Well, duh.

Central African rain forest may have been transformed by Bantu farmers

The State Column | Sunday, February 12, 2012

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The Central African rain forest may have been transformed by Bantu farmers, according to a study published in the journal Science Thursday. While scientists continue to contend that climate change in Central Africa contributed to the transition from rain forest to savanna approximately 3000 years ago, the results of the study suggest that the migration of Bantu farmers across Central Africa also had a significant impact on the eventual disappearance of the Central African rain forest.

The team of researchers began their research by looking at the process of  chemical weathering. The team examined marine sediment samples from the Congo River. The researchers found that weathering patterns in Central Africa matched precipitation levels. However, the team found that approximately 3,000 years ago, the patterns of chemical weathering no longer matched precipitation levels.
The team quickly realized that while climate change could not explain the mismatch between chemical weathering patterns and precipitation levels, the migration of Bantu farmers across Central Africa could. Historical records reveal that the Bantu people farmed in the region, cutting down large portions of the Central African forest in order to grow their crops. The researchers posit that human-land interaction changed the relationship between precipitation and chemical weathering patterns.

“When we first took a look at the results, we were puzzled,” said Germain Bayon, the study’s lead researcher and a geochemist at the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea, according to The Los Angeles Times.

After a thorough examination of the results, Mr. Bayon came to a controversial conclusion.
“Climate did play an important role in the arrival of agriculture,” Mr. Bayon posited, according to ScienceNOW. “But what we show is that the impact of those people developing and introducing agriculture probably had a quite significant impact on soil erosion,” Mr. Bayon added.

Not everyone in the scientific community is supportive of the study’s conclusion, including Katharina Neumann, an archaeobotanist at Goethe University in Germany.

“I was a strong defender of this theory that everything was shaped by humans and humans destroy the environment and so on,” argued Ms. Neumann, who was not involved in the study. “But the archaeological and paleological data from other areas — not just the rain forest — show that the impact of humans was much lower than we thought,” Ms. Neumann added.

However, other members of the scientific community have cheered the study’s conclusion. “This article presents a very elegant study showing that early Bantu farmers did indeed have an impact on the environment,” said Terry Brncic, a paleoecologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the coordinator of the Central Africa Forest Project for the World Resources Institute in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “I’ve been waiting for years for this kind of evidence,” added Mr. Terry Brncic.

Read more: http://www.thestatecolumn.com/articles/2012/02/12/central-african-rain-forest-may-have-been-transformed-by-bantu-farmers/#ixzz1mCyiAFpV

Penis Size Social Psychology

My Penis and Everyone Else's

My Penis And Everyone Else’s challenges society’s stereotypes of masculinity as well as getting to the heart of why men are so fixated with their members.

Emotional, revelatory, and intensely engaging, this film takes on one of society’s last taboos and culminates in one of the most daring exhibitions ever seen in the UK, as Lawrence puts together the world’s largest collection of penis portraiture ever seen!

“I do think pornography and the way it seeped into culture has had some effect because it’s so saturated, it’s so become a norm that people are seeing sex and their bodies through a completely distorted lens.” -Rowan Peeling, Former Editor of the Erotic Review.

 from Lawrence Barraclough on Vimeo.

How Beer Saved The World

Did you know that beer was critical to the birth of civilization?

That’s right – beer. Scientists and historians line up to tell the amazing, untold story of how beer helped create math, poetry, pyramids, modern medicine, labor laws, and America.

If you think beer is just something cold and filling to drink during sporting matches or in the kind of bars that you probably shouldn’t order wine in, then, boy, are you ever in the dark. It turns out beer is responsible for, like, all the greatest things on earth.

Learn more about what beer did for you!

Give Thanks

Is Civilization a Bad Idea?

via  

by Adam Frank

The ice ages came and the ice ages went. For more than a half-million years Homo sapiens endured the changing climate by adapting. Then, deep in the frozen expanse of the last global big chill, something new happened. We woke up to ourselves in a new way.

We became self-conscious, creating art, culture and tools of far greater complexity than anything that had come before. When the ice pulled back yet again, we eventually took a step of even greater consequence. We domesticated ourselves and put the Earth to the plow.

With agriculture came surplus and with surplus came new social arrangements. Eventually, we built cities and far-ranging empires to support them. Human beings began building civilization. In doing so we set ourselves and the entire planet onto a new trajectory.

But did anyone ever stop to ask if it was a good idea?

Now before you give in to the easy snort and chortle that accompanies a seemingly absurd question like this, I am going to ask you to take the long view. In this case long means billions of years, and billions of planets.

We don't want to ask the question: Is civilization good for you (or me)? Instead we want to ask: Is civilization good — in the long term — for planets and their capacity to support life (or at least technologically adept civilizations)?

In other words, we want to frame the question of sustainability in an astrobiological setting.

As of this writing we are pretty sure that at least 10 percent of stars in the galaxy harbor their own worlds. That number translates into at least a billion planets. And that's just in our galaxy. The numbers for the universe are much larger still.

Some of these planets may form biospheres. Some of those biospheres may lead to intelligence. Some of those intelligences may marshal the energy reservoirs of their worlds to build technological civilizations. Where, in the long term, does that lead?

The conflict between potentially stable forms of hunter-gatherer cultures and the new agrarian way of life here on Earth was the theme of Daniel Quinn's award winning philosophical novel Ishmael. Quinn leaned heavily on anthropological research showing that hunter-gather life was not, in general, "brutish and nasty" as we tend to believe. Instead hunter-gather cultures had their good points, including a tendency to be fairly equalitarian. They also required far fewer hours of work for daily subsistance than a modern person puts in. Most importantly for our purposes, hunter-gathers tended to live roughly in balance with the prevailing ecology.

Quinn's general point was that civilization was never inevitable. It simply constitutes a different way of being human compared to what came before. While Quinn was not suggesting a return to that "other way," he did argue much could be learned by looking beyond the bias that urbanized civilization is inherently the best and only mode of being human.

Some more radical writers, John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen for instance, take a far more strident stand on the issue. For them, the development of agriculture was the beginning of a long violent process of denuding the planet and reducing its potential for habitation. "Civilization can never be sustainable" is the first premise of Jensen's book Endgame.

The long-term sustainability of civilization is also a theme that has taken up in modern science fiction. In Charles Wilson's Spin series, intelligent technological species have a tendency to exist for only short periods (galactically speaking), rapidly over-consuming their planetary resources.

Even scientists thinking about SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) have raised the question of civilization's long-term prospects. This line of reasoning takes shape in the Fermi Paradox, which can be stated as: "If ET's are common why haven't we seen them already?" A number of researchers have proposed a so-called "sustainability solution" to Fermi's Paradox, whereby we don't see technologically adept extraterrestrial civilizations because very few are able to manage their own growth curves. Collapse, in the Jared Diamond sense of the word, may be endemic.

Of course, like most folks in the "developed" world, I too am digging the fruits of civilization. Long life span, low infant mortality, a general freedom from famine, amazing images from the Hubble Space Telescope; these are all good things in and of themselves. But the very science and technologies that make this civilization possible also allow us to see how critical the question of sustainability has become.

Perhaps they also let us see how critical the question os sustainability always was, even if it lay hidden behind history and "progress."

For the last few centuries, science, paired with the availability of cheap energy, allowed us to imagine futures of infinite expansion. Those imagined futures cast a long shadow, blinding us, perhaps, to the complex dynamics linking planets and intelligence that make such futures exceedingly difficult — if not impossible — to obtain.

In that case, solving the problem of sustainable civilization may, in the long run, be nature's greatest challenge to us.

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You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking onFacebook and Twitter. His new book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

Humans And Other Animals

Humans And Other Animals: NPR

by: Barbara J King

Humans, and almost all the primates with whom we share a recent common ancestor, are intensely social creatures. Evolving over many millions of years to thrive in the collective, we come together naturally in societies, groups, families (families of various configurations, not only nuclear) and, nowadays, in online communities.

It is through the social bonds experienced in these collectives that we most readily forge our cognitive and emotional responses to the world. It's a process beset as much by edgy negotiation and messy dissent as it is by coordinated thinking and harmonious cooperation.

Anthropology asks some big questions about how this state of affairs emerged. How did Homo sapiens come to be the primate for whom social meaning-making is as natural as bipedal striding, technology making and communicating through endlessly inventive words and gestures? In what ways do we overlap with, and in what ways do we diverge from, other primates in this regard, indeed from other animals generally? How has our evolutionary journey been shaped by our interactions with the other animals who share our habitats, and who — in many cases — approach their lives as thinking, feeling beings in their own right.

In a series of guest posts over the coming weeks, I will fling an anthropological voice into the 13.7 blogging mix. I invite you to engage with me as we pick through some of these big ideas.

By way of background, I am a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia; a monkey-and-ape observer who has collected primate data on the Kenyan savannas and in zoos here at home; and a writer of non-fiction science books, most recently Being With Animals.

I'm also an avid consumer of contemporary fiction; half of a cat-rescue team that helps feral and homeless cats in southern Virginia; and a Twitter addict.

The biological anthropology I practice today centers largely on topics that continue to captivate me more than 30 years after I first stumbled onto the field as an undergraduate. The extent of nonhuman primates' ability to reason and to feel is coming more fully to light by the year. For instance, we know now that the nonhuman great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, the gorillas of Africa, the orangutans of Asia — are hotbeds of political intrigue, technology aided problem solving and an all-too-familiar mix of compassion and cruelty.

It's too limiting to think only at the species level, though. Jane Goodall appreciated this fact soon after launching her studies of wild chimpanzees 50 years ago. It's just taken decades to become widely accepted. Individual animals are behaviorally distinct, within as well as across populations. This variation, far from being mere statistical noise, is central to scientific understanding of animal behavior.

The species-level trap is an easy lure. You've heard the claims, maybe, about chimpanzees and bonobos? Chimpanzees are the male-violent, make-war apes, whereas their close cousins the bonobos are female-empowered and sexy-pacific. Don't believe it, at least not in this overly-simple form. Gentle chimpanzees and feisty bonobos exist, as do apes who one day are kind and the next cruel, shaped (as are we humans) by some combination of how they were raised, their day-to-day social encounters and their genetics.

Often defined as the comprehensive study of humankind, anthropology increasingly embraces the natural world. I lean towards what the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn has called "an anthropology of life," an embrace of elephants, bison, monkeys, crows, dogs, frogs and a thousand other species. Or, more precisely, it's an embrace of the intersection of the lives lived by these animals with the lives lived by human animals.

From the ancient days when our hunter-gatherer ancestors first brushed color on cave walls, leaving glorious animal images behind, or when the first village settlers entered into an unspoken contract of domestication with goats and sheep, our lives have been entwined.

Questions about meaning-making in humans and other animals are not just fodder for reflection. They are a practical matter. How can an appreciation for evolved plasticity, the responsiveness of the human brain and body to learning and social change, speak back to overly-biologized theories of human behavior? To cede too much power to ancient genes and brain modules is to miss a key aspect of the human evolutionary story, the impact of evolving cultural forces on our behavior.

How can an understanding of other creatures' lives guide us beyond study of animals to acting for animals? Whether from habitat loss and poaching in the wild or from abuse and exploitation in captivity, animals face unprecedented threats in the 21st century. Science, broadly speaking, presents an exciting counterpoint to these threats. Science is leading a sea change in our thought as we wake up to the intrinsic value of the lives all around us.

I look forward to touching on these issues, and others, as I write for 13.7. A shared foray into meaning-making with those who read (and write) this blog is certain to be a pleasure.

Mutant Planet