Feburary 2021 Monthly Magazine Anthropology Curious Feburary 2021

C U R I O U S

FEBURARY 2021 MONTHLY MAGAZINE ANTHROPOLOGY CURIOUS FEBURARY 2021

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. How Dexterous Thumbs May Have Helped Shape Evolution Two Million Years Ago 2. Thumbs gave human ancestors a 'formidable' advantage 3. Dear White Anthropologists, Let Not Symbolism Overshadow Substance 4. The Coastal Edge 5. DNA Testing of Immigrants Is Unethical 6. Pedagogical Tools and Evidence for Discussing Disparities in Education in Louisiana 7. Anthropology and Economics in the Public Eye 8. Union Budget 2020-21: Denotified, Nomadic, Semi-nomadic Tribes left out once again 9. Earliest-Known Animal Cave Art 10. Must Conservation and Indigenous Rights Clash? 11. SPECIAL TOPIC: WOMEN IN PRIMATOLOGY: MEET “THE TRIMATES” 12. A glimpse of North-East at the Tribes India Aadi Mahotsav, Dilli Haat 13. New Study: 60 Percent of Primate Species Threatened With Extinction 14. Why Can’t Apes Talk? 15. Why Anthropology Matters 16. 48,000-Year-Old Fossils Hint at Neanderthal-Human Interbreeding 17. Budget allocation of Rs.7524.87 Crore for the year 2021-22 is the highest ever for the Tribal Affairs Ministry :Sh R. Subrahmanyam 18. Budget 2021: Rs 1,731 billion gap in allocation for Dalits and tribal communities; guidelines not followed: National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights 19. Depletion of particular brain tissue linked to chronic depression, suicide: Study 20. Funds Allocated to NGOs for Tribal Welfare 21. ‘At discussions on AI ethics, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone with a background in anthropology or sociology’ 22. Experts Accidentally Discover Fossil of World’s Oldest-Known Animal 23. Chemistry in ancient India, from Harappan to Ayurvedic period 24. Neanderthal-inspired ‘minibrains’ hint at what makes modern humans special 25. Sexual selection: when evolution gets intimate 26. Darwin and Race: Three Strikes, He’s Out 27. Dalits Who Convert to Islam or Christianity Won't Get Quota, Says Law Minister in Rajya Sabha 28. Fossils of ‘Dickinsonia’ found at Bhimbetka 29. Living in the shadow of rebellion: India’s Gond tribe 30. How a single gene alteration may have separated modern humans from predecessors 31. On the origin of our species 32. Malaria threw human evolution into overdrive on this African 33. Environmental factors had a role in the evolution of human tolerance 34. Gene therapy strategy found effective in mouse model of hereditary disease TSC 35. New way to deliver DNA-based therapies for diseases 36. Gene therapy: Novel targets for congenital blindness 37. Safer CRISPR gene editing with fewer off-target hits 38. Gene therapy: Novel targets for congenital blindness 39. Development of new stem cell type may lead to advances in regenerative medicine 40. Neanderthal genes that make susceptible to Covid-19, also protect 41. Tribes India ‘Aadi Mahotsav’ Comes to a Successful Close 42. Scientists study how a single gene alteration may have separated 43. A body burned inside a hut 20,000 years ago signaled shifting views of death 44. Humanlike thumb dexterity may date back as far as 2 million years ago 45. How environmental changes may have helped make ancient humans more adaptable 46. Trifed’s Village and Digital Connect - Establishing a Connect with Tribal People 47. Modern Human Ancestry Won’t Be Traced to a Single Point 48. 2-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools Unearthed in Tanzania 49. Upper Paleolithic Figurines Showing Women with Obesity May Be Linked to Climate Change 50. New Research Sheds Light on Early Life of Neanderthals

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CURIOUS FEBURARY 2021

How Dexterous Thumbs May Have Helped Shape Evolution Two Million Years Ago

Fossils and biochemical models show tool-wielding hominins used their hands like we do today

So much of modern-day life revolves around using opposable thumbs, from holding a hammer to build a home to ordering food delivery on our smartphones. But for our ancestors, the uses were much simpler. Strong and nimble thumbs meant that they could better create and wield tools, stones and bones for killing large animals for food. Because developing dexterous, opposable thumbs pushed our ancestors to make and use tools, eat more meat and grow bigger brains, scientists have long wondered if such thumbs began only with our own genus, Homo, or among some earlier species. Now a new study combines the ancient evidence of fossil fingers and thumbs with cutting-edge computer muscle modeling to conclude that South African hominins boasted flexible, capable thumbs much like ours as far back as two million years ago. “It is remarkable that such a level of thumb dexterity, similar to that of people living today, would be observed in hominins alive two million years ago,” says Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment, University of Tübingen (Germany).

That time period is a notable one as it came before major evolutionary events, including the rise of the large-brained Homo erectus 1.9 million years ago, that species’s dispersal outside Africa 1.8 million years ago and the replacement of primitive stone tools by sophisticated Acheulean handaxes about 1.76 million years ago. “We believe that [thumb dexterity] constituted a crucial evolutionary advantage which likely enabled the subsequent gradual development of complex culture in our lineage,” says Harvati, co-author of the new study published in Current Biology. Shorter thumbs and longer fingers are helpful for climbing. But as our ancestors forsook life in the trees, and increasingly began to make and manipulate objects, shorter fingers and longer opposable thumbs would have produced a hand assembly that got better and better at grasping. Over time natural selection could have refined these anatomical changes based on the many ways humans used their hands and which of those proved most rewarding, like smashing animal bones to collect their high energy marrow. 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 FEBURARY 2021

Tracy Kivell, a paleoanthropologist not involved in the study who specializes in the morphology of primate hands at the University of Kent and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, notes that many primates with different hands are capable of precise and powerful grips. But humans excel at precision grips that match the pad of the thumb to the pads of the fingers—and for those a powerful thumb is essential. “Experimental studies have shown that humans use forceful precision grips when they make and use stone tools, so it's often thought that this ability in humans evolved in response to tool use,” Kivell says.

Anthropologists have spent a lot to time comparing hand, finger and thumb fragments left behind by species across many branches of the human family tree over millions of years to see where and when this ability developed. Such straightforward comparisons of thumb and finger shapes and their similarity to our own are useful but they don’t tell the whole story, because in nature, different shapes and forms sometimes perform in similar ways.

So Harvati and colleagues put some digital flesh on varied bones. The team compared fossilized hands and thumbs of a suite of species ranging from Australopithecus afarensis, at nearly four million years old, to early Homo sapiens, to Homo naledi to modern chimpanzees and humans. Among those specimens were some intriguing two-million-year-old hand bones from South Africa’s Swartkrans cave, that may be either early Homo or Australopithecus robustus. They then used a biomechanics model to recreate how muscles would have been able to manipulate those various thumbs, providing a look at how they once functioned.

The team first tested the accuracy of the models by using them on living humans and chimps with known muscle parameters. The model’s calculations closely matched experimental study results for those species, which gave the authors confidence that their approach could reliably reconstruct dexterity in the fossilized hands.

Kivell says that musculoskeletal modeling isn’t often used in paleontology simply because muscle data isn’t part of the fossil record. It must come from living species. “They used human and chimpanzee muscle data to offer two potential 'extremes' for what muscle size and force might have been in fossil hominins,” Kivell says. “Although there are a lot of caveats and 'unknowns', I think it's still an informative approach to use.”

The study found that two million years ago the inhabitants of Swartkrans cave in South Africa, had surprisingly high efficiency, much like our own, in the act of bringing the thumb and fingers together. Scientists don’t know which species these hands belong to because Paranthropus robustus and early Homo remains were both found in the cave during this time period.

Very efficient thumb opposition appeared in all members of our own genus Homo that were tested in the study. Those included modern humans but also early Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and even the small-brained species Homo naledi. This last species is intriguing, since Homo naledi hasn’t yet been associated with tools and has a small brain that might or might not have been capable of human like cognitive abilities. “This does not mean that it necessarily made and used tools, but that it would have been able to, from the point of view of its manual capacities,” Harvati says.

On the other hand, the study found that hominids of the genus Australopithecus, which might have been the first hominins known to make very simple tools 3.3 million years ago, scored quite low in thumb dexterity.

Previous studies of hand morphology have suggested that Australopithecus africanus had a human-like ability to grip with an opposable thumb two to three million years ago. The hand of Australopithecus sediba features a long thumb, in relation to the rest of the hand, that other scholars have deemed well-suited for grasping and manipulation of objects use much like our own. While Australopithecus thumbs tend to be long they are also thin, suggesting they would’ve been less powerful than human thumbs.

Harvati’s group believes that a more complete look at the hand’s various bones and joints, along with their muscle reconstruction, also suggest a low range of motion and more limited thumb dexterity. That doesn’t mean that Australopithecus couldn’t make tools. But it suggests that if they did, they may have demonstrated a different kind of hand dexterity that we and our closer relatives in the genus Homo enjoyed. "Australopiths could still be dextrous, capable of tool-making and use, even if their thumb is not as powerful as that of humans,” says Kivell.

Of course, if the Swartkrans hands actually belonged to Australopithecus (Paranthropus) robustus, rather than to an early Homo species, they would suggest that parallel evolution occurred among the two distinct lineages.

Neil Thomas Roach, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University not involved with the research, says the study’s compelling case that shifts in both hand bones and their associated muscles occurred after the earliest tools appeared isn’t surprising. But it is illustrative. “To me, this reflects one of the most fascinating dilemmas about tool use, namely, who is responsible and how can we know?” he says. “It just might be possible that such questions aren’t [the] right ones and that data like these show that regardless of when the innovation occurred, it was such a fundamental advantage that it became widely adopted across multiple species.”

When the study’s results are considered alongside the archaeological evidence, they support a coherent theory. Some two million years ago hominins began to increasingly rely on tools and feast on animal fats and proteins. This suggests “a shift in hand use at this time that roughly corresponds to [the] disappearance of Australopiths and greater diversity in Homo species,” says Kivell.

The process of making and using increasingly complex tools requires more than dexterous thumbs and hand and eye coordination. Prehistoric toolmakers also must have displayed some levels of forethought, planning and learning along the way. That required better brains, which might have been fed by a meaty diet made possible by better tools, which were crafted by increasingly more capable brains.

“Tool use and cognitive abilities, even possibly including language, are often thought to be part of a complex feedback loop, one reinforcing the other through human evolution,” Harvati says. Exploring which other key evolutionary factors helped to drive the physical and cognitive evolution that led to modern humans is the next step for Harvati and colleagues. “While our study only looked at a small component, the thumb, we plan to expand our work to directly address these questions.”

Thumbs gave human ancestors a 'formidable' advantage

(CNN)Whether we're texting or using tools, our hands -- perhaps more than any other body part -- are what equip us for modern life.

The killer app in the evolution of our hands was our opposable thumbs, which allow humans to precisely hold tiny things between our fingertips and pad of our thumb.

When did we first get this unusual manual dexterity? It had been thought, based on comparisons of fossilized bones to modern human skeletons, that it may have emerged more than 3 million years ago when our earliest ancestors -- the australopithecines such as the famous fossil Lucy — started using basic stone tools.

A new approach to this question, however, suggests that while early hominins may have been dexterous, they did not have the powerful thumb typical of humans today until later, about 2 million years ago. It was at this time an early species of humans first left Africa, and our dexterity could have been the driving force behind a more complex human culture that emerged then.

"Increased manual dexterity in the form of efficient thumb opposition was among the early defining characteristics of our lineage, providing a formidable adaptive advantage to our ancestors," said paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati, a professor at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany and lead author of a new study that published in the journal Current Biology.

"It is likely a crucial element underlying the development of complex culture over the last 2 million years, shaping our biocultural evolution." The powerful thumb that characterizes the human hand evolved only in some fossil hominin species around 2 million years ago, the study suggested.

The researchers estimated how powerful the thumb was in some of our fossil human relatives by virtually modeling a muscle in the thumb that is important for opposability and the motion that brings the thumb into contact with other fingers.

This involved comparing the grip of recent and early modern humans, living chimpanzees and six different hominin species. Those six species include one of the earliest -- Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) -- and more recent archaic humans such as Neanderthals who existed before and, in some cases, alongside early Homo sapiens in the centuries and millennia before we emerged as the lone hominin survivor.

The scientists took into account soft tissue as well as bone anatomy. "Until now manual dexterity has mainly been assessed by simply comparing the fossils with the anatomy present in humans, and assuming that the more anatomically similar a fossil was to the modern human condition, the more similar in its dexterity and manual capacities," Harvati said via email.

“However, this view is relatively simplistic, as similar efficiency can be achieved by different forms, and also because it did not take into account the effect of muscles. The latter is extremely important, but of course is not preserved in the fossil record.” Increased manual dexterity as a result of a powerful thumb gave our early ancestors an edge, paleoanthropologist and lead study author Katerina Harvati said.

The earliest stone tool makers from the Australopithecus family who lived from around 2 million to 3.8 million years ago did not have the heightened manual dexterity that later hominins did, the researchers found. It would have been more difficult to make precise movements such as holding a pen for writing, but these australopitchecines would have been able to use tools such as sticks and unmodified rocks -- a bit like chimpanzees do in the wild. "The phalanges (finger bones) of Australopithecine hands were generally longer and more curved than those of modern humans (though not as much as living great apes). So, they would probably be able to shake your hand, but it would likely make a noticeable difference," Harvati said.

The researchers' results suggested that the powerful thumb that characterizes the human hand evolved only in some fossil hominin species around 2 million years ago.

At this time Homo erectus emerged -- the earliest humans to have body proportions similar to Homo sapiens and the first to disperse from Africa -- as well as evidence of systematic butchering of hunted animals and use of aquatic resources. Stone tools also got more sophisticated and were used more habitually, widening early human diets.

"Of course it is not possible to show a direct association," Harvati said. "But we do see increased cultural complexity through time in the fossil record after 2 million years or so, which is the age of the earliest fossil showing heightened thumb efficiency in our sample.

"This includes more systematic use of stone tools, the gradual development of more complex stone tool industries, the gradual increased reliance on animal resources and, of course, the appearance of Homo erectus, a large brained and larger bodied hominin, whose geographic range expanded across Africa and Eurasia."

The study also shed some light on Homo naledi -- an enigmatic species of human relative first discovered in 2015 deep inside a cave system in South Africa.

Little is known about the life of this human relative, and no tools have been associated with this species. Its small brain and mix of modern and ancient anatomy has long flummoxed scientists. Homo naledi had a fairly powerful thumb and would have been able to make and use stone tools, this study suggested.

The study also found that Neanderthals and modern humans had a fairly similar levels of dexterity -- suggesting it was inherited from a common ancestor.

Tracy Kivell, a professor at the University of Kent's School of Anthropology and Conservation in the United Kingdom, who wasn't involved in the research, said a lot of assumptions need to be made in this kind of analysis because muscles are not preserved in the fossil record. It can, however, provide some useful insights and new ideas to test, she said. Kivell said the study authors did "an excellent job of dealing with all of the complexities involved in this kind of research to make their results as robust as possible."

“Many primates are capable of precision and power grips. However, humans are capable for forceful pad-to-pad precision grips, for a which a powerful thumb is a critical component," she said via email. "It's often thought that this ability in humans evolved in response to tool use. Being able to efficiently make and use tools (stone, bone, plant-based tools) would allow us to take advantage of new dietary resources that would otherwise be unavailable or take more time/energy to access." How evolution can change science for the better Current reforms to end the 'rat race' between scientists can help; but are they enough? Science is society’s best method for understanding the world. Yet many scientists are unhappy with the way it works, and there are growing concerns that there is something “broken” in current scientific practice.

Many of the rules and procedures that are meant to promote innovative research are little more than historical precedents with little reason to suppose they encourage efficient or reliable discoveries. Worse, they can have perverse side-effects that harm both science and scientists. A well-known example is the general preference for positive over negative results, which creates a “publication bias” — giving the false impression that certain effects exist, where in reality the dissenting evidence simply fails to be released.

Arizona State University researchers Thomas Morgan and Minhua Yan, working with ASU graduate Leonid Tiokhin, now at University of Technology Eindhoven in the Netherlands, have developed a new model, published this week in Nature Human Behaviour, to better understand the challenges facing the scientific process and how we can make it better. They focused on the “priority rule”: the tendency for the first scientist to document a finding to be disproportionately rewarded with prestige, prizes and career opportunities while those in second place get little to no recognition.

Winner takes all

Many scientists have sleepless nights worrying about being “scooped” — fearing that their work won’t be considered “novel” enough for the highest-impact scientific journals because a different group working on the same topic manages to publish first. The priority rule has been around for centuries. In the 17th century, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz haggled over who invented calculus. And in the 19th century, Charles Darwin rushed to publish “On the Origin of Species” to avoid being scooped by Alfred Russel Wallace.

“Rewarding priority is understandable and has some benefits. However, it comes at a cost,” Tiokhin said. “Rewards for priority may tempt scientists to sacrifice the quality of their research and cut corners.”

“The idea is that competition encourages scientists to work hard and efficiently, such that discoveries are made quickly," said Morgan, a research affiliate with the Institute of Human Origins and associate professor with the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. "But if everyone is working hard, and you need to come in first to be successful, then there’s a temptation to cut corners to maximize your chances, even if it means the science suffers.”

This is partly why some academic publishers, such as PLOS and eLife, now offer “scoop protection,” allowing researchers to publish findings identical to those already published within a certain timeframe. The problem is that science and publishers currently don’t have a good idea about whether these reforms make sense.

Modeling the priority rule To figure out how exactly the preference for priority affects science, and whether recent reforms offer any solution for its potential drawbacks, the collaborators developed an “evolutionary agent-based model.” This computer model simulates how a group of scientists investigate or abandon research questions, depending on their own results and the behavior of other scientists they compete against. “The benefit of an evolutionary simulation is that we don’t need to specify in advance how scientists behave. We just create a world in which success is rewarded, and we let selection figure out what kinds of behavior this favors,” Morgan said. “We can then vary what it means to successful — for instance, whether or not it’s critical to come first — and see how selection changes the behavior of scientists in response. We can also measure the benefit to society — are scientists being efficient? Are their findings accurate? And so on.”

No panacea The researchers found that a culture of excessive rewards for priority can have harmful effects. Among other things, it motivates scientists to conduct “quick and dirty” studies, so that they can be first to publish. This reduces the quality of their work and harms the reliability of science as a whole.

The model also suggests that scoop protection, as introduced by PLOS and eLife, works.

“It reduces the temptation to rush the research and gives researchers more time to collect additional data,” Tiokhin said. “However, scoop protection is no panacea.”

This is because scoop protection motivates some scientists to continue with a research line even after several results on that topic have been published, which reduces the total number of research questions the scientific community can address.

The ‘benefit’ of inefficiency Scoop protection reforms in themselves, while helpful, are not sufficient to guarantee high-quality research or a reliable published literature. The model also shows that even with scoop protection, scientists will be tempted to run many small studies if new studies are cheap and easy to set up and the rewards for negative results are high. This suggests that measures that force scientists to invest more heavily in each study, such as asking scientists to preregister their studies or get their research plans criticized before they begin collecting data, can help.

“We also learned that inefficiency in science is not always a bad thing. On the contrary — inefficiencies force researchers to think twice before starting a new study,” Tiokhin said.

Another option is to make large-scale data collection so straightforward that there is less incentive to skimp on data, alternatively, reviewers and journals could be more vigilant in looking out for “underpowered” studies with small sample sizes.

Metascience This project is an example of metascience, the use of the scientific method to study science itself.

“It was a great pleasure to be part of this project. I got to use my modeling skills not only to make specific scientific discoveries, but also to shed light on how the scientific procedure itself should be designed to increase research quality and credibility. This benefits the whole scientific community and ultimately, the whole society,” said Yan, a graduate student in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

Article published in Nature Human Behaviour, “Competition for priority harms the reliability of science but reforms can help,” Leonid Tiokhin, Minhua Yan, Thomas J.H. Morgan.

Dear White Anthropologists, Let Not Symbolism Overshadow Substance

Racism permeates the academy. We will need more than performative allyship and symbolic statements condemning racism in society if we are to build a more inclusive anthropology.

Black bodies have always been and continue to be under social, economic, and physical siege in the United States. Glimpses of widespread protests against racism and police brutality from coastal Georgia, Central Park, Louisville, Minneapolis, and Atlanta coupled with the disproportionately deadly impact of COVID-19 have reminded us of this fact. What we have all witnessed in streets across the United States over the past few weeks, is a collective release of rage against the most cancerous of America’s ills—state and folk violence against African Americans.

The racial composition of protesters has been a frequent discussion point as pundits compare the current response to prior social upheavals. The mass mobilization of white Americans during this time has been remarkably noticeable. This ethos is similarly mirrored in the anthropology community, where a barrage of statements against police brutality have been released by institutions, departments, and associations helmed by white anthropologists. The symbolism here, of white Americans who position themselves as allies committed to publically declaring that Black lives do indeed matter, is powerful.

However, in the United States, symbolism is often the hill where substantive change goes to die. If both the United States and anthropology are to meaningfully change in the wake of this revolutionary moment, then both must commit to doing the hard and sustained work at the personal and institutional levels of translating the symbolic into the substantive. For white anthropologists, this will demand a forceful confrontation with white complicity as well as a willingness to work alongside anthropologists of color in reframing the discipline’s modus operandi within the academic arena.

The genocide of Black people that was foundational to the birth of the United States continues to inform the social fabric of contemporary US society. Anthropology carries a similar burden. The historical tethering of the discipline to the biological understanding of race—an unholy alliance of the highest order—effectively allowed it to aid, abet, and legitimize the white supremacist logics of European and American slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. This, however, is not anthropology’s single story. In recognition of and in response to this history, generations of anthropologists have labored to dismantle racism and the problematic racial worldview that their intellectual ancestors created in order to transform anthropology.

And yet, even in light of this, the present moment beckons us even further toward a deeper engagement with the limits and possibilities of truth, reconciliation, and reparation. Specifically, it calls for a decentering of whiteness in order for white anthropologists to grapple with the micro ways in which white complicity maintains racism, not as an historical artefact of anthropology, but as a part of our present. White anthropologists must question who they study, what defines their notion of who belongs within the bounds of our hallowed canon, what analytics constitute their intellectual toolbox, how they structure the architectures of our departments and organizations, where they commit research dollars, indeed, what defines their very notion of what an anthropologist is expected to look like.

The truthful answers to these questions are all reminders that racism inflects the grammar through which anthropology makes itself legible to the world. Moreover, white anthropologists, whether silent or not, are complicit in this system because they are the gatekeepers and intended beneficiaries. It would be disingenuous to be myopic or naive in our diagnosis of the depths of the systemic illness which ails us. When white anthropologists learn to confront the depths of racism within the discipline as well as their complicity in the present tense, then we can begin to make not just statements, but plans of action that envision an anthropology more just and whole for all.

To be sure, a more inclusive anthropology can never come through performative allyship and symbolic statements condemning racism in society while it still stains the halls of academia. Rather, it can only be forged, as Black feminist scholars from Zora Neale Hurston to Faye Harrison to Gina Athena Ulysse have long taught us, in decolonizing the mundane moments, practices, actions, and interactions which constitute the very modus operandi of our discipline. Such a project of authentic allyship must address the epistemic violence inherent in our theories, publications, and citation practices. It will involve ethically reconstructing our syllabi, our undergraduate and graduate pedagogies, and our mentorship behaviors. It must mean advocating for more equitable models of hiring, leadership, and administration.

For anthropologists, these are, in fact, familiar practices and habits. If attention to the everyday is one of the hallmarks of anthropological inquiry, then we must now turn our perceptive eyes inward and fashion ourselves as ethnographic subjects worthy of study. In doing so, we will come to realize what is required if white anthropologists are to commit to not just saying Black Lives Matter, but more importantly, to living Black Lives Matter. Indeed, living Black Lives Matter means acknowledging that the true success of a revolution comes not in the spectacular burning but in the deliberate and conscientious work of crafting a world anew.

As I, a Black female anthropologist from the Caribbean, sit with and within what certainly feels like a precipice in time, I am reminded of our disciplinary declaration in the nation’s capital only three years ago that, “Anthropology Matters!” But can anthropology matter if Black lives do not matter to anthropology? Interrogating this urgent and existential question will mean a willingness to rethink not only our public relevance in the world but also our very raison d’être within the academy. If anthropologists have been historically trained to study what makes us human, then the time has come, as Irma McClaurin recently suggested, for anthropology to rethink the very terms of what it means to be human. Anthropology, in this sense, must now preoccupy itself not just with the human, but with the question of humanity. If white anthropologists are truly invested in substance over symbolism, then they will realize that the discipline is far better positioned than most to addressing the crisis of humanity at home.

Kimberley D. McKinson is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York (CUNY). She is from Jamaica and her research examines urban in/security, material culture, and critical Black historiography in Kingston.

The Coastal Edge

New technologies are refortifying our coastlines against anthropogenic climate change, drawing our water edgelands near and making them tangible and perhaps valuable.

Edgelands, those ignored yet symptomatic hinterland spaces of our increasingly dysfunctional cities, are perhaps as characteristic of the Anthropocene as contaminated rivers and engineered clouds. They are the by-products of a capitalist growth that progressively urbanizes nature. Condemned to a peripheral, liminal, and silent existence on the edges of urban centres, edgelands proliferate and grow: self-storage units mushrooming on the outskirts of cities, suburban landfills where layers of garbage produced by surging urban populations lead a toxic afterlife… While often inspiring disgust and indignation, edgelands are also celebrated in the creative arts as bizarre hybrids and untapped sources of inspiration.

In this piece, I think about the near ocean—shores, beaches, and shallows—as an edgelands of our urban world. These aqueous margins often extend terrestrial modes of existence into the ocean: port infrastructure is situated in and inhabits marine ecologies; concrete breakwaters interact with currents and undermine sand deposits. What are these watery spaces that urbanization and industrialization produced on the edge of the sea? How do we create them and how do we deal with their decay?

In early 2020, I made an exploratory journey along the southern coast of France and Italy with my partner to conduct preliminary interviews with engineers and residents, and to photograph coastal development projects. It was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to an early shutdown of Genoa’s port facilities and forced us to quarantine in Germany.

Repair

When he hands me the specimen, I am strangely mesmerized by it. This eerie skeleton has grown underwater, I think; particle by particle, shell by shell. I turn it around in my hands, feel its heavy weight and coarse surface. The man, a young chemistry PhD student, points out that this sample stems from a test site. Under water, a subtle alchemy transformed a slim piece of rebar within hours into a thick, durable matter with a limestone-like texture. The process would have taken the polyps that build corals in the shallows near coasts years, if not centuries—a blink of an eye compared to the time that it took the sea and tectonic forces to form cliffs from compacted sediment.

On a sunny day in March, I visited the offices of Géocorail, a small start-up located in Marseille-Fos Port, France’s leading seaport. The company was founded in 2012, and its staff of eight work to reinforce sand beds and prevent abrasion to counteract the destruction of port structures, such as breakwaters, docks, or embankments. Géocorail is also the brand name of the patented electrochemical process that the company applies to prevent erosion, originally designed by former employees of Gaz de France. It allows sediment found in seawater to aggregate and form a stone like, solid mass, or, in more technical terms, a “calcareous mineral agglomerate.” This agglomerate has properties similar to limestone or concrete. Géocorail can thus patch up cracked or fissured underwater foundations of docks or piers.

The in situ “germinative” process uses available nonorganic material, such as sand or shells, and also binds anthropogenic wastes like glass shards. They too are transformed into a durable support compound for rock, harbor, and offshore infrastructure. To kick off this germinative process, engineers submerge metallic cathodes in seawater and send a low current through it. Reverse electrolysis then leads particles to gravitate to the grid and accrete. The company has tried to generate whole breakwaters from scratch using this procedure. Distinguishing themselves from the concrete industry, it calls the product “natural concrete.”

I read Géocorail’s efforts to extend the lifespans of humanmade coastal infrastructures as an expression of what anthropologist Stephanie Wakefield and geographer Bruce Braun (2019, 213) in their work on oystertecture called the practice of “inhabit[ing] capitalist ruins in a more-than-human world.” As they argue, it may not be we humans who stand at the center of these ruins, but rather other species and nonhuman actors.

“Natural concrete” is the result of ascribing new meanings to and valorizing nonhumans, such as sediment and seawater. It signals a new imaginary and politics of infrastructure and repairing the coast, moving on from sand. Sand is worldwide the most extracted raw material and is used in the concrete made to fortify coastal structures (see Beiser 2018). The construction industry is widely recognized as an anti-environment industry, one that leaves a massive human footprint on both fertile topsoil and the atmosphere. As Eli Elinoff (2018) noted, cement production now comprises anywhere from 5–10 percent of global carbon emissions. Géocorail questions the long-established human practice of injecting concrete into the ocean to safeguard coastal and land-based infrastructures.

Géocorail is still in an experimental stage, as the material shows different results in different marine settings. It tested Géocorail in the Wallis and Futuna Islands, a small French overseas territory in the South Pacific located close to Tuvalu, the infamously sinking island state. But Géocorail has also found paying clients. On an isolated island in the Pacific Ocean, it helped build an access road for a land reclamation project. These initial insights suggest that new economic ascriptions of nonhuman life travel and connect coasts along long-standing colonial and capitalist routes.

Extraterrestrial domestication

In 2013, in the Italian port city Genoa, Sergio Gamberini, president of a company that designs diving equipment, started exploring the possibility of growing plants underwater. The company has since built subaqueous arks: containers tied to the ocean floor, in which humidity and light conditions can be kept stable. These “water installations” also have a life of their own: in a YouTube video posted by the company they blink like floating airships ascending from the abyss. This is not “an alien base ready to invade us,” the project coordinator Gianni Fontanesi assures the audience, but a garden. In these biospheres, the divers have successfully grown various edible plants. That is why Gamberini cheekily calls the project Nemo’s Garden. The team constantly monitors the quality of air and water inside the tanks, temperature, and humidity. They also remotely watch the development of the underwater crops via a video feed.

Nemo’s Garden is translating known forms of cultivation to a new medium—water—and has produced astonishing findings: the increased pressure of the artificial environment apparently benefits plant growth. Moreover, naturally occurring condensation due to a difference in water and spheric temperatures makes watering the plants virtually unnecessary. While Nemo’s Garden suggests a beautiful new balance between human and nature—akin to the fish farms described by Chang Rae Lee in his dystopian novel On Such A Full Sea—they require intensive and technologically sophisticated design. Tending to plants on the ocean floor demands technologies that inoculate the human against pressure and anaerobic conditions. Extending terrestrial modes of production to the ocean is a risky and expensive undertaking.

Nemo’s Garden emerged from a vast edgelands—the polluted shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Unprecedented amounts of trash are entering the waters of this most polluted ocean in the world, turning up on beaches, and endangering the health of fish. The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that about 0.5 billion litter items are covering the Mediterranean seafloor. Researchers recently “spotted a floating ‘island’ of plastic waste, measuring several dozen miles long in between the French island of Corsica and the Italian island of Elba.”G Nemo’s Garden revalorizes the coastal edge by showing that new and useful life can emerge from it. The project shows us how the coast is imagined as a new type of infrastructure, an undiscovered frontier space in which experiments may unveil mysteries that could revolutionize food production.

Let me return to the peculiar ontological and infrastructural work of oysters described by Wakefield and Braun (2019). As the mollusk is celebrating a return to New York in environmentalist efforts to protect the bay from future storms and erosion, the organism is enrolled in infrastructural processes and interspecies sociality. It is the peculiar life of oysters, the authors argue, that appears as the perfect antidote to our toxic relationship with the earth. After birth, they show, the oyster is “little more than a tiny mobile blob of larva, nourished only by the nutrients from the egg. Within a few days, it begins to extract calcium carbonate from lime-rich waters and develops organs able to process food, and it begins to grow a thick, hard shell” (ibid., 199). It then attaches to older or dead oysters to form the durable structures that we call reefs, a natural breakwater that shelters countless other maritime species. In New York, people are intensively gardening these oysters, helping them to thrive. But Wakefield and Braun warn against romanticizing the oyster project: oysters are put to work by humans to safeguard human life on densely urbanized shores. They are the subjects of a kind of offshore biopolitics. Building relationships with mollusks will therefore not disrupt ecological and economic practices that perpetuate suffering and environmental risk elsewhere. Still, they claim, the project significantly changes our relation to life, politics, and time: “Oystertecture is not significant because it enrolls nature as infrastructure, but also because with projects like oystertecture infrastructure gains a new political ontology.” As we extend urban space into the sea, we not only leave traces, but we remodel ecosystems according to these new political ontologies.

Edgelands of a hard coast As our last stop, my partner and I visited the French city of Nice. The city’s seaside promenade was vibrant with people sitting by the water, sipping cocktails on patios, and strolling by the beach. As we approached the small harbour, I was struck by the sight of tetrapods lying idly outside the harbour. Dumped in front of a line of massive concrete blocks, the tetrapods were supposed to fortify the shoreline––a sort of last line of defense dispersing peak waves and diminishing the erosive force of the ocean. We realized that one could walk on the blocks near the tetrapods, from one end of the improvised seawall to the other. But none of the other pedestrians were using this waterfront trail, probably because it was almost on a level with the choppy and breaking sea. As we leaped from block to block, we suddenly noticed that we were not jumping across voids but peopled shelters—tents tucked into the niches between the hard tetrapods, their fractal shape slightly reminiscent of a choral forest. 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 FEBURARY 2021

Millions of African migrants have tried to traverse the Mediterranean since 2014. Almost daily, they come up against the symbolic and material walls of Europe in their efforts to transcend dire economic and social conditions in their home countries. Their exceptional plight doesn’t end with their arrival in Europe. What we witnessed in Nice suggests that migrants have to endure, perhaps hide, in coastal edgelands that, ironically, are a product of the city’s efforts to fortify itself against the sea.

The anthropocenic coastline

Edgelands exist on our cities’ coasts. These watery spaces are often off-limits to humans but not to our technical and ethical imagination. The examples of Géocorail and Nemo’s Garden show how cutting-edge technology is able to repair and revalorize ruins in the near ocean, drawing this environment near and making it tangible and perhaps valuable. Short-term solutions to coastal fortification against anthropogenic climate change, however, also produce hazardous niches—spaces of refuge on the edge of the very ontological order that is responsible for the environmental and social disasters of the Anthropocene. Because coasts can turn into deadly borders; because coasts often display the ecological degradation caused by unregulated urban expansion; and because new coastal infrastructures show the important work of nonhumans in maintaining shores, coastal edgelands require urgent scientific attention. What might we discover as we further investigate such watery fringes between land and sea to shine a light on the social orders and ecological processes that are at their origin?

Lukas Ley is a social anthropologist at the Institute of Anthropology, Heidelberg University. His current research is broadly concerned with urban marginalization, temporality, and the material environment within postcolonial urban landscapes. His first monograph, “Building on Borrowed Time,” considers the temporalities of tidal flooding in Semarang, Indonesia, and will appear in fall 2021.

DNA Testing of Immigrants Is Unethical

The collection of genetic biodata for the reunification of families must safeguard individuals’ agency, provide meaningful informed consent, and protect privacy.

DNA testing has been used for nearly two decades to prove family relationships for visa petitions as part of the United States Refugee Admissions Program. Questionable as that may be, the use of DNA testing for immigration purposes has expanded in recent years to include testing detained immigrants, including separated minors at the United States Mexico border. This latest development has created significant bioethical concerns, leaving many scholars, including me, questioning how we got here and what do we do next.

It started in the summer of 2018, when US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers under the Trump administration began separating migrant children from their families at the United States–Mexico border.

The US government proposed using DNA testing to determine if a biological relationship exists between children and their accompanying adults. Advocates argued that DNA tests could reunite separated families and also prevent human trafficking. Critics such as Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Amnesty International, and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle argued against the plan, leading the Trump administration to put the plans temporarily on hold.

However, in October 2019, the New York Times reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) planned to restart DNA testing, and in January 2020 that plan became a reality. It entailed collecting a much more comprehensive genetic profile than previous pilot programs and storing the genetic profiles indefinitely in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) database, accessible by state and law enforcement authorities.

Then, in September 2020, BuzzFeed News reported that it had acquired access to a draft US government policy, which detailed plans for collecting multiple forms of biometric data, including DNA, to establish bona fide genetic relationships between adults and minors in DHS custody.

While it is true that DNA testing would offer a scientifically valid way of confirming familial relationships, we must ask, Is it ethical to collect and store this personal information to address the problem of 666 children still separated from their parents?

An underlying argument against DNA testing in immigration is grounded in the concept of genetic literacy. As an applied anthropologist, I’ve studied and spoken up about consumer genetics over the past four years. In my research on the direct-to-consumer genomics (DTCG) market, I’ve found that the majority of participants lack an appreciation and understanding of the ethical concerns related to DNA testing.

For example, in a survey of 353 participants, I found that 52 percent did not read the privacy policy and terms of service when buying the test and thus lacked a firm understanding of the risks and considerations. Similarly, many participants in my interviews made statements similar to the following two comments:

Yeah, I mean I was like, you know, I think it’s all about genetics, so it’s not something I personally understand, but these are companies that do genetic testing like they seem pretty sure. You know, like scientific facts. (35-year-old male interviewed in 2018)

I don’t think it’s significant because I don’t know. It’s just life. It’s not my address or my social security number. I don’t feel like I could have a monetary loss on this one so I can affect my health. I mean, I don’t understand how my DNA being in the hands of somebody is going to hurt me. (48-year-old male interviewed in 2018)

I share these examples to illustrate the cavalier attitude and behaviors of many consumers, including me, who actively sought out a DNA test and opted to buy it. But if willing consumers demonstrate these behaviors, what about immigrants who are compelled or coerced to take a test? Will they be afforded a meaningful informed consent process? Will they truly understand all of the potential risks of having their biocapital stored in perpetuity in the CODIS database, or how that may be used, potentially against them, in the future?

I argue, no. As my colleagues and I first contended in a poster presented at the 2018 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, adults in the United States appear ill-equipped to understand the complexity of genetic testing. Likewise, we argued that separated minors who likely have little genetic literacy would not be able to provide appropriate informed consent, potentially even with adult supervision.

Finally, no person should be coerced into a genetic test for reunification purposes under such a state of duress. Given that position, I offer the following suggestions to the incoming Biden-Harris administration to reduce the harm if the US government continues with its policy.

Any person should have the right to refuse a DNA test without harm to their immigration status or case and should be presented with other options, even if that extends their case review time. Consequently, any minor separated from their guardian should not be coerced to take a DNA test by any third party in the absence of their legal guardian.

If an individual is asked to take a DNA test, they should be provided meaningful informed consent by a bilingual third party nongovernment scientist or health care professional trained in delivering informed consent and the risks of providing genetic biodata.

If the government insists on using DNA tests for family identification or reunification, it should be used for that purpose exclusively. Furthermore, if a DNA test is administered, it should only be used to verify family relationships where all parties have agreed to be tested. Finally, if a DNA test proves a familial relationship, the family should be reunited, and the DNA sample and derived data destroyed.

Protecting a person’s agency, providing meaningful informed consent, and ensuring their privacy is protected should be considered a prerequisite for the use of any DNA testing, especially in the context of compulsory testing for use in immigration.

The incoming Biden-Harris administration should reverse the inhumane border practices of the Trump administration as quickly as possible, and ensure no more harm to immigrants. No person should ever be coerced into taking a DNA test, especially not separated minors.

Pedagogical Tools and Evidence for Discussing Disparities in Education in Louisiana The majority of the 101 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States are in the South. HBCUs increased in popularity for students of color whose families experienced integration as challenging, although their existence stems from segregation. Southern University (SUNO), the largest public HBCU, has a history of division between administration and faculty; a 1972 call for access to education from students and professors resulted in deaths. This tension repeated recently when four professors died in 2014. What is teaching like under these conditions? How can faculty experiences illuminate these divisions and inequalities? Nina K. Müller-Schwarze and Robert Perry share reflections on their time and experience as faculty at Southern University in New Orleans.

Anthropology News (AN): Displaced from Southern University in New Orleans by Katrina, what was it like to teach anthropology in a city like Seattle, that prides itself on being a progressive Pacific Northwest stronghold?

Nina K. Müller-Schwarze (NMS): Only three out of my 120 students in an autumn 2019 University of Washington class, in a show of hands, knew what an HBCU is. I explained to my northern students that we in New Orleans still lived in conditions like 2006 a decade later; the professors died a decade after Hurricane Katrina. Talking about Black experience in the US white world can be taboo, and these taboos are where race is constructed. I shared a PowerPoint slide with links to the news media reports about the deaths of four professors.

Presenting photographs of my colleagues who passed aligns with New Orleanian memorialization practices. We read these articles in class and discussed media narratives. The PowerPoint engaged Black students, reversing the colonial order of the classroom: the majority white classroom listened. This integrated Black voice and experience and not just Black bodies at an historically white institution. Students noticed silences in the media narratives; the reports included less detail further geographically away from New Orleans. A Chronicle of Higher Education article only interviewed the chancellor, Viktor Ukpolo. We discussed how white media silences Black experiences, how investigative journalists do not serve all Americans, and students pontificated on why and the repercussions for Black people who are charged with solving problems where structures have failed. I experienced silencing when I submitted an earlier version to this publication in 2015, but was told that it was “unsubstantiated” that also lauded gossip as anthropological data.

AN: How does this compare with your experience teaching anthropology at Southern University?

NMS: In contrast, I found, while assistant professor at Southern University at New Orleans, the standard curriculum in anthropology irrelevant: my students read racism throughout texts, and concepts like culture and race from mainstream anthropology in their superficiality were not relevant.

We utilized ideas like categories and structures to articulate social location in discussions and projects; I call this “supporting students in articulating their own social location and historical experiences.” Anthropology can be used to coproduce student voices.

We discussed historical experiences that continue. The anthropological discussion around categories helped us discuss how the bifurcation of experience into Black and white arrived with the Louisiana Purchase and US colonialism over a previous French colonialism that organized people in colorism and creole categories. Social structures continuous in sugar plantation regions (the Gulf Coast and Florida panhandle), and what is termed in Latin American studies the indigenous overseer, are especially deep-rooted as sugar plantations endured into recent history.

The era of legal segregation created HBCUs. However, racism in wider society meant that this school, termed “North South University” in Weissinger, was often the only option in the historical continuities of segregation. Integration in the US South historically placed the burden of Black children entering white schools; whites did not enter Black institutions, so the project of integration itself admits inequality.

AN: Can you speak more about anthropology, race, and lived experiences?

NMS: Anthropological “cultural construction of race” can overlook specific embodiments of our particular constructions of race; where the real barriers and walls are. The physical infrastructure, or lack thereof, at this HBCU in post-Katrina New Orleans was challenging. Buildings that had stood in floodwaters had not been repaired and dangerous mold made instructors and students sick. I was grateful that my class met in a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer with a small window that I could open to the sound of passing freight trains. Many librarians, who could not open windows, became sick. The realities of FEMA trailers still in use too many years after Katrina, which the national government had repurposed from disposal, were high in levels of formaldehyde and mold from standing unassembled in the rain. Articulating social location in class resulted in discussions about structures, categories, and the experiences of where the specifically North American constructs of race are.

AN: How do these experiences and conversations differ or align with popular conceptions of race and social categories? NMS: The idea that everyone in a category shares alliances and allegiances overlooks the structures categories contain and the continuations of historical experiences. The administration at the university was a foreign one, as one colleague stated, “with little allegiance to the local American Black population.” Faculty were generally multiethnic and often deeply committed to teaching; my social location as the daughter of refugees from an ethnic cleansing aligned with the historical experiences of other faculty who felt compassion. It is anthropology that imagines communities. We were located in the hierarchies of structures and in hierarchies of epistemologies. I assigned Lisbeth Schorr, who shows how funding and research ai med at categories result in structural loopholes allowing for predators, to my students. Schorr describes the layers of political structures administering programs aimed at Others. My students articulated their social locations instructures of bureaucracy; as Schorr describes, reporting procedures enable corruption.

Vincanne Adams misses the New Orleanian meaning of the term “corruption” in a quote from an interviewee; her book reads as a master narrative written about anywhere and is not well-researched. My graduate students enjoyed reading Dambisa Moyo. It was not important whether neoliberalism or bureaucratic state structures functioned as explanations; reality demanded more empowering knowledge. The unsung hero attorney Willie Zanders champions equity in education in Louisiana; his work is available. I taught and advised dedicated MA students as assistant professor in the Museum Studies program at Southern University. My students curated their own exhibits in area museums, and I taught six courses per semester. I guided some students through the MA process of writing an outline, creating a timeline for activities, repeatedly reading drafts, and I signed one successful thesis. However, students that I inherited had not received clarity as to what a master’s thesis entails. The administration pressured some to graduate. One student conceived the topic and wrote her MA thesis over spring break. I required standards of excellence, yet received pressure in emails from administrators, like Sara Hollis, to “sign off” on subpar theses. I realized this happened because U.S. News and World Report publicized the less than five percent graduation rate. Viktor Ukpolo called a meeting of faculty to explain that he had travelled to speak with the journalist and to pressure faculty to increase graduation rates. I spoke at that meeting, and I was rapidly and illegally terminated despite achieving tenure from faculty. I noticed that U.S. News and World Report added a footnote excusing the low graduation rate for racial reasons. I subsequently hoped to boost my career by taking out my retirement account to write a theory book, but that’s another story! AN: Can you share with us what it’s like having these conversations about race and your experiences? NMS: Talking about Black experience in the US white world can be taboo, and these taboos are where race is constructed. We discussed in the FEMA trailer how the process of integration that burdens with solving problems those suffering ignores other aspects of personhood beyond biological race. A wall of silence erects when I mention in conversations at American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings that four of my colleagues died. I probably hold a record for job applications. Employers at northern white universities don’t even understand these incommensurable experiences; I lost them at the term “HBCU.” Experts on culture and race are often the least likely to reflect upon their own social location.

AN: In the opening paragraph, you touched briefly on the division between the administration and faculty Southern University. Can you share with us something about your time as faculty there?

Robert Perry (RP): My philosophy embraces the fact that if one chooses a career in the teaching profession the reward is in the realization of the significance of the services rendered, not in immediate monetary benefits or accolades one may receive. I briefly describe some of the blatant disregard of professional respect I endured as I attempted to provide a high quality technical education for students. 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 FEBURARY 2021

During my tenure as department chair the enrollment number of physics and mathematics majors was steadily increasing. We had field trips to NASA Stennis, witnessed stargazing events through telescopes, and the National Association of Black Mathematicians met twice on SUNO’s campus. I could not help but notice how poorly our students were performing on the Educational Testing Service (ETS) tests, such as the LSAT, GRE, MCAT, and PRAXIS. ETS has a Summer Scholars Program for university professors designed to train them in developing test taking skills and learning the ins and outs of creating test items. Although each summer only 25 scholars are selected to participate, I was one of two accepted to return to participate for two summers. For a while I was writing general physics test items for the GRE when I was at Southern University New Orleans (SUNO). I used these skills to help physics and mathematics students to improve their score on these tests. In spite of great opposition and no support from Andrea Jefferson, Vice Chancellor and wife of former Congressman William Jefferson, it worked. Mathematics and physical science test scores improved and a mathematics major graduated suma cum laude.

AN: Outside of teaching, what were some of your experiences at Southern University?

RP: For a while I served on the SUNO Faculty Senate. It was brought to my attention and others on a committee that several professors had not verified their degrees with official transcripts on file. In good faith we requested that faculty members should be willing to provide copies of transcripts that should have already been included in university files. This simple request was met with extreme opposition and some administrators did not approve of this request. I have been informed that there are several SUNO faculty members who have not provided any official transcript to indicate that they have indeed earned the degrees they claim. Official transcripts should be required prior to any offer of employment at a university and remain a part of the human resources files.

After about three years into my service to SUNO as chair of the Department of Mathematics & Physics we had a vacancy created by the retirement of physics professor Roy Williams whose service to the department was exemplary. From the best ten or “short list” of viable candidates as we called it, we presented the best three applicants to Andrea Jefferson, who was to make the final selection. I was shocked in my disbelief that Jefferson chose Joe Omojola, whose resume had been rejected. Similarly, Mostafa Elaasar was hired to teach without going through the normal vetting process. I received many complaints from students who would have majored in physics or mathematics but were discouraged to pursue that field of study because of professors Omojola and Elaasar. Because of this, SUNO no longer offers a degree in physics.

After serving as department chair for seven years, certain administrators decided to remove me from that position and make Elaasar the chair of the Department of Mathematics & Physics and Omojola the dean of Natural Sciences. Their knowledge of these fields was often demonstrated as questionable. And then came Hurricane Katrina which caused the shutdown of all universities located in New Orleans. AN: What kind of impact did that have your life and teaching career? RP: My family and I evacuated to Houston, Texas, where we stayed for nine months. During that seemingly endless period of time I made several attempts to orchestrate my return to teaching at SUNO. I drove from Houston to the Southern University at Baton Rouge’s campus (SUBR) to meet with chancellor Robert Gex who encouraged and supported my return to teaching duties at SUNO. Gex advised me to meet with Moustaffa Elaasar, the appointed chair of the SUNO Mathematics & Physics Department. Several times I drove to SUBR for meetings with Elaasar we had scheduled. He did not show up for any of these. After using my savings to survive in Houston for almost a year I had to withdraw from my retirement account. I was forced into early retirement because I did not receive my job back and FEMA assistance was two years too late to save my retirement funds. I was later informed that I had been furloughed and my services were no longer needed at SUNO, despite the fact that I was a tenured associate professor and several untenured SUNO faculty members were retained to resume their teaching responsibilities. Years of court battles determined that SUNO’s unfair furlough was indeed illegal and these former faculty members were on paper found to be in the right for their long struggles. It is unfortunate SUNO administrators continue to make short sighted decisions of policy that compromise the essential process of education and the retention of academically dedicated faculty. Nina K. Müller-Schwarze, PhD wrote a book, The Blood of Victoriano Lorenzo: An Ethnography of the Cholos of northern Coclé Province, Panama. Working as assistant professor at Southern University expanded her abilities to teach diverse students, speak about disparities in education, and create multimedia museum exhibits. Robert Perry, an Aerospace Corporation and Hughes Aircraft Corporation Electro-Optical Systems Group physicist, adjunct professor at California State University, University of California at Fullerton, Tulane University, and Nunez Community College, and Physics Department chair at Talladega College, served as chair of the Department of Physics and Mathematics at SUNO.

Anthropology and Economics in the Public Eye

How can anthropologists approach the influence of economists?

The COVID-19 pandemic and how to mitigate its effects is only one recent public and policy issue on which anthropologists can contribute significant insights and solutions. Yet in policy debates and the media, anthropologists do not have an impact proportional to their insight. Despite actual and potential contributions of anthropologists to global problem-solving, anthropological influence has been far less than that of economics.

There is a Council of Economic Advisers in the White House and economists serve as advisors and decision makers throughout federal and state governments and legislatures. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Federal Reserve employ hundreds of economists. Most major corporations have chief economists, but not chief anthropologists. There is a Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, but none in anthropology. Joe Biden said, when speaking of the pandemic on Meet the Press in March 2020: “President Trump should listen to his scientists, health experts, and economists.” Media outlets often turn to economists for analysis, predictions, and opinion on current social and political issues; prominent economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, Thomas Piketty, and Paul Krugman write influential books and op-eds.

As an anthropologist and an economist who are policy oriented (and married), we offer some explanations for this difference between anthropology and economics and argue that the gap can and should be narrowed. A number of anthropologists work to bring their knowledge and views into the public realm, initiatives on which we can build so that there is robust participation across the discipline. Many more anthropologists must find ways to persuade decision makers and the general public to alter policies—from economy to food security to public health—with their uncommon findings and insights created by the anthropological lens.

Economists’ impact in public forums

Economists start with advantages for influencing policy. They tend to focus on a single objective—maximizing material well-being—and assume that everyone in any society has roughly that same objective. These assumptions underlie quantitative models that generate hypotheses, which economists can and do test—consistent with the scientific method and helpful for persuading noneconomists. Economists also have a policy orientation dating back to the discipline’s founders, from Adam Smith and David Ricardo (microeconomics) to John Maynard Keynes (macroeconomics in response to Great Depression). The behavioral assumptions let economists fearlessly generalize beyond the traditional confines of the discipline (e.g., on family, on crime). Models and mindsets give economists confidence in making policy recommendations on issues on which they have personally done no research. The training and employment of economists reinforce these advantages. Graduate seminars often encourage challenge and debate, honing verbal skills and “thinking on your feet.” Economists outside academia must write and speak clearly and persuasively to noneconomists and make convincing recommendations to get and keep their jobs. Consulting opportunities for academics reward those skills as well. Economists know not to repeat the error of Edwin Nourse whose unwillingness to offer clear advice (“on the other hand…”) led President Truman to beg for a one handed economist. Economists—or any experts—do not always win the argument. Economist and presidential advisor Michael Boskin stated one should only take the job of being on the Council of Economic Advisers if satisfied with Wade Boggs’s batting average (one hit in three). Anthropology’s potential

We are overwhelmed with information and awash with survey data. Between the politicians and the pundits, it is challenging to make sense of what is happening during crises like the pandemic or resulting recession. Anthropologists have a knack for identifying connections and themes due to their analytic and sensemaking competencies, and for telling persuasive stories from the field by conveying authenticity and empathy. Using such techniques positions anthropologists to engage effectively in public discussions and disarm faulty arguments by posing simple questions drawn from their holistic and comparative perspective.

Narrowing the gap with economists

To increase public and policy impact, anthropologists need to do the following:

Express insights in clear, concise, and compelling language (the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) collaboration with The Op-Ed Project is a good initiative with this goal; the shift as a result of the pandemic from Annual Meeting to a fall event series with many shorter live-streamed and interactive events should also be useful in this regard).

Generalize how culture works, incorporating knowledge of structure (e.g., roles, rules) and dynamics (e.g., relationships, interactions) in the relevant context.

Explain how and why past and present research sheds light on important policy questions and decisions. Get broadcast media training (AAA and universities are resources).

Adopt a consultant’s mindset, rather than decline to offer an explanation or insist that every question requires a new study before guidance can be offered.

Be attentive to ongoing public conversations and link anthropology to them, weighing in on important issues even without incentives from employers.

Think like an entrepreneur and network, since decision makers and reporters do not usually seek out anthropologists for advice.

Take a cross-disciplinary and collaborative approach by establishing connections within policy communities and creating research designs, teams, and implementation strategies that cross boundaries (an approach that might have helped Brunson and colleagues influence the recent Medicaid expansion policy debate).

This list of actions can be intimidating for those who have not yet ventured into the public eye. However, anthropology has some current role models. Among them are anthropologists highly visible in the media and policy (e.g., Gillian Tett, Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, Helen Fisher, Genevieve Bell). Another group consists of public-facing media who bring the value of anthropology to wider communities (e.g., This Anthro Life, Mindshare, Sapiens). A third group includes all anthropologists engaged in practice work. Taking a cue from all of these colleagues, anthropologists must be willing to offer solutions to thorny issues and defend them. It is now critical that we see a palpable integration between scholarship and public influence, theory and practice, individual exploration and collaborative networks. The time is ripe for a step change in anthropologists’ role on the world stage and public perception of the discipline. If more anthropologists skilled in communication, generalization, and a change-oriented mindset promote their perspective publicly, society would benefit enormously.

Elizabeth K. Briody is founder of Cultural Keys LLC, a consulting practice dedicated to improving organizational effectiveness. She previously worked at General Motors R&D as an anthropologist. She is secretary of the American Anthropological Association and won the 2020 Bronislaw Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology.

Marc S. Robinson is an economist and strategist now consulting externally after 33 years as an internal consultant at General Motors, including in strategic initiatives and strategic risk management. Earlier, he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and Stanford. He served in the White House on George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.

CURIOUS FEBURARY 2021

Union Budget 2020-21: Denotified, Nomadic, Semi-nomadic Tribes left out once again

The year 2020-21 is significant for Denotified, Nomadic and Semi-nomadic Tribes (DNT). A hundred-and-fifty years ago, in 1871, the British Parliament passed the notorious Criminal Tribes Act. The criminal act stigmatised generations of this community once and for all. Union Budget 2020-21, the community had hoped, would address its problem comprehensively.

As Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman started her budget speech on February 1, 2020, hope soared at the mention of the three key themes: Aspirational India, economic development and, above all, a ‘caring society’. Soon it became clear, however, that like past budgets this also had little new to offer the marginalised sections, especially the DNT community. The DNTs are a heterogenous group engaged in various occupations such as transport, key-making, salt trading, entertaining — acrobats, dancers, snake charmers, jugglers — and pastoralists. These communities were branded ‘born criminals’ under the colonial-era Criminal Tribes Act, 1871. They were ‘denotified’ in 1952 when independent India repealed this act. But the Habitual Offenders Act, 1952, kicked in soon after.

There are nearly 1,500 nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes and 198 denotified tribes, comprising 15 crore Indians, according to the Renke Commission, 2008. These tribes remain socially and economically marginalised even now, depriving many of them of basic human rights. In the interim budget of 2019-2020, then interim finance minister Piyush Goyal said: “… to this end, the condition of the denotified, nomadic and semi-nomadic communities merits special attention. These communities are hard to reach, less visible, and therefore, frequently left out.”

The government set up a Development and Welfare Board under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 under the aegis of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment for implementing development and welfare programmes for the DNT.

Budgetary Allocation The overall budget for the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment was increased 13.7 per cent for 2020-21, compared with 14.6 per cent last year. The department caters to a vast range of the most marginalised sections of the community, such as safai karamcharis (sanitation workers including manual scavengers), people with disabilities, those from scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST) and other backward classes (OBC) and the DNTs. 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 FEBURARY 2021

A more specific analysis of the budget for the schemes for the development of the DNTs across six years shows a slow growth. While the budget slightly increased in 2018-19 —to 10 crore from Rs 6 crore, it has been stagnant since then. It was significant to note that, the actual expenditure for each year has been below the budgetary allocation, showing the inability of DNTs to avail of funds and resources meant for them.

Allocation for the Welfare Board created in 2019 was slightly increased to Rs 1.24 crore in 2020-21 from Rs 0.40 crore in 2019-20.

“In the last budget, the government spoke convincingly about the DNTs and announced that they would work towards our development. I believe that they (the government) have enough data about our population and should work accordingly towards this proposed development. But this year, again, the government has lost the chance to prove that they are serious about the empowerment of the DNTs,” said Dakxin Chhara, founder member, DNT Adhikar Manch.

“We had hoped that after coming to power for a second time this government would work towards the upliftment of the DNT. But they have not taken any steps to improve the lives of those that are at the absolute margins of the Indian society,” said Rahul, a member of the National Alliance Group for Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (NAG-DNT).

Uncounted, Unaccounted

The absence of any uniform classification across the country is among the biggest dilemmas regarding DNTs: They are not enumerated separately in the Census, making it difficult to ascertain concrete figures. Also, these communities are spread across SC, ST and OBC communities in different states. DNTs, as a whole are not recognised as a separate social category under constitutional schedules.

Many of the communities were subsumed under SC, ST or OBC, but their biggest hurdle is access to schemes and, as a first step, access to the caste certificates.

“Our biggest problem is caste certificate. Every step towards getting any kind of benefits is riddled with set-backs. In order for me to get a caste certificate they ask me for proof from the 1950s, which is near impossible for anyone to have or prove,” said Rohini Chhari, secretary, Bhoomi Gramothhan Evam Sehabhagi Gramin Vikas Samiti, from the Bedia community of Madhya Pradesh.

The government constituted two commissions for DNTs (NCDNT) in 2005 and 2015 to identify these communities and prepare state-wise lists of different castes of DNTs.

The Renke Commission, which submitted its report in 2008, highlighted that 50 per cent of DNTs lacked any kind of documents and 98 per cent were landless.

The report brought to light various challenges that the communities faced, especially with regard to access to caste certificates, health care and school enrolment.

Ten years later, in 2018, the Idate Commission released its report. As with the Renke Commission, the report of this commission revealed that nothing changed in a decade — with most DNT communities still deeply impoverished.

“It’s a shame that after Piyush Goyal’s budget remarks, this budget has not found it important to pursue the promises made by him,” said Tom Thomas, chief executive of Praxis – Institute of Participatory Practices. He added that:

“The irony is that while the government has been on an overdrive in accumulating citizen’s data through Aadhaar and now NPR, these are of no use to those who need proof of their identities the most, for their rightful share of state resources like the DNT. Let us hope that the state budgets will do more justice – not only in terms of increasing allocations, but also in reaching out to those who have been deprived of their legitimate stake for one-and-a-half centuries, for no fault of theirs.”

“How much money a section of the society has been allocated should not be the criteria to judge a budget. How well the community has been able to use and benefit the amount is what is more important,” said Balkrishna Sidram Renke, who headed the first national commission for DNTs.

“It is the duty of the government that they empower these communities to avail the benefits that are created for them. The National Advisory Council reviewed all data. It clearly stated that although the DNTs are spread across different backward class categories and are entitled to various schemes under these categories, they are unable to access any of these benefits,” he pointed out.

Renke said there were two main reasons for this — one was identity certificates; the other, the lack of awareness: “No government has been able to help them with regard to their most pressing issue — their identity. They need to be provided with an equal opportunity to develop.”

The core and critical need is that of identity. This is the starting point to establish their claim and avail of benefits under existing schemes as well as to quantify and qualify their future needs. This alone will establish what the third component of the budget hopes to achieve — a ‘caring society’. Sadly, this dire need has not been addressed in the budget.

Earliest-Known Animal Cave Art

The dating of an exceptionally old cave painting of animals that was found recently on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi is reported in our recent paper. The painting portrays images of the Sulawesi warty pig (Sus celebensis), which is a small (40–85 kilograms), short legged wild boar endemic to the island. Dating to at least 45,500 years ago, this cave painting may be the oldest depiction of the animal world, and possibly the earliest figurative art (an image that resembles the thing it is intended to represent), yet uncovered.

ICE AGE ART IN INDONESIA

Sulawesi is host to abundant cave art, the existence of which was first reported in the 1950s. Until recently, the prevailing view was this art was the handiwork of Neolithic farmers who arrived around 4,000 years ago from southern China rather than the hunter-gatherers who had lived on Sulawesi for tens of thousands of years. We now know that this is not correct.

In 2014, we reported the first dates for the South Sulawesi rock art. Based on uranium-series analysis of mineral deposits (calcite) that formed naturally on the art, we showed that a stenciled image of a human hand found in one cave was created at least 40,000 years ago. This is compatible in age with the famous ice age cave art in Europe.

Then, in 2019, we dated a spectacular painting at another cave that portrays hybrid human-animal figures hunting Sulawesi warty pigs and dwarf buffalos, anoas. This hunting scene is at least 43,900 years old, and it features what may be the oldest depictions of supernatural beings. In our latest study, we push the age of Sulawesi’s rock art a little deeper into the past. THE SECRET VALLEY In December 2017, we conducted the first survey of an isolated valley set in mountainous terrain a stone’s throw from one of Indonesia’s largest cities, Makassar. Despite its proximity to a major urban center, there is no road to this valley. The small community of local Bugis farmers live a secluded existence, although they are widely reputed for the sublime quality (and potency) of their palm wine, ballo.

According to them, no Westerner had ever set foot in their valley before.

This secret valley is a pristine environment and a place of resplendent natural beauty. There is hardly any rubbish in the tiny village in the center of the valley. Being there feels like stepping back in time.

The valley harbors a limestone cave known as Leang Tedongnge, and inside it, we found a rock painting the locals claimed they had never noticed before.

The painting was produced using a red mineral pigment (ironstone hematite, or ochre). It depicts at least three Sulawesi warty pigs engaged in social interaction of some kind.

We interpret the surviving elements of this artwork as a single narrative composition or scene, a mainstay of how we tell stories using images today but an uncommon feature of early cave art.

UNLOCKING THE AGE OF THE ART Dating rock art is very difficult at the best of times. But at Leang Tedongnge, we were fortunate to identify a small calcite deposit (known as “cave popcorn”) that had formed on top of one of the pig figures (pig 1, below).

We sampled the calcite and analyzed it for uranium-series dating. Amazingly, the dating work returned an age of 45,500 years ago for the calcite, meaning the painting on which it formed must be at least this old.

EARLY ART IN WALLACEA

Our discovery underlines the global importance of Sulawesi, and the wider Indonesian region, for our understanding of where and when the first cave art traditions developed by our species arose.

The great antiquity of this artwork also offers hints at the potential for other significant findings in this part of the world.

Sulawesi is the largest island in Wallacea, the zone of oceanic islands located between mainland Asia and the ice age continental landmass of Australia-New Guinea.

Modern humans are said to have crossed through Wallacea by watercraft at least 65,000 years ago in order to reach Australia by that time.The Conversation

But the Wallacean islands are poorly explored, and presently, the earliest excavated archaeological evidence from this region is much younger.

We believe further research will uncover much older rock art in Sulawesi or on other Wallacean islands, dating back at least 65,000 years and possibly earlier.

Must Conservation and Indigenous Rights Clash?

Our planet is in trouble. By some estimates, just 23 percent of Earth’s nonfrozen landmass and 13 percent of its oceans remain as wilderness, a million species are threatened with extinction, and climate change is set to worsen many of these trends.

Though scientists broadly agree that these changes are worrying, determining the best course of action in response is not easy. Several proposals now feed into a global plan to expand the proportion of land and seas set aside for conservation by 2030.

Earlier this month, one idea hit an important milestone: More than 50 countries committed to support the “Thirty by Thirty” plan, which proposes reserving 30 percent of the Earth’s surface for conservation, banning human activities like fishing, agriculture, or forestry except where done at a small scale that does not threaten biodiversity. Just this week, U.S. President Joseph Biden pledged to see the country participate in this effort.

A draft scientific working paper, commissioned by proponents of the Thirty by Thirty plan and co-authored by more than 100 scholars from disciplines including zoology, economics, and anthropology, suggests this 30 percent plan could bring environmental and economic windfalls. The paper also argues that the 30 percent approach could reduce carbon emissions and cut the risk of disease transfer from wildlife to humans.

But some social scientists oppose this plan. Critics worry that the paper’s calculations overlook the effects on Indigenous peoples and other communities that are often marginalized—particularly as the efforts could involve an end to fishing, farming, and herding on some of their lands. In an open letter released this month with 30 signatures, environmental anthropologists and other scholars say the report marginalizes rural people whose livelihoods will be most affected by the Thirty by Thirty plan.

They see the paper as part of a larger, troubling tendency to ignore the plight of certain communities in the name of conservation and economic growth. As Paige West, an anthropologist at Columbia University in New York and one of the open letter’s authors, says, “I believe that somewhere along the way, the world forgot that the economy is actually people.”

Authors of the scientific working paper circulated their draft among the academic community in July 2020. (The paper technically has still not been finalized or formally published.)

These authors calculate the “costs, benefits, and economic implications” of the Thirty by Thirty plan, comparing them with scenarios involving more modest action. They conclude that expanding protected areas would result in net economic benefits over time through effects including repopulating fish stocks and mitigating climate change impacts. These benefits would outweigh the investment required, the paper suggests, ranging from US$103 billion to US$178 billion per year. While West and the other critics acknowledge the desperate need to address the biodiversity crisis, they worry that the report has failed to acknowledge the outsize impact the Thirty by Thirty plan will have on vulnerable communities. These letter writers see the paper’s shortcoming as symptomatic of a failure to consider Indigenous peoples and their rights in environmental conservation more broadly.

“Historically, protected areas have always had a bigger socioeconomic effect on Indigenous and marginalized people,” West says. She finds such considerations lacking from the draft report. Ashish Kothari, an Indian environmentalist and a founder of Kalpavriksh, a nonprofit organization that deals with environmental and development issues, says such global initiatives often give “inadequate consideration” to the socioeconomic and cultural impacts of extending protected areas into regions likely to be used by Indigenous peoples and other local communities. Kothari adds, “This is precisely why community-led or community-centered approaches are crucial.”

In the open letter critiquing the Thirty by Thirty paper, Kothari, West, and others argue that the report relies heavily on scholars based in wealthier nations. They write that it “ignores decades of research and experience on the social impacts of conservation” and that the draft report reads “like a proposal for a new model of colonialism.”

CURIOUS FEBURARY 2021

The working paper authors disagree that their document ignores the social costs of conservation. Anthony Waldron, the University of Cambridge–based biodiversity finance consultant who led work on the report, counters that the draft paper contains numerous warnings about the importance of respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples and other local communities.

Waldron says that he and his co-authors “look forward to engaging even more strongly with those questions in our next revision of the working paper.”

Some of his co-authors, however, worry that critiques could harm conservation efforts by playing into the hands of those that oppose them. Other co-authors felt the open letter misguidedly critiqued what amounts to an unpublished work in progress. The open letter, these authors claim, implies that the paper is making recommendations regarding the type, location, or arrangement of new conservation areas. But the scientific working paper does not go that far.

Eduardo Brondizio is a Brazil-born environmental anthropologist based at Indiana University Bloomington who contributed to the working paper with Waldron. He argues that there has been progress in recent decades in conservation actions recognizing that the land and resource rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities are foundational to environmental protection.

In the past two to three decades, Brondizio says, collaborations among Indigenous people, governments, and conservation organizations have produced “important advances in both nature conservation and land rights.” What some readers of the working paper may not understand, he contends, is that the Thirty by Thirty plan is part of international negotiations that build on previous intergovernmental agreements, some of which are rooted in the conservation efforts of Indigenous peoples and other local communities.

Brondizio adds that the working paper is already being revised to give greater emphasis to these issues and to highlight that conservation must be a process that is, he says, “bottom-up, respectful of local rights and resource uses, and co produced locally” while also created within larger-scale political and environmental efforts.

In the meantime, the Thirty by Thirty plan continues to gain international momentum. If it receives global buy-in at the U.N. biodiversity summit scheduled to take place in China this May, it may set the pace of global biodiversity conservation for the coming decade.

SPECIAL TOPIC: WOMEN IN PRIMATOLOGY: MEET “THE TRIMATES”

While many STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields have traditionally been, and continue to be, dominated by men, primatology has a long history of significant research conducted by women. This is due, in part, to the fact that three of the most well-known primatologists are women, making it clear that this is a field in which women can excel. In the early 1960s, British paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey (see Chapters 9 and 10 for more about Louis Leakey’s work) was looking for students to study the great apes in hopes of shedding light on the behavior of our early ancestors. He chose Jane Goodall (Figure 6.23a) to study chimpanzees, Dian Fossey (Figure 6.23b) to study mountain gorillas, and Birute Galdikas (Figure 6.23c) to study orangutans. These three women, sometimes referred to as Leakey’s “Trimates,” have transformed our understanding of ape (and primate) behavior through their work.

Arriving at the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania in 1960, Jane Goodall (Figure 6.23a) was the first scientist to conduct a long-term study of wild nonhuman primates. Until then, most field studies lasted less than a year. By 1961, she had made two astounding observations that forced us to reconsider what differentiates humans from the rest of the primate order: She observed chimpanzees eating a colobus monkey, the first reported evidence of meat eating in our closest relatives (she later observed them hunting and killing other mammals and sharing the meat) and also discovered that chimpanzees make and use tools by stripping leaves off twigs to “fish” for termites. After several decades of study, her work has produced long term data on chimpanzee mating strategies, mother-infant bonds, and aggression within and between communities. When her study group, the Kasakela community, fissioned in the mid-1970s, she observed males of the larger community attack and kill those of the smaller one. This behavior, which Goodall compared to human warfare, is now known to be typical of wild chimpanzees and is another behavior we share with our closest relatives. In the mid-1980s, Goodall transitioned from field researcher to conservationist and activist, advocating for the humane use of nonhuman animals (Stanford 2017).

In 1967, Dian Fossey (Figure 6.23b) began her long-term study of mountain gorillas and founded the Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda. Through patience and hard work, Fossey habituated several groups of gorillas to the presence of human observers, and their research over several decades has formed the foundation of our understanding of gorilla social behavior, ecology, and life history. Gaining the gorillas’ trust was difficult as they were fearful of humans they had known only as poachers. Censuses of the Virunga gorilla population in the 1970s by Fossey and her colleagues estimated a population of fewer than 300. This represented a decline of 40% from the previous decade.

The primary causes of this decline were habitat loss and illegal hunting. Fossey’s advocacy for mountain gorilla conservation kicked into high gear when, at the end of 1977, poachers killed her favorite gorilla, Digit, as he protected his group. A year later, poachers attacked one of her main study groups and killed several gorillas as they tried to kidnap an infant to sell to a zoo. Her efforts to publicize the killings led to the development of conservation programs that ultimately saved the mountain gorilla. By the end of the 1980s, the population had begun to recover and continues to increase. Tragically, Dian Fossey was murdered in her research cabin at Karisoke in December 1985; the case remains unsolved (Stewart 2017).

Birute Galdikas (Figure 6.23c) began her study of orangutans in Kalimantan, Borneo, in 1971 and set up a field station called Camp Leakey. Hers was the first long-term study conducted on the Bornean orangutan. Her research still continues, and over 150,000 hours of observational data have been collected by Galdikas and her colleagues, focusing on the life histories of individual orangutans. While conducting her behavioral research, Galdikas discovered that the pet trade and habitat loss were adversely affecting the orangutan population. She began working with the Indonesian government to confiscate orangutans that had been removed from the wild illegally, many of whom ended up as pets. Taking these orphaned orangutans back to Camp Leakey, Galdikas’s conservation efforts began to extend beyond advocacy and into rehabilitation and forest preservation (Bell 2017). If you would like to learn more about primate conservation, please see Appendix B.

A glimpse of North-East at the Tribes India Aadi Mahotsav, Dilli Haat

Home to more than 200 unique tribes, the North East is one of the most diverse and vibrant areas of the country. It is not surprising then that the stalls from the North-Eastern states, exhibiting a wide range of products, form the pride of place in the Tribes Aadi Mahotsav currently underway at Dilli Haat.

The North-East tribes have a rich crafts tradition of their own, which reflect their innate natural simplicity, earthiness and identity. A glimpse of this rich tradition is on display here. Be it superior Bodo weaves made of cotton or eri; the famed silk textiles, the warm cups and woven shawls from Nagaland and Manipur; or in the beautiful bamboo work from Assam, in the form of baskets, cane chairs, and pen and lamp stands, or in the rich organic natural produce which act as excellent immunity boosters such as honey, spices, and herbs; everything can be found at this national festival.

The Bodo women weavers, considered among the finest weavers in the region, are known for their resplendent weaves; while earlier limited to running fabrics and dokhona, now their product range has expanded. You can get kurtas, dresses, or stoles, shawls, wrap-around skits, tops and kurtis and other accessories. Saris made of moga silk, mekhala chador, pretty embroidered blouses from Assam; knitted caps, booties for kids, and pouches from Sikkim and Manipur are also available for sale. The tribals of the North-East still produce weaves using the older back-strap loom and you can get pretty, handcrafted vibrant bags, pillow covers, pouches made in this way. The weaves have designs clearly inspired by nature and are classy, sustainable and comfortable. Another highlight is the pottery items made in the exceptional village of Longpi by the Thankul Naga tribes of Manipur. The stalls with the grey-black pots, kettles, mugs, bowls and trays stand out in the crowd. What is exceptional about these is that they aren’t made using the potter’s wheel; instead shaping is done with the hand using some moulds.

Visitors can also get high-quality organic food products such as rice varieties, such as Joha rice from Assam; the black rice from Manipur; pulses, spices such as large cardamom from Sikkim, cinnamon from Meghalaya, the famous Lakadong turmeric from Meghalaya and the well-known Naga chilis.

Besides all this, you can taste some authentic North-eastern cuisine as well at the Aadi Vyanjan.

A visit to the Aadi Mahotsav is a good way to experience the vibrant and unique culture of the North-Eastern tribal people.

The Aadi Mahotsav- A Celebration of the Spirit of Tribal Crafts, Culture and Commerce is on at Dilli Haat, INA, New Delhi till the 15th February, 2020 from 11 am to 9 pm.

The upcoming weekend of 6th and 7th February has some interesting events, with a fashion show being organised showcasing traditional handicraft artisan Ms. Ruma Devi and renowned designer Ms. Rina Dhaka’s creations.

The Aadi Mahotsav is an annual event that was started in 2017. The festival is an attempt to familiarise people with the rich and diverse craft, culture of tribal communities across the country, at one place. However, due to the pandemic, the 2020 edition of the festival could not be held.

The fortnight-long festival features the exhibition-cum-sale of tribal handicrafts, art, paintings, fabric, jewellery and much more through 200 stalls to showcase this. About 1000 tribal artisans and artists from across the country are participating in the festival.

Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India (TRIFED) under the M/o Tribal Affairs, as the nodal agency working towards tribal empowerment, has been putting in place several initiatives that help in improving the income and livelihood of the tribal people, while preserving their way of life and tradition. The Aadi Mahotsav is one such initiative that helps enable the economic welfare of these communities and bring them closer towards mainstream development.

Visit Aadi Mahotsav and further the “Vocal for Local” movement! #BuyTribal

(Source:PIB)

New Study: 60 Percent of Primate Species Threatened With Extinction

Primates are remarkable. We’re all familiar with chimpanzees, monkeys, and ring-tailed lemurs, but have you heard of tarsiers, with their big eyes? Or Cleese’s woolly lemur, named after John Cleese? Or the fabulous red-shanked douc? What about the scary-looking red-headed bald uakari? Or did you know that primates can be as small as mice?

There are 504 species in all, which makes primates one of the largest groups of mammals. Some—those we’re most familiar with—are active during the day, but others come out only at night. Some eat fruit, others eat leaves, still others eat insects, and some hunt for meat. One species mainly eats mushrooms, and some even eat other primates.

Primates mostly live in tropical rainforests, and two-thirds of all species can be found in Brazil, Madagascar, Indonesia, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. But they can also be found in grasslands, snowy mountains, and deserts, and some even thrive in our cities.

Primates can live in solitude, in huge, complex societies, or anything in between. Some swing through the trees with such grace that they look like they’re flying, others don’t seem to move very much at all. Some sing duets. Many of them are superbly colorful. Some are beautiful; others are ugly. All of them are fascinating.

I’ve been studying primates for 20 years, and I’m still surprised and delighted by new discoveries. Like the day I saw female monkeys attack a male three times their size. Or when I learned that some primates bury themselves in the ground to hibernate. And that capuchins crush millipedes and use them as insect repellent.

Primates are also essential to tropical rainforests, pollinating trees and dispersing seeds across these vital carbon stores. They’re our closest biological relatives, and we look to them to understand our own evolution.

BAD NEWS FOR PRIMATES Over the past couple of years, I’ve been part of a global group of primatologists who have assessed the conservation status of all those 504 species. Our results were published in January in the journal Science Advances. The news is bad—primates are in dire trouble. Around 60 percent of species are threatened with extinction and 75 percent are declining in numbers. Without action, these numbers will grow and more species will disappear forever. This dismal situation is our fault. Primates are mainly threatened by losing their habitat when it is logged or converted into farms or ranches. They can also be hunted for meat or to supply the illegal trade in pets and body parts. Road construction, oil and gas extraction, mining, pollution, disease, and climate change all add to the list of threats, often in combination.

I have flown over agricultural land that has replaced tropical forests, and stood among the charred remains of what was primate habitat. I have driven along newly constructed roads and seen dead primates for sale and shopped in markets which sell bush meat. I have seen newly caught baby monkeys destined to die slowly despite the best efforts of their human carers. I have worked with rescued animals and pondered their future. I have traveled on rainforest rivers heavily but invisibly polluted by illegal mining. I have come across hunters’ camps deep in protected areas, and I have walked through silent forests, emptied of animals.

People living in these areas don’t set out to exterminate primate species. I have talked with people driven to distraction when their subsistence crops are ravaged by wildlife, including primates; with hunters who hunt to feed their family and to earn money for their children’s schooling and for medical bills; and with fisherpeople who hunt primates to feed their family when there are no fish available.

The threat to primates is a result of political uncertainty, socio-economic instability, organized crime, corruption, and policies that favor short-term profit over long-term sustainability.

It is hard to be positive when faced with human-driven extinction of our closest relatives. The situation is critical, but we, the 31 authors of the new report, led by Alejandro Estrada of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Paul A. Garber of the University of Illinois, believe it is still reversible. To prevent primate extinctions, human needs must be addressed in sustainable ways, whether that be locally (finding ways for farmers to coexist with primates who forage on their crops) or globally (halting deforestation).

PREVENTING EXTINCTION There is no single answer. Conservation policies must be adapted for each country, habitat, or species, based on the exact nature of each problem. This is a formidable task. But our hope stems from exceptional projects and extraordinary people around the world, like the Virunga rangers who risk (and lose) their lives to protect gorillas and other primates in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Fundación Pro-Conservación Primates Panameños, an organization dedicated to conserving Panama’s monkeys.

The solutions lie in global fairness and taking responsibility for the implications of our actions. We can’t ignore political and human disasters in other countries. We need to accommodate the needs of both primates and people in land-use policies, monitor primate populations, and mitigate illegal trade. Captive populations can be used to rescue species from the brink of extinction, but if their natural habitat has gone, there is no hope.

To reduce the pressure on primates and their habitats we must decrease demand for tropical hardwood, beef, palm oil, soy, rubber, minerals, and fossil fuels, and promote sustainable resources. This is not news, but we must make it unacceptable to prioritize excessive and unnecessary consumption over the persistence of other species. Every consumer decision we make has global implications. Moreover, we must understand that wild animals are not suitable pets (the clue is in the word “wild”).

Biologically, extinction is a normal phenomenon. Species evolve, and species go extinct. From time to time in Earth’s history, mass extinctions have wiped out huge numbers of species globally. However, we cannot accept that we, as one primate species, drive others to extinction when we are still able to prevent it.

Why Can’t Apes Talk?

We all know that parrots can talk. Some people may have even seen elephants, seals, or whales mimicking speech sounds. So why can’t our closest primate relatives speak like us? Our new research suggests they have the right vocal anatomy but not the brainpower to use it.

Scientists have been interested in understanding this phenomenon for centuries. Some have argued that nonhuman primates didn’t have the right-shaped body parts to make the same sounds as we do, and that human speech evolved after our speech organs changed. But comparative studies have shown that the form and function of the larynx and vocal tract is very similar across most primate species, including humans.

This suggests that the primate vocal tract is “speech ready” but that most species don’t have the neural control to make the complex sounds that comprise human speech. When reviewing the evidence in 1871, Charles Darwin wrote, “the brain has no doubt been far more important.” Along with Jeroen Smaers from Stony Brook University in New York, I have been investigating the relationship between the number of different calls that each primate species can make and the architecture of their brains. For example, Golden pottos have only ever been recorded using two different sounds, while chimpanzees and bonobos use around 40.

Our recent study, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, focused on two particular features of the brain. These were the cortical association areas that govern voluntary control over behavior, and the brainstem nuclei that are involved in the neural control of muscles responsible for vocal production. Cortical association areas are found within the neocortex and are key to the higher-order brain functions considered to be the foundation for the complex behavior of primates.

The results indicate a positive correlation between the relative size of the cortical association areas and the size of the vocal repertoire of primates. In simple terms, primates with bigger cortical association areas tended to make more sounds. But, interestingly, a primate’s vocal repertoire was not linked to the overall size of its brain, just the relative size of these specific areas.

We also found that apes have particularly large cortical association areas, as well as a bigger hypoglossal nucleus than other primates. The hypoglossal nucleus is associated with the cranial nerve that controls the muscles of the tongue. This suggests that our closest primate relatives may have finer and more voluntary control over their tongues than other primate species.

By understanding the nature of the relationship between vocal complexity and brain architecture, we hope to identify some of the key elements that underlie the evolution of complex vocal communication in our ancestors, ultimately leading to speech.

EVOLUTION OF SPEECH

The origins of speech is a topic that has long been debated. The Société de Linguistique de Paris famously banned any further inquiry into the matter in its publication pages in 1866, as it was deemed to be far too unscientific. But much progress has been made in the last few decades thanks to a wide range of evidence, such as that from studies of communication in other species, fossils and, more recently, genetics.

Research has shown that some primate species, such as vervet monkeys, use “words” to label things (what we would call semantics in human language). Some species even combine calls into simple “sentences” (what we would think of as syntax). This can tell us a lot about the early evolution of language, and the elements of language that might have already been present in our common ancestors with these species some millions of years ago.

The fossil record can also provide insight. Speech itself clearly does not fossilize, so researchers have searched for proxy evidence in the skeletal remains of extinct human relatives. For example, some researchers have argued that the position and shape of the hyoid bone (the only bone in the vocal tract) can tell us something about the origins of speech.

Similarly, others have argued that the diameter of the thoracic canal (which connects the thorax to the nervous system), or the hypoglossal canal (through which the nerves travel to the tongue), can tell us something about breathing, or speech production. And the size and shape of the tiny bones in the middle ear may be able to tell us something about speech perception. But, in general, the fossil record is simply too limited to draw any strong conclusions.

Finally, comparing genetics of humans and other species has provided insight into the origins of speech. One much discussed gene that seems to be relevant for speech is the FOXP2 gene. If this gene mutates, it leads to difficulties with learning and producing complex mouth movements, and to wide-ranging linguistic deficiencies.

It was long thought that the DNA sequence changes in the human FOXP2 gene were a unique trait related to our unique ability to use speech. But more-recent studies have shown that these mutations are also present in some extinct human relatives, and the changes in this gene (and, perhaps language itself) may be much more ancient than previously thought.

Technological developments, such as further ancient DNA sequencing of extinct species, and increased knowledge of the neurobiology of language, are certain to provide further giant leaps. But the future of this contentious and complex field will likely depend on large-scale, multidisciplinary collaboration. Comparative studies like ours, comparing traits across a range of species, were the primary tools used by Darwin. No doubt such studies will continue to provide important insights into the evolution of this incredible aspect of our behavior.

BAD NEWS FOR PRIMATES

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been part of a global group of primatologists who have assessed the conservation status of all those 504 species. Our results were published in January in the journal Science Advances.

The news is bad—primates are in dire trouble. Around 60 percent of species are threatened with extinction and 75 percent are declining in numbers. Without action, these numbers will grow and more species will disappear forever.

This dismal situation is our fault. Primates are mainly threatened by losing their habitat when it is logged or converted into farms or ranches. They can also be hunted for meat or to supply the illegal trade in pets and body parts. Road construction, oil and gas extraction, mining, pollution, disease, and climate change all add to the list of threats, often in combination.

Why Anthropology Matters

It’s the antidote to nativism, the enemy of hate—a vaccine of understanding, tolerance and compassion that can counter the rhetoric of demagogues

In 2012, both Kiplinger and Forbes ranked anthropology as the least valuable undergraduate major, unleashing a small wave of indignation as many outside the field rushed to defend the study of culture as ideal preparation for any life or career in an interconnected and globalized world. The response from professional anthropologists, confronted by both an existential challenge and public humiliation, was earnest but largely ineffective, for the voice of the discipline had been muted by a generation of self-absorption, tempered by a disregard for popular engagement that borders on contempt.

Ruth Benedict, acolyte of the great Franz Boas and in 1947 president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), reputedly said that the very purpose of anthropology was to make the world safe for human differences.

Today, such activism seems as passé as a pith helmet. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the AAA met in Washington, D.C. Four thousand anthropologists were in the nation's capital in the wake of the biggest story of culture they or the country would ever encounter. The entire gathering earned but a mention in The Washington Post, a few lines in the gossip section essentially noting that the nutcases were back in town. It was hard to know who was more remiss, the government for failing to listen to the one profession that could have answered the question on everyone’s lips—Why do they hate us —or the profession itself for failing to reach outside itself to bring its considerable insights to the attention of the nation.

Perhaps fittingly it took an outsider to remind anthropologists why anthropology matters. Charles King, professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, begins his remarkable book The Reinvention of Humanity by asking us to envision the world as it existed in the minds of our grandparents, perhaps your great-grandparents. Race, he notes, was accepted as a given, a biological fact, with lineages dividing white from Black reaching back through primordial time. Differences in customs and beliefs reflected differences in intelligence and destiny, with every culture finding its rung on an evolutionary ladder rising from the savage to the barbarian to the civilized of the Strand in London, with technological wizardry, the great achievement of the West, being the sole measure of progress and success.

Sexual and behavioral characteristics were presumed fixed. Whites were smart and industrious, Blacks physically strong but lazy, and some people were barely distinguishable from animals; as late as 1902 it was debated in parliament in Australia whether aborigines were human beings. Politics was the domain of men, charity work and the home the realm of women. Women’s suffrage only came in 1919. Immigrants were seen as a threat, even by those who had themselves only just managed to claw their way ashore. The poor were responsible for their own miseries, even as the British army reported that the height of officers recruited in 1914 was on average six inches taller than that of enlisted men, simply because of nutrition. As for the blind, deaf and dumb, the cripples, morons, Mongoloids, and the mad, they were best locked away, lobotomized and even killed to remove them from the gene pool.

The superiority of the white man was accepted with such assurance that the Oxford English Dictionary in 1911 had no entries for racism or colonialism. As recently as 1965, Carleton Coon completed a set of two books, The Origin of Races and The Living Races of Man, in which he advanced the theory that the political and technological dominance of Europeans was a natural consequence of their evolved genetic superiority. He even asserted that “racial intermixture can upset the genetic as well as the social equilibrium of a group.” Coon at the time of his retirement in 1963 was a respected professor and curator at the University of Pennsylvania. Interracial marriage remained illegal across much of the United States until 1967.

Today, not two generations on, it goes without saying that no educated person would share any of these bankrupt certitudes. By the same token, what we take for granted would be unimaginable to those who fiercely defended convictions that appear to the modern eye both transparently wrong and morally reprehensible. All of which raises a question. What was it that allowed our culture to go from zero to 60 in a generation, as women moved from the kitchen to the boardroom, people of color from the woodshed to the White House, gay men and women from the closet to the altar?

Political movements are built upon the possibility of change, possibilities brought into being by new ways of thinking. Before any of these struggles could flourish, something fundamental, some flash of insight, had to challenge and, in time, shatter the intellectual foundations that supported archaic beliefs as irrelevant to our lives today as the notions of 19th-century clergymen, certain that the earth was but 6,000 years old.

The catalyst, as Charles King reminds us, was the wisdom and scientific genius of Franz Boas and a small band of courageous scholars—Margaret Mead, Alfred Kroeber, Elsie Clews Parsons, Melville Herskovits, Edward Sapir, Robert Lowie, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston and many others— contrarians all, who came into his orbit, destined to change the world. We live today in the social landscape of their dreams. If you find it normal, for example, that an Irish boy would have an Asian girlfriend, or that a Jewish friend might find solace in the Buddhist dharma, or that a person born into a male body could self-identify as a woman, then you are a child of anthropology.

If you recognize that marriage need not exclusively imply a man and a woman, that single mothers can be good mothers, and that two men or two women can raise good families as long as there is love in the home, it’s because you’ve embraced values and intuitions inconceivable to your great-grandparents. And if you believe that wisdom may be found in all spiritual traditions, that people in all places are always dancing with new possibilities for life, that one preserves jam but not culture, then you share a vision of compassion and inclusion that represents perhaps the most sublime revelation of our species, the scientific realization that all of humanity is one interconnected and undivided whole.

Widely acknowledged as the father of American cultural anthropology, Franz Boas was the first scholar to explore in a truly open and neutral manner how human social perceptions are formed, and how members of distinct societies become conditioned to see and interpret the world. What, he asked, was the nature of knowing? Who decided what was to be known? How do seemingly random beliefs and convictions converge into this thing called culture, a term that he was the first to promote as an organizing principle, a useful point of intellectual departure.

Far ahead of his time, Boas recognized that every distinct social community, every cluster of people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet of the human legacy and its promise. Each was a product of its own history. None existed in an absolute sense; every culture was but a model of reality. We create our social realms, Boas would say, determine what we then define as being common sense, universal truths, the appropriate rules and codes of behavior. Beauty really does lie in the eye of the beholder. Manners don’t make the man; men and women invent the manners. Race and gender are cultural constructs, derived not from biology but born in the realm of ideas.

Critically, none of this implied an extreme relativism, as if every human behavior must be accepted simply because it exists. Boas never called for the elimination of judgment, only its suspension so that the very judgments we are ethically and morally obliged to make as human beings may be informed ones. Even as he graced the cover of Time magazine in 1936, a German Jew in exile from a homeland already dripping in blood, Boas railed against the cruel conceits and stupidity of scientific racism. Inspired by his time among the Inuit on Baffin Island, and later the Kwakwaka’wakw in the salmon forests of the Pacific Northwest, he informed all who would listen that the other peoples of the world were not failed attempts to be them, failed attempts to be modern. Every culture was a unique expression of the human imagination and heart. Each was a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? When asked that question, humanity responds in 7,000 different languages, voices that collectively comprise our repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species.

Boas would not live to see his insights and intuitions confirmed by hard science, let alone define the zeitgeist of a new global culture. But, 80 years on, studies of the human genome have indeed revealed the genetic endowment of humanity to be a single continuum. Race truly is a fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all descendants of common ancestors, including those who walked out of Africa some 65,000 years ago, embarking on a journey that over 40,000 years, a mere 2500 generations, carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world.

But here is the important idea. If we are all cut from the same fabric of life, then by definition we all share the same mental acuity, the same raw genius. Whether this intellectual potential is exercised through technological innovation, as has been the great achievement of the West, or through the untangling of complex threads of memory inherent in a myth, a priority of many other peoples in the world, is simply a matter of choice and orientation, adaptive insights and cultural emphasis. There is no hierarchy of progress in the history of culture, no evolutionary ladder to success. Boas and his students were right. The brilliance of scientific research, the revelations of modern genetics, has affirmed in an astonishing way both the unity of humanity and the essential wisdom of cultural relativism. Every culture really does have something to say; each deserves to be heard, just as none has a monopoly on the route to the divine.

As a scholar, Boas ranks with Einstein, Darwin and Freud as one of the four intellectual pillars of modernity. His core idea, distilled in the notion of cultural relativism, was a radical departure, as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics. Everything Boas proposed ran against orthodoxy. It was a shattering of the European mind, the sociological equivalent of the splitting of the atom. And though his research took him to esoteric realms of myth and shamanism, symbolism and the spirit, he remained grounded in the politics of racial and economic justice, the promise and potential of social change. A tireless campaigner for human rights, Boas maintained always that anthropology as a science only made sense if it was practiced in the service of a higher tolerance. “It is possible,” wrote Thomas Gossett in his 1963 book Race: The History of an Idea in America, that “Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history."

Though remembered today as the giants of the discipline, Boas and his students in their time were dismissed from jobs because of their activism; denied promotion because of their beliefs; harassed by the FBI as the subversives they truly were; and attacked in the press simply for being different. And yet they stood their ground, and because they did, as Charles King writes, “anthropology came into its own on the front lines of the great moral battle of our time… [as it] anticipated and in good measure built the intellectual foundations for the seismic social changes of the last hundred years from women’s suffrage and civil rights to sexual revolution and marriage equality.”

Were Boas to be with us today, his voice would surely resound in the public square, the media, in all the halls of power. He would never sit back in silence as fully half the languages of the world hover on the brink of extinction, implying the loss within a single generation of half of humanity’s intellectual, ecological and spiritual legacy. To those who suggest that indigenous cultures are destined to fade away, he would reply that change and technology pose no threat to culture, but power does. Cultures under threat are neither fragile nor vestigial; in every instance, they are living dynamic peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces. If human beings are the agents of cultural loss, he would note, we can surely be facilitators of cultural survival.

Anthropology matters because it allows us to look beneath the surface of things. The very existence of other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other visions of life itself, puts the lie to those in our own culture who say that we cannot change, as we know we must, the fundamental way in which we inhabit this planet. Anthropology is the antidote to nativism, the enemy of hate, a vaccine of understanding, tolerance and compassion that silences the rhetoric of demagogues, inoculating the world from the likes of the Proud Boys and Donald Trump. As the events of the last months have shown, the struggle long ago championed by Franz Boas is ongoing. Never has the voice of anthropology been more important.

But it must be spoken to be heard. With a million Uighurs in Chinese prison camps, the forests of the Penan in Sarawak laid waste, and the very homeland of the Inuit melting from beneath their lives, contemporary anthropologists must surely do better than indulging doctrinal grievance studies, seminars on intersectionality, the use of pronouns and other multiple expressions of woke orthodoxy if the discipline is to avoid the indictment of actually being the most worthless of undergraduate degrees.

48,000-Year-Old Fossils Hint at Neanderthal-Human Interbreeding

Several hominin teeth found the Paleolithic site of La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey may belong to Neanderthal-Homo sapiens hybrids, according to new research led by the Natural History Museum, London.

The thirteen permanent fully erupted teeth were excavated at the Paleolithic site of La Cotte de St Brelade in 1910 and 1911.

They were all found in the same location, on a ledge behind a hearth within the cave. “La Cotte de St Brelade is a site of huge importance and it continues to reveal stories about our ancient predecessors,” said Olga Finch, Jersey Heritage’s Curator of Archaeology.

While the La Cotte teeth have Neanderthal characteristics, several specimens lack features normally found in Neanderthals, and certain aspects of their shape are typical of anatomically modern humans. Recent dating of adjacent sediments suggested a probable age of less than 48,000 years for the fossils. This suggests they could have represented some of the youngest Neanderthal remains known.

“Given that modern humans overlapped with Neanderthals in some parts of Europe after 45,000 years ago, the unusual features of these La Cotte individuals suggest that they could have had a dual Neanderthal-modern human ancestry,” said senior author Professor Chris Stringer, a researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum, London.

“This idea of a hybrid population could be tested by the recovery of ancient DNA from the teeth, something that is now under investigation.” The La Cotte teeth were previously recorded as belonging to a single Neanderthal individual. However, Professor Stringer and colleagues found that the teeth are from at least two adult individuals who share the same distinctive features, suggesting traits prevalent in their population.

“This work offers us a glimpse of a new and intriguing population of Neanderthal people and opens the door to a new phase of discovery at the site,” said co-author Dr. Matt Pope, a researcher in the Institute of Archaeology at University College London.

“We will now work with Jersey Heritage to recover new finds and fossils from La Cotte de St Brelade, undertake a new programme analysis with our scientific colleagues, and put in place engineering to protect this very vulnerable site for the future.” “It will be a mammoth project and one to watch for those fascinated by our closest evolutionary relatives.”

(Source:http://www.sci-news.com)

Budget allocation of Rs.7524.87 Crore for the year 2021-22 is the highest ever for the Tribal Affairs Ministry :Sh R. Subrahmanyam

Allocation for Increased per unit cost of setting up EMRSs will help to improve their quality substantially

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs has been allocated Rs.7524.87 Crore in the Budget for the year 2021-22 which is an increase of 36.62 % over the previous year’s Revised Estimate of Rs. 5508 Crore. Briefing media about the budgetary provisions of the M/o Tribal Affairs in New Delhi today, Secretary, Tribal Affairs Shri R. Subrahmanyam said that there has been a steady growth in the ministry’s budget allocations over the last five years and this is the highest ever budget allocation for the Tribal Affairs Ministry.

Giving further details, Shri R. Subrahmanyam said that the overall allocation of funds for the welfare of STs has also seen a huge increase this year. Giving details, he said that in the Union Budget 2021-22, an amount of Rs. 78256.31 crore has been allocated as STC funds (Scheduled Tribes Component) of 41 ministries/departments which is more than 50% increase than the STC Budget of last financial year ,and there is a more than four fold increase in provision of STC funds over the allocation of FY 2014-15. “We will be engaging with these ministries to ensure that the amount is spent fully and well with monitorable outcomes”, the Secretary explained.

Highlighting the provisions for Eklavya Model Residential Schools in the budget, the Secretary said that there is a big bonanza in the budget for setting up of these schools with an enhanced per unit cost which will help to substantially improve the quality of these residential schools to the level of Jawahar NavodayaVidyalayas. “We are determined that every tribal block with more than 50% ST population and at least 20000 tribal persons must have an EMRS. We will improve their quality and also make them academically more successful”, Shri Subrahmanyam elaborated. A total of 740 EMRS schools will be established by the year 2022.

The Secretary also briefed media persons about various other provisions in the budget which will benefit the tribals including setting up of a Central University at Leh, reduction in margin money requirement under Stand Up India Scheme, provision for welfare of tea workers of Assam and West Bengal among others.

http://164.100.117.97/WriteReadData/userfiles Note%20for%20Secy%20TA%20on%20budget%20announcement%20edited.pdf

Budget 2021: Rs 1,731 billion gap in allocation for Dalits and tribal communities; guidelines not followed: National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights ‘Dalit Adivasi Budget Analysis 2021-22’ by the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights shows a total gap in allocation of Rs 1,128.63 billion under Schedule Caste budget and Rs 602.47 billion under Schedule Tribe budget. There is an urgent need to allocate and implement the stipulated percentage of funds, it says.

On February 1, presenting the Union Budget 2021-22 in Parliament, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said: “The government, led by the Prime Minister, stretched its resources to deliver for most vulnerable sections of our society – the poorest of the poor, the Dalits, Tribals, the elderly, the migrant workers, and our children (sic).”

She also announced the setting up of 750 Eklavya model residential schools in tribal areas. The unit cost of each such school was increased from Rs 200 million to Rs 380 million, and to Rs 480 milion for hilly and difficult areas. This, she said, “would help in creating robust infrastructure facilities for our tribal students”.

Sitharaman announced the revamping of the Post Matric Scholarship Scheme for the welfare of Scheduled Castes (Dalits) and allotted Rs 352.19 billion for six years till 2025-2026, to benefit 40 million students.

However, ‘Dalit Adivasi Budget Analysis 2021-22’, an analysis of Budget 2021 by the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, a forum working to eliminate discrimination based on caste, shows that funds allocated towards Dalits and tribal communities, which constitute 25 per cent of the country’s population, is far below the guidelines.

According to the guidelines of NITI Aayog, the allocation of funds to Schedule Castes (SCs) and Schedule Tribes (STs) should be proportionate to their share of the population. However, the allocations in Budget 2021 are far from that.

“There is a total gap in allocation of Rs 1,12,863 crore under SC Budget and Rs 60,247 crore under ST Budget. Out of the total budget allocated for SCs, only Rs 48,397 crore (4.5 per cent) has been allocated towards Targeted schemes, and for STs it Rs 27,830 Crore (2.6 per cent). Thus, most of the allocations are either notional or general in nature,” reads the document ‘Dalit Adivasi Budget Analysis 2021-22’ (see Budget For Scheduled Castes & For Scheduled Tribes -2021-22)

“Tribal people constitute more than eight per cent of India’s total population. But in Budget 2021, Rs 7524.87 crore has been allocated to the Union ministry of tribal affairs. This is about 0.216 per cent of the total budgetary allocation,” Manjeet Kaur Bal, team leader with Samarth Charitable Trust, Chhattisgarh, told Gaon Connection. Her organisation works with the state’s tribal communities.

“In Budget 2021, a number of schemes and projects have been regrouped and renamed. The same has happened with tribal schemes, which are now divided into 14 sectors. Several allocations have come down or remained unchanged,” she added.

Education of SCs and STs

The ‘Dalit Adivasi Budget Analysis 2021-22’ points out that the government announced Rs 350 billion for five years — about Rs 70 billion per year — for Post Matric Scholarship. For SCs, only Rs 38.66 billion has been allocated and for STs it is Rs 21.46 billion, which is insufficient to cater to the growing demand of students, claim activists.

According to National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights, in the Department of School Education and Literacy, out of the total allocation of Rs 94.21 billion under SCC (Schedule Caste Component) and Rs 52.97 billion under STC (Schedule Tribe Component), only four schemes have direct provisions for SCs and STs. These four schemes account only for Rs 30.41 billion for scheduled castes and Rs 17.83 billion for scheduled tribes — only 32 per cent and 33.66 per cent, respectively, of the total sub-plan allocation under the department.

Safety of SC and ST women

According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s ‘Crime in India 2019’ report, at least 10 cases of rape of Dalit women and another five rape cases of tribal women are reported in the country every day. However the allocation for the implementation of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, and the Protection of Civil Rights (PCR) Act, 1955, is a mere Rs 6,000 million.

The total allocations for Dalit women is Rs 151.16 billion and tribal women is Rs 72.05 billion, which amounts to 1.4 per cent and 0.67 per cent of the total eligible Centrally Sponsored schemes and Central Sector schemes, respectively, notes the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights. Meanwhile, for manual scavengers, an amount of Rs 1,000 million has been allocated in Budget 2021. “This is really a pittance compared to the number of people engaged in this work. It is also sad to see that the Pre Matric Scholarship for children of those engaged in unclean occupations and prone to health hazards’ has received no allocation this year as compared to Rs 25 crore [250 million] in FY 2020-21,” reads ‘Dalit Adivasi Budget Analysis 2021-22’.

Recently, the government informed the Lok Sabha that in the last five years, 340 manual scavengers have died in 19 states of the country till December 31, 2020. The highest deaths (52) were reported from Uttar Pradesh followed by Tamil Nadu (43), Delhi (36), Maharashtra (34), Gujarat (31) and Karnataka (24).

Other concerns

According to Bal, there are several other concerns of tribal communities that Budget 2021 ignored. “Tribal communities live in remote areas and are in dire need of safe drinking water sources. The government keeps talking of Jal Jeevan Mission and Har Ghar Nal, but in tribal areas, women still walk three to four kilometres daily to fetch water from jhiriya [small surface water open source]. They do not even have dug wells,” said Bal.

Apart from access to safe drinking water, tribal areas also suffer high malnutrition. “Several tribal areas still do not have anganwadi centres and malnutrition is high among children. The Budget ignores these serious issues,” complained Bal. “Almost 90 per cent kids of PVTGs [particularly vulnerable tribal groups] are out of the reach of anganwadis. Rather than opening new anganwadis in such villages, the total allocation for anganwadis has been reduced in Budget 2021,” she added. This will have a serious impact on the nutrition of tribal kids, she warned.

According to Jawed Alam Khan, senior development economist working with the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability, New Delhi, “Institutions for tribal sub-plan have been set up and several units are there at the district and block levels. But neither is there staff, nor adequate infrastructure in such units and institutions to absorb the funds allocated in budget.”

He went on to say how there was a huge gap between the aspirations and needs of the tribal communities that never reflect in the budget and official plan documents. “We never ask tribal communities what their needs are, but prepare budgets for them. Community participation in budget formulation is zero. In the present scenario of the pandemic and its impacts, the budget has not come out with anything substantial for Dalits and tribal communities,” he told Gaon Connection.

Depletion of particular brain tissue linked to chronic depression, suicide: Study

Astrocytes, a kind of supportive nerve cells, were found in much lower quantity in people who died by suicide

A common characteristic was found in the brain structure of people who died by suicide — there was a sharp fall in the density of a particular nerve cell throughout the brain. The observation was made in a report published by scientists from Douglas Mental Health University and McGill University in Canada on February 4.

The researchers took brain tissues from 10 men who were suffering from depression and died by suicide and compared it with those of 10 others who died suddenly and were never diagnosed with depressive conditions.

They found that the number of astrocytes, a type of supportive nerve cells, was much lower in brains of people who had died by suicide. Three regions of the brain that are considered to be responsible for emotion regulation — dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, dorsal caudate nucleus and mediodorsal thalamus — were the focus of the study.

The density was five times lower in the mediodorsal thalamus and caudate nucleus and half in the prefrontal cortex in the subjects who had died by suicides than those who had no psychiatric conditions till death.

Astrocytes, which look like the end of a frayed rope, belong to a category of cells called glial cells. Till a few decades ago, these cells were considered to be simply helper cells that provide nutrition and structural support to the neurons. But recent studies done on animals have underlined their active role in neurotransmission.

“Astrocytes can strongly modulate most facets of neuronal activity, including neuronal firing, neurotransmitter synthesis, neurotransmitter reuptake and synaptic transmission,” the paper noted.

The authors have pointed out that the human cerebral cortex has a larger volume and faster variety of astrocytes than that in mice. So, their role in the human brain will be much more significant.

The research also noted that depression impacted the quantity of these nerve cells rather than their structure. It, however, doesn’t establish the reason behind this depletion of astrocyte volume.

Earlier studies had also highlighted the role of astrocytes in depression. “We show here that it happens throughout the brain rather than in one specific brain region,” Liam O’Leary, one of the authors and doctoral candidate in the psychiatry department, McGill University, told Live Science, a science news website.

Because the quantity of astrocytes in the human brain plays a significant role in depression, medicines that induce growth of these cells or curb their depletion could be a probable treatment for the disease, the authors said. 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 JANUARY 2021

A Human Ancestor for the Apes?

Do we really need to consider turning everything upside down by considering the existence of a human ancestor for the apes? This suggestion definitely has the quality of blasphemy against religious doctrine. It just feels wrong and goes against our deeply held beliefs and understanding of the world.

However, this is exactly where the evidence leads.

Overall, I don’t expect that the entire anthropology community will suddenly abandon everything that has been taught for decades. However, my point is the following:

We see the spine anatomy of a hindlimb supported upright ape in Morotopithecus, Pierolapithecus, Oreopithecus. The data is compelling and extensive – and I have detailed it in technical raw data form in my book: Axial Character Seriation in Mammals, which republishes my Harvard PhD Thesis.

The underlying patterns are extracted and synthesized in my recent PLoS ONE paper “Homeotic Evolution of the Mammals, Diversification of Therian Axial Seriation and a Morphogenetic Basis for Human Origins” and in my Neurosurgical Focus article. The context in evolutionary theory is explained in my recent book “The Upright Ape: A New Origin of the Species” which has a foreword by David Pilbeam – currently Dean of Harvard College and certainly one the most knowledgeable and experienced paleoanthropologists in the world.

We have evidence of an upright hindlimb supported Orrorin based on the femur and Sahelanthropus based on the skull. There is no convincing fossil evidence at all of a non-bipdeal hominoid outside of the proconsulid group.

We have an early outgroup whose infants have innate bipedal walking (see the video Hominiform Progression). The Siamang video is interesting because of the innate bipedalism. As I point out in the video, John Fleagle has seen young siamangs of this age walk bipedally high in the canopy in Malaysia.

It is typical to say that all of this is irrelevant and misleading and should be ignored. There was a quadrupedal common ancestor for chimps and humans and the human lineage suddenly and majestically stood up about 5-6 million years ago. However, I feel that there is no a priori reason why we must ignore all of the evidence for early bipedalism. None of the skeletal evidence can ultimately distinguish between “short bursts” and long distance bipedalism as Kambiz points out in his post. My focus is on the character state and whether the crucial anatomical basis is a shared derived feature of a hominiform clade.

It can certainly be said that the siamangs only engage in bipedalism for short bursts, but that is also true of their brachiation. Similarly, the chimps and gorillas knuckle walk and the orangutans fist walk only in short bursts. However, the important point is that chimps, gorillas and orangutans seem to locomote in diagonal posture more than 90% of the time and only occasionally deploy a short burst of bipedal walking. I would argue that they have very bad spinal architecture for bipedal walking. On the other hand, hylobatids use bipedalism 100% of the time when they locomote on the ground no matter how long the burst of activity. If a hylobatid has to travel a long distance on the ground – it does not lapse into a quadurpedal gait – it just keeps walking bipedally. There is an important difference in the role of bipedalism as deployed by hylobatids and hominines as opposed to what we see in chimps, gorillas and orangutans.

This would be a morphogenetic origin for upright bipedal walking rather than an adaptive origin. Essentially, the origin of upright posture was not driven by any ecological scenario, but rather occurred suddenly as a result of a morphogenetic mutation in the Pax genes. Various descendant forms will have lived in various environments with variously optimized versions of primary upright bipedalism on large horizontal arboreal supports and on the ground.

It is certainly easier to assert that Morotopithecus was upright and hindlimb supported – based on spinal anatomy – than to prove it was primarily bipedal or a long distance walker. Gibbon Walking on a VineHowever, this is where the video showing the baby siamang learning to walk bipedally is relevant. Yes, you could argue that innate bipedalism evolved independently in parallel in hylobatids and hominines, but is also reasonable to consider that since this is so unusual, that it reflects descent from a common ancestor that had this feature. Essentially – an eight month old Morotopithecus baby would do the same thing that we see in the two descendant groups (hominines and hylobatids) – the baby would innately begin to walk bipedally as it’s primary locomotor pattern.

So – if the chimp-human split did take place 6 million years ago (as the molecular data suggests), then what do we do with Sahelanthropus which many believe was a full time upright biped but which lived 7 million years ago?

If you want a slow gradual evolution of bipedalism, you need to push the chimp human split back to say 8 million years. However, there is an alternative explanation. Upright bipedalism was already the primary means of locomotion in the common ancestor of chimps and humans – Sahelanthropus is ancestral to both lines.

What defines a “human?” I have taken the position that it is a body plan (bauplan). Most of us have accepted that early Australopithecines whose brains and skulls were chimp-like, should be considered human and not ape. When you find a fossil such as Sahelanthropus that has a “chimp-like” skull from the point of view of its face and brain, but has the skull base of a human (and presumably upright bipedal post-cranial anatomy) – how can you tell from the fossil if it’s an ape or a human?

The Hennigian cladistic approach lets us say that the isolation point between the chimp and human lineages – where hybridization became impossible – is the origin point of humans. However this means that the definition is arbitrary since ape and human would pretty much look identical at that time. Another alternative is to stick with our current definition – a hominoid whose anatomy reveals that it is primarily an upright biped is a human. I have proposed the term “hominiform” to refer to a clade of hominoids that share the Morotopithecus spinal transformation (septo-neural transposition – in which the dorso-ventral plane of the body flips from ventral to the spinal canal to a new position dorsal to the spinal canal) and the styloid process is converted into a neomorphic hominiform lumbar.Among hominiforms we have primitive “eubipedal” types (most Miocene and Pliocene fossil hominiforms, the hylobatids and the hominines) and derived “metabipedal” types (lineages of chimps, gorillas and orangutans) that have abandoned bipedalism as their primary locomotor pattern on the ground.

Sahelanthropus appears to be a human species that is representative of species in the line of ancestry to both the chimpanzees and hominines.

Funds Allocated to NGOs for Tribal Welfare

Ministry of Tribal Affairs

Funds Allocated to NGOs for Tribal Welfare

The Government has adopted a multi-pronged strategy for overall development of tribal people across the country which includes support for education, health, sanitation, water supply, skill development, livelihood, etc. Major part of infrastructure development and provision of basic amenities in tribal areas / regions in the country is carried out through various schemes / programmes of concerned Central Ministries and State Governments concerned, while the Ministry of Tribal Affairs provides additive to these initiatives by way of plugging critical gaps. A list of schemes/ programmes being implemented by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs for the welfare of the tribal people in the country including in the State of Maharashtra is given below.

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs is implementing two schemes namely 'Grant-In-Aid to Voluntary Organisation Working for the Welfare of Scheduled Tribes' and 'Strengthening Education among Scheduled Tribe Girls in Low Literacy Districts’ through Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs)/Voluntary Organisations (VOs).The details of the NGOs VOs and funds released to them under these schemes during last two years and current year are placed given below.

The Government is providing the assistance directly to beneficiaries including Scheduled Tribes (STs) through Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) under various schemes such as pension schemes- Atal Pension Yojna, Scholarship schemes, PAHAL-Direct Benefits Transfer for LPG(DBTL), PM Awas Yojna, Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM KISAN), Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY) etc.

This information was given by Minister of State for Tribal Affairs Smt. Renuka Singh Saruta in Rajya Sabha today.

‘At discussions on AI ethics, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone with a background in anthropology or sociology’

Where is the AI ethics discussion in India at the moment?

Ameen Jauhar: There is a lot to do in terms of developing our own indigenous understanding of what we mean by AI ethics. As a term, ethics has become too ubiquitous. When European or North American schools of thought talk about it, they have years of research backing up why they’re proposing certain things within their ethical framework. But for India, specifically, I don’t think we have that kind of research backing.

Abhishek Gupta: When we’re talking about bias, for instance, most discussions centre on gender and race. This is from western European and North American perspectives. Gender and race are, yes, very important. But there are far more regional differences in India. I think another problem is the stature of social sciences here. At the discussions that were happening last year on AI ethics, all of the people were sourced from IITs and IIMs. Exclusively. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone with a background in, say, anthropology or sociology.

How does that gap, not having social sciences on board, affect AI innovation?

Ameen: You need social sciences research to bring out how technology will interact with people and communities it is deployed for. Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) in law enforcement is a good example. That’s something people are voicing concern over. But nobody is talking about how different skin tones and skin textures would be designed into an algorithm in India. Or what is the database they are using? When I went to get my passport renewed, I agreed to get my picture taken, my consent was for that alone. There was no informed consent on my side to then allow this dataset to be shared with the NCRB so they could come up with FRT.

Abhishek: There are also other subtle scenarios which, I think, have a longer running fuse. Translation services, for instance, and how they are not built appropriately for a place like India. Relying on broken systems will further enhance inequities in terms of access to knowledge and core government services. 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 FEBURARY 2021

Is there work being done on the labour impact of AI?

Abhishek: People tend to think of this in binaries. A good example is call centres. A lot of tier one customer support can be automated. That said, there’s still a lot of room for those services. This is where discussions on labour impacts of AI fall apart. We’re talking about labour impact, but we don’t have proper context about our labour markets or structure, how people go through the skilling process, what are the social safety nets. It’s important to have people who are trained in social sciences. Or you’re just sitting in an AC office, thinking about worker conditions.

Ameen: In India, we are also talking about AI in courts. But fundamental to that approach is the fact that you’re not going to remove the human element from the ecosystem.

And AI applications in other sectors?

Ameen: In 2018, the AP government had entered into an agreement with Microsoft to create an algorithm that was going to predict dropout rates for students. In an objective sense, it sounds good. But as we have seen, predictive tools have their problems, especially with what kind of datasets you are putting into the algorithm to train it. So, will it put a child from a lower income background at a higher dropout risk because, historically, data is askew? It’s automation bias coming into play. Thing is, are you going to question it?

AI innovation depends on large datasets. Are privacy concerns being taken into account?

Abhishek: There, again, specific localised evidence is a problem. Everybody has an anecdote about how YouTube or Facebook ads are creepy. But where is the empirical evidence?

Ameen: I feel empirical evidence would actually show the contrary. Everybody is not against the trade-off. Privacy perceptions vary. So, it’s not just your financial information. If someone is asking what your caste or religion is, you should question it.

At the same time, my pet peeve with how AI ethics and discussions in India have been struggling is the focus on privacy and data protection. There is a very interesting model called Kingdon’s multiple streams framework, which explains why something becomes a frontrunning issue and gains policy makers’ attention. One of the elements is sustained political push. Data protection has had that since Aadhaar. For AI, it’s yet to happen.

(Source:TimesofIndia)

Experts Accidentally Discover Fossil of World’s Oldest-Known Animal

Bhimbetka Rock Shelters in Madhya Pradesh are known to be an ideal habitat for ancient humans for tens of thousands of years ago and the remarkable ancient art stands testimony to the repeated inhabitance of this site during prehistoric times. Now, in a chance discovery, researchers have spotted an extremely ancient fossil imprinted on the roof of the Auditorium Cave at this famous UNESCO site situated near Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.

The fossil is said to be belonging to the world's oldest-known animal called Dickinsonia, which lived during the Late Ediacaran period nearly 570 million years ago. This is the first such discovery of this genus’ fossil in India. The recently discovered fossil measures around 17 inches long, while other fossils discovered in different parts of the world go up to 4 feet in length. Spotting the fossil among ancient art Bhimbetka is one of the UNESCO designated world heritage sites for Paleolithic and Mesolithic cave art. The site hosts thousands of ancient arts carved on the rock, which depict hunts, battles, humans and even mythical beasts.

As per reports, two experts from the Geological Survey of India (GSI) discovered the fossil by chance. These experts, along with other international scientists, were on a sightseeing tour as part of the 36th International Geological Congress, which was scheduled in March 2020. The scientists spotted a leaf-like impression carved on the cave at eleven feet top from the Auditorium site. The imprints were found to be perfectly blended with the rock and at first, it appeared like just another prehistoric art—mostly found from this site.

The experts, however, were able to spot some peculiar differences and interpreted that it belongs to Dickinsonia. On the spot, they captured as many different pictures as they could to further analyze the carved specimen. The team used the technique of image-based 3D modelling to carefully compare the fossil with the others discovered so far. After brief analyses, they concluded that it is not just another cave art, but indeed a fossil belonging to the oldest known animal Dickinsonia.

Some experts have questioned these findings saying that it depicts just another art. However, the study states that the size, shape and surrounding rocks of the Bhimbetka pattern match well with Dickinsonia fossils. The research paper reads: “The fossils are identical with Dickinsonia tenuis from the Ediacaran Member of the Rawnsley Quartzite in South Australia, and like them also show deformation due to lateral impingement, arcuate pieces missing, and alignment.” 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 FEBURARY 2021

Uncertainties around earliest known animal

Being the oldest-known animal, Dickinsonia has puzzled scientists for a long time and their actual origin is still debated. They are regarded as one of the first sources of complex life on Earth. As per the study published in the journal Science, these are the earliest animal life ever found and they paved the way for the birth of diverse life in the Cambrian period about 541 million years ago.

These blob-like creatures with internal ridges have left their imprints in many parts of the world. These fossil imprints have been mostly found in countries like Australia, Russia, and Ukraine so far. They have a flattened, ribbed oval body, which can mainly grow up to four feet. Enigmatic blobs may have survived on the warm shallow seas as early as 570 million years ago—and were the first creatures to crawl on the seafloor.

However, there has been a consistent debate on their habitat. Some experts believe they survived mostly on the seafloor, while others state that they lived on land, like lichens. Even in this recent study, experts have emphasized that they survived well on land.

Moreover, the debate has also swirled around on exactly to which family tree do they belong. Researchers have proposed three groups, which includes fungi, protists, and animals. A wider consensus is that they are animals—based on scientific studies of its specimens—and could be an extinct genus of a basal animal. Their closest rival for the title of oldest-known animal is said to be Kimberella, an early mollusc-like animal, that dates back up to 555 million years.

CURIOUS FEBURARY 2021

Chemistry in ancient India, from Harappan to Ayurvedic period Metallurgy was intimately linked with chemistry in India. We will discuss Indian metallurgy and metal-working in a later article, focussing our attention on chemical techniques for now.

Chemical techniques in India can be traced back all the way to the Indus valley or Harappan civilisation (3rd millennium BCE). Following Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861-1944), the eminent Indian chemist of the last century and a historian of chemistry, five stages in its development in India can be recognised. They are: (i) the pre-Vedic stage upto 1500 BCE, including the Harappan period, (ii) the Vedic and the Ayurvedic period upto 700 CE, (iii) the transitional period from 700 CE to 1100 CE, (iv) the Tantric period from 700 CE to 1300 CE, and (v) the ‘Iatro-Chemical period’ from 1300 CE to 1600 CE. The dates cannot be considered definitive.

Metallurgy was intimately linked with chemistry in India. We will discuss Indian metallurgy and metal-working in a later article, focussing our attention on chemical techniques for now. Pre-Harappan Indians were acquainted with the art of making baked or burnt clay pottery as well as painting the same with two or more colours.

This implies the construction of open and closed kilns. The pottery of the Harappan culture consisted of mainly wheel made ware, turned in various shapes, sizes and colours out of the well-levigated alluvium of the Indus.

The colour and other characteristics of the wares depended upon the composition of the clay used and techniques of firing under either oxidising or reducing conditions. The Harappans also experimented with various mortars and cements made of burnt limestone, gypsum and mica, among other components. Finely crushed quartz, once fired, produced faience, a synthetic material; it was then coated with silica (perhaps fused with soda), to which copper oxide was added to give it a shiny turquoise glaze. Faience was then shaped into various ornaments and figurines.

Addition of iron oxide, manganese oxide, etc., resulted in different colours. The Harappan artisans must have had an intimate knowledge of the processing and properties of several naturally occurring chemical substances.

The craftsmen were highly skilled in the art of shaping and polishing the precious and semi-precious stones used for the production of beads. In the second stage, Rigveda (earlier than 1500 BCE) mentions many fermented drinks and methods of fermentation, apart from various metals. Soma juice from the stems of the soma plant was highly extolled and considered a divine drink. Madhu and suraa (brewed from barley grain) also find mention.

Curd or fermented milk was an important food item. Cloths were mainly made of wool and the garments were often dyed red, purple or brown. Obviously, the Vedic Indians were acquainted with the art of dyeing with certain natural vegetable colouring matters. A type of pottery, now known as ‘Painted Grey Ware’, is associated with the Vedic period. This ceramic is a thin gray deluxe ware, mostly wheel-made, well-burnt, glossy and copiously painted. Later, ‘Northern Black Polished Ware’ also came into being in the eastern part of the Gangetic plains. Also, plenty of iron objects of the later period have been found throughout India.

Glass beads dating back to the 10th century BCE have been discovered. In the succeeding centuries, the glass industry gained momentum and there were notable feats of excellence, as evidenced by the archeological finds in over 30 sites spread over India. The sites include Taxila in present Pakistan, Hastinapur, Ahichchhatra and Kopia in Uttar Pradesh, Nalanda in Bihar, Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh, Nasik and Nevasa in Maharashtra, Brahmagiri in Karnataka, and Arikamedu in Puducherry. The glass objects include beads of different colours, including gold foil ones, glass vessels in green and blue colours, flasks of agate-banded type, bangles, ear-reels, eye-beads, etc.

There is no doubt that the glassmakers were skilful in controlling the temperature of fusion, moulding, annealing, blotching and gold foiling. The chemical composition of a typical glass specimen from Kopia is as follows: silica 66.6%, alumina 7%, alkalies (Na2O) 21.7%, ferric oxide 1.6%, lime 2.4%, manganese oxide .07%, and traces of titania and magnesia. Kautilya’s Arthashaastra (3rd or 4th century BCE), a well-known text of governance and administration, has a lot of information on prevailing chemical practices. Apart from mines and minerals, it discusses the details of precious stones (pearl, ruby, beryl, etc.), and also of the preparation of fermented juices (sugarcane, jaggery, honey, jambu, jackfruit, mango, etc.) and oil extraction.

It also has classifications such as sour fruit juices, liquids, spices, vegetables, etc., based on their chemical practices. The earliest versions of the two great Ayurveda classics, Charaka Samhitaa and Sushruta Samhitaa, may date back to a few centuries before the common era. They give accounts of several minerals, metals, metallic compounds, salts and fermented beverages. More importantly, they discuss the preparation of various alkalis (kshaara). Alkalis are of three types: mild (mridu), caustic (teekshna) and average (madhyama).

They are prepared from some 25 plants that are mentioned in Sushruta Samhitaa. Hot alkaline solutions were used for treating thin sheets of metals like iron, gold or silver before incorporation into drugs. Caustic alkalis were also used for treating surgical instruments. Varahamihira’s Brihat-samhitaa (6th century CE) gives detailed information on the preparation of various perfumes and cosmetics. It also gives recipes for the preparation of glutinous material to be applied on the roofs and walls of buildings.

Neanderthal-inspired ‘minibrains’ hint at what makes modern humans special

What is it about DNA that makes the human brain “human?” Seeking to understand how our complex brains evolved, researchers have now switched a single human gene out for its Neanderthal counterpart in brain tissue grown in a lab dish. Changes to the resulting organoid reveal the role this gene may have played in ancient—and modern—brain development.

“This is amongst the first studies of its kind to investigate how specific changes in the DNA of modern humans influences brain development,” says Debra Silver, a developmental neurobiologist at Duke University who was not involved with the work. Although past work has used similar approaches to examine the differences between the brains of humans and other primates, the new work looks at an even closer relative, where differences are expected to be more subtle.

Neanderthals are archaic humans that lived from 500,000 years ago to about 11,700 years ago, interbreeding with our species, Homo sapiens, for much of that time. Their brains were about as big as ours, but anthropologists think they must have worked incredibly differently, because in those hundreds of thousands of years, Neanderthals never achieved the sophisticated technology and artistry humans have.

To explore what differences might exist, neuroscientist Alysson Muotri at the University of California (UC), San Diego, and his team first compared the genomes of modern humans with those of Neanderthals and Denisovans—another archaic human—reconstructed from excavated bones. They found 61 genes for which modern humans all had one version and the archaic humans had another.

His team then used the gene-editing tool CRISPR on stem cells derived from human skin cells to modify a gene, NOVA1, known to regulate the activity of other genes during early brain development. Switching out just one DNA base turned that gene into a Neanderthal NOVA1.

Next, the researchers grew little clusters of brain cells called organoids, with and without the Neanderthal version, and compared them. Organoids are a far cry from real brains, and those with a single Neanderthal gene can by no means be considered fully “Neanderthal” organoids, cautions Madeline Lancaster, a developmental biologist at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

Nonetheless, changing that one gene altered the organoid’s growth, appearance, and electrical activity, Muotri and his colleagues report today in Science. The modified organoid matured faster, yielding an uneven, complex surface instead of a smooth one. Its electrical activity revved up more quickly than that of its counterpart, and the connections between nerves, the synapses, depended on slightly different versions and interactions of key proteins. What’s more, the electrical impulses were not as synchronized as in the fully modern human organoid.

“It looks almost like anything they could [test] showed a difference,” says Arnold Kriegstein, a developmental neurobiologist at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine.

The results, which held up in tests using human stem cells derived from a different donor’s skin cells, “tell us their brains probably worked in a different way than [ours] do,” Muotri says.

Researchers are excited but cautious about these results. “It is amazing that by changing a single amino acid in a single protein, one creates an effect that is visible even in how the organoids look in the microscope,” says Svante Pääbo, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

But because organoids represent only the earliest stages of development, “it’s difficult to know how [the changes] would manifest in a more mature brain,” Kriegstein says.

Although they can be powerful, organoids “are a difficult tool,” adds Wolfgang Enard, an evolutionary geneticist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

They can be tricky to grow and their characteristics are often hard to replicate across batches.

But Muotri is undaunted. Now that they have the protocol nailed down, he and other UC San Diego researchers have launched a center to expand their study of archaic human gene variants. Having teased out the effects of one Neanderthal gene, they’re ready to tackle the other 60.

Sexual selection: when evolution gets intimate How could outrageously impractical plumage like the peacock’s tail possibly have evolved through natural selection? We delve into the secrets of sexual selection, a kind of evolution that initially left Charles Darwin bafﬂed…

Charles Darwin once said: “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me feel sick.” And he had a point. Have you ever looked at a male Indian Peafowl Pavo cristatus – really looked at it – and wondered how such bizarre and impractical plumage could even exist? Surely, according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, natural selection should have driven it to extinction by now.

So what’s going on here?

It wasn't until later that Darwin would work out the answer: sexual selection. Here’s how it works.

Bearing young takes a lot of energy, so in most species, the females are the picky ones. If a male evolves a trait that females find attractive, he will get more action than all the other males, and pass on his “sexy” feature to the rest of the population, regardless of whether the trait actually aids survival.

Females might find a trait attractive for several reasons. Redwings Turdus iliacus are programmed to seek out red berries on trees, so perhaps females might associate a male’s red markings with food.

Alternatively, an impractical “ornament” like a peacock’s tail can act as an honest display of a male’s fitness. If a male is still able to feed and escape predators despite this handicap, it proves he is very good at surviving. A peacock’s tail is effectively crying out: “Look at me! Only an incredibly strapping and capable male can manage to survive while dragging this ridiculous tail around. You definitely want to mate with me so you can have strapping and capable babies!”

In fact, the growth of male ornaments, such as the comb on a Red Junglefowl Gallus gallus (the ancestor of our domesticated chicken), requires large quantities of testosterone, a hormone that actually suppresses the immune system. Remaining disease-free in the face of such difficulty is the sign of a truly good constitution. And humans are not excluded from this. Studies have shown that muscular men are more prone to catching minor infections like colds than skinny men, because high testosterone suppresses the immune system.

But sexual selection needn’t have anything to do with a male’s strength. Occasionally, a female may simply evolve a random preference for something that may not even exist yet. The gene for this preference can spread through the population by pure chance, but may never come into action – unless a mutation occurs in one lucky male, which makes him the object of their desire.

This might all sound a bit mad, but believe me, it happens. Let me tell you a tale of two fish: the swordtail and the platyfish.

The Green Swordtail Xiphophorus hellerii, unsurprisingly, has a tail shaped like a sword. The Southern Platyfish Xiphophorus maculatus (an “older” species that was earlier to branch off the evolutionary tree) does not. Intriguingly though, the platyfish does have a preference for sword-shaped tails: a preference for something that doesn’t exist in its own species.

To discover this, scientists used the most cutting-edge and advanced techniques: they stuck artificial swords to male platyfish’s tails. The effect on females was impressive. When it came to sheer sex appeal, platyfish with artificial swords won hands down. This implies that a preference for sword-shaped tails was lurking around long before the sword shape ever evolved.

The ﬂamboyant "Macaroni" men's fashion style was the subject of much caricature in the 18th century

There’s no reason to think we humans are any different in this regard – but unlike animals, we are able to modify our surroundings, and ourselves, to a far greater extent. From the towering powdered wigs of the 18th century, to modern bodybuilders who spend so much time pumping iron in the gym that it gives them joint problems, we too are guilty of putting image before practicality.

But sexual ornaments, like human fashions, become outmoded. A trait that is successful with the females will spread through the whole population – but once everyone has it, it’s not special any more. That’s why new ornaments will evolve to make some males stand out from the crowd. The problem is that all the old ornaments still need to remain, as they now make up the female’s mental image of what a male should look like. And so we return to the tragic image of the peacock, weighed down by countless ostentatious ornaments, only a few of which are still even noticed by the females. No wonder Darwin felt sick.

Darwin and Race: Three Strikes, He’s Out

February is Black History Month, and this week, Friday, February 12, is Darwin Day — the birthday of Charles Darwin. It is, therefore, quite appropriate to probe and ask, What exactly did Charles Darwin — evolution’s “leading light” — believe about race? Was he a racist? Most of Darwin’s apologists say emphatically, “No!” Adrian Desmond and James Moore, for example, suggest that opposition to slavery was indeed Darwin’s “sacred cause,” and that his conviction that all humankind was linked together through common descent led to that fervent belief. Adam Gopnik in Angels and Ages (2009) states emphatically, “Racism, in any form that would have been familiar in his time or would be familiar in ours, had no place either in Darwin’s life or in Darwin’s logic.” But is this true? A careful examination of the facts suggests that when it comes to Darwin and race it’s, “Three strikes, you’re out!” Ranking Races by Intellect

First, although Darwin may indeed have opposed slavery, he did not believe in racial equality. In the Descent of Man (1871) he cited the work of his generation’s leading ethnologists — J. Barnard Davis and Paul Broca — in linking cranial capacity with racial and ethnic hierarchies. Darwin was quite clear on the matter; “science” demonstrated that craniometrics allowed for the ranking of intellect accordingly:

The belief that there exists in man some close relationship between the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties is supported by the comparison of skulls of savage and civilized races, of ancient and modern people, and by the analogy of the whole vertebrate series. Dr. J. Barnard Davis has proved [emphasis added], by many careful measurements, that the mean internal capacity of the skull in Europeans is 92.3 cubic inches; in Americans 87.5; in Asians 87.1; and in Australians only 81.9 cubic inches.

Should there be any surprise, then, that Darwin would tell the Reverend Charles Kingsley in a letter dated February 6, 1862, “It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.” Or that he would write to William Graham on July 3, 1881, “Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.” For Darwin, humans could be placed into definite racial categories with an Anglo-centric eye. Did Darwin really believe in the equality of all humankind: no. Strike one. 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 FEBURARY 2021

The “Brotherhood of Man”

Did common descent translate for Darwin into racial equality — the so-called “brotherhood of man”? Quite the contrary. For him, common descent also meant struggle for existence and so “survival of the fittest” could easily translate into racial superiority, national expansion, extermination of “inferior” peoples, and a view of human “progress” that was unmistakably racialized. Even his apologists, Desmond and Moore, are forced to admit in Darwin’s Sacred Cause (2009), “Darwin ended up calibrating human ‘rank’ no differently than the rest of his generation. After shunning talk of ‘high’ and ‘low’ in his youthful evolution notebooks, he had ceased to be unique or interesting on the subject.” For Darwin common descent meant the evolutionary ascent of “superior” ethnic and racial groups over “inferior” ones. Strike two. Darwin and Eugenics

Finally, there is Darwin’s contribution to eugenics, a horrific abuse in the name of “science” that sought to “improve” humanity by selective breeding of society’s “best” and the forced sterilization of society’s “worst” people. One of Darwin’s most persistent defenders, historian Peter Bowler, insists in Darwin Deleted (2013), that eugenics was spawned by middle class fears of a rising tide of the “unfit” in later 19th- and early 20th-century society. Furthermore, he argues, “It was eugenics that encouraged scientists to focus on heredity and recognize the potential of artificial selection, and they could have done this without the inspiration of Darwinism.” It is true that eugenics certainly had a class-based element to it, but it is also true that eugenics was also seen as a form of “racial hygiene” leading toward a “better” society. Bowler’s claim that eugenics could have been pursued without Darwin is doubtful. After all, it was Darwin’s own fascination with the domestic breeding of pigeons and livestock that formed the first chapter of his Origin of Species (1859) and this domestic breeding analogy he took to be the essence of natural selection’s creative power. Jean Gayon has argued convincingly in Darwin’s Struggle for Survival (1998) that his domestic breeding analogy was not merely a pedagogical tool or heuristic device but essential to the theory itself. But despite what Bowler argues, the link between Darwin and eugenics was made by leading eugenicists themselves, as when Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson write in Applied Eugenics (1918):

The science of eugenics is the natural result of the spread and acceptance of organic evolution, following the publication of Darwin’s work The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in 1859. It took a generation for his ideas to win the day; but then they revolutionized the intellectual life of the civilized world. Man came to realize that the course of nature is regular; that the observed sequence of events can be described in formulas which are called natural laws; he learned that he could achieve great results in plant and animal breeding by working in harmony with these laws. Then the question logically arose, “Is not man himself subject to those same laws? Can he not use his knowledge of them to improve his own species, as he has been more or less consciously improving the plants and animals that were of most value to him, for many centuries?

So it would appear that efforts to distance Darwin from the odious designs of eugenics are contradicted by the statements of eugenicists themselves. Whatever Bowler may think of the matter, it is clear that Darwin’s theory was uppermost in these social manipulators’ minds when they contemplated the “wonders” to which eugenic principles could be applied. Strike three.

By any measure, when racial equality is being discussed, Darwin is clearly out of the running.

Editor’s note: Darwinism and its legacy for racial thinking are examined in John West’s multiple award-winning documentary Human Zoos:

Dalits Who Convert to Islam or Christianity Won't Get Quota, Says Law Minister in Rajya Sabha New Delhi: Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad in response to a question in Rajya Sabha said that Dalit converting to Islam or Christianity cannot claim reservation benefits and it will also deprive the person the eligibility to contest parliamentary or Assembly election from constituencies reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC).

Prasad, in response to a question from BJP member G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, clarified that those who have adopted Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist faiths would be eligible for contesting from SC reserved seats and getting other reservation benefits. He further elaborated on the aspect of eligibility to fight an election from reserved constituencies.

Prasad added that Para 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order outlines that no person who professes a religion different from Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist religion shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste. However, the minister clarified that there was no proposal to bring in any amendment in the Representation of People Act to debar SC STs converted to either Islam or Christianity from fight polls: parliamentary or Assembly elections.

In 2015, the top court in a ruling had said that once a person ceases to be a Hindu and becomes a Christian, the socialand economic disabilities arising because of Hindu religion cease and hence it is no longer necessary to give him protection and for this reason he is deemed not to belong to a Scheduled Caste.

Prasad, in his response, made it clear that there exists a clear distinction between Dalits adopting Islam and Christianity with those choosing to adopt Hinduism.

Fossils of ‘Dickinsonia’ found at Bhimbetka

Discovery near Bhopal is of the earliest known animal about 550 million years old

Researchers have discovered three fossils of the earliest known living animal — the 550-million-year-old ‘Dickinsonia’ — on the roof of the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters, about 40 km from Bhopal.

One can identify the fossils from the white leaf-like patches with a central vertebra (central midrib) and connecting veins. While one fossil is 17 inches long, the other two are much smaller.

The new discoveries, published in a journal, Gondwana Research, can be seen right at the beginning of the ‘Auditorium Cave’, the first of such caves at Bhimbetka, a UNESCO heritage site, located about 3.5 metres above the ground.

Geological Survey of India’s Bhopal in-charge Tapan Pal, who had come to visit the site, told The Hindu that they were the only such fossils available in the country, and were similar to those seen in south Australia.

“This is further proof of the similar paleoenvironments and confirms assembly of Gondwanaland by the 550 Ma (mega annum), but not reconstructions adjusted for true polar wander,” the article says.

The five authors of the article are Gregory J. Retallack, Neffra A. Matthews, Sharad Master, Ranjit G. Khangar and Merajuddin Khan.

Living in the shadow of rebellion: India’s Gond tribe

Members of Central India’s Gond tribe find themselves caught in a decades-long conflict between armed Maoists and the police.

Reena* was a teenager when she became inspired by the speeches of a Maoist leader who lived in her small hamlet in Abujmad, located in the Narayanpur district of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

It was the late 1990s and the leader spoke of equality and women’s rights.

A new pride in being Gondi – one of the largest Indigenous groups in India – consumed her as she listened to rousing speeches about how the Gond tribe were equal to other cultures; not inferior to them as she had come to

The Naxalite-Maoist movement, which was sweeping across the region at the time and which remains a strong force today, gave her a sense of purpose and identity.

Reena had seen what she believed was the slow annihilation of her culture, along with the Gond belief system of Koya Punem. Until then, she had been ignorant of the strength and symbols of her people – Jal, Jangal, Jameen (water, forest, land).

“Since childhood, I was not conscious of our tribal identity,” says Reena. “l studied in a school where we learned about the Hindu religion and Hindu way of life. We had begun feeling that the practices of our own religion were not relevant any more. There was also a belief that tribal culture is that of ‘demons’ and, therefore, inferior.”

She became a part of the Maoist group in 1999, at the age of 14. She lived with her comrades, moving around different villages in the forests of the Bastar region for another 14 years, sharing the food that local communities could offer.

Caught in the crossfire

The Naxalite-Maoist movement has its roots in Naxalbari in the eastern state of West Bengal. In the mid-1960s, poor peasants and landless farmers in Naxalbari had begun revolting against the rich, exploitative landowners in the region. In more recent years, the movement has found support in the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which was founded in 2004 via the merger of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War (People’s War Group) and the Maoist Communist Centre of India (MCCI).

Although the uprisings at Naxalbari in the 1960s were ultimately put down, the movement spread across several federal states, including Chhattisgarh, as the struggle against what they saw as the government’s “anti-poor” policies – such as allocating mineral-rich areas to corporate organisations for development without consulting the people living in those regions – continued.

The Maoists began to spread their ideology in the district of Bastar in Chhattisgarh in 1982. Bastar remained one of the fiercest battlegrounds between the cadres and government forces for many years.

According to the home ministry’s annual report for 2018-2019, some 3,749 people have been killed in 10,660 incidents of Maoist violence across 10 Indian states since 2010. Chhattisgarh reported the highest number of casualties, with 1,370 people dead in 3,769 violent incidents.

In 2005, the Chhattisgarh government created the Salwa Judum (Gondi words meaning “Peace March”) by mobilising members of local tribes as fighters against the Maoists.

These fighters were trained by the state government in armed struggle and provided with weapons. They would vandalise the homes and shops of suspected Maoist supporters, while Maoists would kill those they suspected of being government informers.

The Salwa Judum movement, though, drew criticism from human rights observers as people found themselves caught in the crossfire between the two sides.

The numbers of casualties as a result of the struggle are sketchy. In 2008, the Indian Express reported: “Since the launch of Salwa Judum in June 2005, more than 800 people, including some 300 security personnel, have been killed by Naxalites.

Special Police Officer (SPO) deaths alone total 98 – one in 2005; 29 in 2006; 66 in 2007; and two, so far, this year. There are 23 Salwa Judum camps in Bijapur and Dantewara [Dantewada] districts of Bastar region where almost 50,000 tribals from over 600 villages have been settled.”

One of the fallouts was the mass displacement of an estimated 50,000 tribe members from Chhattisgarh to neighbouring states. Eventually, the countermovement was disbanded in 2011 on the orders of India’s Supreme Court.

Reena describes how, against this background during her childhood, the Maoist leaders would stay with people in their villages, where they would discuss issues such as education, healthcare, the price of Tendu leaves (a type of ebony tree), and politics through casual interactions as well as at village meetings.

They encouraged people to raise their voices against all kinds of oppression, such as the displacement of tribe members because of mining, the perceived apathy of the government towards water contamination by red oxide from mining, and the leasing of tribal lands and forests to corporations. The cadre members also provided informal education and basic healthcare, which the government was perceived as failing to provide.

The ones who come from the green mountains There are estimated to be more than 14 million Gondi people in India. They call themselves “Koitur”, or “the oneswho come from the green mountains”. “Gond” and “Koitur” or “Koya” are used interchangeably.

Their traditional homeland, known as Gondwana, spreads across the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and parts of Maharashtra and Odisha. They refer to themselves by different names, such as Raj-Gonds, Madia-Gonds, Khatola Gonds and Koyas, depending on where the tribes are located, although these names are, in fact, not strictly state specific. The Gondi language is said to be derived from the Dravidian language group, a family of some 70 languages spoken mainly in the south of India. However, these people are believed to be genetically Proto-Australoids – related to Australian Aboriginal people.

The Raj-Gonds ruled over some parts of the state of Madhya Pradesh in the 14th century until they fell to the Marathas from western India. Medieval texts mention the rise of Gond kingdoms in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and parts of Maharashtra and Odisha. Despite the eventual fall of the Gond kingdoms, many Gondis in the interior region remained free of the influence of new rulers. With time, however, Hinduism and modernism have had a significant influence on their culture and religious practices.

Traditional attire – usually pieces of cloth worn above the knee, together with silver and brass jewellery – is now worn only by those living deep in the forests. In the towns, and among the educated and those who are more economically comfortable, it would be difficult to identify a Gondi just by looking at their clothes. Tattoos, however, still form part of the Gondi identity. They are usually done at specific stages of life, such as coming of age, marriage or having a baby, and are believed to keep people safe from evil forces.

The Gondi people follow a pantheistic religion and their supreme deity is Parsapen, the child of supreme beings Salla and Gandra. Gondi legend has it that when Parsapen was born, so were the Gondi people, along with the universe. Each of the 750 Gond clans has its own deities, to whom shrines are built inside homes.

In the Gond religion, there is no concept of heaven and hell, but a belief that dying people join their ancestors’ spirits. Outside each village is a sacred ground where memorials to the dead are erected. Offerings of food, maize and grains are made at these memorial sites to appease the spirits of the dead. Roaming jungles, drinking from streams Through her experience of living with the poorest of her tribe in the deep forests of Bastar, after she joined the Naxalite movement, Reena says she learned how illiterate people there were being exploited by traders who bought Tendu leaves at throwaway prices and sold them on at outside markets for huge profits.

She also saw how healthcare and basic amenities were absent in these villages even though their land had been taken over by the government for mining and industrial purposes. Rivers in many areas had become polluted because of the iron ore draining out of mines into the streams, causing malnutrition and a lack of drinking water sources. For 14 years, Reena says, she roamed the jungles of Bastar, densely inhabited by tropical trees. She drank water from the streams flowing from the Abujhmar Hills and plucked fruit from trees on her way to visit remote villages in the hinterlands where people lacked basic amenities and where it was hard for the police to reach them.

“It was roaming around in these villages that I learned the Gondi language,” Reena says. While she had grown up understanding the Gondi language, she says, most people in her childhood village spoke Chhattisgarhi (similar to India’s official language Hindi) and Halbi (similar to Oriya, spoken in the eastern Odisha state).

The village she grew up in was closer to the main towns of the region and had integrated with the majority population, adopting their religious and cultural practices. This was not the case with the villages she visited further afield, however, where only the Gondi language was spoken. “People there defended the Gond identity more fiercely. “They understood no other language and no other gods than their hills.”

Reena lived in the Gondi villages inside the forests until 2014 when she started to show symptoms of heart disease. Otherwise healthy, she found herself experiencing difficulties on hill treks or walking long distances. Rejoining mainstream society meant surrendering to the police in exchange for not being prosecuted as an “insurgent”, something she and a friend did together with the mediated assistance of a human rights organisation. Charges of “insurgency” were dropped and Reena was allowed to be examined by a doctor.

The day before she surrendered to the authorities, she says, she “twisted and turned” in her thatched bed and stared at the darkness outside of her window.

“Leaving the movement was one of the toughest decisions of my life,” she says at her upper-middle-class home in New Delhi, where she now works and lives. “But I had to take it for my own wellbeing.”

She was found to have a hole in her heart and received treatment and, for the first time in years, returned to her childhood village last year. Now, aged 32, she lives with her partner in New Delhi. After several years of struggling to find a job – not easy for someone labelled as a rebel in police records – she has settled down.

Stories abound in the region of people being coerced into joining the Maoist movement, but Reena does not believe this is the case. She says no one is forced to join but acknowledges that many people are caught in the fighting between the armed movement and the Indian authorities.

The police in the Bastar region confirm that Naxalite cadres – or Naxalites, as members of the Maoist outfit are often called – can “surrender” to the authorities in the way Reena describes.

Bastar’s Inspector General Sundarraj Pattilingam told Al Jazeera: “Disenchanted local cadres have started to shun violence and have decided to join the national mainstream. Rehabilitation policy of the government provideseconomic assistance and other facilities for those surrendered Maoist cadres, who want to lead a normal, peaceful life. So far in the last five years, more than 2,458 Maoist cadres have surrendered.

“After observing the activities of these surrendered cadres for a reasonable time period, their criminal charges against them are withdrawn by adopting due legal procedures. A few of the surrendered cadres have joined the police and have immensely contributed to the anti-Naxalite operations being conducted against the left-wing extremists.”

Caught between two sides in a war

Back in the armed uprising-hit Bastar region, tribal rights activist Soni Sori, 45, is trying to get on with her life as a mother to three children, as well as continue her work as a human rights activist and advocate in Dantewada district, where there is a tense standoff between the Naxalite-Maoist movement and security forces including the state police and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF).

Her work as an activist involves helping Indigenous people reclaim the land they say has been stolen from them by the authorities, as well as fight for social justice, particularly for women. Women here complain regularly of mistreatment by the police, including wrongful arrest, rape and even shootings, but there are no official figures showing the number of such incidents. Sori says she is often accused by the authorities of having Naxal links but denies being involved with the group.

Her interests lie in women’s rights and saving forests and hills – the home of her tribe’s gods – from capitalism and a government which she sees as wanting to exploit the region’s rich mineral resources to support the country’s development. To this end, Sori and her friends organise peace marches and dharnas – peaceful, sit-in protests. They do not engage in violence, she says.

Despite this, she has been arrested many times and police officers are stationed outside her house.

Inspector General Pattilingam confirmed to Al Jazeera that Sori is currently receiving “security cover”. He also said if Sori wants the security removed, she should submit a written application.

On the other side, Naxalites continue to seek her allegiance and support for their cause, which is often bloody. Sori says she does not believe in an armed struggle because it is the common woman and man who ends up suffering the most as a result. She says she does not feel “under pressure” to join, but Naxalites have triedto “influence” her by arguing that their struggles and the enemy are the same – the government.

However, she says, the people living in this region do feel conflicted about the troubles between rebels and police forces.

While they see the injustice people here suffer because of government policy and actions,they can also be harmed by Naxalites.

Her own life has been torn apart by the fighting between rebels and the authorities

“In 2011, my father was shot at by Naxalites. He never supported Naxalites, never attended meetings – he opposed them,” she says. As the head of his village, he refused to allow armed Maoists to stay there. “Naxalites burned our home, car, jewellery, everything.”

Sori was visiting friends about 30km (19 miles) away when she received the news about her father’s shooting. For several hours, she could not return to be with him out of fear that the Naxalites might be waiting for her on the way. When she finally reached her father, he was still lying on the ground outside the family home where he had been shot. People nearby were too afraid to help him, so he lay there, wounded, for hours before Sori reached him. Thankfully, he survived

Sori, a former government school teacher, has herself had her fair share of brushes with the law. In the same year that her father was shot by Naxalites, she was arrested on charges of being a conduit for the group.

She alleges that she was sexually and mentally tortured in captivity. “They would strip me naked and make fun of my private parts. The police also shoved pebbles in my private parts. I am still living with the pain and discomfort of the torture,” she says.

Her arrest gained national attention after a letter to then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on her behalf from Human Rights Watch in New Delhi became public. The charges against her were dropped in 2013 but she lost her job as a government school teacher following her arrest and has not been able to work again because of the case.

‘Where is your God?’ Sori has continued to protest peacefully on behalf of the Gond people, regardless. In 2019, for example, she joined hundreds of tribal people, mostly from the Gond tribe, who had gathered at Bailadila in Dantewada district to protest against the granting of a mining lease. The site on which the mining was proposed was on

The Nandraj Hill, on the iron-ore-rich Bailadila range, is dedicated to Pitod Devi, wife of nature god Nandraj. The locals believe the family of Nandraj resides in the hills and protects them from the “furies” of nature.

“Where is your God? There is no temple there or statues to represent your Gods,” Sori recalls the government officials saying during the dispute.

“We don’t have temples,” she explains. “In our culture, the hill itself is holy ground. They [government and corporate representatives] could not understand the concept.

“Once, I suggested to the locals in some of the villages near the hills that we construct a boundary wall or a structure that would endorse the fact that our Gods live there. But people rejected it asking: ‘Do we have boundary walls in our homes? How can we restrict the existence of our God? Don’t ever think about it. Our Gods are free, just as we are, under the open skies. Our tribals are ready to die to protect the land of our Gods. These Gods keep our tribe safe.’”

It is disputes like these, say human rights activists, as well as the fact that once an industry is built, the locals do not benefit from it in terms of jobs or other facilities, that have driven many into the arms of the Maoist movement. Bastar-based human rights lawyer and researcher Bela Bhatia says: “Every illegality that the government allows means that the family and the community of the deceased are going to lean towards the Maoists. There is no third side to this story. Failure on the part of the government to keep its constitutional promises leads the people to join the movement.”

This trend has left its mark on the Gond tribe generally. Sori, who now lives in the town of Geedam, explains how much of the traditional music and dance during festivals in her village 30km away have stopped for fear of attracting unwanted attention from the police force who might mistake them for Naxalite gatherings. “We were very happy people and loved our songs and dances. Young people danced until the dawn during religious festivals and marriages but now it has all mellowed down. They [police] have finished our culture,” she says. “People now are so bogged down with fighting for justice for themselves and their kin that culture is now secondary to us.”

Victims of mistaken identity

A drive through the villages in Dantewada district bears out this sentiment. Almost every person here has a story to tell, either about police harassment or living under the shadow of the Naxalites. Thirty-six-year-old Baman, who lives with his mother, wife and two children in Kirandul village in Dantewada, lost his brother a couple of years ago. He alleges that the police force shot his younger brother because they suspected that he was a Naxal supporter. Baman says it was a case of mistaken identity. “He was just having lunch with us one day, when police officials dragged him out of his home and shot him in the fields. No trial, just shot dead,” Baman says. He is still seeking justice for his brother and helping people in similar situations to speak out and register complaints against such atrocities.

One family he is helping to find refuge in a neighbouring village lost their 26-year-old son because of a similar case of mistaken identity. “He had just gone to pluck Mahua flowers in the morning when police personnel, stationed in the camps in our village in Gampur [in the neighbouring Bijapur district], shot him,” says Madko Madvi, Badru’s mother.

Badru was killed in March, just before the COVID-19 lockdown was imposed, but the family have not given him a proper burial as they say they will only do so when justice is served.

“We don’t want compensation, just justice for our son,” Madvi says. “I wish he had not stayed back home and instead had joined his wife for work [as a contract labourer] in Andhra Pradesh [a neighbouring state].”

Twenty-five-year-old Kowasi Kosa is another resident of Bijapur district who we met making a pit-stop on a journey into Dantewada. He says he has not seen his brother, who was arrested in December 2019, for nearly a year. He also believes it was a case of mistaken identity – claiming that the police confused his name with a wanted Naxalite in the area.

“We have government ID cards to prove [who we are]. My brother and the other person actually have different names, but the police just wouldn’t listen. During the lockdown months, I would walk 40km to 50km just to drop fresh clothes for my brother at the jail. No meeting, no conversation. We have hired a lawyer and are still waiting to be heard.” In response to these claims and many more like them, Inspector General Pattilingam, says: “Police and security forces deployed in Bastar don’t get involved in any extrajudicial activities. They perform their functions within the prescribed legal framework. There are lot of checks and balances like magisterial inquiry, Supreme Court guidelines, NHRC monitoring, with regard to any death due to police action. In order to boost the morale of their disenchanted cadres and malign the credibility of police forces, Maoist cadres and their sympathisers level false allegations against us.

“In the last 20 years, more than 1,400 of our brave soldiers have made the supreme sacrifice by attaining martyrdom in the line of duty. On countless occasions, security forces have proved our commitment to protect and serve the native population. We would continue to do so in order to make life better and peaceful for the native population of Bastar.”

Fighting a new battle

Thousands of kilometres away from this land of green mountains, Reena is fighting a different battle – the revival of her language and culture. She is still proud of her time as a Naxalite. To her, it wasn’t about violence but about empowering her tribe to fight against state “atrocities”. It was also the phase during which she felt and experiencedthe beauties of her tribe the closest. “I wouldn’t have had it any other way,” she says thoughtfully. Her slow, sing-song tone resembles the sound of the breeze on the Tendu leaves in her beloved Bastar. At 32, she is much mellowed but her beliefs are still intact.

“My father often told us a story about a king of Bastar. Whenever he would go to foreign countries, he would claim that he eats from plates of gold every day and throws them away. I asked him, ‘How?’ My father pointed at the plates made of leaves that we were eating from and said, ‘That is our gold and the gold plates that the king was talking about,’” says Sori.

Both Sori and Reena’s struggle is to safeguard the “golden plates” from which their people eat every day.

How a single gene alteration may have separated modern humans from predecessors

Novel study used brain organoids genetically modified to mimic now-extinct

As a professor of pediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, Alysson R. Muotri, PhD, has long studied how the brain develops and what goes wrong in neurological disorders. For almost as long, he has also been curious about the evolution of the human brain -- what changed that makes us so different from preceding Neanderthals and Denisovans, our closest evolutionary relatives, now extinct?

Evolutionary studies rely heavily on two tools -- genetics and fossil analysis -- to explore how a species changes over time. But neither approach can reveal much about brain development and function because brains do not fossilize, Muotri said. There is no physical record to study.

In a study published February 11, 2021 in Science, Muotri's team catalogued the differences between the genomes of diverse modern human populations and the Neanderthals and Denisovans, who lived during the Pleistocene Epoch, approximately 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago. Mimicking an alteration they found in one gene, the researchers used stem cells to engineer "Neanderthal-ized" brain organoids. "It's fascinating to see that a single base-pair alteration in human DNA can change how the brain is wired," said Muotri, senior author of the study and director of the UC San Diego Stem Cell Program and a member of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. "We don't know exactly how and when in our evolutionary history that change occurred. But it seems to be significant, and could help explain some of our modern capabilities in social behavior, language, adaptation, creativity and use of technology."

The team initially found 61 genes that differed between modern humans and our extinct relatives. One of these altered genes -- NOVA1 -- caught Muotri's attention because it's a master gene regulator, influencing many other genes during early brain development. The researchers used CRISPR gene editing to engineer modernhumanstem cells with the Neanderthal-like mutation in NOVA1. Then they coaxed the stem cells into forming brain cells and ultimately Neanderthal-ized brain organoids.

Brain organoids are little clusters of brain cells formed by stem cells, but they aren't exactly brains (for one, theylack connections to other organ systems, such as blood vessels). Yet organoids are useful models for studyinggenetics disease development and responses to infections and therapeutic drugs. Muotri's team haseven optimized the brain organoid-building process to achieve organized electrical oscillatory waves similar to those produced by the human brain.

The Neanderthal-ized brain organoids looked very different than modern human brain organoids, even to the naked eye. They had a distinctly different shape. Peering deeper, the team found that modern and Neanderthal ized brain organoids also differ in the way their cells proliferate and how their synapses -- the connections between neurons —form. Even the proteins involved in synapses differed. And electrical impulses displayed higher activity at earlierstages, but didn't synchronize in networks in Neanderthal-ized brain organoids.

According to Muotri, the neural network changes in Neanderthal-ized brain organoids parallel the way newborn non human primates acquire new abilities more rapidly than human newborns. "This study focused on only one gene that differed between modern humans and our extinct relatives. Next we want to take a look at the other 60 genes, and what happens when each, or a combination of two or more, are altered,” Muotri said.

“We're looking forward to this new combination of stem cell biology, neuroscience and paleogenomics. The ability to apply the comparative approach of modern humans to other extinct hominins, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, using brain organoids carrying ancestral genetic variants is an entirely new field of study."

On the origin of our species Experts from the Natural History Museum, The Francis Crick Institute and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Jena have joined together to untangle the different meanings of ancestry in the evolution of our species Homo sapiens.

Most of us are fascinated by our ancestry, and by extension the ancestry of the human species. We regularly see headlines like 'New human ancestor discovered' or 'New fossil changes everything we thought about our ancestry’, and yet the meanings of words like ancestor and ancestry are rarely discussed in detail. In the new paper, published in Nature, experts review our current understanding of how modern human ancestry around the globe can be traced into the distant past, and which ancestors it passes through during our journey back in time.

Co-author researcher at the Natural History Museum Prof Chris Stringer said: "Some of our ancestors will have lived in groups or populations that can be identified in the fossil record, whereas very little will be known about others. Over the next decade, growing recognition of our complex origins should expand the geographic focus of paleoanthropological fieldwork to regions previously considered peripheral to our evolution, such as Central and West Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia."

The study identified three key phases in our ancestry that are surrounded by major questions, and which will be frontiers in coming research. From the worldwide expansion of modern humans about 40-60 thousand years ago and the last known contacts with archaic groups such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans, to an African origin of modern

The scientists argue that no specific point in time can currently be identified when modern human ancestry was confined to a limited birthplace, and that the known patterns of the first appearance of anatomical or behavioural traits that are often used to define Homo sapiens fit a range of evolutionary histories.

Co-author Pontus Skoglund from The Francis Crick Institute said: "Contrary to what many believe, neither the genetic or fossil record have so far revealed a defined time and place for the origin of our species. Such a point in time, when the majority of our ancestry was found in a small geographic region and the traits we associate with our species appeared, may not have existed. For now, it would be useful to move away from the idea of a single time and place of origin."

"Following from this, major emerging questions concern which mechanisms drove and sustained this human patchwork, with all its diverse ancestral threads, over time and space," said co-author Eleanor Scerri from the Pan African Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. "Understanding the relationship between fractured habitats and shifting human niches will undoubtedly play a key role in unravelling these questions, clarifying which demographic patterns provide a best fit with the genetic and palaeoanthropological

The success of direct genetic analyses so far highlights the importance of a wider, ancient genetic record. This will require continued technological improvements in ancient DNA (aDNA) retrieval, biomolecular screening of fragmentary fossils to find unrecognised human material, wider searches for sedimentary aDNA, and improvements in the evolutionary information provided by ancient proteins. Interdisciplinary analysis of the growing genetic, fossil and archaeological records will undoubtedly reveal many new surprises about the roots of modern human ancestry.

Malaria threw human evolution into overdrive on this African

Researchers uncover recent traces of human adaptation in the Cabo Verde islands

Malaria is an ancient scourge, but it's still leaving its mark on the human genome. And now, researchers have uncovered recent traces of adaptation to malaria in the DNA of people from Cabo Verde, an island nation off the African coast.

An archipelago of ten islands in the Atlantic Ocean some 385 miles offshore from Senegal, Cabo Verde was uninhabited until the mid-1400s, when it was colonized by Portuguese sailors who brought enslaved Africans with them and forced them to work the land.

The Africans who were forcibly brought to Cabo Verde carried a genetic mutation, which the European colonists lacked, that prevents a type of malaria parasite known as Plasmodium vivax from invading red blood cells. Among malaria parasites, Plasmodium vivax is the most widespread, putting one third of the world's population at risk.

People who subsequently inherited the protective mutation as Africans and Europeans intermingled had such a huge survival advantage that, within just 20 generations, the proportion of islanders carrying it had surged, the researchers report.

Other examples of genetic adaptation in humans are thought to have unfolded over tens to hundreds of thousands of years. But the development of malaria resistance in Cabo Verde took only 500 years.

"That is the blink of an eye on the scale of evolutionary time," said first author Iman Hamid, a Ph.D. student in assistant professor Amy Goldberg's lab at Duke University.

It is unsurprising that a gene that protects from malaria would give people who carry it an evolutionary edge, the researchers said. One of the oldest known diseases, malaria continues to claim up to a million lives each year, most of them children. The findings, published this month in the journal eLife, represent one of the speediest, most dramatic changes measured in the human genome, says a team led by Goldberg and Sandra Beleza of the University of Leicester.

The researchers analyzed DNA from 563 islanders. Using statistical methods they developed for people with mixed ancestry, they compared the island of Santiago, where malaria has always been a fact of life, with other islands of Cabo Verde, where the disease has been less prevalent.

The team found that the frequency of the protective mutation on Santiago is higher than expected today, given how much of the islanders' ancestry can be traced back to Africa versus Europe.

In other words, the chances of a person surviving and having a family thanks to their genetic code -- the strength of selection -- were so great that the protective variant spread above and beyond the contributions of the Africans who arrived on Santiago's shores. The same was not true elsewhere in the archipelago.

The team's analyses also showed that as the protective mutation spread, nearby stretches of African-like DNA hitchhiked along with it, but only on malaria-plagued Santiago and not on other Cabo Verdean islands. Together, the results suggest that what they were detecting was the result of adaptation in the recent past, in the few hundred years since the islands were settled, and not merely the lingering imprint of processes that happened long ago in Africa.

Humans are constantly evolving, but evidence of recent genetic adaptation -- during the last 10 to 100 generations -- has been hard to find. Part of the problem is that, on such short timescales, changes in gene frequencies can be hard to detect using traditional statistical methods.

But by using patterns of genetic ancestry to help reconstruct the Cabo Verdean islanders' history, the researchers were able to detect evolutionary changes that previous techniques missed.

The authors hope to extend their methods to study other populations where mass migration means migrants are exposed to different diseases and environments than they were before. “Humans are still evolving, and here we have evidence," Hamid said.

Environmental factors had a role in the evolution of human tolerance

Study suggests environmental factors had a role in the evolution of human tolerance

Environmental pressures may have led humans to become more tolerant and friendly towards each other as the need to share food and raw materials became mutually beneficial, a new study suggests. This behaviour was not an inevitable natural progression, but subject to ecological pressures, the University of York study concludes.

Humans have a remarkable capacity to care about people well outside their own kin or local group. Whilst most other animals tend to be defensive towards those in other groups our natural tolerance allows us to collaborate today on a global scale, as seen with trade or international relief efforts to provide aid for natural disasters.

Using computer simulations of many thousands of individuals gathering resources for their group and interacting with individuals from other groups, the research team attempted to establish what key evolutionary pressures may have prompted human intergroup tolerance.

The study suggests this may have begun when humans began to leave Africa and during a period of increasingly harsh and variable environments.

The study was concerned with the period 300,000 to 30,000 years ago where archaeological evidence indicated greater mobility and more frequent interactions between different groups. In particular, this is a time in which there is a movement of raw materials over much longer distances and between groups.

The researchers found that populations which shared resources were more likely to be more successful and more likely to survive harsh environments, where extinctions occur, than those populations which do not share across borders.

However, in resource rich environments sharing was less advantageous and in extremely harsh environments populations are too low for sharing to be feasible.

Penny Spikins, Professor in the Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of York, said: "That our study demonstrates the importance of tolerance to human success is perhaps surprising, especially when we often think of prehistory as a time of competition, however we have seen that in situations where people with surplus share across borders with those in need everyone benefits in the long term."

Dr Jennifer C. French, lecturer in Palaeolithic Archaeology at the University of Liverpool added: "Our study's findings also have important implications for wider debates about the increases in examples of innovation and greater rates of cultural evolution that occurred during this period.

"They help to explain previously enigmatic changes in the archaeological record between 300,000 and 30,000 years ago."

The study is published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.

Gene therapy strategy found effective in mouse model of hereditary disease TSC

Patients with tuberous sclerosis complex, a genetic disorder characterized by the growth of noncancerous tumors in multiple organs of the body, have limited treatment options. A team led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has now shown that gene therapy can effectively treat mice that express one of the mutated genes that cause the disease. The research is published in Science Advances.

The gene, called TSC2, codes for tuberin, a protein that acts to inhibit cell growth and proliferation. When mutations occur in TSC2, resulting in a lack of tuberin in cells, the cells enlarge and multiply, leading to the formation of tumors.

To restore the function of TSC2 and tuberin in a mouse model of tuberous sclerosis complex, researchers developed a form of gene therapy using an adeno-associated virus vector carrying the DNA that codes for a condensed form of tuberin (which fits within the vector's carrying capacity) and functions like the normal full-length tuberin protein.

Mice with tuberous sclerosis complex had a shortened life span of about 58 days on average, and they showed signs of brain abnormalities consistent with those that are often seen in patients with the disease. When the mice were injected intravenously with the gene therapy treatment, however, their average survival was extended to 462 days, and their brains showed reduced signs of damage.

“Current treatments for tuberous sclerosis complex include surgery and/or lifelong treatment with drugs that cause immune suppression and potentially compromise early brain development. Therefore, there is a clear need to identify other therapeutic approaches for this disease," says co-lead author Shilpa Prabhakar, an investigator in the MGH departments of Neurology and Radiology. "Adeno-associated virus vectors have been used widely in clinical trials for many hereditary diseases with little to no toxicity, long-term action in nondividing cells, and improvement in symptoms," adds Prabhakar. She notes that benefits can be seen after a single injection, and some forms of the viral vector can efficiently enter the brain and peripheral organs after intravenous injection.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a limited number of gene therapy products for use in humans, and the results from this study suggest that clinical trials are warranted to test the strategy's potential in patients with tuberous sclerosis complex.

New way to deliver DNA-based therapies for diseases Polymers could be used to create less expensive gene therapies or vaccines for diseases University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers in the Department of Chemistry have created a new polymer to deliver DNA and RNA-based therapies for diseases. For the first time in the industry, the researchers were able to see exactly how polymers interact with human cells when delivering medicines into the body. This discovery opens the door for more widespread use of polymers in applications like gene therapy and vaccine development.

The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Gene therapy involves altering the genes inside the body's cells to treat or cure diseases. It requires a carrier that "packages" the DNA to deliver it into the cell -- oftentimes, a virus is used as a carrier. Packaging of nucleic acids is also used in vaccines, such as the recently developed messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccine, which is enclosed in a lipid.

The research team is led by chemistry professor Theresa Reineke and associate professor Renee Frontiera. Reineke’s lab synthesizes polymers, which are long-chain molecules that make up plastics, to use for packaging the nucleic acids instead.

"It's kind of like ordering something from Amazon, and it's shipped in a box," Reineke explained. "Things get broken if they're not delivered in a package. That's basically what we're doing here but on a nano-level. We're taking these really sensitive RNA and DNA cargo that are susceptible to enzymatic degradation, that won't get to their target unless you have something to protect them."

The researchers designed the copolymer using quinine, a naturally occurring substance used in tonic water, and 2 hydroxyethyl acrylate (HEA), which makes the material soluble and is used in a variety of personal care and medical materials. Because quinine is fluorescent, the research team was able to track the DNA package throughout the body and into the cells using Raman spectroscopy, a chemical imaging technique.

"We've discovered a new packaging tool with this natural product that's important for all of these high-flying, important fields like gene therapy and vaccines," said Reineke, who is also a Distinguished McKnight University Professor. "And, it works in a variety of cell-types. On top of that, it's got all of these cool features -- it's fluorescent, we can track it, it's Raman active, and that allowed us to understand a lot of fundamentals about these packaging systems that were impossible to probe before we incorporated this natural product."

Polymer-based drug delivery is significantly cheaper than using viruses, especially for gene therapy, which can cost up to $2 million for a single injection. However, the main barrier preventing widespread polymer use was that scientists didn't know a lot about how the polymer package actually interacts with cells in the body.

This research helps clear up that uncertainty. Frontiera's lab specializes in chemical imaging. Using Raman spectroscopy, they discovered that a cell's own proteins play a key role in unpacking the nucleic acid cargo once the polymer carrier enters the cell.

"It's very satisfying to know how this is actually happening, what the process of delivery is, and to actually see that in real-time," Frontiera said.

“A key point is that these polymers also work very well. For all the beneficial attributes, they're also incredibly effective at getting the payload into cells, and we were able to tell why, which doesn't always happen in this field."

Gene therapy: Novel targets for congenital blindness

Retinitis pigmentosa is the most prevalent form of congenital blindness. Using a retinitis pigmentosa mouse model, researchers from Ludwig-Maximilians Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have now shown that targeted activation of genes of similar function can compensate for the primary defect.

A research team led by PD Dr. Elvir Becirovic at the Department of Pharmacology of Natural Sciences (Head: Prof. Dr. Martin Biel) has developed a new strategy in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Stylianos Michalakis of the Opthalmology Clinic in the LMU Medical Center. This approach is designed to compensate for the causative hereditary defect by activating genes with similar functions that are normally repressed in the affected tissues, and utilizes a variant of the CRISPR/Cas9 technology that was first described in 2015. In the online journal Science Advances, the team describes the first successful application of this method in the context of gene therapy. Currently, two strategies are being used in the development of gene therapies: In the context of gene supplementation, an attempt is made to replace the defective gene with an intact version. However, this is currently only possible for relatively small genes.

The second strategy aims to correct disease-causing mutations, but this usually has to be tailored to each individual mutation. In view of the high effort and the associated development costs, a broad application of this strategy is therefore not possible. "To overcome these limitations, we have developed a new strategy," says Becirovic.

"To do so, we delivered a system called Cas9-VPR into the affected retinal cells." The Cas9-VPR system is a derivative of the CRISPR/Cas9 technology that is widely used for the targeted modification of genes. Akin to the classical CRISPR/Cas9 system, Cas9-VPR utilizes the same targeting principle to guide an activating protein to the particular gene of interest. Becirovic and colleagues made use of a mouse model for retinitis pigmentosa to test the activation approach. These mice lack the light-sensitive rhodopsin protein that is normally expressed exclusively in the rod cells of the retina, which are required for dim light and night vision. The researchers delivered the Cas9-VPR system into the rod cells with the aid of a harmless virus. By introducing Cas9-VPR into the rods of the mice, the scientists switched on genes closely related to the rhodopsin gene, which are normally active in the cones responsible for color and daylight vision. "In this way, we were able to compensate for the lack of rhodopsin function in the rod cells, to attenuate the rate of retinal degeneration and improve retinal function without detectable side-effects," says Becirovic.

The authors believe that a similar strategy can be applied to a wide range of genes and genetic diseases, and offers a number of significant advantages over existing strategies. "Given the growing importance of gene therapy and its potential benefits for patients, we are convinced that our approach could soon be used in initial clinical feasibility studies," says Becirovic.

Safer CRISPR gene editing with fewer off-target hits

The CRISPR system is a powerful tool for the targeted editing of genomes, with significant therapeutic potential, but runs the risk of inappropriately editing "off-target" sites. However, a new study publishing July 9, 2020 in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Feng Gu of Wenzhou Medical University, China, and colleagues, shows that mutating the enzyme at the heart of the CRISPR gene editing system can improve its fidelity. The results may provide a therapeutically safer strategy for gene editing than using the unmodified enzyme system.

The CRISPR system employs an enzyme called Cas9 to cleave DNA. Cas9 will cut almost any DNA sequence. Its specificity comes from its interaction with a "guide RNA" (gRNA) whose sequence allows it to bind with the target DNA through base-pair matching. Once it does, the enzyme is activated and the DNA is cut.

The CRISPR system is found in multiple bacterial species; among those commonly used in research, that from Staphylococcus aureus has the advantage of size -- unlike some others, its gene is small enough to fit inside a versatile and harmless gene therapy vector called adeno-associated virus, making it attractive for therapeutic purposes.

A key limitation of any of the CRISPR systems, including that from S. aureus, is off-target cleavage of DNA. A guide RNA may bind weakly to a site whose sequence is a close but imperfect match; depending on how close the match is and how tightly the enzyme interacts with the paired gRNA-DNA complex, the enzyme may become activated and cut the DNA wrongly, with potentially harmful consequences.

To explore whether the S. aureus Cas9 could be modified to cleave with higher fidelity to the intended target, the authors generated a range of novel Cas9 mutants and tested their ability to discriminate against imperfect matches while retaining high activity at the intended site. They found one such mutant, which distinguished and rejected single base-pair mismatches between gRNA and DNA, regardless of the target, increasing the fidelity up to 93-fold over the original enzyme.

They showed that the mutation affected part of the recognition domain, the region of the enzyme that coordinates contacts between the enzyme and the gRNA-DNA complex. The mutation had the likely effect of weakening those contacts, thus ensuring that only the strongest pairing -- which would come from a perfect sequence match -- would trigger enzyme activity.

"Avoidance of off-target cleavage is a crucial challenge for development of CRISPR for medical interventions, such as correcting genetic diseases or targeting cancer cells," Gu said. "Our results point the way to developing potentially safer gene therapy strategies."

Gene therapy: Novel targets for congenital blindness

As many as 40,000 people in Germany suffer from retinitis pigmentosa. This hereditary disorder is characterized by loss of photoreceptors in the retina, and can be caused by mutations in many different genes. Depending on the nature of the underlying genetic defect, the severity of the condition can vary between night blindness and progressive visual field loss that can ultimately result in total blindness. The first gene therapies for the disease have recently been approved. However, these approaches have certain disadvantages, which limit their range of application. A research team led by PD Dr. Elvir Becirovic at the Department of Pharmacology of Natural Sciences (Head: Prof. Dr. Martin Biel) has developed a new strategy in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Stylianos Michalakis of the Opthalmology Clinic in the LMU Medical Center. This approach is designed to compensate for the causative hereditary defect by activating genes with similar functions that are normally repressed in the affected tissues, and utilizes a variant of the CRISPR Cas9 technology that was first described in 2015. In the online journal Science Advances, the team describes the first successful application of this method in the context of gene therapy.

Currently, two strategies are being used in the development of gene therapies: In the context of gene supplementation, an attempt is made to replace the defective gene with an intact version. However, this is currently only possible for relatively small genes. The second strategy aims to correct disease-causing mutations, but this usually has to be tailored to each individual mutation. In view of the high effort and the associated development costs, a broad application of this strategy is therefore not possible. "To overcome these limitations, we have developed a new strategy," says Becirovic.

Many genes in the human genome fall into families, whose members fulfill similar functions in different cell types, or are activated at different stages during the differentiation of a particular cell type. "Our idea was to compensate for the mutant gene's loss of function by specifically activating genes that have a similar function but are normally not expressed in retinal cells," says Becirovic. "To do so, we delivered a system called Cas9-VPR into the affected retinal cells." The Cas9-VPR system is a derivative of the CRISPR/Cas9 technology that is widely used for the targeted modification of genes. Akin to the classical CRISPR/Cas9 system, Cas9-VPR utilizes the same targeting principle to guide an activating protein to the particular gene of interest.

Becirovic and colleagues made use of a mouse model for retinitis pigmentosa to test the activation approach. These mice lack the light-sensitive rhodopsin protein that is normally expressed exclusively in the rod cells of the retina, which are required for dim light and night vision. The researchers delivered the Cas9-VPR system into the rod cells with the aid of a harmless virus. By introducing Cas9-VPR into the rods of the mice, the scientists switched on genes closely related to the rhodopsin gene, which are normally active in the cones responsible for color and daylight vision. "In this way, we were able to compensate for the lack of rhodopsin function in the rod cells, to attenuate the rate of retinal degeneration and improve retinal function without detectable side-effects," says Becirovic.

Development of new stem cell type may lead to advances in regenerative medicine

A team led by UT Southwestern has derived a new "intermediate" embryonic stem cell type from multiple species that can contribute to chimeras and create precursors to sperm and eggs in a culture dish. The findings, published online this week in Cell Stem Cell, could lead to a host of advances in basic biology, regenerative medicine, and reproductive technology.

Cells in early embryos have a range of distinct pluripotency programs, all of which endow the cells to create various tissue types in the body, explains study leader Jun Wu, Ph.D., assistant professor of molecular biology. A wealth of previous research has focused on developing and characterizing "naïve" embryonic stem cells (those about four days post-fertilization in mice) and "primed" epiblast stem cells (about seven days post-fertilization in mice, shortly after the embryo implants into the uterus).

However, says Wu, there's been little progress in deriving and characterizing pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) that exist between these two stages -- largely because researchers have not been able to develop a paradigm for maintaining cells in this intermediate state. Cells in this state have been thought to possess unique properties: the ability to contribute to intraspecies chimeras (organisms that contain a mix of cells from different individuals of the same species) or interspecies chimeras (organisms that contain a mix of cells from different species) and the ability to differentiate into primordial germ cells in culture, the precursors to sperm and eggs.

For this study, the researchers successfully created intermediate PSCs, which they named "XPSCs" from mice, horses, and humans.

Wu says that these results could eventually lead to an array of advances in both basic and applied research. For example, looking at gene activity in XPSCs from different species and interspecies chimeras could help researchers understand which signatures have been conserved through evolution. Examining the communication between cells inchimeras may help scientists identify strategies that could be used to accelerate the development of tissues and organs from stem cells used for transplantation. And using chimera-derived primordial germ cells to create sperm and eggs could aid in preserving endangered animal species and advancing infertility treatments.

“These XPSCs have enormous potential. Our study helps open the door to each of these possibilities," says Wu, who is a Virginia Murchison Linthicum Scholar in Medical Research. Wu notes that developing XPSCs presented a special challenge because the conditions that keep naïve PSCs in a stable state are exactly the opposite from those that stabilize primed PSCs. While culture conditions for naïve PSCs must activate a WNT cell-signaling pathway and suppress the FGF and TGF-ß pathways, the conditions to maintain primed PSCs must suppress WNT and activate FGF and TGF-ß. Aiming for the preferred environment for XPSC derivation, Wu and his colleagues placed cells from early mouse embryos into cultures containing chemicals and growth factors that activate all three pathways. These lab-grown cells were extremely stable in culture and able to multiply without developing any further for approximately two years.

Additional experiments showed that these cells met the expectations researchers have long strived to meet of contributing to chimeras and directly differentiating into primordial germ cells. Wu and his colleagues made intraspecies chimeras of mice using cells derived from mice with different coat colors by injecting the cells into early mouse embryos. They also tracked the contributions of the XPSCs by tagging the cells with a fluorescent protein and Wu's team made interspecies chimeras by injecting horse XPSCs into early mouse embryos and allowing the embryos to develop in mice for several days. Surprisingly, although horses have a comparatively long gestational period — nearly a year -- the researchers found that these foreign cells had contributed to mouse organ development, indicating that signals from the mouse cells determine organ developmental timelines.

Like XPSCs from other species, the human cells showed that they were capable of differentiating into a variety of tissues if culture conditions allowed them to progress in development, as well as directly form primordial germ cells in a dish.

Neanderthal genes that make susceptible to Covid-19, also protect

Last year, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, had published a report that showed major genetic susceptibility to coronavirus in people who have inherited genes from Neanderthals.

Now, the same researchers carried out another study that showed Neandertals also contributed a protective variant.

The study, published in the journal PNAS, stated that half of all people outside Africa carry a Neanderthal gene variant that reduces the risk of needing intensive care for Covid-19 by 20 per cent. According to researchers, a major genetic risk factor is located on chromosome 3 and dramatically increases the risk of respiratory failure and even death due to coronavirus.

Hugo Zeberg and Svante Pääbo at Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology had found last year that this risk variant is inherited from Neandertals. Now the research duo demonstrated that the Neandertals also contributed a protective variant to present-day people. They found that a region on chromosome 12 that reduces the risk of needing intensive care upon infection with the virus by 20 per cent is inherited from Neandertals.

The genes in this region are called OAS and regulate the activity of an enzyme that breaks down viral genomes. The Neanderthal variant of the enzyme seems to do this more efficiently, the study noted.

“This shows that our heritage from Neandertals is a double-edged sword when it comes to our response to SARS CoV-2. They have given us variants that we can both curse and thank them for,” says Hugo Zeberg, researcher at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The study also showed that the protective variant from Neandertals increased in frequency since the last Ice Age so that it is now carried by about half of all people outside Africa.

“It is striking that this Neandertal gene variant has become so common in many parts of the world. This suggests that it has been favorable in the past,” stated Svante Pääbo, director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.”

He added, “It is also striking that two genetic variants inherited from Neandertals influence Covid-19 outcomes in opposite directions. Their immune system obviously influences us in both positive and negative ways today.”

Tribes India ‘Aadi Mahotsav’ Comes to a Successful Close

The Tribes India ‘Aadi Mahotsav’ held from 1-15 February, 2021 at Dilli Haat, INA, New Delhi came to a successful close last evening. The closing ceremony was presided by Shri Ramesh Chand Meena, Chairman, TRIFED in the presence of Shri Krishnadhan Das, Chairman, Tripura MARKFED and Shri Pravir Krishna, Managing Director, TRIFED.

The closing programme began with the visit of dignitaries to the stalls of the festival. In his welcome address, Shri Krishna thanked the dignitaries for their visit and the residents of Delhi for making this event a grand success. He was confident that the heavy footfall and the phenomenal sales registered despite the times we live in, would definitely go a long way in helping the tribal artisans and dwellers overcome the setback that they faced during the lockdown.

The short ceremony which also saw the felicitation of the top three tribal artisans categorized in different groups such as textiles, gifts and assortments, organic products, cane and bamboo, jewellery, metal, paintings, pottery, and tribal cuisine based on their sales and popularity with the audiences. The artisans/ organisations felicitated were given a memento.

The fortnight-long National Tribal Festival saw the participation of thousands of tribal artisans, chefs, artists and cultural troupes from 25 states across the country. The rich tribal culture as evident in the form of raretribal handicrafts, handloom and natural products, tribal cuisines were on display in about 200 stalls.

The Aadi Mahotsav succeeded in winning the hearts of the residents of Delhi as witnessed by the heavy footfall over the past 15 days and the sales registered.

As reported by TRIFED , perhaps making up from the losses registered due to the lockdown, the Aadi Mahotsav has seen the tribal artisans register approximately Rs 4 crore in direct sales over the past fortnight. Moreover, a purchase order worth Rs 8 crores has been placed by TRIFED; leading to a total of approximately Rs 12 crores in business transactions for the tribals participating in this festival. The Aadi Mahotsav has truly been a celebration of the spirit of tribal life – crafts, culture and cuisine.

Scientists study how a single gene alteration may have separated

As a professor of pediatrics and cellular and molecular medicine at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, Alysson R. Muotri, PhD, has long studied how the brain develops and what goes wrong in neurological disorders. For almost as long, he has also been curious about the evolution of the human brain -; what changed that makes us so different from preceding Neanderthals and Denisovans, our closest evolutionary relatives, now extinct?

Evolutionary studies rely heavily on two tools -; genetics and fossil analysis -; to explore how a species changes over time. But neither approach can reveal much about brain development and function because brains do not fossilize, Muotri said. There is no physical record to study.

So Muotri decided to try stem cells, a tool not often applied in evolutionary reconstructions. Stem cells, the self renewing precursors of other cell types, can be used to build brain organoids -; "mini brains" in a laboratory dish. Muotri and colleagues have pioneered the use of stem cells to compare humans to other primates, such as chimpanzees and bonobos, but until now a comparison with extinct species was not thought possible. In a study published February 11, 2021 in Science, Muotri's team cataloged the differences between the genomes of diverse modern human populations and the Neanderthals and Denisovans, who lived during the Pleistocene Epoch, approximately 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago. Mimicking an alteration they found in one gene, the researchers used stem cells to engineer "Neanderthal-ized" brain organoids.

It's fascinating to see that a single base-pair alteration in human DNA can change how the brain is wired. We don't know exactly how and when in our evolutionary history that change occurred. But it seems to be significant, and could help explain some of our modern capabilities in social behavior, language, adaptation, creativity and use of technology."

Alysson R. Muotri, Study Senior Author, Director, UC San Diego Stem Cell Program and Member, Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine

The team initially found 61 genes that differed between modern humans and our extinct relatives. One of these altered genes -; NOVA1 -; caught Muotri's attention because it's a master gene regulator, influencing many other genes during early brain development. The researchers used CRISPR gene editing to engineer modern human stem cells with the Neanderthal-like mutation in NOVA1. Then they coaxed the stem cells into forming brain cells and ultimately Neanderthal-ized brain organoids. Brain organoids are little clusters of brain cells formed by stem cells, but they aren't exactly brains (for one, they lack connections to other organ systems, such as blood vessels). Yet organoids are useful models for studying genetics, disease development and responses to infections and therapeutic drugs. Muotri's team has even optimized the brain organoid-building process to achieve organized electrical oscillatory waves similar to those produced by the human brain.

The Neanderthal-ized brain organoids looked very different than modern human brain organoids, even to the naked eye. They had a distinctly different shape. Peering deeper, the team found that modern and Neanderthal-ized brain organoids also differ in the way their cells proliferate and how their synapses -; the connections between neurons -; form. Even the proteins involved in synapses differed. And electrical impulses displayed higher activity at earlier stages, but didn't synchronize in networks in Neanderthal-ized brain organoids. According to Muotri, the neural network changes in Neanderthal-ized brain organoids parallel the way newborn nonhuman primates acquire new abilities more rapidly than human newborns.

"This study focused on only one gene that differed between modern humans and our extinct relatives. Next we want to take a look at the other 60 genes, and what happens when each, or a combination of two or more, are altered,” Muotri said

"We're looking forward to this new combination of stem cell biology, neuroscience and paleogenomics. The ability to apply the comparative approach of modern humans to other extinct hominins, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, using brain organoids carrying ancestral genetic variants is an entirely new field of study."

To continue this work, Muotri has teamed up with Katerina Semendeferi, professor of anthropology at UC San Diego and study co-author, to co-direct the new UC San Diego Archealization Center, or ArchC.

"We will merge and integrate this amazing stem cell work with anatomic comparisons from several species and neurological conditions to create downstream hypotheses about brain function of our extinct relatives,” Semendeferi said. "This neuro-archealization approach will complement efforts to understand the mind of our ancestors and close relatives, like the Neanderthals."

A body burned inside a hut 20,000 years ago signaled shifting views of death Linking the dead with human-built structures may have brought the dead and living closer

Middle Eastern hunter-gatherers changed their relationship with the dead nearly 20,000 years ago. Clues to that spiritual shift come from the discovery of an ancient woman’s fiery burial in a hut at a seasonal campsite.

Burials of people in houses or other structures, as well as cremations, are thought to have originated in Neolithic period farming villages in and around the Middle East no earlier than about 10,000 years ago. But those treatments of the dead appear to have had roots in long-standing practices of hunter-gatherers, says a team led by archaeologists Lisa Maher of the University of California, Berkeley and Danielle Macdonald of the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.

The new find suggests that people started to associate the dead with particular structures at a time when groups of hunter-gatherers were camping for part of each year at a hunting and trading site in eastern Jordan. A budding desire to link the dead with human-built structures possibly reflected a belief that by doing so the dead would remain close to the living, the scientists report in the March Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

Excavations at the ancient site, now called Kharaneh IV, in 2016 revealed a woman’s partial, charred skeleton on the floor of a hut that had been lit on fire. Her body had been placed on its side with knees flexed. Analyses of charring patterns on her bones and burned sediment surrounding her remains suggest the woman’s body was placed inside the hut just before the brushwood structure was intentionally burned. Charcoal- and ash-rich sediment borders where the hut once stood, a sign that the fire was confined to the structure. The hut’s walls apparently fell inward after being set ablaze.

Radiocarbon-dated samples from the earthen floor near the woman’s remains date her interment to around 19,200 years ago.

Several Neolithic sites contain examples of the dead having been placed in or under burned houses, as well as instances of bodies that were intentionally burned after death, says archaeologist Peter Akkermans of Leiden University, who did not participate in the new research. “The work at Kharaneh IV now dates these practices to more than 10,000 years earlier, in wholly different cultural settings of hunter-gatherer communities versus Neolithic farming villages.”

Other social developments traditionally attributed to Neolithic farmers, including year-round settlements (SN: 8/30/10) and pottery making (SN: 6/28/12), first appeared among hunter-gatherers.

Remains of at least three other huts have been found at Kharaneh IV, including one with graves beneath the floor that contained two human skeletons (SN: 2/22/12). That roughly 19,400-year-old hut was also burned down, possibly when the site’s occupants stopped using it but not as part of a human burial event. The new discovery at Kharaneh IV “links the death of a person and the destruction or death of a building as part of a funerary rite,” Maher says. Perhaps the hut was where the woman or her family lived, or perhaps she died there and the structure was deemed off-limits, she suggests. Either way, Kharaneh IV was occupied for several generations after the woman’s death, until roughly 18,600 years ago, so establishing a permanent place for her may have been considered important.

Meanings and beliefs that Kharaneh IV residents attributed to burning a hut in which a dead woman’s body had been placed are still a mystery, Maher says. The use of fire in that event might have signified some type of transformation, rebirth, cleansing or life-and-death cycle, she suggests.

Humanlike thumb dexterity may date back as far as 2 million years ago

Improved grip gave tool-wielding ancestors an advantage over related hominids

Thumb dexterity similar to that of people today already existed around 2 million years ago, possibly in some of the earliest members of our own genus Homo, a new study indicates. The finding is the oldest evidence to date of an evolutionary transition to hands with powerful grips comparable to those of human toolmakers, who didn’t appear for roughly another 1.7 million years.

Thumbs that enabled a forceful grip and improved the ability to manipulate objects gave ancient Homo or a closely related hominid line an evolutionary advantage over hominid contemporaries, says a team led by Fotios Alexandros Karakostis and Katerina Harvati. Now-extinct Australopithecus made and used stone tools but lacked humanlike thumb dexterity, thus limiting its toolmaking capacity, the paleoanthropologists, from Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany, found.

The researchers digitally simulated how a key muscle influenced thumb movement in 12 previously found fossil hominids, five 19th century humans and five chimpanzees. Surprisingly, Harvati says, a pair of roughly 2-million-year old thumb fossils from South Africa display agility and power on a par with modern human thumbs.

Scientists disagree about whether the South African finds come from early Homo or Paranthropus robustus, a species on a dead-end branch of hominid evolution (SN: 4/2/20). But the thumb dexterity in those ancient fossils is comparable to that found in members of Homo species that appeared after around 335,000 years ago, the researchers report January 28 in Current Biology. That includes Neandertals from Europe and the Middle East, and a South African hominid dubbed Homo naledi, which possessed an unusual mix of skeletal traits (SN: 5/9/17).

By comparison, they conclude, Homo or P. robustus possessed thumbs that were more forceful than those of three several-million-year-old Australopithecus species, two of which have previously been proposed to have humanlike hands (SN: 1/22/15).

“Australopithecus would probably be able to perform most [tool-related] hand movements, but not as efficiently as humans or other Homo species we studied,” Harvati says. The tool-wielding repertoire of Australopithecus species fell closer to that of modern chimpanzees, who use twigs to collect termites and rocks to crack nuts, she suggests (SN: 11/6/09).

Harvati’s team went beyond past efforts that focused only on the size and shape of ancient hominids’ hand bones. Using data from humans and chimpanzees on how hand muscles and bones interact while moving, the researchers constructed a digital, 3-D model to re-create how a key thumb muscle — musculus opponens pollicis — attached to a bone at the base of the thumb and operated to bend the digit’s joint toward the palm and fingers.

These new models of how ancient thumbs worked underscore the slowness of hominid hand evolution, says paleoanthropologist Matthew Tocheri of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Canada. Australopithecus made and used stone tools as early as around 3.3 million years ago (SN: 5/20/15). “But we don’t see major changes to the thumb until around 2 million years ago, soon after which stone artifacts become far more common across the African landscape,” he says.

Karakostis and Harvati’s 3-D models of ancient thumb dexterity represent a promising advance, says paleoanthropologist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri in Columbia. But further work needs to examine how other thumb muscles interacted with musculus opponens pollicis to influence how that digit worked in different hominid species, she adds.

In a related finding, Ward and her colleagues — including Tocheri — reported in 2014 that a roughly 1.42-million year-old hominid finger fossil from East Africa pointed to an early emergence of humanlike manipulation skills.

Humanlike thumb dexterity may date back as far as 2 million years ago

Improved grip gave tool-wielding ancestors an advantage over related hominids

How environmental changes may have helped make ancient humans more adaptable A sediment core traces 1 million years of ecological shifts in eastern Africa An unforgiving environmental twist deserves at least some credit for the behavioral flexibility that has characterized the human species since our African origins around 300,000 years ago, a new study suggests. For hundreds of thousands of years in parts of East Africa, food and water supplies remained fairly stable. But new evidence shows that starting about 400,000 years ago, hominids and other ancient animals in the region faced a harsh environmental reckoning, says a team led by paleoanthropologist Rick Potts of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

The climate began to fluctuate dramatically. Faults caused by volcanic eruptions fractured the landscape and reduced the size of lakes. Large animals died out and were replaced by smaller creatures with more diverse diets. These changes heralded a series of booms and busts in the resources hominids needed to survive, Potts and his colleagues report October 21 in Science Advances.

Around that time, hominids at a site called Olorgesailie in what’s now Kenya transformed their culture. That shift, between around 500,000 and 320,000 years ago, was probably influenced by increasingly unpredictable periods of water and food scarcity, the scientists contend.

Stone hand axes and other cutting tools made of local stone had dominated African toolkits for 700,000 years before that transition occurred. After that, Middle Stone Age tools, such as spearpoints made from rock imported from distant sources, gained popularity, Potts’ team has previously found (SN: 3/15/18). Middle Stone Age tools were smaller and more carefully crafted implements. Widely scattered hominid groups began to trade with one another to obtain suitable toolmaking rock and other resources.

Potts has long argued that Olorgesailie hominids evolved genetically and behaviorally to handle frequent climate shifts, a process dubbed variability selection (SN: 7/12/97). But the new study indicates that ancient humans adapted to a number of environmental forces, not just climate fluctuations, he says.

A cascade of ancient ecological changes led to alternating periods of resource abundance and scarcity, likely helping to make us the most adaptable [hominid] species that ever existed,” Potts says.

Erosion at Olorgesailie has destroyed sediment layers dating to the Middle Stone Age transition. So the researchers hired a Kenyan company to drill as deeply as possible in the Koora basin, located about 24 kilometers south of Olorgesailie. Dating of the 139-meter-long extracted core found that the sediments spanned much of the last 1 million years, making it the best environmental record of that time period for anywhere in Africa, Potts says.

Chemical and microscopic studies of the core revealed signs of volcanic eruptions having created faults that fragmented the Olorgesailie landscape starting roughly 400,000 years ago. Small ponds and lakes then replaced larger lake basins at a time when rainfall became inconsistent. Intermittent, increasingly frequent dry periods resulted in severe water shortages.

Vegetation changes followed. Shifts back and forth from grassy plains to forests denied large animals, such as elephants, regular access to former grazing areas. Faults in the landscape also reduced the size of any available grazing areas. As Potts’ team has previously found, smaller animals with diverse diets, including antelopes and pigs, became prominent at Olorgesailie during the Middle Stone Age. Stone tools at that time may have been tailored for hunting and processing smaller prey, the researchers say.

Booms and busts in resource availability during the Middle Stone Age each generally lasted for a few thousand years, based on evidence from the Koora sediment core, Potts says. That time resolution is a big improvement over previous studies that used global climate data to reconstruct ancient African environmental changes that occurred over tens of thousands of years, says archaeologist and paleoanthropologist Manuel Will of the University of Tübingen in Germany, who did not participate in the new investigation.

Pott and colleagues’ findings “provide the best evidence yet for a link between environmental changes in East Africa and the spread of Middle Stone Age technology and increased mobility across the landscape,” says paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. Although it’s still unclear where in Africa — as well as when and by whom — Middle Stone Age tools were invented, early humans would have found such implements invaluable for adapting to environmental disruptions, Stringer says.

Olorgesailie’s Middle Stone Age boom-and-bust scenario may not apply to other parts of Africa where spearpoints and related implements didn’t appear until later, cautions archaeologist Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In those settings, Middle Stone Age tools may have proven useful even for groups that enjoyed relatively stable water and food sources.

Trifed’s Village and Digital Connect - Establishing a Connect with Tribal People Over the past year , under the aegis of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, TRIFED has implemented several initiatives to help improve the livelihoods of the beleaguered tribals who had been severely impacted due to the pandemic. To ensure that these initiatives reach the tribals and they benefit from the existing schemes and initiatives, TRIFED’s regional officials across the country will be going to identified villages with a significant tribal population across the country and will set up base there till 31st March, 2021. Being present on the ground level will help TRIFED’s officials oversee the implementation of these programmes and ensure the empowerment of the tribal brethren.

Adapting Go Vocal for Local, into Go Vocal for Local Go Tribal – Mera Van Mera Dhan Mera Udyam, several of these pathbreaking initiatives, other than the existing programmes, have emerged as a panacea for the tribals.

These initiatives include programmes like Van Dhan tribal start-ups and Schemes like Mechanism for Marketing of Minor Forest Produce (MFP) through Minimum Support Price (MSP) & Development of Value Chain for MFP’, that provides MSP to gatherers of forest produces and introducing value addition and marketing through tribal groups and clusters which has found widespread acceptance across the country.

An all-encompassing digitisation drive had also been launched to not only promote tribal commerce but also map and link its village-based tribal producers and artisans to national and international markets by setting up state of art e- platforms benchmarked to international standards.

TRIFED has digitized all the information related to the forest dwellers associated with the VanDhan Yojana, village haats and their warehouses into a VanDhan MIS portal. This digitization effort wherein all tribal clusters are identified and mapped using GIS technology will be capitalized upon during this phase of Village connect. TRIFED officials will ensure that all the tribal producersand clusters have been mapped to these digital systems and will receive all the benefits available in convergence with other Ministries and agencies. in villages will be connected to this portal.

Moreover, TRIFED has also launched a marketplace for tribal producers – forest dwellers and artisans, to facilitate the purchase of MFPs, handicrafts and handlooms online. Gradually 5 lakh tribal producers across the country and sourcing their natural produce, handcrafted goods are being onboarded on the marketplace. With the presence of the TRIFED officials on ground, it is expected that tribal artisans will be adequately informed and helped so that they can find greater access to larger markets and thereby improve their incomes.

It is expected that this phase of TRIFED’s village and digital connect will aid immensely in the successful implementation of all planned initiatives in the next year and effecta complete transformation of the tribal ecosystem across the country

Modern Human Ancestry Won’t Be Traced to a Single Point

While we may be attracted by the headlines of “Oldest Human Fossil Discovered” and “New Human Ancestor Found”, the idea that we’re on the route to unearthing an actual, single point in time and space for modern human origins is unlikely. A new study suggests that instead of continuing the search for where and when modern human ancestry originated, the focus should shift to solving other mysteries.

While the topic of human ancestry is undoubtedly fascinating, EurekAlert! notes that “the meanings of words like ancestor and ancestry are rarely discussed in detail.” That’s where the new study comes in, with a different perspective. A team of experts from the Natural History Museum, The Francis Crick Institute, and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History Jena have presented a new paper titled ‘Origins of modern human ancestry’ in the journal Nature. A Single Starting Point Won’t Be Found in the Genetic or Fossil Records

The study explores the current understanding about modern human ancestry and how it can be traced back to the distant past, as well as some of the human ancestors found on that timeline. It also asserts that no specific starting point can currently be identified when we’re talking about modern human ancestry.

Locations of early individuals with modern human ancestry in Eurasia, together with sites that may indicate an earlier dispersal in Asia and Sahul (the continental shelf centred on Australia). (Bergström et al. 2021/ Nature)

They write: “no specific point in time can currently be identified at which modern human ancestry was confined to a limited birthplace, and that patterns of the first appearance of anatomical or behavioural traits that are used to define Homo sapiens are consistent with a range of evolutionary histories.”

Professor Chris Stringer, a co-author in the new study and researcher at the Natural History Museum explained that there just isn’t enough information to work with. He said:

Some of our ancestors will have lived in groups or populations that can be identified in the fossil record, whereas very little will be known about others . Over the next decade, growing recognition of our complex origins should expand the geographic focus of paleoanthropological fieldwork to regions previously considered peripheral to our evolution, such as Central and West Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.

This cranium from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco is often called a modern human ancestor. The topic of human ancestry is carefully examined in a new study. ( Chris Stringer )

Contrary to what many believe, neither the genetic or fossil record have so far revealed a defined time and place for the origin of our species. Such a point in time, when the majority of our ancestry was found in a small geographic region and the traits we associate with our species appeared, may not have existed. For now, it would be useful to move away from the idea of a single time and place of origin. ◦ The Origin of ‘Us’: What We Know So Far About Where We Humans Come From ◦ ‘Distinct’ Facial Features Have Been Around For A Very Long Time ◦ Age of the Wise Men: What Distinguishes Homo Sapiens from the Other Great Apes?

What Should Researchers Look For Instead?

The study identifies three significant phases in human ancestry and major questions which still surround those phases. They suggest that future research should explore these avenues instead of trying to find the elusive starting point of the human story.

The first of the three points of interest is given in the paper as “the worldwide expansion of modern humans between 40 and 60 thousand years ago (ka) and their last known contacts with archaic groups such as Neanderthals and Denisovans.” A second focus “is associated with a broadly construed African origin of modern human diversity between 60 and 300 ka.” Finally, the experts believe there should be more interest in “the complex separation of modern human ancestors from archaic human groups from 0.3 to 1 million years ago.”

a, Locations of key H. sapiens, Neanderthal, Denisovan and other archaic human fossils from the past 500 thousand years. Pale colors indicate uncertain but possible lineage assignments. b, Chronology of archaic human populations that are unlikely to have contributed to modern human ancestry. These include Homo naledi, Homo floresiensis, and Homo luzonensis. (Bergström et al. 2021/ Nature)

According to the study co-author Eleanor Scerri from the Pan-African Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, these major questions “concern which mechanisms drove and sustained this human patchwork, with all its diverse ancestral threads, over time and space.” Furthermore Scerri clarified that “Understanding the relationship between fractured habitats and shifting human niches will undoubtedly play a key role in unravelling these questions, clarifying which demographic patterns provide a best fit with the genetic and palaeoanthropological record.” What’s Needed to Shift the Focus of Human Ancestry Research? To achieve the monumental task of answering these questions, the researchers note that the ancient genetic record needs to be amplified. To do so, they suggest that improvements are necessary for the technology that is used in retrieving and screening ancient DNA , including the ability to find sedimentary ancient genetic material. More interdisciplinary work on the fossil, archaeological, and genetic records is also encouraged.

2-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools Unearthed in Tanzania An international team of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists has discovered a large collection of 2-million-year old stone tools, fossilized bones and plant materials at the site of Ewass Oldupa in the western portion of the ancient basin of Olduvai Gorge (now Oldupai) in northern Tanzania. The discovery reveals that the earliest Olduvai hominins used diverse, rapidly changing environments that ranged from fern meadows to woodland mosaics, naturally burned landscapes, to lakeside woodland/palm groves as well as steppes.

The newly-discovered stone tools belong to the Oldowan, the oldest-known stone tool industry. Dating as far back as 2.6 million years ago, the Oldowan tools were likely manufactured by Homo habilis, and are a major milestone in human evolutionary history.

“Our research sheds further light on our distant origins and evolutionary history,” said co-author Professor Tristan Carter, a researcher in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University.

“The exposed canyon wall reveals 2 million years of geological history and ancient sediments have preserved the stone artifacts remarkably, as well as human and faunal remains.”

The concentration of stone tools and animal fossils (wild cattle, pigs, hippos, panthers, lions, hyena, primates, reptiles, and birds) at the Ewass Oldupa site are evidence that both human and animal life centered around water sources. “Our research reveals that the geological, sedimentary and plant landscapes around Ewass Oldupa changed a lot, and quickly,” the researchers said.

“They used a great diversity of habitats: fern meadows, woodland mosaics, naturally burned landscapes, lakeside palm groves, steppes.” “These habitats were regularly blanketed by ash or reworked by mass flows associated with volcanic eruptions.”

“The occupation of varied and unstable environments, including after volcanic activity, is one of the earliest examples of adaptation to major ecological transformations,” said co-author Dr. Pastory Bushozi, a researcher at Dar es Salaam University.

The scientists also compared the chemical composition of the Ewass Oldupa tools and determined the majority of rocks used to make them had been obtained 12 km (7.5 miles) away from the site.

“This indicates planned behavior at an early stage in human evolution,” said co-author Julien Favreau, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University.

“The artifacts are truly spectacular in terms of their age, but what they really show is that through time, human ancestors were occupying vastly different environments with only one tool kit. It really speaks to their behavioral flexibility and ecological adaptability.”

“Geological, sedimentary and plant landscapes were changing dramatically and quickly at the time,” said lead author Dr. Julio Mercader, a researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary.

Thanks to past and ongoing radiometric work, the team was able to date the artifacts to a period known as the Early Pleistocene, 2 million years ago. What’s not clear is which hominin species made the tools.

“We did not recover hominin fossils, but the remains of Homo habilis have been found in the younger sediments from another site just 350 m (1,148 feet) away,” the authors said.

“It’s likely that either Homo habilis or a member of the genus Paranthropus — remains of which have also been found at Olduvai Gorge previously — was the tool maker. More research will be needed to be sure.” The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Upper Paleolithic Figurines Showing Women with Obesity May Be Linked to Climate Change Obesity is rare in hunter-gatherer cultures. Nevertheless, dozens of handheld ‘Venus’ figurines — the oldest art sculptures of humans known and tend to be of women who have obesity or are pregnant — have been identified that date to Ice Age European hunter-gatherers from 38,000 to 14,000 years ago. In a new paper, published in the journal Obesity, a team of researchers from the University of Colorado and the American University of Sharjah suggests that these figurines show greater obesity during the time of the glacier advance and less during the glacier retreat, and the figurines of women closest to the glaciers show the greatest obesity.

Early modern humans entered Europe during a warming period about 48,000 years ago. Known as Aurignacians, they hunted reindeer, horses and mammoths with bone-tipped spears. In summer they dined on berries, fish, nuts and plants. But then, as now, the climate did not remain static.

As temperatures dropped, ice sheets advanced and disaster set in. During the coldest months, temperatures plunged to 10-15 degrees Celsius (50-59 degrees Celsius). Some bands of hunter gatherers died out, others moved south, some sought refuge in forests. Big game was overhunted.

It was during these desperate times that the Venus figurines appeared. They range between 6 and 16 cm (2.4-6.3 inches) in length, and were made of stone, ivory, horn or occasionally clay. They often show realistic features of obesity despite the accepted view that obesity was rare among these peoples.

Most figurines are also naked, or nearly so, which seems ironic for their proximity to the glaciers. They also focus on the torso and sexual features, and the head is typically faceless with small arms and no feet.

Many figurines are in or near childbearing years, with some appearing pregnant and others showing abdominal obesity or expanded fat in the buttocks, suggestive of overnutrition.

A few figures of women are on the verge of puberty, and occasional figurines of middle-aged women are known. However, obesity is restricted to female figurines, as the known male figurines are elongated and slender

That the figurines with obesity are always women, of which some are pregnant, has led to the long-standing interpretation that the figurines represent fertility or beauty — hence the general adoption of the term Venus figurines.

“Some of the earliest art in the world are these mysterious figurines of overweight women from the time of hunter gatherers in Ice Age Europe where you would not expect to see obesity at all,” said study lead author Professor Richard Johnson, a researcher in the School of Medicine at the University of Colorado. “We show that these figurines correlate to times of extreme nutritional stress.”

Professor Johnson and his colleagues measured the Venus figurines’ waist-to-hip and waist-to-shoulder ratios. They discovered that those found closest to the glaciers were the most obese compared to those located further away. They believe the figurines represented an idealized body type for these difficult living conditions. “We propose they conveyed ideals of body size for young women, and especially those who lived in proximity to glaciers,” Professor Johnson said.

“We found that body size proportions were highest when the glaciers were advancing, whereas obesity decreased when the climate warmed and glaciers retreated.” According to the team, obesity became a desired condition. An obese female in times of scarcity could carry a child through pregnancy better than one suffering malnutrition. So the figurines may have been imbued with a spiritual meaning — a fetish or magical charm of sorts that could protect a woman through pregnancy, birth and nursing. Many of the figurines are well-worn, indicating that they were heirlooms passed down from mother to daughter through generations. Women entering puberty or in the early stages of pregnancy may have been given them in the hopes of imparting the desired body mass to ensure a successful birth.

New Research Sheds Light on Early Life of Neanderthals

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that the modern human nursing strategy, with onset of weaning at 5 to 6 months, was present among Neanderthals who lived between 70,000 and

The extent to which Neanderthals differ from Homo sapiens is the focus of many studies in human evolution. There is debate about their pace of growth and early-life metabolic constraints, both of which are still poorly understood.

“The beginning of weaning relates to physiology rather than to cultural factors,” said co-first author Dr. Alessia Nava, a researcher in the Department of Maxillo-Facial Sciences at Sapienza University of Rome and the Skeletal Biology Research Centre at the University of Kent.

“In modern humans, in fact, the first introduction of solid food occurs at around 6 months of age when the child needs a more energetic food supply, and it is shared by very different cultures and societies.” “Now, we know that also Neanderthals started to wean their children when modern humans do.”

“In particular, compared to other primates, it is highly conceivable that the high energy demand of the growing human brain triggers the early introduction of solid foods in child diet,” said co-first author Dr. Federico Lugli, a researcher at the University of Bologna.

In the study, the scientists analyzed an unprecedented set of fossil teeth from archaeological sites in northeastern Italy. These four milk teeth include three Neanderthals, dated to between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, and one Early Upper Paleolithic modern human as a comparative specimen.

“Our results imply similar energy demands during early infancy and a close pace of growth between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals,” said co-senior author Dr. Stefano Benazzi, a researcher in the Department of Cultural Heritage at the University of Bologna and the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

“Taken together, these factors possibly suggest that Neanderthal newborns were of similar weight to modern human neonates, pointing to a likely similar gestational history and early-life ontogeny, and potentially shorter inter-birth interval.”

Using time-resolved strontium isotope analyses, the authors also collected data on the regional mobility of the Neanderthals.

“Neanderthals were less mobile than previously suggested by other scientists,” said co-senior author Dr. Wolfgang Müller, a researcher in the Institute of Geosciences and the Frankfurt Isotope and Element Research Center at Goethe University Frankfurt.

“The strontium isotope signature registered in their teeth indicates in fact that they have spent most of the time close to their home.” “This reflects a very modern mental template and a likely thoughtful use of local resources.”

“Despite the general cooling during the period of interest, northeastern Italy has almost always been a place rich in food, ecological variability and caves, ultimately explaining the survival of Neanderthals in this region till about 45,000 years ago,” said co-senior author Dr. Marco Peresani, a researcher in the Institute of Environmental Geology and Geoengineering-IGAG CNR and the Department of Humanities at the University of Ferrara.

Neanderthals Were as Good at Tolerating Smoke-Related Toxins as Early Modern Humans: Study

A new genetic study conducted by researchers from Leiden University and Wageningen University thoroughly debunks previous claims that a genetic mutation gave early Homo sapiens an evolutionary advantage over Neanderthals in adapting to campfire smoke exposure.

“Making and using fire is regarded as one of the most significant innovations in man’s evolution,” said Dr. Jac Aarts, lead author on the current study, and colleagues. “Fire brought with it such benefits as warmth, for example, protection against predators and a broader diet because it made it possible to cook raw, inedible foods.”

“A disadvantage of fire is that it exposes people to the toxic substances in smoke,” they added. In 2016, Pennsylvania State University researchers looked at the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) gene — which regulates the human body’s response to carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons produced by fires — in modern humans and Neanderthals. They found that modern humans carry a mutation in the AHR gene that increased their tolerance to smoke-related toxins.

They concluded that Neanderthals were up to 1,000 times more sensitive to these toxins than modern humans. In 2018, Dr. Aarts’ team came to the opposite conclusion, based on an analysis of 19 relevant genes in Neanderthal, Denisovan, prehistoric and extant anatomically modern human genomes.

They found that Neanderthals had more gene variants that better neutralized the harmful effects of toxins than most modern humans. In the new study, Dr. Aarts and co-authors repeated the earlier experiments of their colleagues from Pennsylvania.

Instead of rat cells, the researchers used human cells and found that there are no grounds for concluding that the AHR protein made Neanderthals more vulnerable to toxins in the smoke.

“Our results are strongly at odds with a major role of the modern human AHR in the evolution of hominin detoxification of smoke components and consistent with our previous study based on 18 relevant genes in addition to AHR, which concluded that efficient detoxification alleles are more dominant in ancient hominins, chimpanzees and gorillas than in modern humans,” they said.

Their results were published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

I am UPSC aspirant, preparing for anthropology optional on my own. Firstly, I want to express my gratitude to the entire Team Vijetha for coming up with such a magazine. The “Humans are still evolving” article in March 2020 month issue was really informative. I would appreciate if you can bring up more issues related to Indian anthropology in the forthcoming issue.

—- Preetham Banglore, Karnataka.

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