Tiny, long-lost primate rediscovered in Indonesia

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – On a misty mountaintop on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists for the first time in more than eight decades have observed a living pygmy tarsier, one of the planet’s smallest and rarest primates.

Over a two-month period, the scientists used nets to trap three furry, mouse-sized pygmy tarsiers — two males and one female — on Mt. Rore Katimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in central Sulawesi, the researchers said on Tuesday.

They spotted a fourth one that got away.

The tarsiers, which some scientists believed were extinct, may not have been overly thrilled to be found. One of them chomped Sharon Gursky-Doyen, a Texas A&M University professor of anthropology who took part in the expedition.

“I’m the only person in the world to ever be bitten by a pygmy tarsier,” Gursky-Doyen said in a telephone interview.

“My assistant was trying to hold him still while I was attaching a radio collar around its neck. It’s very hard to hold them because they can turn their heads around 180 degrees. As I’m trying to close the radio collar, he turned his head and nipped my finger. And I yanked it and I was bleeding.”

The collars were being attached so the tarsiers’ movements could be tracked.

Tarsiers are unusual primates — the mammalian group that includes lemurs, monkeys, apes and people. The handful of tarsier species live on various Asian islands.

As their name indicates, pygmy tarsiers are small — weighing about 2 ounces (50 grammes). They have large eyes and large ears, and they have been described as looking a bit like one of the creatures in the 1984 Hollywood movie “Gremlins.”

They are nocturnal insectivores and are unusual among primates in that they have claws rather than finger nails.

They had not been seen alive by scientists since 1921. In 2000, Indonesian scientists who were trapping rats in the Sulawesi highlands accidentally trapped and killed a pygmy tarsier.

“Until that time, everyone really didn’t believe that they existed because people had been going out looking for them for decades and nobody had seen them or heard them,” Gursky-Doyen said.

Her group observed the first live pygmy tarsier in August at an elevation of about 6,900 feet.

“Everything was covered in moss and the clouds are right at the top of that mountain. It’s always very, very foggy, very, very dense. It’s cold up there. When you’re one degree from the equator, you expect to be hot. You don’t expect to be shivering most of the time. That’s what we were doing,” she said.

(Editing by Sandra Maler)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081118/sc_nm/us_primate_indonesia

Anthropology Outreach

For my anthropology class we had “projects” for “making anthropology public.  As one of my projects I presented to biology classes at a local high school (my alma mater).  It wasn’t really something I was terribly thrilled about, especially with it being so close to finals (eeekkk!) and all, but it went really well.  When I got home this evening the teacher that allowed me to talk to her classes had sent me this e-mail (which follows). I must admit that it is a nice ego-boost! Anyway, just wanted to share it and how well it went!

Hello Ashlee:

(I hope I copied the email address correctly). I want to thank you once again for taking time from your day to speak to my students. They enjoyed your presentation and talked amongst themselves about the things they heard and saw after you were gone. In another city I lived and worked, I used to lead an after school program that brought in guest speakers to teach the students about various careers related to math and science. Your presentation was the type of information that would have been ideal for such a program. In fact, I am thinking about maybe starting up something similar on our campus. If so, I would love to use you as a speaker.

When I did my research for my master’s thesis (in education), the focus of my study was the factors that seem to keep girls and minorities out of the traditional science careers. One important factor was the lack of role models. I think the students saw “one of them” talking passionately about science, and hopefully, it might spark an interest, or at least broaden their horizons of possibilities.

Again, thank you for visiting us!

Nita Lorenzana

It’s not just the polar bears in trouble!

the Arctic mammal at greatest risk due to global warming is the narwhal. The medium-sized whale has evolved specifically to live in small cracks in parts of the Arctic where it’s 99 percent heavy ice, said study lead author Kristin Laidre of the University of Washington.

Sometimes known as the corpse whale, the narwhal has a long spiral tusk. Laidre acknowledged they are “not that cute,” which makes it harder to interest the public in their plight. Stanford University biologist Terry Root said she is afraid the narwhal “is going to be one of the first to go extinct” from global warming.

Aimé Césaire Dies at 94

I had to read Césaire for a Philosophy class and found that his work,  Discourse on Colonialism, is an amazing read. I highly recommend it. It’s well worth the money and may make you think. It’s a political statement, a discussion, a well articulated prose, and poetic. And now onto the article from the NY times:

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By THEASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: April 18, 2008

FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique (AP) — Aimé Césaire, an anticolonialist poet and politician who was honored throughout the French-speaking world and who was an early proponent of black pride, died here on Thursday. He was 94.

A government spokeswoman, Marie Michèle Darsières, said he died at a hospital where he was being treated for heart problems and other ailments.

Mr. Césaire was one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated cultural figures. He was especially revered in his native Martinique, which sent him to the French parliament for nearly half a century and where he was repeatedly elected mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city.

In Paris in the 1930s he helped found the journal Black Student, which gave birth to the idea of “negritude,” a call to blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. His 1950 book “Discourse on Colonialism” was considered a classic of French political literature.

Mr. Césaire’s ideas were honored and his death mourned in Africa and France as well as the Caribbean. The office of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said Mr. Sarkozy would attend Mr. Césaire’s funeral, scheduled for Sunday in Fort-de-France. Students at Lycée Scoelcher, a Martinique high school where Mr. Césaire once taught, honored him in a spontaneous ceremony Thursday.

Mr. Césaire’s best-known works included the essay “Negro I Am, Negro I Will Remain” and the poem “Notes From a Return to the Native Land.”

Born on June 26, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, Mr. Césaire attended high school and college in France. In 1937 he married another student from Martinique, Suzanne Roussi, with whom he eventually had four sons and two daughters.

He returned to Martinique during World War II and was mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001, except for a break from 1983 to 1984.

Mr. Césaire helped Martinique shed its colonial status in 1946 to become an overseas department of France.

He was affiliated with the French Communist Party early in his career but became disillusioned in the 1950s and founded the Martinique Progressive Party in 1958. He later allied with the Socialist Party in France’s National Assembly, where he served from 1946 to 1956 and from 1958 to 1993.

As the years passed, he remained firm in his views. In 2005 he refused to meet with Mr. Sarkozy, who was then minister of the interior, because of Mr. Sarkozy’s endorsement of a bill citing the “positive role” of colonialism.

“I remain faithful to my beliefs and remain inflexibly anticolonialist,” Mr. Césaire said at the time. The offending language was struck from the bill.

Despite the snub, Mr. Sarkozy last year successfully led a campaign to rename Martinique’s airport in honor of Mr. Césaire. Mr. Césaire eventually met with Mr. Sarkozy in March 2006 but endorsed his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, in the 2007 French elections.

Article from NY Times

You, only different

I stumbled upon this site and it has been a wonderful diversion–I should be sleeping. I quite like the option of making people I know look like a chimp

http://morph.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Transformer/

Ancient Poop!

Humans in North America earlier than thought

DNA from fossilized feces in Oregon provides evidence that humans inhabited the area 1,200 years sooner than theorized.

By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

DNA from fossilized human feces found in an Oregon cave is 14,300 years old, at least 1,200 years older than previous evidence for humans in North America, researchers said Thursday.

The find provides the strongest evidence in an archaeological controversy about whether people of the Clovis culture, which manufactured distinctive stone tools and weapons, were the first to populate the Americas. The new evidence, reported online in the journal Science, indicates they were not.

The fossilized DNA “represents, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest human DNA obtained from the Americas,” said geneticist Eske Willerslev of Denmark’s University of Copenhagen, a co-author of the paper.

“If you are looking for the first people in North America, you are going to have to step back more than 1,000 years beyond Clovis to find them,” added archaeologist Dennis L. Jenkins of the University of Oregon, the lead author of the report.

The find is “a smoking gun” for the pre-Clovis colonization of the Americas, said anthropologist Ripan Malhi of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved in the research.

In addition to changing ideas about when humans arrived here, the new research will also change ideas about how.

Archaeologists theorize that humans from Siberia and eastern Asia migrated to North America across the Bering land bridge when a global warming episode melted the glaciers that had blocked their progress and stranded them for thousands of years in the area known as Beringia.

If humans were on this continent 14,300 years ago — at least 1,000 years before that melting episode — they had to have come before the glacier blocked the route or by a different pathway, Willerslev said.

He argues that a strip of land along the western coast of North America was exposed during the Ice Age, allowing migration along the coast rather than by the favored inland route. Archaeological artifacts from that trek are now submerged under the Pacific Ocean, he said.

The feces fossils, technically called coprolites, were discovered by Jenkins in the summers of 2002 and 2003 in the Paisley Caves in the Summer Lake basin, about 220 miles southeast of Eugene. The eight caves are wave-cut shelters on the shoreline of Lake Chewaucan, whose levels rose and fell with changes in precipitation in the region.

In addition to the coprolites, Jenkins also found manufactured threads of sinew and plant fibers, hides, basketry, cordage, rope, wooden pegs, animal bones and a couple of projectile point fragments — but not enough to link the cave’s inhabitants to the Clovis people or any others.

The small number of artifacts in the cave suggests that whoever occupied it did so only for a short period, rather than using it as a long-term residence, Jenkins said.

Organic material from the coprolites was radiocarbon dated, and the oldest ones were found to be 14,300 years old.

Willerslev’s lab analyzed mitochondrial DNA from the coprolites and concluded that it was similar to DNA from both Native Americans and the populations of Siberia and East Asia.

Fearing contamination of the samples, Willerslev also analyzed samples from all 55 people who visited the cave during the excavations, as well as from all 12 members of his laboratory and showed that none of them had similar DNA.

The coprolites also contained DNA similar to that of the red fox, coyote or wolf. Jenkins said the added DNA could have come from human ingestion of the animals or from the animals urinating on the feces.

Critics, such as anthropologist Gary Haynes of the University of Nevada, Reno, argued that the coprolites could be animal feces and that the human DNA was deposited when humans urinated on them much later.

But Jenkins said that the coprolites also contained human proteins in concentrations too high to have come from urine, as well as human hair.

“Whether the coprolites are human or canine is irrelevant, since for a canine to swallow human hair people had to be present in that environment,” he told Science. “Anyway you cut the poop, people and dogs would have had to be at the site within days of each other 14,000 years ago.”

thomas.maugh@latimes.com

Random ‘ranting’

It’s not that I am uninterested in cultural anthropology, far from it in fact, but I can only take so much! Why are there not more people into biological anthro at Fresno State? I wish that there were more coursework offered in that discipline. I feel like I am getting the short end of the stick. I am so excited that the Human Osteology course is being offered in the fall (and it is a night class! SWEET!) ! I just wish more was available, hopefully primate behaviour is not far behind!!

Don’t think that I am unhappy with the department, I am not. I enjoy it and the prof.s and students are great (that I have met so far ) . I am learning loads and having a blast, but still… Perhaps I should have gone out of city for school to a college with a more “popular” biological anthro department. So is life I suppose.

At least I’ll get to fill my world with bones and be stressed out and overwhelmed after the summer!

Would Shakespeare have rode a float in a gay pride parade?

*Disclaimer: this is a stream of consciousness, not an analysis.

I say he would.
As a fan of Shakespeare and someone who enjoys literature analysis I am always intrigued as to how people interpret The Bard. However, I have come to the realization that people are far too obsessed with homosexual undertones (or overtones) and/or homo-eroticism in every single play!

I recently had to read Twelfth Night–which is a great play– twice (once in the fall semester and once this spring) and both times I heard people go on about a scene involving Antonio and Sebastian and how it was “quite obviously” that Antonio had a love that far surpassed “friendly” with Sebastian. Here is a link to the part I am referring to; (http://nfs.sparknotes.com/twelfthnight/page_60.epl).I have to argue that I adamantly believe this interpretation is vague at best and I say this because of the fact that much of the language used, though flamboyant or excessive is characteristic of most characters in Shakespeare’s plays, not just the ones who are “in love” with each other.

My opinion is that the bond shared by the two is one of a brotherly, comrade-in-arms sort of affection. To jump to a conclusion of; “Oh, they are gay!” is so rash and unsupported by the text. Especially because it is such a short interaction and there is little to no character development of either of them. I would have to say that if anyone in the play is displaying any sort of homosexuality it is Orsino and his relationship with Cesario (for those who don’t know the play; Cesario is actually a woman, Viola, who has disguised herself as a man because she is all alone in a strange land and in mourning of her brother Sebastian because she thinks he died in the shipwreck. Of course no one knows that Cesario is a woman.)

Back to my point. I heard from one of my Professors that in England they protray the supposedly gay scene between Antonio and Sebastian as a neutral or simply that the two have become good friends. I think that the varying opinions on the matter reveal something about the ambiguity of the scene as well as, forgive my over generalization her, the mentality of the American reader. Cultural relativism at it’s best. We in the 21st century interact with people differently than in the 1500-1600s. We are imposing different cultural values, morals, and experiences (consciously and unconsciously ) on work that was a voice of life in another time.

Could it be that not only is the artist in his/her art, but also that the analyst is in his/her analysis? I whole heartedly think so. I am by no means saying that if “you” see their relationship as being homosexual that “you” are gay, but rather that there is something in the back of you mind, or something insinuated by your Prof. that Shakespeare was gay, wrote about homosexuality a lot, or whatever the case may be that one will expect to see it.

I’d also like to say that the amount of time spent discussing sexual innuendos, undertones, or double meanings in my English class has led me to wonder how many authors are turning over in their graves at some of the parallels people, myself included, draw.