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News

Green Sahara reveals its treasures

added on: 5th November, 2008

Sci­en­tists in Ni­ger have found the Sa­hara De­sert’s larg­est known Stone-Age grave­yard, which of­fers an un­par­al­leled rec­ord of life when the re­gion was green. Dat­ing back 10,000 years and called Gob­ero af­ter the Tua­reg name for the ar­ea, the site was brim­ming with skele­tons of hu­mans and an­i­mals. Gob­ero is hid­den away with­in Ni­ger’s for­bid­ding Ténéré Des­ert, known to lo­cal Tua­reg no­mads as a ‘des­ert with­in a des­ert.’ The site was pris­tine, ap­par­ently nev­er vis­ited. Two sea­sons of ex­cava­t­ion even­tu­ally re­vealed some 200 graves clearly be­long­ing to two suc­ces­sive lake­side popula­t­ions. The old­er group, de­ter­mined to be Kif­fian, were hunters of wild game who left ev­i­dence that they al­so speared huge perch with har­poons when they col­o­nized the green Sa­hara dur­ing its wet­test per­i­od be­tween 10,000 and 8,000 years ago. Their tall stat­ure, some­times reach­ing well over 6 feet, was not im­me­di­ately ap­par­ent from their tightly bound bur­i­al po­si­tions. The more re­cent popula­t­ion was the Tene­r­ian, a more lightly built peo­ple who ap­peared to have had a di­verse econ­o­my of hunt­ing, fish­ing and cat­tle herd­ing. They lived dur­ing the lat­ter part of the green Sa­hara, about 7,000 to 4,500 years ago. Their one-of-a-kind bur­i­als of­ten in­clud­ed jewellery or rit­u­al pos­es - a girl wear­ing an upper-arm brace­let carved from a hip­po tusk, for ex­am­ple, and a stun­ning tri­ple bur­i­al con­tain­ing a wom­an and two chil­dren in a poign­ant em­brace. ‘At first glance, it’s hard to im­ag­ine two more bi­o­log­ic­ally dis­tinct groups of peo­ple bur­y­ing their dead in the same place,’ said team mem­ber Chris Sto­janowski, a bioar­chae­o­lo­g­ist from Ar­i­zo­na State Uni­ver­s­ity. ‘The big­gest mys­tery is how they seemed to have done this with­out dis­turb­ing a sin­gle grave.’ Al­though the Sa­hara has long been the world’s larg­est des­ert, a faint wob­ble in Earth’s or­bit and oth­er fac­tors oc­cur­ring some 12,000 years ago caused Af­ri­ca’s sea­son­al mon­soons to shift slightly north, bring­ing new rains to the Sa­hara. From Egypt in the east to Mau­ri­ta­nia in the west, lakes with lush mar­gins dot­ted the form­erly parched land­scape, draw­ing an­i­mals, fish and even­tu­ally peo­ple. Sep­a­rat­ing these two popula­t­ions was an ar­id in­ter­val per­haps as long as a mil­len­ni­um that be­gan about 8,000 years ago, when the lake disap­peared and the site was aban­doned. One bur­i­al brought ac­ti­vity at the site to a stand­still. Ly­ing on her side, the ske­l­e­ton of a pe­tite Tene­r­ian wom­an emerged from the sand, fac­ing the skele­tons of two young chil­dren; their slen­der arms reached to­ward her and their hands were clasped in an ev­er­last­ing em­brace. Sam­ples tak­en from un­der the skele­tons con­tained pol­len clus­ters, taken as ev­i­dence the peo­ple had been laid out on a bed of flow­ers. Sto­janowski an­a­lyzed doz­ens of in­di­vid­u­als’ bones and teeth for clues to the two popula­t­ions. ‘This in­di­vid­ual, for ex­am­ple, had huge leg mus­cles,’ he said of ridges on the thigh bone of a Kif­fian ma­le, ‘which sug­gests he was eat­ing a lot of pro­tein and had an ac­tive, stren­u­ous lifestyle. The Kif­fian ap­pear to have been fairly healthy - it would be dif­fi­cult to grow a body that tall and mus­cu­lar with­out suf­fi­cient nu­tri­tion.’ In con­trast, the fe­mur ridge of a Tene­r­ian male was barely per­cep­ti­ble. ‘This man’s life was less rig­or­ous, per­haps tak­ing smaller fish and game with more ad­vanced hunt­ing tech­nolo­gies,’ Sto­janowski said. Anal­y­sis of mea­sure­ments on Kif­fian skulls links them to skulls found across north­ern Af­ri­ca, some as old as 16,000 years, Sto­janowski said. The Tene­r­ian, how­ev­er, are not closely linked to these an­cient popula­t­ions. A large-scale re­turn ex­pe­di­tion is planned to the site to fur­ther ex­plore the two popula­t­ions that coped with ex­treme cli­mate change. For more news visit www.world-science.net.

'Insideout' sanctuary

added on: 5th November, 2008

InsideOut, the Lancashire-based garden office company, have just completed a new garden room for staff and clients at Bridewell Organic Garden and Vineyard, the award winning West Oxfordshire charity. Bridewell’s clients, who suffer from a range of complex mental illnesses from depression to schizophrenia, are encouraged to help tend the garden and vineyards. Their involvement forms an important part of the therapeutic process. More than twenty staff and clients previously used an old garage to relax in. So the new room, with its log-burning stove, is a very welcome addition. Clients and staff now have a peaceful, attractive place overlooking the garden to sit, have a cuppa and admire their hard work. Built in just two weeks, the new room is eco-friendly by design. Gordon Smith, InsideOut’s architect explains, ‘We’ve constructed the room from low-toxicity materials to reduce the building’s environmental impact. It is durable, low maintenance, highly insulated, has an environmentally responsible finish and it’ll last for a long, long time.’ Lynn Fotheringham and Gordon Smith have been building garden offices and granny flats since 2002, using their own traditional timber frame building system. ‘The concept is to create good looking, fully functioning outdoor living and working spaces,’ says Gordon Smith. ‘Our buildings are about as far from garden sheds as you can get!’  Bridewell General Manager Alex Taylor commented, ‘We chose InsideOut because of their professional response. And because their buildings were such high quality Lynn and Gordon immediately struck us as people who understood what Bridewell’s all about. Our judgment has proved correct... everyone at Bridewell thinks the new building is fantastic. It’ll make a major difference to our facilities and to how people experience the garden.’ From InsideOut’s point of view, the project has been a rewarding one. “Bridewell allowed us to fully indulge our concerns for the environment, and the respect we like to give a building’s surroundings. Working with an organization that bases everything it does on organic principles has been entirely in tune with what we’re all about’, explains Lynn Fotheringham, managing director. InsideOut designs and builds to a high standard of comfort. Rooms are beautifully finished using environmentally friendly larch cladding, grown in carefully managed woodland in Scotland and Northumbria. Wherever possible, the company uses materials manufactured in the UK, with lower levels of industrial energy, chemicals and transport. All this helps customers reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For more information on Bridewell visit www.bridewellorganicgardens.co.uk or on InsideOut speak to Lynn Fotheringham on 01524 737999 or visit www.iobuild.co.uk

Sunday peaceful Sunday

added on: 12th September, 2008

New York City’s Nokia Theatre in Times Square is hosting a star-studded concert to celebrate Peace Day 2008 on 9 September. Grammy-award winning singers Annie Lennox and Bryan Adams will be performing with video messages of Peace from Jude Law and Lenny Kravitz, speeches from international luminaries and clips from Peace One Day founder Jeremy Gilley’s acclaimed new documentary, The Day After Peace. The New York concert will be filmed and a TV special will be broadcast globally. The New York concert will be held in addition to a UK Gala Celebration on 21 September at the Royal Albert Hall in London. In addition, churches and communities throughout the world are committing to the International Day of Peace through prayer, meditation and other forms of spiritual observance. For 2008, The World Council of Churches (WCC) office for the Decade to Overcome Violence (DOV) has made available prayer and liturgical resources developed in the context of this year’s DOV focus on the Pacific region and its theme ‘Witnessing to God’s Peace’. The International Day of Prayer for Peace was proposed at a 2004 meeting between WCC general secretary Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia and UN secretary general Kofi Annan. WCC’s invitation to pray for peace on 21 September, or the Sunday preceding it, coincides with a United Nations’ initiative that encourages ‘global 24-hour spiritual observation for peace’, which ‘is meant to demonstrate the power of prayer and other spiritual practices in promoting peace and preventing violent conflict’. For more information visit Peace One Day at: www.peaceoneday.org

Germinating gems

added on: 12th September, 2008

According to Andrei Sommer, and two of his colleagues at the University of Ulm in Germany, the surface of diamonds may have provided the right conditions to foster the chemical reactions believed to have given rise to life on Earth billions of years ago. Many scientists have theorized that life’s chemical precursors gradually evolved from a so-called ‘primordial soup’ of simpler molecules. But just how these simpler molecules, called amino acids, would have assembled into complex larger structures remains one of science’s great mysteries. This most recent study focused on diamonds as they provide us with crystallized forms of carbon older than the earliest forms of life. In a series of laboratory experiments, the scientists found that after treatment with hydrogen, natural diamond forms crystalline layers of water on its surface. These layers may have been essential for the development of life, and involved in electrical conductivity, the group argued. In other words, they explained, when primitive molecules landed on the surface of these ‘hydrogenated’ diamonds in the early atmosphere, the resulting chemical reaction could have generated more complex organic molecules that eventually gave rise to life. For the full study see the August issue of Crystal Growth & Design, a research journal of the American Chemical Society.

A turbine first

added on: 12th September, 2008

Rock Port in Missouri sets the bar by being the first town in the US to generate all of its electricity from wind power. It makes use of the 75 wind turbines spread out across three Missouri counties, and local experts are excited about the potential for wind power throughout the state. Though sceptics suggest this is relatively easy for somewhere like Rock Point to achieve, as it only has 1300 residents, it is an encouraging start. The US government sees wind power only providing around 20% of the power needed to run the country in the future, but that’s still 20% less dependency on fossil fuels, so not just a lot of hot air!

Not such ‘happy feet’

added on: 12th September, 2008

Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, penguins are sounding the alarm for potentially catastrophic changes in the world’s oceans, a University of Washington biologist, Dee Boersma says. The culprits are global warming, oil pollution, depletion of fisheries and rampant coastline development threatening breeding habitats for many penguin species. ‘Penguins are among those species that show us that we are making fundamental changes to our world,’ says Dee. 'The fate of all species is to go extinct, but there are some species that go extinct before their time and we are facing that possibility with some penguins.’ She advocates an international effort to check on the largest colonies of each penguin species at least every five years. Working with the Wildlife Conservation Society and colleagues, Boersma has studied the world’s largest breeding colony of Magellanic penguins at Punta Tombo on Argentina’s Atlantic coast. That population probably peaked at about 400,000 pairs between the late 1960s and early 1980s, and today is half that, she said. Galapagos Islands penguins, the only species whose range extends into the northern hemisphere, now number around 2,500, about a quarter of what their population was when Boersma first studied them in the 1970s. These problems raise the question of whether humans are making it too hard for other species to coexist, Boersma argued. Penguins in places like Argentina, the Falklands and Africa run rising risks of being fouled by oil, either from ocean drilling or because of petroleum discharge from passing ships, she continued. The birds’ chances of getting oiled are also rising because they often have to forage much farther than before to find prey. 'As the fish humans have traditionally eaten get more and more scarce, we are fishing down the food chain and now we are beginning to compete more directly with smaller organisms for the food they depend on,' she said.

Heads Up!

added on: 26th June, 2008

New research suggests that two well-known crystal skulls in the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, are not, after all, from ancient Mexico. Academics now believe the British skull was made in 19th-century Europe and the American one even later. Electronmicroscope analysis for tool marks found both skulls were carved with a rotary disc-shaped tool, a technology the ancient Mexicans didn’t have. Analysis of the quartz in the Brit ish Mu se um skull sug gests it was quar ried from Brazilor Madagascar – far outside the Ancient Mexicans’ trading links. The team, made up of experts from Cardiff and Kingston universities, the British Museum and the Smithsonian, concluded that neither skull could have been made in Mexico before the time of Columbus. They believe the British skull was created in Europe in the 19th century, and the Smithsonian’s shortly before it was bought in Mexico City in 1960. ‘It is always disappointing when an intriguing arte fact like a crystal skull turns out not to be genuine,’ said Cardiff University’s Ian Freestone, a mem ber of there search team. The findings are to appear in The Journal of Archaeological Science.

Sea Sanctuary

added on: 25th June, 2008

Environmental groups are applauding the recent promise by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet to convert Chile’s entire coastline – one of the longest in the world – into a whale sanctuary. Nearly 50 per cent of the world’s whale species pass through Chilean waters on a regular basis and, in addition, Chile hosts a sizeable population of blue whales which come to feed and reproduce off the northern coast of Chile. Bachelet made the announcement as part of her annual May 21 State of the Nation speech. During June’s annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) – to be held in Santiago – she promised that Chile will condemn the capture and killing of whales for scientific purposes. The whale sanctuary plan was first proposed in 2007 by the National Confederation of Chilean Artisan Fishermen which joined with the Center for Cetacean Conservation and Ecoceanos, a Santiago-based environmental NGO, in lobbying Chilean government authorities. A law already in place bans whaling until 2025 and the new sanctuary would help extend that law indefinitely. In recent months the initiative has received almost universal backing; over 100 environmental groups around the planet including the Marine Connection support the proposed sanctuary. ‘This is a huge triumph for the people of Chile and a strong international signal by the host country of the International Whaling Commission gathering,’ said Ecoceanos Director Juan Carlos Cárdenas. ‘This demonstrates the eff ectiveness of the combined effort by environmentalist and artisan fishers, who in demanding the creation of a sanctuary were able to attract the support of 97 per cent of the Chilean public.’ For more information visit ww.marineconnection.org

Water Worries

added on: 24th June, 2008

Tourist lodges requiring huge amounts of water are to be built on the land of the Kalahari Bushmen – but the Bushmen are not allowed to pump water from their single borehole. The government has invited companies to tender for concessions to run tourist lodges at three sites in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR). One of the sites is very close to the Bushman community of Molapo. The companies, Afro Ventures Botswana and the Safari Adventure Company, have been asked to bid for this concession. The Bushmen have been asking the government to allow them to reopen a disused water borehole inside the reserve, ever since the government dismantled it during the evictions of 2002. The Bushmen say they will seek their own funding to pump water. But the government has refused, on the grounds that the borehole is ‘government property’. The Bushmen won the legal right to return home in December 2006 but the government is making this almost impossible by preventing them from pumping water in what is an extremely arid and inhospitable environment. Survival’s director Stephen Corry said: ‘The government’s plan to build tourist lodges in the reserve makes its denial of water to the Bushmen seem crueller than ever. Some tourists thinking of visiting are bound to change their minds when they hear what happened to the Bushmen there.’ Several boreholes have already been sunk in the reserve in preparation for Gem Diamonds’ $2.2 billion diamond mine at the Bushman community of Gope. For more information contact Miriam Ross on (+44) (0)20 7687 8734 or email mr@survival-international.org

Emu oil to the rescue

added on: 20th June, 2008

The oral history of the Australian Aborigine indicates their use of oil from emus for over forty thousand years. They used ‘emu oil’ to gain relief from minor aches and pains, to help heal wounds quicker, and protect their skin from the harsh elements of wind and sun. Emu oil made the headlines in the UK after Paula Radcliff e discovered the remedy and claimed it helped her get over injuries she had suff ered prior to her record-breaking run in the 2003 Flora London Marathon. Now registered as a therapeutic anti-infl ammatory in Australia and without the side-eff ects of man-made alternatives such as an increased risk of heart disease, vascular disease and strokes, emu oil’s popularity is only set to grow. As science learns more and more lessons from nature the hope is that the likes of emu oil will open up people’s minds to other remedies used by indigenous people around the world and help us protect and nurture their medicinal remedies. For more information contact The Pioneer Trading Company by calling 01526 344971/345613 or by visiting their website at: www.pion-tc.co.uk