![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgt
Neanderthals’ Tools Were Their Own Work
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, September 27, 2010
Neanderthals living in southern Italy 42,000 years ago developed bone and stone tools, decorative ornaments and pigments on their own, not through interactions with Homo sapiens, according to Julien Riel-Salvatore, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Denver.
Until now, tools and ornaments used by Neanderthals were thought to have come about because of contact with the species that replaced them. But Dr. Riel-Salvatore said his paper in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory “counters the persistent idea about Neanderthals and shows that they were really able to innovate.” Dr. Riel-Salvatore spent several years studying artifacts from Neanderthal communities in southern and central Italy as well as human artifacts from the same time period in northern Italy.
Humans in northern Italy developed a diverse set of tools unique from those found in the Neanderthal community of southern Italy.
Meanwhile, Neanderthals in central Italy used the same large, primitive stone tools for 100,000 years, taking no inspiration from their neighbors to the north or south, Dr. Riel-Salvatore said
“If humans introduced tools to southern Italy, you would have found these new tools in central Italy first; that would be the natural geographic progression,” he said.
Because Neanderthals in central Italy were so primitive, it is likely that the innovations in the north and south occurred independently, he said.
Until recently, it was also unclear whether Neanderthals and humans interbred, but earlier this year, researchers determined that Neanderthals mated with some modern humans.
Polar Sidekicks Earn a Place on the Map
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, September 27, 2010
Late by almost a century, cartographic immortality is being accorded the dogs and ponies who bore much of the burden, and in most cases gave their all, in the 1911-12 race between the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the Englishman Robert Falcon Scott to be the first to reach the South Pole.
The frozen poles, south and north, were the outer space of that day, a mystery and a challenge, and getting there first had fired up personal and national rivalries not unlike those in the race to the Moon in the 1960s. Amundsen’s team got to the South Pole first, by five weeks. Scott and his men starved and froze to death on their return trek. In death Scott was hailed the hero, long eclipsing Amundsen in romanticized history.
Today’s map of Antarctica is sprinkled with the names of the two of them and other explorers and scientists, affixed to plateaus and valleys, seas and ice shelves. Even their benefactors and other notables, including now obscure European royalty, are acknowledged. But nowhere is there a tip of the hat to the canine and equine contributions, which historians and polar experts agree were, in the case of the dogs at least, indispensable in early Antarctic discovery.
That is changing, in a modest way, as the result of a United States Air Force colonel’s inspired campaign and in anticipation of next year’s centennial celebration of the Amundsen-Scott achievements.
Beginning this week, as aircraft resume supply runs in what passes for springtime after the bitter austral winter, aeronautical maps of the primary route used by all air traffic between New Zealand and McMurdo Station in Antarctica will bear names of 11 of Amundsen’s sledge dogs and Scott’s ponies.
Navigation waypoints on this highway in the sky will honor, among others, Helge, Mylius and Uroa (Greenland dogs of Amundsen’s) and Jimmy Pigg, Bones and Nobby (Scott’s Manchurian and Siberian ponies). Several of the animals’ names have been modified to conform to the standard five-letter format for the waypoints, where at intervals of a few hundred miles pilots must report by radio to air traffic controllers their time of arrival, position and weather conditions.
On the new map, for example, Helge’s name appears in full, but Uroa’s becomes Urroa, and Jimmy Pigg is conflated to Jipig. Previously, waypoint names were just a set of letters generated by computers, meaning nothing. An exception, the next to last waypoint near the Antarctic coast, will continue to be designated Byrrd, for Adm. Richard E. Byrd, one of the most famous American explorers of the continent.
The map changes hardly put Helge in the boldface class with such landmarks as Marie Byrd Land, after the admiral’s wife. And only navigators and air traffic controllers are expected to cast eyes on the fine print along route A338 curving south from Christchurch.
But for Col. Ronald J. Smith, an Air Force navigator and former commander of Operation Deep Freeze, the military arm supporting Antarctic research, the Amundsen-Scott Centennial Aeronautical Chart is the culmination of a two-year personal campaign to make amends for the lack of public recognition of the animals’ role in the race to the pole.
Colonel Smith, 54, now an adviser to the Air Mobility Command at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, conceived of a kind of dog-and-pony show of his own: putting some of their names on the map. Since the names of individual animals were not allowed on the map of the continent itself, the colonel set his sights on the charts he knew so well from flying the Christchurch-McMurdo route over the years.
“Everybody I went to said, ‘Sounds great, go for it,’ ” he said in one of several interviews last week.
First, the Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand, responsible for that sector of air space, endorsed the concept and secured approval from the International Civil Aviation Organization. The National Science Foundation, which manages science research in that part of Antarctica, also approved. “And there was no pushback from the military,” Colonel Smith added.
Then Lynne Cox, an American author who is writing a book on Amundsen, helped the colonel compile the names of the 52 dogs that Amundsen started out with on Oct. 19, 1911, identifying the ones that reached the pole and the 11 that survived to the end. While in Norway, Ms. Cox worked with archivists to determine the fate of those that did not and to screen the abbreviated versions of the names to catch any that might be off-color, silly or too similar to other waypoint names on international maps.
“Ron was so careful about the names, being sure that in any language they were O.K.,” said Ms. Cox, a hardy cold-water swimmer who has long laps off Antarctica and across the Bering Strait to her credit.
Two of the names used, Uroa and Mylius, are for dogs that completed the round trip, on Jan. 25, 1912. Three — Per, Frithjof and Lasse (no kin to the collie of cinematic fame) — were killed on the return trek. Helge reached the pole, weak and dying, and so was killed. It was the practice throughout for the explorers to sacrifice some of the dogs for their meat, feeding them to the remaining dogs and sometimes eating the cutlets themselves.
In one of the many poems he has written about his own Antarctic experience, Colonel Smith addressed the unfortunate Helge. Part of the poem reads:
“Though you faltered
before the fame,
the untamable terrain;
breed of exalted wild-ones,
we did succeed
amidst your slaughter...”
Colonel Smith consulted archivists in London for the five pony names for the new map. Besides Jimmy Pigg as Jipig, Snippets becomes Snipt, Bones Boenz, Jehu Jehoo and Nobby Nobey.
Scott’s strategy was to rely not just on dogs but also on motorized sledges, 10 little horses and manpower — the men themselves pulling sledges. As Scott wrote, “In my mind no journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of that fine conception which is realized when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers, and difficulties with their own unaided efforts.”
But the motor vehicles failed early in the trek, and the ponies proved unequal to the tasks. They were sacrificed on the way to the pole. For the most part, the five men took up the full burden.
Scott’s team left later for the pole, on Nov. 1, 1911, and from a starting point that gave Amundsen a 60-mile advantage on the 1,500-mile traverse. The Englishmen did not arrive at the pole until Jan. 17, 1912. In his diary, Scott wrote: “Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”
In the last half of the last century, biographers have reassessed Amundsen’s success against Scott’s failure.
Roland Huntford, the British author of the 1999 book “The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole,” contends that the Norwegian’s steady temperament and expert preparations were decisive in winning the race. According to this thesis, Amundsen approached the hardships realistically, applying practical lessons from his experience with Eskimos in the north and relying on well-trained dogs to pull sledges. Scott, by contrast, took a more romantic view of exploration, in which hardships simply were to be endured as a test of heroism.
To one degree or another, this assessment has gained a wide following. But while Amundsen may have earned success, Scott may not have been entirely responsible for his fate. Several recent books have attempted to restore Scott’s heroic standing. In a 2001 book, “The Coldest March,” Susan Solomon, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, assigns much of the blame for Scott’s fate to an exceptional blizzard that struck before his party could reach the home base.
With the centennial near, plans are being made for ceremonies at the bottom of the world, at the American-operated outpost known as the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Cruise ships are laying on special tourist trips into Antarctic waters, and individuals from several nations are petitioning authorities for permission to re-enact the polar treks. Norway has proposed a new race to the pole, by snowmobiles.
But no dogs are likely to be invited for the occasion. In the 1980s, it was found that they were spreading distemper that proved fatal to indigenous seals. So by international agreement in 1993, dogs have been banned from the ice-bound continent where they once helped make history.
A Finding on Malaria Comes From Humble Origins
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, September 27, 2010
It has taken 10 years for Dr. Beatrice H. Hahn to build the world’s most comprehensive treasury of great ape dung samples.
And now it has yielded an unexpected gem: The most dangerous form of malaria originated in gorillas, not chimps, as had long been believed.
In and of itself, knowing that does nothing to help defeat malaria. But malaria experts were pleased to learn it — and it shows what wonders can be performed when you have 2,700 fecal samples in your freezers and a little imagination.
“There’s a lot you can do with ape scat,” Dr. Hahn said. “It’s worth its weight in gold.”
Dr. Hahn, a virologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is an expert not in malaria but in S.I.V., or simian immunodeficiency virus, the precursor to the virus that causes AIDS in humans. But she has made deals with primate researchers all across Africa who collect fecal samples for their own projects, to have them take extras for her.
They go into vials with a special solution, called RNAlater, that preserves the nucleic acids of all the cells in the sample — which includes not only what apes eat, but cells sloughed off their gut linings, which contain all the things infecting them. She has systematically sequenced the genes of many of those infective agents: S.I.V., simian foamy virus, hepatitis and now malaria parasites.
Her study was published Thursday in Nature.
Knowing that gorillas are the source is not going to lead to a new drug, but it is reassuring in one important way, said Frank Collins, a malaria expert at the University of Notre Dame. The human disease probably came from a mutant parasite that crossed over from a single gorilla thousands of years ago. That implies that if malaria is ever wiped out in humans, it is unlikely that it will ever be reintroduced from apes.
Reintroduction is not an idle threat. In 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation gave up on its 17-year campaign to eradicate yellow fever. Its scientists had realized that monkeys carried the same virus, so it would never be wiped out without wiping out monkeys, too.
Opening the freezer door and rescreening 1,827 dung samples from chimpanzees, 805 from gorillas and 107 from bonobos yielded several surprises, Dr. Hahn said.
Chimpanzees across Africa had various malaria parasites; bonobos, their closest relatives, did not. West African gorillas were infected, but East African ones were not. (The populations are kept separate by wide rivers like the Congo and by humans who chop down their jungle habitats and hunt them.)
Until recently, it had been believed that the falciparum strain of malaria — the most deadly kind, which can kill in 48 hours — came from chimpanzees, because the closest relative to it that had been found, the reichenowi strain, was common in chimps.
But previous surveys of ape malaria — which go back as far as 1907 — have had obvious flaws, several malariologists said. Most sampled only a few apes, who were usually in captivity or in ape sanctuaries close to humans. One bonobo in one previous study, Dr. Hahn said, had parasites that not only were identical to human strains, but showed resistance to malaria drugs — which meant the bonobo must have caught them from a nearby human, not the other way around.
With the exception of 28 samples from a gorilla troupe habituated to humans, “all my samples are from the forest floor,” she said.
One researcher who sends her samples is David B. Morgan, a primatologist at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and for the Wildlife Conservation Society based at the Bronx Zoo, who studies gorillas and chimpanzees in the Goualougo Triangle of the Congo Republic. Dr. Morgan uses fecal samples to track hormone levels, parasites and even family relationships.
He does not try to get blood samples with “biopsy darts” or capture or tranquilize apes for study.
“We want to have as little impact on them as possible,” he said. (Primatologists now frown on the friendly banana-sharing that so endeared Jane Goodall to readers of National Geographic decades ago.) He and his local trackers stay at least 35 feet from troupes they watch. They are vaccinated against diseases that apes can catch, take deworming pills and even defecate in bags that they carry back to camp so as not to risk infecting apes with human parasites, which has happened at other sites, he said.
Chasing samples is hard work, said Sabrina Locatelli, a State University of New York primatologist who works in Africa and collaborates with Dr. Hahn.
With colobus monkeys, who rain feces down from 70 feet up in the forest canopy, finding samples “means keeping your head up and your neck bent to spot them, so it can be painful,” Dr. Locatelli said.
With chimps and gorillas, she said, you follow them until they start building nests for the night, take a GPS point, go back to camp, get a few hours of sleep, and then come back early in the morning to look for samples, which are usually in or near the nest. With luck, the nest also has a few stray hairs, useful for DNA analysis.
Explaining her job to local officials is not easy either, she added.
Seven years ago, she said, when she was negotiating for permission to track bonobos in the Congo, she tried to explain what she wanted by showing park officials a vial of gel used for drying samples.
“It had these tiny blue beads in it,” she said. “People thought I was smuggling diamonds. They just would not believe me. They were saying ‘Why would this tiny woman come so far to collect bonobo poop?’ ”
