And once humans became cooperative hunters, we had no predators. Without predation controlling our numbers, and little family planning beyond delayed marriage and infanticide, populations grew to exploit the available resources.
Further growth, or food shortages caused by drought, harsh winters or overharvesting resources would inevitably lead tribes into conflict over food and foraging territory. Warfare became a check on population growth, perhaps the most important one.
Our elimination of other species probably wasn’t a planned , coordinated effort of the sort practiced by civilizations, but a war of attrition. The end result, however, was just as final. Raid by raid, ambush by ambush, valley by valley, modern humans would have worn down their enemies and taken their land.
Yet the extinction of Neanderthals, at least, took a long time – thousands of years. This was partly because early Homo sapiens lacked the advantages of later conquering civilizations: large numbers, supported by farming, and epidemic diseases like smallpox, flu, and measles that devastated their opponents. But while Neanderthals lost the war, to hold on so long they must have fought and won many battles against us, suggesting a level of intelligence close to our own.
Today we look up at the stars and wonder if we’re alone in the universe. In fantasy and science fiction, we wonder what it might be like to meet other intelligent species, like us, but not us. It’s profoundly sad to think that we once did, and now, because of it, they’re gone.
(Source:by Nick Longrich was originally published on The Conversation and has been republished under a Creative Commons license)
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New “Prime Editing” Method Makes Only Single-Stranded DNA Cuts
Anew gene editing technique called prime editing, tested in human and mouse cells, rewrites DNA by only cutting a single strand to add, remove, or replace base pairs. The method may allow researchers to edit more types of genetic mutations than existing genome-editing approaches such as CRISPR-Cas9, researchers report today (October 21) in Nature.
Emma Haapaniemi, a group leader at the Center for Molecular Medicine Norway who studies gene editing to treat rare diseases and wasn’t part of the work to develop prime editing, tells The Scientist that the approach is “innovative and novel,” though of course, the technique is “still a prototype” and will need to be refined.
The discovery that CRISPR-Cas9 could be harnessed and used to edit animal and human genes ushered in a new era of genetic research over the past several years. The technique has become an indispensable tool in many research laboratories, allowing scientists to more easily create animal models of genetic diseases. While CRISPR-Cas9 has been making its way toward the clinic, its practical use in curing human disease has been limited by ethical considerations, challenges with delivery, and precision—in particular, so-called off-target effects that alter DNA at unintended loci in the genome.
The CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system has been known to produce extra cuts in wrong sections of DNA, which can interrupt cell function. Another type of gene editing that doesn’t rely on DNA breaks and was thought to minimize inaccuracy is base editing, in which an enzyme can trade one DNA nuclease for another, but this strategy offers limited options as it can only make four of the 12 possible base pair changes, and some recent work has suggested it’s not as precise as scientists first thought. When postdoc and lead author of the study Andrew Anzalone joined David Liu’s lab at the Broad Institute, which previously developed the technique for base editing, he was especially excited by the possibility of editing genes without using DNA breaks. So building on what the two knew about base editing and CRISPR-Cas9, they began working on a new technique to cut just one strand of DNA, leaving the other intact. It uses the same Cas9 nuclease as frequently deployed in the CRISPR system but combines the enzyme with two new reagents: a guide RNA called pegRNA, which leads Cas9 to the desired spot in the genome, and a reverse transcriptase that initiates the addition of a new sequence or base into the genome. Once the new genetic material is incorporated into the cut strand of DNA, the prime editor nicks the unedited strand, signaling to the cell to rebuild it to match the edited strand.
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The team tested prime editing in vitro in four different types of human cell and mouse neurons. “What we observed was pretty remarkable,” Liu said in a press conference. In order to compare its accuracy to CRISPR-Cas9, the team used its technology to edit four genetic mutations. Previous studies had shown that when CRISPR-Cas9 targeted these same mutations, it caused off- target DNA changes in 16 predictable locations. Prime editing only altered three of these loci, suggesting it is more precise than CRISPR-Cas9.
Prime editing is more complex than CRISPR editing. It requires three separate steps in which the DNA must match up with parts of the prime editing system. Liu says he believes this might be the secret to its accuracy. CRISPR- Cas9 relies on one pairing step: the guide RNA must pair with the target DNA. Prime editing requires this first step, but also includes two more components, a part of the guide RNA called the primer must also bind to the target site and the newly introduced DNA must bind to the original site. “If any one of those three DNA pairing events fail, then prime editing can’t proceed,” says Liu. “We believe that those three independent pairing events each provide an opportunity to reject off-target sequences,” he adds.
Nicholas Katsanis, who studies genetic medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Chicago, says that “there’s no denying that there’s some off-target effect [with CRISPR-Cas9] but the fear of the off-target effects is more than the reality.” Nonetheless, he’s excited by the new tool and “enamored” of some aspects of the new technology, such as its potential ability to edit a greater diversity of targets than other gene editing methods can.
Liu and his team used prime editing to target genes underlying Tay-Sachs disease and sickle cell anemia. The mutations were changed back to healthy DNA sequences with 35–55 percent efficiency, similar to rates that would likely be achieved with CRISPR-Cas9 editing.
The Broad Institute has licensed the technique to Prime Medicine, a company cofounded by Liu, under the institute’s “inclusive innovation” model, which allows Prime to exclusively use the technology to aim at certain targets, but offers other companies the opportunity to apply to license it for editing other genes. Liu’s group has also made the technique available on the Addgene database for academic use. “I’m hopeful that hundreds if not thousands of researchers will try to use prime editing in the coming weeks and months and years,” says Liu. “It’s really important that the community test and, if needed, optimize prime editing in as many different types of cells and organisms as possible.”
(Source:TheScientist)
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Modern humans and Neanderthals lived in Portuguese caves just THREE MILES apart for centuries and could have swapped technology, tools and mates, study
1. Researchers have been excavating the the Lapa do Picareiro cave in Portugal 2. They found stone age tools characteristic of early humans, and animal remains 3. These remains have been dated back to around 41,000–38,000 years ago 4. The findings support a rapid westward spread of modern humans across Eurasia
Modern humans first arrived in westernmost Europe 5,000 years earlier than was previously believed — and may have overlapped with Neanderthals — a study found.Archaeologists digging in the Lapa do Picareiro cave of central Portugal's Atlantic coast have unearthed stone tools characteristic of modern humans.
The finds — which date back to around 41,000–38,000 years ago — link the cave to other sites across Eurasia and the Russian plain that have yielded similar tools.
This supports a rapid westward spread of modern humans across Eurasia within a few thousand years of their first appearance in south-eastern Europe, the team said.The discovery, they added, has 'important ramifications' for understanding the possibility of interactions between modern humans and Neanderthals in the region. It may also help shine a light on the ultimate disappearance of the Neanderthals.
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'The question whether the last surviving Neanderthals in Europe [were] replaced or assimilated by incoming modern humans is a long-standing, unsolved issue,' said paper author Lukas Friedl of the University of West Bohemia, in the Czech Republic.
'The early dates for Aurignacian stone tools at Picareiro likely rule out the possibility that modern humans arrived into the land long- devoid of Neanderthals — and that by itself is exciting,' he added. Aurignacian stone tools are a type of technology definitively associated with the activities of early modern humans in Europe.Until now, the oldest evidence for modern humans south of Spain's Ebro River came from Bajondillo, a cave site on the southern coast. In the area earlier than we thought,' said paper author and anthropologist Jonathan Haws of the University of Louisville in Kentucky.
'The evidence in our report definitely supports the Bajondillo implications for an early modern human arrival, but it's still not clear how they got here.''People likely migrated along east-west flowing rivers in the interior, but a coastal route is still possible,' he concluded.
'The spread of anatomically modern humans across Europe many thousands of years ago is central to our understanding of where we came from as a now-global species,' commented US National Science Foundation archaeologist John Yellen.
'This discovery offers significant new evidence that will help shape future research investigating when and where anatomically modern humans arrived in Europe and what interactions they may have had with Neanderthals.'
Having been the subject to excavations and study for the last quarter-century, the Lapa do Picareiro cave has produced a record of human occupation going back around 50,000 years. Researchers have extracted from the site rich archaeological deposits — including not only stone tools but also thousands of animal bones that show signs of having been involved in hunting, butchery and cooking activities.Ancient humans would have broken bones apart to extract their marrow — which would have been valued as a nutritious food. Dating the bones with accelerator mass spectrometry, the team have determined that modern humans arrived in the area around 41,000–38,000 years ago.
The last Neanderthal occupation at the site took place between around 45,000–42,000 years ago. Although these dates would suggest that modern humans only arrived after the Neanderthals disappeared, a cave just three miles away — known as 'Oliveira' — has been found to contain evidence of Neanderthal occupation dating up to 37,000 years ago.
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'If the two groups overlapped for some time in the highlands of Atlantic Portugal, they may have maintained contacts between each other and exchanged not only technology and tools, but also mates,' said paper author Nuno Bicho.'This could possibly explain why many Europeans have Neanderthal genes,' the archaeologist from the University of Algarve, Portugal, added.
'Besides genetic and archaeological evidence, high-resolution temporal context and fossil evidence across the continent is crucial for answering this question,' said Dr Friedl explained.'With the preserved key layers dated to the transitional period, we are now awaiting human fossils to tell us more about the nature of the transition.'Excavations have still yet to reach the bottom of the cave, the researchers said, with an 'enormous' amount of sediment remaining for future work.
'I've been excavating at Picareiro for 25 years,' commented Professor Haws.Just when you start to think it might be done giving up its secrets, a new surprise gets unearthed,' he added.
'Every few years something remarkable turns up and we keep digging.'The full findings of the study were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(Source:dailymail.uk)
WHAT KILLED OFF THE NEANDERTHALS?
The first Homo sapiens reached Europe around 43,000 years ago, replacing the Neanderthals there approximately 3,000 years later.
There are many theories as to what drove the downfall of the Neanderthals.Experts have suggested that early humans may have carried tropical diseases with them from Africa that wiped out their ape-like cousins.
Others claim that plummeting temperatures due to climate change wiped out the Neanderthals.
The predominant theory is that early humans killed off the species through competition for food and habitat.
Homo sapiens' superior brain power and hunting techniques meant the Neanderthals couldn't compete.
Based on scans of Neanderthal skulls, a new theory suggests the heavy-browed hominids lacked key human brain regions vital for memory, thinking and communication skills.
That would have affected their social and cognitive abilities - and could have killed them off as they were unable to adapt to climate change.
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