(Geçen ay Yeşilist için yazdığım yazıyı aşağıda paylaşıyorum.)
http://blog.yesilist.com/turkiyede-vegan-olmak-yalnizliktir/
Yaşam tarzı olarak vegan olmayı seçtiyseniz, üç farklı tepkiyle karşılaşırsınız. Birinci gruptakiler, bu kelimeyi daha önce hiç duymamış olanlardır. “O ne demek?” diye hayretle bakarlar yüzünüze. Gencinden yaşlısına hemen her ülkeden insanın gösterebileceği tepkilerden birisi bu.
Daha çok “vejetaryen” kavramına alışkın olduklarından, ikisini aynı sanan da olur. Vejetaryenlerin sadece et yemediğini; veganların ise, hayvansal hiçbir ürünü yemediğini ve bununla kalmayıp hayvanlardan elde edilen veya üzerlerinde denenen hiçbir ürünü de giymeyip kullanmadıklarını söylersiniz.
Hemen ardından “Neden?! Hadi eti anlıyorum ama mesela neden süt içmiyorsun?” şeklindeki ikinci soru gelir. “Bu bir düşünsel/felsefi eğilimin gereği olarak oluşan yaşam tarzıdır. Hayvanları insanların ihtiyaçları için yaratılan birer meta olarak değerlendiren görüşü reddediyorum. Sonuçta hayvanın kendi yavrusuna vermesi gereken süte el koyuluyor. Fabrikasyon üretimde mutlaka hayvana zulüm söz konusu” dersiniz. Kimisi sessiz kalır, kimisi “Çok garipmiş” der.
Bununla kalsa iyi. İkinci gruptakiler, daha sert tepki verenlerdir. Veganizm hakkında bir şeyler duymuşlardır ama tam bilgileri olmasa da şiddetle karşı gelirler. “Bu yanlış! Et yemek doğaldır. B12 vitaminini nereden karşılayacaksınız? Böyle gereksiz şeyler de moda oluyor!” deyip çıkarlar. Araştırmalarla ortaya konan gerçeklerden, ilk insanların vejetaryen olduğundan, bilinçli bir beslenmeyle B12 konusunda önlem alınabileceğinden söz edersiniz ama boşunadır; o sizi “garip bir yaratık, bir uzaylı” olarak değerlendirmiştir kafasında...
Sayıları az olsa da, “Çok zor olsa gerek. Saygı duyuyorum” diyen bir üçüncü grup da var. Türkiye de her üç insan tipiyle de karşılaşmak olanaklı. Bana göre vegan olmanın en zor yanı, bir topluma girdiğinizde bu tercihinizin nedenini açıklamak zorunda kalmanız. Ben bundan kaçınmak amacıyla, “Neden vegansın?” dendiğinde, konuşmanın uzamaması için kısaca “Etik nedenlerle” diyorum. Çünkü ben kendi argümanlarımı açıklamaya başlarsam, ister istemez karşımdakini tercihinden dolayı yargılıyormuşum duygusuna kapılıyorum ve bunu yapmak istemiyorum.
Elbette bana göre ideal bir dünyada herkes vegan olurdu. Ama içinde yaşadığımız dünya birçok açıdan berbat durumda; ideal olmaktan çok uzak. O nedenle her fırsatta hayvan haklarını savunsam da, benim kendi yaşam tarzımı başkalarına dayatma gibi bir tavrım olamaz. Herkesin yaşayacağı tek bir hayatı var ve onu kendi düşünceleri, duyguları, vicdanı doğrultusunda kurgulayacaktır.
Sık sık “Yabancı bir ülkede vegan olmakla Türkiye’de vegan olmak arasında ne fark var?” sorusuyla da karşılaşırım. Ben hayatımın bir dönemini New York’ta yaşadım. “Vegan Cenneti” derim ben oraya. Çünkü çok sayıda vegan restoranı, doğal ürünler satan mağazaları ve bu konuda bilinçli bir halkı olduğu için, orada kendimi daha iyi hissederim.
Ama Türkiye’de yaşayan bir vegansanız, azınlık olmanın ne demek olduğunu iyi tecrübe edebilirsiniz. İstanbul gibi dünyanın en büyük metropol kentlerinden birinde vegan restoranı yok. Geçenlerde bir dergi, anket tarzı bir röportaj yaptı benimle. “Bu yıl en çok hangi restoranda yediniz?” diye sordular. En çok evde yemek yedim ben. Sokaktayken karnım acıktığında yemek yiyebileceğim restoran sayısı çok az. Yemeklerin içine mutlaka hayvansal bir ürün katılıyor ya da garsonlar bu konuda çok bilgisiz olduğu için sağlıklı bilgi veremiyor.
Kısa bir süre önce başıma şöyle bir olay geldi. Sağlıklı ve hafif yemekler sunduğunu söyleyen bir restorana gittim. Menüde benim yiyebileceğim bir şey olmadığı için, garsona, salatayı keçi peyniri olmadan yapabilirler mi diye sordum. “O şekliyle tavsiye ederim!” dedi. “Hayvansal ürün yemiyorum” diye yanıtlayınca, “Ama o peynir üç ay bekletiliyor” dedi. İnsanların bu konudaki bilgisizliğine iyi bir örnekti. Bir keresinde de restoran sahibi kadın, “Sen buraya sık gel; ben seni iyileştiririm” dedi üzüntüyle. Benim hasta olduğuma karar vermişti...
Bir veganın yaşayabileceği en büyük sorun, aslında yemek değil; üzerinde deri olmayan ayakkabı bulmak. Bir ayakkabı beğenir, umutsuzca tezgahtara yaklaşırsınız ve aranızda şu konuşma geçer:
Vegan: Bu deriden mi yapılmış?
Tezgahtar: Evet, elbette! Hem de kanguru derisi!
Vegan: Ben deri olmayan ayakkabı arıyorum. Var mı sizde?
Tezgahtar: Bizde her şey hakiki deri. Neden deri istemiyorsunuz ki?
Vegan: Ben veganım, hayvansal ürün kullanmıyorum.
Tezgahtar: O ne? Bir hastalık mı, alerji filan mı var?
Vegan: İyi günler...
Bu örneklerin de ortaya koyduğu gibi, Türkiye’de veganlık dolayısıyla değil, daha çok insanların bu konudaki bilgisizliğinden sıkıntı çekiyorum. Bir şekilde yiyecek buluyorsunuz ama bu tercihim nedeniyle yargılanmak üzücü oluyor. Ben yanımdaki insanların tercihine karışmazken, onlar sürekli benim neden onlar gibi olmadığımı sorguluyor. Bu yüzden yemeklere davet edilmiyor, dışlanıyorsunuz. Hep yalnız geziyor, hep yalnız yiyorsunuz.
Yalnızlıktan sıkılan bir insan olmadığımdan benim için sorun yok. Ama “Türkiye’de vegan olmak” üzerine bir yazı yazıyorsam, bunu belirtmek durumundayım. Şiddeti ve zulmü tümüyle hayatından çıkarmak isteyen; hayvanların yaşam hakkına saygı duyan ve bu nedenle de uçan, koşan, yürüyen, yüzen, gözleri ve bir annesi olan hiçbir canlıyı yemem diyen barışçıl bir insan olsanız da, genel tercihin dışındaysanız, yalnız kalırsınız.
“Acaba Türkiye’deki tek vegan ben miyim?” diye düşündüğüm çok olmuştur. Bu gibi durumlarda çok önemli bir soruyu kendinize sorup tercihinizi tekrar net şekilde ortaya koyarsanız, yalnızlığı da aşarsınız: “Yalnızlık mı, vicdan huzursuzluğu mu?”
Zülal Kalkandelen
14 Kasım 2011 Pazartesi
17 Ekim 2011 Pazartesi
The best thing I've seen on the Internet today.
I do love sea horses very much and New Scientist is the best magazine in the world!http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/sea-portraits
Spotted seahorse
The common seahorse (Hippocampus kuda) is a strange hodgepodge of characters, from the top of its equine head to the tip of its prehensile tail. But its unusual appearance is as nothing compared with its unique approach to breeding: famously, in seahorses, pipefishes and sea dragons it is the male of the species that carries the pregnancy.
The female uses her ovipositor to inject eggs into a pouch on the male's belly, where they are fertilised and grow into tiny replicas of adults over the course of three to four weeks. (Source: New Scientist)
2 Ağustos 2011 Salı
weightless cats
Human spaceflight rests on the shoulders of kitties. Before shooting humans into space, NASA and the U.S. Air Force tested the low-gravity waters with smaller mammals, birds and insects. The propaganda videos of the time claimed the animal astronauts were ushering in "a new era -- not a Buck Rogers era in a science fiction world, but an age having its foundations in research." That may be true. But the resulting videos of these hapless creatures, which range from hilarious to disturbing, seem to best answer the question, "How does a creature that doesn't understand gravity respond to its absence?"
Cat Can Has Gravity?
Cats only land on their feet when they know which way is down. Researchers at the Air Force Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories in Dayton, Ohio sent cats flying in a C-131 jet on a trajectory that gave them 15 seconds of weightlessness. This footage is from an Air Force film called Bioastronautics Research.
(via Wired)
31 Mayıs 2011 Salı
How animals made us human
Very interesting article from New Scientist's new issue (Issue Number 2814)
Written by Pat Shipman who is adjunct professor of biological anthropology at Penn State University.
Her book The Animal Connection: A new perspective on what makes us human is published by W. W. Norton & Company on 13 June
-------------
Our bond with animals goes far deeper than food and companionship: it drove our ancestors to develop tools and language
TRAVEL almost anywhere in the world and you will see something so common that it may not even catch your attention. Wherever there are people, there are animals: animals being walked, herded, fed, watered, bathed, brushed or cuddled. Many, such as dogs, cats and sheep, are domesticated but you will also find people living alongside wild and exotic creatures such as monkeys, wolves and binturongs. Close contact with animals is not confined to one particular culture, geographic region or ethnic group. It is a universal human trait, which suggests that our desire to be with animals is deeply embedded and very ancient.
On the face of it this makes little sense. In the wild, no other mammal adopts individuals from another species; badgers do not tend hares, deer do not nurture baby squirrels, lions do not care for giraffes. And there is a good reason why. Since the ultimate prize in evolution is perpetuating your genes in your offspring and their offspring, caring for an individual from another species is counterproductive and detrimental to your success. Every mouthful of food you give it, every bit of energy you expend keeping it warm (or cool) and safe, is food and energy that does not go to your own kin. Even if pets offer unconditional love, friendship, physical affection and joy, that cannot explain why or how our bond with other species arose in the first place. Who would bring a ferocious predator such a wolf into their home in the hope that thousands of years later it would become a loving family pet?
I am fascinated by this puzzle and as a palaeoanthropologist have tried to understand it by looking to the deep past for the origins of our intimate link with animals. What I found was a long trail, an evolutionary trajectory that I call the animal connection. What's more, this trail links to three of the most important developments in human evolution: tool-making, language and domestication. If I am correct, our affinity with other species is no mere curiosity. Instead, the animal connection is a hugely significant force that has shaped us and been instrumental in our global spread and success in the world.
The trail begins at least 2.6 million years ago. That is when the first flaked stone tools appear in the archaeological record, at Gona in the Afar region of Ethiopia (Nature, vol 385, p 333). Inventing stone tools is no trivial task. It requires the major intellectual breakthrough of understanding that the apparent properties of an object can be altered. But the prize was great. Those earliest flakes are found in conjunction with fossilised animal bones, some of which bear cut marks. It would appear that from the start our ancestors were using tools to gain access to animal carcasses. Up until then, they had been largely vegetarian, upright apes. Now, instead of evolving the features that make carnivores effective hunters - such as swift locomotion, grasping claws, sharp teeth, great bodily strength and improved senses for hunting - our ancestors created their own adaptation by learning how to turn heavy, blunt stones into small, sharp items equivalent to razor blades and knives. In other words, early humans devised an evolutionary shortcut to becoming a predator.
That had many consequences. On the plus side, eating more highly nutritious meat and fat was a prerequisite to the increase in relative brain size that marks the human lineage. Since meat tends to come in larger packages than leaves, fruits or roots, meat-eaters can spend less time finding and eating food and more on activities such as learning, social interaction, observation of others and inventing more tools. On the minus side, though, preying on animals put our ancestors into direct competition with the other predators that shared their ecosystem. To get the upper hand, they needed more than just tools and that, I believe, is where the animal connection comes in.
Two and a half million years ago, there were 11 true carnivores in Africa. These were the ancestors of today's lions, cheetahs, leopards and three types of hyena, together with five now extinct species: a long-legged hyena, a wolf-like canid, two sabretooth cats and a "false" sabretooth cat. All but three of these outweighed early humans, so hanging around dead animals would have been a very risky business. The new predator on the savannah would have encountered ferocious competition for prizes such as freshly killed antelope. Still, by 1.7 million years ago, two carnivore species were extinct - perhaps because of the intense competition - and our ancestor had increased enough in size that it outweighed all but four of the remaining carnivores.
Why did our lineage survive when true carnivores were going extinct? Working in social groups certainly helped, but hyenas and lions do the same. Having tools enabled early humans to remove a piece of a dead carcass quickly and take it to safety, too. But I suspect that, above all, the behavioural adaptation that made it possible for our ancestors to compete successfully with true carnivores was the ability to pay very close attention to the habits of both potential prey and potential competitors. Knowledge was power, so we acquired a deep understanding of the minds of other animals.
Out of Africa
Another significant consequence of becoming more predatory was a pressing need to live at lower densities. Prey species are common and often live in large herds. Predators are not, and do not, because they require large territories in which to hunt or they soon exhaust their food supply. The record of the geographic distribution of our ancestors provides more support for my idea that the animal connection has shaped our evolution. From the first appearance of our lineage 6 or 7 million years ago until perhaps 2 million years ago, all hominins were in Africa and nowhere else. Then early humans underwent a dramatic territorial expansion, forced by the demands of their new way of living. They spread out of Africa into Eurasia with remarkable speed, arriving as far east as Indonesia and probably China by about 1.8 million years ago. This was no intentional migration but simply a gradual expansion into new hunting grounds. First, an insight into the minds of other species had secured our success as predators, now that success had driven our expansion across Eurasia.
Throughout the period of these enormous changes in the lifestyle and ecology of our ancestors, gathering, recording and sharing knowledge became more and more advantageous. And the most crucial topic about which our ancestors amassed and exchanged information was animals.
How do I know this? No words or language remain from that time, so I cannot look for them. I can, however, look for symbols - since words are essentially symbolic - and that takes me to the wealth of prehistoric art that appears in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, starting about 50,000 years ago. Prehistoric art allows us to eavesdrop on the conversations of our ancestors and see the topic of discussion: animals, their colours, shapes, habits, postures, locomotion and social habits. This focus is even more striking when you consider what else might have been depicted. Pictures of people, social interactions and ceremonies are rare. Plants, water sources and geographic features are even scarcer, though they must have been key to survival. There are no images showing how to build shelters, make fires or create tools. Animal information mattered more than all of these.
The overwhelming predominance of animals in prehistoric art suggests that the animal connection - the evolutionary advantages of observing animals and collecting, compiling and sharing information about them - was a strong impetus to a second important development in human evolution: the development of language and enhanced communication. Of course, more was involved than simply coining words. Famously, vervet monkeys have different cries for eagles, leopards and snakes, but they cannot discuss dangerous-things-that-were-here-yesterday or ask "what ate my sibling?" or wonder if that danger might appear again tomorrow. They communicate with each other and share information, but they do not have language. The magical property of full language is that it is comprised of vocabulary and grammatical rules that can be combined and recombined in an infinite number of ways to convey fine shades of meaning.
Nobody doubts that language proved a major adaptive advantage to our ancestors in developing complex behaviours and sharing information. How it arose, however, remains a mystery. I believe I am the first to propose a continuity between the strong human-animal link that appeared 2.6 million years ago and the origin of language. The complexity and importance of animal-related information spurred early humans to move beyond what their primate cousins could achieve.
As our ancestors became ever more intimately involved with animals, the third and final product of the animal connection appeared. Domestication has long been linked with farming and the keeping of stock animals, an economic and social change from hunting and gathering that is often called the Neolithic revolution. Domestic animals are usually considered as commodities, "walking larders", reflecting the idea that the basis of the Neolithic revolution was a drive for greater food security.
When I looked at the origins of domestication for clues to its underlying reasons, I found some fundamental flaws in this idea. Instead, my analysis suggests that domestication emerged as a natural progression of our close association with, and understanding of, other species. In other words, it was a product of the animal connection.
Man's best friend
First, if domestication was about knowing where your next meal was coming from, then the first domesticate ought to have been a food source. It was not. According to a detailed analysis of fossil skulls carried out by Mietje Germonpré of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and her colleagues, the earliest known dog skull is 32,000 years old (Journal of Archaeological Science, vol 36, p 473). The results have been greeted with some surprise, since other analyses have suggested dogs were domesticated around 17,000 years ago, but even that means they pre-date any other domesticated animal or plant by about 5000 years (see diagram). Yet dogs are not a good choice if you want a food animal: they are dangerous while being domesticated, being derived from wolves, and worst of all, they eat meat. If the objective of domestication was to have meat to eat, you would never select an animal that eats 2 kilograms of the stuff a day.
A sustainable relationship
My second objection to the idea that animals were domesticated simply for food turns on a paradox. Farming requires hungry people to set aside edible animals or seeds so as to have some to reproduce the following year. My Penn State colleague David Webster explores the idea in a paper due to appear in Current Anthropology. He concludes that it only becomes logical not to eat all you have if the species in question is already well on the way to being domesticated, because only then are you sufficiently familiar with it to know how to benefit from taking the long view. This means for an animal species to become a walking larder, our ancestors must have already spent generations living intimately with it, exerting some degree of control over breeding. Who plans that far in advance for dinner?
Then there's the clincher. A domestic animal that is slaughtered for food yields little more meat than a wild one that has been hunted, yet requires more management and care. Such a system is not an improvement in food security. Instead, I believe domestication arose for a different reason, one that offsets the costs of husbandry. All domestic animals, and even semi-domesticated ones, offer a wealth of renewable resources that provide ongoing benefits as long as they are alive. They can provide power for hauling, transport and ploughing, wool or fur for warmth and weaving, milk for food, manure for fertiliser, fuel and building material, hunting assistance, protection for the family or home, and a disposal service for refuse and ordure. Domestic animals are also a mobile source of wealth, which can literally propagate itself.
Domestication, more than ever, drew upon our understanding of animals to keep them alive and well. It must have started accidentally and been a protracted reciprocal process of increasing communication that allowed us not just to tame other species but also to permanently change their genomes by selective breeding to enhance or diminish certain traits.
The great benefit for people of this caring relationship was a continuous supply of resources that enabled them to move into previously uninhabitable parts of the world. This next milestone in human evolution would have been impossible without the sort of close observation, accumulated knowledge and improved communication skills that the animal connection started selecting for when our ancestors began hunting at least 2.6 million years ago.
What does it matter if the animal connection is a fundamental and ancient influence on our species? I think it matters a great deal. The human-animal link offers a causal connection that makes sense of three of the most important leaps in our development: the invention of stone tools, the origin of language and the domestication of animals. That makes it a sort of grand unifying theory of human evolution.
And the link is as crucial today as it ever was. The fundamental importance of our relationship with animals explains why interacting with them offers various physical and mental health benefits - and why the annual expenditure on items related to pets and wild animals is so enormous.
Finally, if being with animals has been so instrumental in making humans human, we had best pay attention to this point as we plan for the future. If our species was born of a world rich with animals, can we continue to flourish in one where we have decimated biodiversity?
-
Written by Pat Shipman who is adjunct professor of biological anthropology at Penn State University.
Her book The Animal Connection: A new perspective on what makes us human is published by W. W. Norton & Company on 13 June
-------------
Our bond with animals goes far deeper than food and companionship: it drove our ancestors to develop tools and language
TRAVEL almost anywhere in the world and you will see something so common that it may not even catch your attention. Wherever there are people, there are animals: animals being walked, herded, fed, watered, bathed, brushed or cuddled. Many, such as dogs, cats and sheep, are domesticated but you will also find people living alongside wild and exotic creatures such as monkeys, wolves and binturongs. Close contact with animals is not confined to one particular culture, geographic region or ethnic group. It is a universal human trait, which suggests that our desire to be with animals is deeply embedded and very ancient.
On the face of it this makes little sense. In the wild, no other mammal adopts individuals from another species; badgers do not tend hares, deer do not nurture baby squirrels, lions do not care for giraffes. And there is a good reason why. Since the ultimate prize in evolution is perpetuating your genes in your offspring and their offspring, caring for an individual from another species is counterproductive and detrimental to your success. Every mouthful of food you give it, every bit of energy you expend keeping it warm (or cool) and safe, is food and energy that does not go to your own kin. Even if pets offer unconditional love, friendship, physical affection and joy, that cannot explain why or how our bond with other species arose in the first place. Who would bring a ferocious predator such a wolf into their home in the hope that thousands of years later it would become a loving family pet?
I am fascinated by this puzzle and as a palaeoanthropologist have tried to understand it by looking to the deep past for the origins of our intimate link with animals. What I found was a long trail, an evolutionary trajectory that I call the animal connection. What's more, this trail links to three of the most important developments in human evolution: tool-making, language and domestication. If I am correct, our affinity with other species is no mere curiosity. Instead, the animal connection is a hugely significant force that has shaped us and been instrumental in our global spread and success in the world.
The trail begins at least 2.6 million years ago. That is when the first flaked stone tools appear in the archaeological record, at Gona in the Afar region of Ethiopia (Nature, vol 385, p 333). Inventing stone tools is no trivial task. It requires the major intellectual breakthrough of understanding that the apparent properties of an object can be altered. But the prize was great. Those earliest flakes are found in conjunction with fossilised animal bones, some of which bear cut marks. It would appear that from the start our ancestors were using tools to gain access to animal carcasses. Up until then, they had been largely vegetarian, upright apes. Now, instead of evolving the features that make carnivores effective hunters - such as swift locomotion, grasping claws, sharp teeth, great bodily strength and improved senses for hunting - our ancestors created their own adaptation by learning how to turn heavy, blunt stones into small, sharp items equivalent to razor blades and knives. In other words, early humans devised an evolutionary shortcut to becoming a predator.
That had many consequences. On the plus side, eating more highly nutritious meat and fat was a prerequisite to the increase in relative brain size that marks the human lineage. Since meat tends to come in larger packages than leaves, fruits or roots, meat-eaters can spend less time finding and eating food and more on activities such as learning, social interaction, observation of others and inventing more tools. On the minus side, though, preying on animals put our ancestors into direct competition with the other predators that shared their ecosystem. To get the upper hand, they needed more than just tools and that, I believe, is where the animal connection comes in.
Two and a half million years ago, there were 11 true carnivores in Africa. These were the ancestors of today's lions, cheetahs, leopards and three types of hyena, together with five now extinct species: a long-legged hyena, a wolf-like canid, two sabretooth cats and a "false" sabretooth cat. All but three of these outweighed early humans, so hanging around dead animals would have been a very risky business. The new predator on the savannah would have encountered ferocious competition for prizes such as freshly killed antelope. Still, by 1.7 million years ago, two carnivore species were extinct - perhaps because of the intense competition - and our ancestor had increased enough in size that it outweighed all but four of the remaining carnivores.
Why did our lineage survive when true carnivores were going extinct? Working in social groups certainly helped, but hyenas and lions do the same. Having tools enabled early humans to remove a piece of a dead carcass quickly and take it to safety, too. But I suspect that, above all, the behavioural adaptation that made it possible for our ancestors to compete successfully with true carnivores was the ability to pay very close attention to the habits of both potential prey and potential competitors. Knowledge was power, so we acquired a deep understanding of the minds of other animals.
Out of Africa
Another significant consequence of becoming more predatory was a pressing need to live at lower densities. Prey species are common and often live in large herds. Predators are not, and do not, because they require large territories in which to hunt or they soon exhaust their food supply. The record of the geographic distribution of our ancestors provides more support for my idea that the animal connection has shaped our evolution. From the first appearance of our lineage 6 or 7 million years ago until perhaps 2 million years ago, all hominins were in Africa and nowhere else. Then early humans underwent a dramatic territorial expansion, forced by the demands of their new way of living. They spread out of Africa into Eurasia with remarkable speed, arriving as far east as Indonesia and probably China by about 1.8 million years ago. This was no intentional migration but simply a gradual expansion into new hunting grounds. First, an insight into the minds of other species had secured our success as predators, now that success had driven our expansion across Eurasia.
Throughout the period of these enormous changes in the lifestyle and ecology of our ancestors, gathering, recording and sharing knowledge became more and more advantageous. And the most crucial topic about which our ancestors amassed and exchanged information was animals.
How do I know this? No words or language remain from that time, so I cannot look for them. I can, however, look for symbols - since words are essentially symbolic - and that takes me to the wealth of prehistoric art that appears in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, starting about 50,000 years ago. Prehistoric art allows us to eavesdrop on the conversations of our ancestors and see the topic of discussion: animals, their colours, shapes, habits, postures, locomotion and social habits. This focus is even more striking when you consider what else might have been depicted. Pictures of people, social interactions and ceremonies are rare. Plants, water sources and geographic features are even scarcer, though they must have been key to survival. There are no images showing how to build shelters, make fires or create tools. Animal information mattered more than all of these.
The overwhelming predominance of animals in prehistoric art suggests that the animal connection - the evolutionary advantages of observing animals and collecting, compiling and sharing information about them - was a strong impetus to a second important development in human evolution: the development of language and enhanced communication. Of course, more was involved than simply coining words. Famously, vervet monkeys have different cries for eagles, leopards and snakes, but they cannot discuss dangerous-things-that-were-here-yesterday or ask "what ate my sibling?" or wonder if that danger might appear again tomorrow. They communicate with each other and share information, but they do not have language. The magical property of full language is that it is comprised of vocabulary and grammatical rules that can be combined and recombined in an infinite number of ways to convey fine shades of meaning.
Nobody doubts that language proved a major adaptive advantage to our ancestors in developing complex behaviours and sharing information. How it arose, however, remains a mystery. I believe I am the first to propose a continuity between the strong human-animal link that appeared 2.6 million years ago and the origin of language. The complexity and importance of animal-related information spurred early humans to move beyond what their primate cousins could achieve.
As our ancestors became ever more intimately involved with animals, the third and final product of the animal connection appeared. Domestication has long been linked with farming and the keeping of stock animals, an economic and social change from hunting and gathering that is often called the Neolithic revolution. Domestic animals are usually considered as commodities, "walking larders", reflecting the idea that the basis of the Neolithic revolution was a drive for greater food security.
When I looked at the origins of domestication for clues to its underlying reasons, I found some fundamental flaws in this idea. Instead, my analysis suggests that domestication emerged as a natural progression of our close association with, and understanding of, other species. In other words, it was a product of the animal connection.
Man's best friend
First, if domestication was about knowing where your next meal was coming from, then the first domesticate ought to have been a food source. It was not. According to a detailed analysis of fossil skulls carried out by Mietje Germonpré of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels and her colleagues, the earliest known dog skull is 32,000 years old (Journal of Archaeological Science, vol 36, p 473). The results have been greeted with some surprise, since other analyses have suggested dogs were domesticated around 17,000 years ago, but even that means they pre-date any other domesticated animal or plant by about 5000 years (see diagram). Yet dogs are not a good choice if you want a food animal: they are dangerous while being domesticated, being derived from wolves, and worst of all, they eat meat. If the objective of domestication was to have meat to eat, you would never select an animal that eats 2 kilograms of the stuff a day.
A sustainable relationship
My second objection to the idea that animals were domesticated simply for food turns on a paradox. Farming requires hungry people to set aside edible animals or seeds so as to have some to reproduce the following year. My Penn State colleague David Webster explores the idea in a paper due to appear in Current Anthropology. He concludes that it only becomes logical not to eat all you have if the species in question is already well on the way to being domesticated, because only then are you sufficiently familiar with it to know how to benefit from taking the long view. This means for an animal species to become a walking larder, our ancestors must have already spent generations living intimately with it, exerting some degree of control over breeding. Who plans that far in advance for dinner?
Then there's the clincher. A domestic animal that is slaughtered for food yields little more meat than a wild one that has been hunted, yet requires more management and care. Such a system is not an improvement in food security. Instead, I believe domestication arose for a different reason, one that offsets the costs of husbandry. All domestic animals, and even semi-domesticated ones, offer a wealth of renewable resources that provide ongoing benefits as long as they are alive. They can provide power for hauling, transport and ploughing, wool or fur for warmth and weaving, milk for food, manure for fertiliser, fuel and building material, hunting assistance, protection for the family or home, and a disposal service for refuse and ordure. Domestic animals are also a mobile source of wealth, which can literally propagate itself.
Domestication, more than ever, drew upon our understanding of animals to keep them alive and well. It must have started accidentally and been a protracted reciprocal process of increasing communication that allowed us not just to tame other species but also to permanently change their genomes by selective breeding to enhance or diminish certain traits.
The great benefit for people of this caring relationship was a continuous supply of resources that enabled them to move into previously uninhabitable parts of the world. This next milestone in human evolution would have been impossible without the sort of close observation, accumulated knowledge and improved communication skills that the animal connection started selecting for when our ancestors began hunting at least 2.6 million years ago.
What does it matter if the animal connection is a fundamental and ancient influence on our species? I think it matters a great deal. The human-animal link offers a causal connection that makes sense of three of the most important leaps in our development: the invention of stone tools, the origin of language and the domestication of animals. That makes it a sort of grand unifying theory of human evolution.
And the link is as crucial today as it ever was. The fundamental importance of our relationship with animals explains why interacting with them offers various physical and mental health benefits - and why the annual expenditure on items related to pets and wild animals is so enormous.
Finally, if being with animals has been so instrumental in making humans human, we had best pay attention to this point as we plan for the future. If our species was born of a world rich with animals, can we continue to flourish in one where we have decimated biodiversity?
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4 Mayıs 2011 Çarşamba
musicians busking on a sunny may day in manchester and no one stops to listen to them...
i took this video on a sunny may day in manchester.
busking musicians from zülal on Vimeo.
22 Mart 2011 Salı
Into the heart of Hurricane Katrina
ever wondered what it would look like to follow a monster hurricane as it develops? watch this amazing visualisation?
9 Mart 2011 Çarşamba
Hawaiian volcano sweps and spatters!
Mount Kilauea in Hawaii has been living up to its fiery reputation this year. Its name means "spewing" or "spreading" in the Hawaiian language and it's one of the most active volcanoes in the world.
Throughout January and February, it's been grumbling loudly and crater walls have been collapsing. Cascading lava was captured on February 17 at the Puu Oo crater and on 3 March, a dramatic collapse at Halema'uma'u shows part of the vent wall falling into the lava lake. Erupting fissures were filmed in early March, sending lava up to 10 metres into the air.
According to US Geological Survey (USGS), a lake of lava about 200 metres deep has formed inside one of the craters, while seismic activity in the area remains high. New reports estimate that 150 detectable earthquakes have been caused by the eruption, although so far it poses no threat to locals.
The time-lapse is a compilation of videos shot by the (USGS) from a variety of cameras between 15 February and 6 March 2011.
(source: New Scientist)
1 Mart 2011 Salı
Solar Flare Eruption Recorded By NASA
A large and stunning solar flare was captured on camera by NASA this past week. According to the BBC, the eruption lasted about 90 minutes, and was the latest in a series of sunstorms.
NASA caught the flare in extreme ultraviolet light, using high definition and a cadence of a frame taken every 24 seconds, making the sense of motion appear seamless. The eruptions created a "tendril of plasma" (a solar prominence), which can be seen in the video.
Earlier this month, massive solar flares threatened to disrupt power grids and communication systems on Earth. But this most recent flare was not aimed at earth, and thus was not considered a threat to satellites or other systems. Fortunately for Earthlings, this week the solar flare just made for an awesome video. (via HuffingtonPost)
28 Şubat 2011 Pazartesi
7 Şubat 2011 Pazartesi
Whole sun imagined for the first time
The sun is one of the objects most familiar to humanity, but until yesterday, we'd never seen all of it at once.
On February 6, NASA's twin STEREO probes moved into position on polar opposite sides of the sun and started beaming back the first images to capture the star's entire surface (see video above).
"For the first time ever, we can watch solar activity in its full 3-dimensional glory," says Angelos Vourlidas, a member of the STEREO science team at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC.
(Image: NASA)
This new ability should improve forecasts of solar eruptions. These violent magnetic events can wreak havoc with satellites and even power lines and railway signals on Earth. But without a view of the sun's entire surface, charged solar emissions can end up hurtling through space, even towards Earth, without warning.
The twin probes left Earth in 2006, heading for the positions they have now reached. They are expected to beam back images of the entire sun for the next 8 years.
(Source: New Scientist)
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