The Yolngu are Australian Aborigines who live in north east Arnhem Land at the very top of Australia.
In 1976 Professor Muhammad Yunus, Head of the Rural Economics Program at the University of Chittagong, investigated the possibility of designing a credit delivery system to provide banking services targeted at the rural poor. The Grameen Bank was born (Grameen means "rural" or "village" in Bangla language). The philosophy behind the bank was that the extremely poor, given the opportunity of borrowing a small amount of money, can make dramatic improvements in their life through establishing a small business. The loans, typically in the range of $25, are made to people who a bank would typically not lend to because they have no security. These people would usually have to borrow from loan sharks whose outrageous interest rates and violent practices would work towards keeping the poor poor.
In essence Microcredit is the extension of small loans to enterpreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans and it has been phenonemonly successful, spreading from its roots in Bangladesh across much of the poorer sections of the world.
One of the characteristics of Microcredit is that 97% of the borrowers are women and in particular women who are disempowered through gender discriminations within their communities. The success of the program might cause one to wonder at the motivation for these women and there is a fringe element in the feminist movement who believe that their motivation is to free themselves from the men who dominate their lives. The reality is, however, far more modest. New research by Dr Alfred Lakwo of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research has found the principal objectives for the women who take the opportunities provided by the loans is not to be dependent on men and to feel that they are taken more seriously as partners and village residents. Basically we are talking about self-esteem. According to Dr Fred, policy makers should realise that this is not the same as creating independent 'macho' women, a western outlook on the emancipation of women.
The objective of the microcredit program is to empower individuals and particularly women to be able to make their own choices and not to impose our western ideals and expectations upon them. They have had quite enough of that in the past.
Well that is a tad harsh but they have a lot less than they used to.
Lynn Smith-Lovin who is Professor of Sociology at Duke University has been studying this very phenonemon. When it comes to finding someone with whom you can discuss important matters Americans now have, on average, 1/3 fewer people available than they did 19 years ago (down from 3 to 2).What's more the number of people who said they had no-one which whom they can discuss things that are important to them has doubled to nearly 25% of those surveyed.
It appears that the social infrastructure of American societies outside the home is breaking down with the number of people with no close friends outside their immediate family rising from 57% to 80%. 9% of those surveyed were totally dependant on their spouse, rising from 5% 19 years ago.
Fear is a powerful tool and it has been weilded with zeal by Australia's Prime Minister and America's President for
1. gaining a strategic advantage over their political opponents
2. justifying draconian laws that erode civil liberties
3. the withdrawal of human rights for people they regard as our enemies
People, however, do not compartmentalise their fear and the collapse of social cohesion that is indicated by this study is perhaps a natural consequence of the use of fear as a tool.
Participation in social interaction outside the home is becoming the stuff of history. Most American's belong to no clubs, have no positive interaction with their neighbours and have no-one outside their immediate family that they trust. It seems like "the land of the free and the home of the brave" is becoming a myth that Americans imagine rather than live. If you are an American and you can't relate to this new reality then you are probably highly educated and white (or is that European American). This is the only group that has maintained its extra-famililial social infrastruture in spite of the climate of fear.
To the extent that the terrorists have a primary objective, then it is probably the distruction of western society. It seems that, with the assitance of Mr Bush and Mr Howard, they have made some progress in this aim. In reality most people are kind good people and it is up to every one of us to believe in the goodness of others and not buy into the fear that is the "white-ant" of our society.
Or is it???????
According to the research by Heather Lacey, a postdoctoral fellow and member of the U-M Medical School's Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine this is a common misconception shared by both the young and the old alike. Dr Heather says
Overall, people got it wrong, believing that most people become less happy as they age, when in fact this study and others have shown that people tend to become happier over time. Not only do younger people believe that older people are less happy, but older people believe they and others must have been happier 'back then'. Neither belief is accurate.
Happiness is, of course, a completely subjective experience and it is not limited to the young or the healthly. As challenging as it might seem, that beautiful young thing (of either gender) is probably not as happy as you are. What's more, some of the sickest people in our society, suffering from terminal illnesses are some of the happiest. Dr Heather says:
People often believe that happiness is a matter of circumstance, that if something good happens, they will experience long-lasting happiness, or if something bad happens, they will experience long-term misery but instead, people's happiness results more from their underlying emotional resources -- resources that appear to grow with age. People get better at managing life's ups and downs, and the result is that as they age, they become happier -- even though their objective circumstances, such as their health, decline.
Yes, the grass in the young paddock is definitely greener but the price you pay for grazing there is happiness. Fortunately, for the older sections of the community there is no choice. They are forced to choose happiness over youth which, perhaps, is not such a bad thing.
In 1964 the Australian Government had completed the Woomera rocket range in outback South Australia. They were preparing for the first test firing of “The Blue Streak”, a controversial new rocket that was a joint development between the British and Australia governments. The rocket was planned to come down in the Western Desert several thousand kilometers to the west in Western Australia.
In 1964 Yuwali was 17 and living in the Western Desert with her family. She had never seen a white person and was completely unaware of their existence. She had never seen a car or any other technology more advanced than a wooden spear or a boomerang. The group had seen planes fly over but considered them to be devils racing across the sky. Her family group was, to the best of our knowledge, the last Australian Aboriginal group to come in contact with white civilisation.
The Green Man met Yuwali, pictured below, at the National Fok Festival in Canberra where she is promoting her book, developed in conjunction with Sue Davenport and Peter Johnson, that documents her experience of first contact with civilization. Entitled “Cleared Out” She writes
My father had too many wives. He went away with three wives. He left two wives: my mother and her sister. We were walking around for long time without men. For a long time; a long long time. Two hot times (summer) – three, yes, three. I never thought of men. We were minding our own business, but we never thought of anyone coming looking for us.
At that time Walter McDougall was a native patrol officer appointed to look after the welfare of aborigines in his area, which included the Western Desert. This is also, in part, his story. He was charged with the task of finding any Aborigines that were in the drop zone of the rocket and to move them to safety. He was by accounts a kind, compassionate and ethical man placed in an essentially unethical situation. He fought ferociously for their rights, in particular, their right to the continuation of their lifestyle. Writing to the press he wrote
I believe that what is happening to these natives is contrary to the spirit of declaration of human rights in the United Nations charter. If no check is possible, they seem doomed to increase the number of displaced persons in the world – to become prideless, homeless vagabonds living by begging, stealing and government handouts.
The response of the authorities was swift and vicious, they banned the publication of the letter that the quote above comes from and forbade McDougall from making any further public statements.
Faced with this situation, McDougall chose to continue his work. To undertake the move of these people as compassionately and sensitively as possible.
If you think you have seen a lot of change in your lifetime, consider the experience of Yuwali. This is an fascinating and enjoyable book and a must read for anyone interested in the human condition.
A new web site is up and running with the objective of stimulating dialogue concerning the indigenous cultures of the world. The Greenman knows this because he got stuck with setting it up. Never mind it is a worthy cause and I dare say it will have some interesting and at times controversial material.
Well worth checking out from time to time.
Here is the link dialoguesacrosscultures.org
Well it used to be money. If a man was rich that was pretty much it and a bit for most women but the times they are a changin and women are getting more finanically independant.
So what does a rich women want, a hunk of course and why wouldn't she.
It seems that a study to be published in Evolution and Human Behavior has found a significant shift in what women find desirable in men. The researcher, Fhionna Moore of the University of St Andrews, UK, (not to be confused with the golf course), says
It is this change in comparison to historical constraints that I believe influences mate preferences
Monash University's Centre For Australian Indigenous Studies does some recruiting.
Mrs Green Man has just got back from Garma, one of the largest indigenous festivals in Australia. The Green Man couldn't go which was the cause of some disappointment and envy, never mind it sounds like quite an adventure even if the organisers were somewhat over enthusiastic vis-a-vis parting the attendees with their cash.
There was many cultural activities and much dancing. Here is a photo but it is not by Mrs Green Man.
She had our trusty digital camera, a Pentax Optio that is a feeble 2 megapixels but still takes good enough photos for the website. Sadly however she had to sign a form that prevented me from publishing any of the photos that she took. All part of exploiting the attendees that seems to have been a subtext to the experience. It is that delicate balance really. It is an important income source for the Yolngu people but it seems like it has crossed the line into blantant profiteering.
Never mind she had a good time anyway. Garma is held in August each year and the photo above is from the Garma Website. It sounds like a good thing to go to provided you have, and are prepared to part with, lots of cash.
Are women more trusting than men?
Marilynn Brewer professor of psychology at Ohio State University doesn't think so but they do use fundamentally different methods of determining who they will trust.
A man decides whether to trust someone or not based on their membership of a group, such as his team, his company, his club. Women on the other hand decide based on personal connection, for example whether the other person is a friend of a friend. She says
Researchers sometimes claim that men are less socially oriented than women, but our research shows that men can be very connected to other people – they are just connected in a different way.Men look for symbolic connections that you get from belonging to the same group, rather than for personal connections that women prefer
The male approach would seem to have very tribal origins and it is easy to see how the military exploit this characteristic of masculine trusting. Dr Marilynn's study used university students (they are so easily available afterall) it would be interesting to see whether female soldiers are consistent with normal female behaviour or whether they have adopted a more masculine approach based on the military culture within which they must survive.
Clearly America has a health crisis on its hands. The direct conclusion to be drawn from the figures above is that the quality of life in America has fallen dramatically since 1990 and will continue to fall because this pandemic is not on the radar of the federal administration in any serious way. It is so much easier to focus on and address external threats to the American population however there is no external threat that comes close to the threat that obesity poses.
In 2003, the cost to the US administration of obesity related illness was $75 billion, up from $52 billion in 1995. It is a fair assumption that this will grow exponentially over the next few years as the long term effects of obesity manifest themselves.
The negative consequences for the state and for the individuals concerned are significant with increases in the rates of diabetes, sleep related disorders, arthritis, heart disease and strokes flowing naturally from this trend.
The achillies heel of democracy, in the flavour that is consumed in both the USA and Australia, is that 4 year terms inevitably mean that polititians favour the short term over the long term. Short term pain for long term gain is a very difficult thing to convince a polititian to even contemplate let alone legislate for. It would be a collosal irony if the thing that lead to the collapse of the USA as a world economic powerhouse was the individual consumption of its citizens.
Source US Centres for Disease Control
Here is a photo of Brant Burleson and Amanda Holmstrom. If you needed comforting which one would you go to. Probably Amanda since she's a woman and we expect that women will be good at comforting others. In this case you would probably pretty safe with either of them since "comforting" is their specialty, they are researching it at Purdue University.
They have confirmed that the expectation is that women will be good at comforting but the way of things are that some women have good comforting skills and some do not. Further, those who do not are thought of quite poorly by the sisterhood and the irony is that the less a woman conforms to the traditional notion of "feminine" the more critical she is of other woman who lack comforting skills.
Women who see themselves as highly feminine are far less critical of the comforting shortcomings of other women. Brant and Amanda hypothesise that this is because they are projecting their expectation of good comforting skills onto the other woman rather realistically evaluating how good the woman actually is.
Of course if the comforter is a man he is thought of quite favourably regardless of whether he is any good at the comforting or not.
Beer brewing is a subject close to The Green Mans stomach at the moment having been the subject of considerable experimentation over the past couple of months. GM is currently working his way through a fairly crappy batch that may well be the result of not sterilising properly at the start. It is not that good but after one or two is seems to taste better.
Beer brewing and wine production are lengthy processes and require both time and infrastructure for success. Accordingly Kathleen Antrobus, Justin Jennings and a few of their drinking companions from Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are using these processes to study feasting strategies in ancient cultures. By exploring the recipes used to make each of these beverages, they demonstrate how details of each drink's manufacture, such as shelf life, plant maturation, and labor crunches, offered challenges and opportunities for those who attempted to organize mass-production of the booze.
See now this is the sort of research that makes Anthropology such a fun descipline.
The results are published in an article entitled "'Drinking Beer in a Blissful Mood': Alcohol Production, Operational Chains, and Feasting in the Ancient World." in the latest edition of Current Anthropology. Here is the link to Current Anthropology but they are somewhat unsporting and expect you to pay if you want to read it.
Here is a picture of Anna. How tantilising, if The Green Man was interested making some real bucks he'd now be saying something like "Pay me $10 a month and you can see Anna and lots more like her with much more clarity."
A number of now extremely wealthy entrepreneurs have discovered that there are an aweful lot of people, presumably male, who are prepared to part with the $10 a month. Porn has established itself as one of the niche markets for which the internet is ideally suited. Pornography is one of the few things that that people, in particular men, are prepared to pay big bikkies for on the net.
Robert Deaner a neurobiologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina has found that it is not only human males that are prepared to pay for porn. He has found that male monkeys will 'pay' in fruit juice to look at a picture of a socially dominant monkey or a female's hindquarters. The monkeys could choose to take a smaller container in juice in exchange for a 1/2 second glance at a picture of the backside of a female member of their troop. Dr Bob says
Virtually all male monkeys will give up juice to see female hindquarters. They really value the images."
He goes on to say
This is not monkey pornography. It's more to do with assessing sexual receptiveness, which in the wild also involves females' behaviour and smell.
Clearly the human male audience of human porn gets some considerable pleasure from viewing it which is why they pay. Do the monkeys gain pleasure from the images? Dr Bob doesn't think so, he thinks they are paying to be kept informed of the sexual readiness of the females rather than enjoying the images for themselves.
It seems a bit of a fine destinction. Placed in the context of the humans greater ability to abstract concepts this may be essentially the same thing.
Bearing in mind that the definition of pornography is "Sexually explicit pictures, writing, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal"
By way of a footnote the picture of Anna that I blurred out was from a post on male sexuality that I wrote some time ago. I was going to make you search for it (your equivalent of the sacrifice of fruit juice) but I'm not conducting any research so here is the link.
So in 1960 over a quarter of all women aged 20 - 24 gave birth to a child in the USA. Ah that hippie generation was fertile.
These days only a handful of these women in their prime child bearing years (68/1000) have a child. American - A superpower of fertility no longer. Oh the shame of it.
Source Centres For Disease Control
Jenny is in the early stages of labour and she is having a bit of a snack. An apple is a nice healthy sort of thing to eat. Within the next few hours, just after the birth of her child, she will be much more hungry and there will be something available for her to eat that will be potentially even better for her than the apple. However many mothers would find it challenging to eat, to say the least. It is her babies afterbirth and it is best eaten raw. This is called placentophagy and nearly all non-human mammalian mothers practice it.
It was presumed until recently that the only benefit that was gained was simply that it was a valuable source of nutrient that most animal mothers could not afford to waste. New research however has shown that there are far more complex and compelling reasons for mothers, including human mothers, to consume the afterbirth of the new babies.
Dr Mark Kristal who is a behavioral neuroscientist at the University at Buffalo has been researching this particular phenonemon and believes that consuming the afterbirth reduces post-partum pain, helps prevent post-natal depression, and operates on two specific brain centers to influence the subsequent emergence of maternal behavior.
It is believed that chemicals in placenta interact directly with the mothers body when ingested. No matter how therapeutic it may be it, many western women would find the practice too gross to even contemplate. Particularly, you would imagine, if you were a vegitarian. Not withstanding that there are women who have tried it. Interestingly the word for placenta in German (Mutterkuchen) literally means "mother cake". The word "placenta" itself comes from the latin word for cake. Mary Field, a nurse and midwife was determined to give it a go but cultural taboos meant that she did not speak to anyone of her intention and waited until she was alone.
After trying cooking a piece, not a great success taste or texture wise, she plucked up the courage to try some raw, which would be better anyway since none of the beneficial chemicals would be destroyed. Her verdict was that raw was the way to go. Apparently human placenta tastes very similar to beef, with a springy texture similar to the heart
It is anecdotal of course but Mary, who tried eating the placenta on her second pregnancy, was overwhelmed with the improvement in her physical and psychological wellbeing following this birth as compared to her first. She says
The best results were to be seen in my skin and hair, it retained the bloom of pregnancy over the first postpartum week, and even the skin of my belly seemed supple, not dry as with Sarah, my first child . . . My milk supply was abundant by the second day. Postnatal euphoria set in - I was so strong and felt as though I could do anything. . . I continued to eat bits of raw placenta out of the bowl in the fridge, eventually perfecting a technique for eating it: cutting off a small square each time that could be placed at the back of the mouth and swallowed whole without tasting it. Every time I began to feel at all tearful during these days I ate a small chunk of raw placenta and found it to be an instant anti-depressant.
So will Jenny give it a go, well probably not, most women seem grossed out by the whole concept however if she does a bit of raw placenta chopped up and blended with tomato juice is apparently quite delicious.
Read more about Dr Marks research here.
Read Mary's personal account here.
Find some interesting placenta recipes here.
Here is a young couple who are in love, or more precisely, at this stage of the relationship, they are in lust. For many of course this will go on to be love but will it last?
How does this couple navigate a life time and end up like those below, an old couple sharing a lifetimes memories.
What is it about this old couple that has enabled them to weather the storms that have confronted them? What characteristics of their make up has caused these storms to strengthen their relationship rather than weaken it.
Do opposites indeed attract or are those of like personalities more likely to survive as a couple?
These are the sorts of questions that have captivated Dr Eva Klohnen of the University of Iowa and she thinks she has the answer. Personality-related domains such as attachment, extraversion, conscientiousness and positive or negative emotions mean nothing, you may be the same or different to your partner, it does not matter. The only thing that is essential is that you share the same attitudes, values, and beliefs.
Survival is one thing, conflict in a relationship is another and there are definate personality mixes that are recipes for conflict and angst in a relationship. That is not to say these couples are unhappy, some relationships sail smoothly across waters with barely a ripple whilst others thrive on continually oscillating from high crests to deep troughs.
Even those navigating the stormiest seas can do so together on a raft of common values and beliefs.
It seems that Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly were the exception and that in discos and dance halls across the USA Americans are embarrassing themselves when they hit the dance floor. Compare this to Bulgarian and Macedonian adults who process complex musical rhythms much better than North American adults.
Americans it seems don't have rhythm. Not that they start out that way. All children have an inherent rhythm and it takes some serious indoctrination to knock it out of them. This is achieved, according to Erin E. Hannon of Cornell University, and Sandra Trehub of University of Toronto, by the homogenous nature of the music that is presented to children in the USA during there development. The rhythms that they are presented with all have a simple music structure and over time this dulls the perception of more complex musical structures.
If you live in New York, or one of the other large American cities, I am sure you will be able to locate an "Eastern European" quarter. That is where you will the American citizens with the the best rhythmic appreciation of music.
(Read more at American Pychological Society website)
Give your attention to the map below. It is a unique document that details the sexual intrigues of your average American high school, in this case Jefferson High School.
Much as you might suspect it is a TV soap, this is a real school and it makes your average TV soap look a bit bland. The detail of these sexual goings on are the result of an 18 month study by James Moody who is professor of sociology at Ohio State University.
Professor Jim, who skillfully dodged the label of "dirty old man" by being too young for it to apply, took on the 18 month task of documenting the sexual proclivities of a typical American high school.
The results will be of no surprise to your average medical practitioner at the local sexual health centre but the rest of you may be amused/disturbed/envious of the fact that more than half of those students who were sexually active were linked in one large network. Of course most students only had one, two or maybe three partners, it is just that they shared them with everyone else.
It is interesting to observe the number of girls that had large clusters of attendant males, something that appears not so common in the reverse. Take for example the cluster in the upper right where one girl has six boys all have whom only have her or possibly one other girl. Seems to be a tick for the sexual emancipation of American school girls does it not?
Only one of the boys could match this effort and he does not appear to command the fidelity from his partners that some of the girls could muster.
Read more of Prof. Jim's work here.
Take a look at the image below which shows grey matter used for intelligence in the brain of males and females. Looks like men have much more doesn't it and that is because they do.
Men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women. The two brave men who are risking a life long absense of female sexual partners by publishing these findings are Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics at University of California Irving (a longtime human intelligence researcher) and Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist .
Those male chauvinists amongst the readership who wish to grab hold of this small morsel of hope they they may indeed be superior may leave now without reading the rest of the post.
Much to the disappointment of those males who have now departed the post, we know that women have similar intelligence to men so the question arises "How can this be?". The answer is that women compensate for this lack of grey matter with white matter. They have approximately 10 times the amount of white matter when compared to males. White matter is used to collect and assimilate pieces of intelligence into a collective whole. Whilst women have much less raw intelligence they are so much better at organising it and utilising what they have that it compensates for the lack of processing power. It also means that women have more natural ability in those tasks that involve integrating and organising pieces of information, such as language skills.
Not only do women have significantly less grey matter but is almost all concentrated in the frontal lobes. Men, on the other hand, have grey matter throughout the brain. This is the reason that women are more extensively cognitively impaired by frontal brain injuries.
Katherine Krpan of University of Toronto, whose surname appears to contain at least 1 too few vowels, has been doing some interesting research into how a mothers age affects her interaction with her baby. It appears that younger mothers, whilst OK with the practical component of looking after a baby, show their child much less affection than do older women. (see here)
Lisa E. Crandell of University College London adds to the picture by observing that mothers who felt secure were more loving to their children than mothers who felt insecure. Additionally children of secure mothers were more compliant than children of insecure mothers. One could hypothesise this was because of the better quality of caregiving that they were receiving. (see here)
There is nothing like a fag hanging out of the mouth to attract the blokes. It adds that mysterious, alluring quality that marks you as a sophisticated young woman. Sadly, in Australia, these days it is a husband attracting technique that is becoming increasingly difficult to utilise. The places that you would go to acquire such a male, affectionately known as a "meat market", are increasingly being made smoke free.
What is a girl to do? Why turn to the internet of course. You can puff away to your hearts content whilst sitting in your bedroom plying your seductive wares on the internet dating sites.
The most popular dating service in Australia (apparently, since The Green Man has no need for such services) is www.rsvp.com.au and Dr Simon Chapman of School of Public Health, University of Sydney, Dr Melanie Wakefield and Dr Sarah Durkin of Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer have been visiting RSVP, purely in the name of research of course.
They found that the women advertising themselves on RSVP were more likely to be smokers than the general population of women. The same applied to men over 50.
This raises the question of whether women in the "desparate and dateless" category are more likely to be smokers generally or is it just the fag addicted ones that resort to internet dating services. One thing that the study found was that even across the internet, smoking was a big turn-off. Admitting that you were a regular smoker was a guaranteed way of dramatically reducing the number of people that would respond to your advertisement.
Another interesting little statistic was that, even before a potential suitor knew whether a person was a smoker or non-smoker, they were more likely to pick a non-smoker. Something about the pictures of non-smokers made them more attractive than the pictures of their smoking competition and one can presume that they did not have a fag hanging out of their mouth in the photo.
The results for young women were not reflected for young men. It seems that if you are a young man you have to do a lot more than just give up the fags to make yourself attractive and, as a consequence, dateable.
Read more about their research in Medical Journal of Australia.
At this time of year in Australia we are bombarded with images of Christmas church going in the homeland, England that is. Yep in spite of the fact that a significant percentage of Australians have no ancestoral ties with England at all the mainstream media are fixated on England as our model for what traditional Christmas should be.
How relevant is this model anyway. Are we clinging to English traditions that the English themselves have long since discarded. When it comes to church going at Christmas, the answer is yes and no. A quick look at the religious breakdown of London shows that only 58% of Londoners are Christian and that this percentage is falling. This is compared with 72% of British generally being Christian. It is easy to see that Christmas church going is simply irrelevant to a significant percentage of the Londoners.
Outside of London the percentage of Christians increases and there are regional areas where Christmas churchgoing is practiced however they are largely isolated pockets. Hereford tops the list with 10% of the population attending a traditional Anglican Christmas church service. Compare this to Manchester where barely 2% attend a church service.
In spite of the declining numbers at Christmas it is still the number one choice for those attending church only once at year. To the committed Christian Easter may hold more significance but for your casual church goer Christmas is the one with almost twice as many people attending church at Christmas as compared to Easter. Of course you don't have to be a believer to go to church and, in fact, one particularly interesting statistic is that, whilst 76% of Britons say they are religious, only 60% actually believe in God and an even smaller percentage (47%) believe in life after death and other related religious concepts. (See here)
Never mind, in Australia we can settle down in front of the tele and watch the Vicar of Dibley Christmas episode and be assured that all is still well in the motherland.
(This article is a mutilation of the research of Dr David Voas, a University of Manchester specialist in religious change in modern societies Click here to read more.)
This is Melanie. She is at university and like most students she is interested in the broader social aspects of university life. She has joined a number of clubs and organisations within the university community. As a young woman she is interested in contemporary feminism and is considering joining the Feminist Society. Do you think she will be accepted? You would hope so wouldn't you and perhaps she will be but perhaps not.
Twenty years ago she almost certainly would not have been, not dressed like that anyway. She would have been branded a mindless slave to fashion, dressing as a plaything of men and, as such, unacceptible as a member of any serious feminist organisation.
Have things changed? "Not that much" says Linda Scott, a professor of advertising and of gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In her new book "Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism" she takes on the myth that to be a serious feminist you must aschew all attempts at beauty. Pointing to the fact that their values were rooted in an upper-class Puritan tradition and that those values strongly influenced their attitude to dress and personal appearance. She says
In their calls for simplicity of dress, (they) were echoing years of conservative tradition in their own community, rather than making a ground-breaking critique as is often claimed.
It seems that, from a traditional feminist perspective, women should be free to be anything they want to be except, of course, attractive.
Here is a copy of a map that shows the evolution and dispersal of humans that has been updated to include Homo Floresiensis courtesy of Nature.
You will note that current thinking is that this hobbit like individual evolved from Homo Erectus branching off from the path that lead to Homo Sapiens approximately one million years ago.
Well not hobbits per se but a species of human that could easily have been a real life equivalient of a hobbit. Recently discovered in discovered in Indonesia by Peter Brown, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, this new species of human has been named Homo floresiensis after Flores, the Indonesian island upon which it was found.
Standing approximately 1 metre tall, evidence suggests that they were present as recently as 12,000 years ago. More intriguingly local folk tales have them existing and cohabiting with modern humans until relatively recent times. If these folk tales are true then they were still alive when the Dutch colonised Indonesia.
One local story tells of them stealing a baby from a nearby village and it being traded back for several bales of straw.
If these tales turned out to be true then they raise the remote, but tantilising, chance that a small group may still be living in the more remote and unexplored parts of this large tropical rainforest.
The ethical and moral dilemmas that would surround a discovery of this nature are fascinating. We would have to reconsider what it actually means to be human. Our view of ourselves as being somehow different and apart from the animal kingdom would take another battering. A concept such as cannibalism, for example, will need to be completely rethought.
The biggest question of course would be "What do we actually do?"
Do they have "human rights" or do these rights only apply to our version of being human?
If they were on the verge of extinction do we have the right (or the obligation) to attempt to save them or is this a form of eugenics, a concept that has been completely discredited following the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
If they are discovered The Green Man thinks that the major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Islam and Judiasm, are going to have quite a bit of sorting out to do as to where they stand and what is the status of these new humans vis-a-vis the possesion of a soul and related matters.
For a scientific but still readable take on this see Nature
If mainstream is more your style then see The Australian.
Dr Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg is an assistant professor of anthropology and evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State University where she has been investigating Neanderthals with particular attention being given to their quality of life. She has discovered that it wasn't all that bad even during the ice-age that has been thought to have driven them to extinction.
Neanderthals lived in Europe from about 200,000 to 30,000 years ago, at which time they disappeared. Their extinction was relatively rapid and common wisdom is that the ice age and increasing competition from us (homo sapiens) is what pushed them off the evolutionary tightrope that all species walk. Dr Debbie disagrees. Studying linear enamel hypoplasia which are growth rings of the teeth for evidence of a deprived childhood she found that, at the time of their extinction, the neanderthals were doing it no tougher than the modern pre-columbian Inuit. She is now extending her research to Cro-Magnon fossils of the same period to give us a more complete picture.
Her findings are published in Journal of Human Evolution (or the Journal of Complete Fiction if you are a fundamentalist Christian).
So why did they die out? Well we seem to be back to the drawing board when it comes to answering that question. Never mind it is a fascinating domain to be exploring, The Green Man is quite envious of people who get paid to do such fun stuff.
Read more about Dr Debbie's research at the Ohio State University web site.
Hang on a minute, isn't Ohio in the bible belt. Is that the most appropriate place to be researching human evolution? Interesting!
This attractive gentleman that you see on the left is approximately 3,000 years old. He is a mummy of Harwa from Egyptian Museum, Torino, Italy.
What makes him interesting is the method that was used to determine what he looked like. One of the problems of archaeology has traditionally been that it is destructive. To see what a mummy was like we needed to unwrap it which essentially destroyed it. Now multidetector computed tomography, that is 3D x-rays folks, are being used as a non-destructive way of examining mummies.
On the right is a sample of the imagery that was used in the reconstruction process.
Harwa was about 45 years old at the time of his death and the multidetector computed tomography images of his face were detailed enough to reveal a mole on his left temple although The Green Man is somewhat uncertain as to why the mole is important.
Dr Cesarani who is pioneering the technique points to it's application in forensics, anthropology and medicine, saying
Police use it for identifying bodies, anthropologists to learn more about individuals in ancient societies and medicine can learn about the diseases that afflicted ancient peoples
To see more pictures and learn about the technique visit The American Journal of Roetgenology
How do you decide how healthy people are generally in a society? Well one way is to look at how tall, on average, that they are. This is based on the logic that a child who is healthy and well fed will grow into a taller adult than one that does not enjoy these benefits.
Using this simple measure Richard Steckel, a professor of economics at Ohio State University, has looked the health of European populations through the ages and the most interesting finding is that people living in between the ninth and eleventh centuries were quite a lot healthy than those that lived later. Average height declined steadily from this period through to the the industrial revolution in the 17th/18th centuries.
In the last century we recovered much lost ground and are now back to being as healthy as we were 1,200 years ago.
He has applied the same technology to native American populations and discovered that the urbanisation of pre-Columbian societies lead to a general decline in health. One can hypothesise that the increasing density of living lead to hygene issues that impacted the general health of the community in both these societies.
In these Olympic besotted times there are few things that shift the attention of the masses from Athens. Enough subtly The Green Man is pulling out the big guns in the attention seeking stakes. Yes, in an effort to break the herculean grip of Olympic fever it is time the post an article on sex.
New Scientist reports on a study by linguist Amy Perfors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston where she found that your name has an impact on how sexy you are perceived by the opposite sex. Men having a 'front sounding" vowel in their name as in Matt are viewed as sexier than men whose parents inflicted them with a "back sounding" vowel, such as in Paul.
Of course, if you are a bit of a hunk it probably doesn't matter. Amy says
An attractive person with a bad vowel name is still more attractive than an unattractive person with a good vowel name
For the rest of us, it is off to the registry office to change our names to Matt.
Part of the value of the Taungurong get togethers is to link up with other members of the community which off doing their own things. The Green Man is a gubba himself but is still interested.
Yarn Strong Sista is a Koorie educational consultancy that specialises in indigenous inclusivity in curriculum development and does considerable work at the early childhood education level. Supplying educators and resource materials into this sector.
Visit their website www.yarnstrongsista.com to find out more.
Here is a photo from the classic 1933 movie King Kong. Fay Wray, who is is playing the damsal in the possession of this mighty beast, died yesterday in her New York apartment aged 96. Of the beast Fay Wray once said
Although he had tremendous strength and power to destroy, some kind of instinct made him appreciate what he saw as beautiful. Just before he dies, he reaches toward me, but can't quite reach. The movie affects males of all ages. Recently, a 6-year-old boy said to me, `I've been waiting to meet you for half my life.'
I have a copy of this movie on tape, I bought it recently at a chuck-out sale for $5. Obviously it lacks the high tech special effects of recent movies but it has a simplicity and intensity that makes these techniques somewhat superfluous. The movie encapsulates the essence of the genre in that the monster has a degree of humanity, it is a metaphore for human failings. In the end, when it is killed we feel a sense of pity for it.
This is an aspect of the genre that seems to have been lost recently.
The Age has an interesting opinion piece today by Jonathan Freedland on the book The Da Vinci Code. The book is a fictional thriller that proposes an alternative view to Christs life from that provided by The Bible.
The central tenet of the piece is that the church fails because, in western society, it has lost a crucial ingredient that humans crave, namely a sense of magic. There is a flood of people back to pagan spirituality, books and films like the Harry Potter series are breaking all records and todays pragmatic church is shrivelling.
It is easy to mistake what people say they want for what, at a primal level, they need. Despite what we may think our world is no less dangerous, no more predictable than was the world of our distant ancestors. The dangers are, in fact, not that much different, forces of nature beyond our control fundamentally affect our lives, other tribes (we now call them nations) threaten our existance, we still must make sense of what our life means. For many people, a practical logical approach to religion does not have enough mystery and, as such, is just not satisfying.
One only has to visit a Christian Church in Mexico or a Hindu Temple in India or a Buddhist Temple in Nepal to witness mysticsim in action. They are magical places redolent with spirituality. One does not have to believe in the particular religion being practiced in these places to feel their potency. Compare this to a visit to an Australian Christian Church, austere, stylised, sterile.
Of course if you tried to replicate one of these churches/temples in Australia it would not work because they are integrated in a gestalt-like fashion with their community. They would be out of place here. It may be impossible for an Australian Christian Church to take the essence of these more mystical institutions and recreate it in an Australian context but, if the church in Australia is to thrive, it must try.
Ever wondered why, in these days when information on sex and sexual activity is more readily available than it has ever been and where condoms are also readily available and inexpensive that teenage girls are still falling pregnant accidentally at such a consistent rate.
Well the obvious reason is that a good number of them actually want to get pregnant and research by Dr. Susan Davies of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Public Health supports this view. Whilst the conception is accidental, the desire the become pregnant means that risk taking is a more common occurance, incidents of unprotected sex being more common amongst this group.
Interestingly the male who is so obligingly providing the sperm in these instances is usually at least 5 years older than the girl. The researchers suggest this points to the
perceived role of the male partner in parenthood, other than to assist with conception, may be minimal from the adolescent girl’s perspective.
This of course simply reflects the parenting experience of many of these girls with single parent (mother only) families becoming increasingly more common in western societies.
The outcomes of this research provide pointers to new directions in health education amongst this group. Education based on the assumption that the girls view pregancy as undesirable and something that they will avoid if they know how misses the point. Education must also be provided to these girls on the implications on their lives of a decision of this nature.
Who is best to give this education? Teachers? Parents? Nope you are wrong on both counts. Research by Dr Judith Stephenson, from the Centre for Sexual Health and HIV Research at University College London has shown that peers are the ones who adolescents listen to.
The survey of 8,000 teenagers, who had formal lessons about sex from either other pupils or their teachers, revealed that pupil-led classes helped pupils develop better attitudes to sex.
This is, in part, because many of the teachers assigned to this most delicate area of education, are immensely embarrassed by the subject themselves. Michael Reiss, a leading specialist in sex education at the Institute of Education agrees. He says
Most teachers are not specialists in teaching people about sex. It's one of the few subjects where this is the case. You're usually taught history by someone with a history degree and training. If you get taught sex education you're lucky if your teacher has had 20 hours.
Although by way of counter argument The Green Man notes that all of the History students he knew at University spent at least as much time on sex as they did on History during their undergraduate years.
The Green Man is also somewhat intrigued by Dr Judith's concept of "role plays" when it comes to sex education. hmmmmmm No wonder the peer lead sessions are embraced so enthusiastically.
Biologically, of course, late adolescent girls are built to become pregant and their biology is facilitating this course of action. Sadly, for those who are disadvantaged, having a child is one of the few rewarding and fulfilling options that are available to them.
Read more on Dr. Susan's research here.
Read more on Dr Judith's here.
The somewhat inappropriately named Glenn Stalker has been hanging around peoples houses. Glenn is from the University of Toronto and his interest is in the changing role that the home plays in peoples lives. A home used to be a place you invited people to but his research shows that that is now changing. He found that in 1998, Canadians spent 34 per cent of their spare time alone at home, up from 28 per cent in 1986.
It is easy to hypothesise that the current climate of fear that is pervading most western societies at the moment is having a profound impact on the way we view our home. Once it used to be our small corner of the world that we happily and readily shared with friends and acquaintances. Now it is taking on the role of fortress where we can lock ourselves away from the perceived dangers of world at large.
Not only are we socialising less than we used to but when we do socialise we are increasingly doing it away from the home, in bars and restaraunts. Homes are coming to be viewed as exceedingly private places to which others, even relatives, are only invited on rare occasions.
Read more about his research here.
Take a look at a male primate skull, a gorilla or something, and compare it with a female skull from the same species. If you were an amateur you could be forgiven for thinking that they belonged to different species. The male's jaw etc is huge compared to the females.
We used to be like that too. Our male ancestors had much more solid faces than our female ancestors. So why did we change? Well Eleanor Weston at the Research Institute Senckenberg in Frankfurt recons it's because we scarificed this classic masculine feature to make our selves more attractive to women.
Not being female, The Green Man must trust her advice on these things, but apparently large canines are a big turn-off to your modern woman, that is one less than 2 million years old. It was about this time that, sadly, women started to get choosy about who they had sex with. Now The Green Man knows why hopefull adolescents keep dragging their girlfriends along to Dracula movies. It is to cast their canines in a much better light.
An even more tragic outcome of the research is the finding that the male faces that are cited as examples of faces that are viewed as preferential are those of Orlando Bloom and Viggo Mortensen (ie Legolas and Aragorn). Clearly dragging your girlfriend along to a fifteenth viewing of "The Return Of The King" is not going to do much for your chances. The Green Man, by way of contrast, is married. Mrs GreenMan just issues a sigh of resignation and tags along.
The Green Man is an accepting sort of person. He has been friends with all sorts of people even some vegetarians. At least one of the said vegetarians has indicated in conversation that they viewed vegetarians as being deeper thinkers than your average omnivore. It will come as a big disappointment to these individuals then to discover that their capacity for such deep thought is being linked to their ancestors meat eating ways.
New research by Nancy Minugh-Purvis of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia indicates that, lacking the constraints of a bulky chewing apparatus, the human skull may have been free to grow, enabling the massive development of the brain. The reduction in the need for a big jaw arose from a mutation 2.4 million years ago that left us unable to produce one of the main proteins in primate jaw muscles and marked a shift to a higher protein based diet.
Nancy summerises it nicely:
Humans may not have needed particularly strong jaws anyway. By then, our ancestors may have switched from eating chewy leaves all day long to snacking on smaller portions of meat.
Read more in Nature.
Dr. Peter Bearman of Columbia University in New York is interested in teenage sex but only in the most scientific of ways of course.
There was a ripple of excitement amongst the conservative elements of the community a year or two back about the practice of teenagers pledging to not have sex until after marriage. Dr Bearman has been studying this concept. Interestingly the rate of sexually transmitted disease amongst these teenagers is exactly the same as for the general teenage community. This is because so few of them actually keep the pledge. He found that 88% of teenagers who pledged to remain virgins until they are married ended up having sex before marriage.
Not only did they have sex but it was also much more likely to be unsafe sex. He proposes that this is because they had not paid attention in sex education classes. You would also suspect that, if it was a spur of the moment decision, they would unprepared, ie would not have condoms.
So what happens when they catch a STD well it seems that they are much less likely to seek medical assistance for reasons I think we can probably guess.
The study also found that pledging reduced the number of sexual partners, lead to earlier marriages and delayed the age at which sexual activity commenced.
Hmmmm, so pledging teenagers are having less partners and the same rate of STD infection. One would have to speculate that there are some other teenagers who are very persuasive, very sexually active and also STD infected.
One fatefull day approximately 5 millions years ago there was a serious domestic dispute in a small group of primates. A section of the group stomping off grunting something to effect that they were sick and tired of the stuffy old way things had been done and want to try something new, which in fact they did. They tried being humans and it worked. Today we are clearly the most successful of the primates with most of the others on the verge of extinction but how much have we diverged from our primate cousins?
The answer is not that much really. Scientists estimate that humans and chimps share about 99.2% of their respective genomes but the really interesting bit is to look at those areas in which we are different. These are pointers to the different evolutionary paths that we have taken.
Michele Cargill of the biotech company , Celera Diagnostics in Alameda, California has done this comparison and has discovered that the most significant differences are in the areas of smell, hearing and the way we digest protiens. She compared the sequences for more than 7,500 human, chimpanzee and mouse genes, compiled by the genome projects for each species, the mice providing a useful indicator by which she could eliminate generic mammalian genes. Differences were found in around 50 genes tied to smell with many of the human equivalents demonstrating little functional value, reflecting the lack of importance of smell to our species.
Twenty-one genes linked to hearing also displayed differences which she hypothesised may be linked to the development of language. Eighty genes used to digest proteins also differ between chimps and humans probably arising from the differing diets of the two species over the period since we diverged.
Lost in the mists of prehistoric times a small family group of our predecessors are huddled in a cave living a precarious life. In this scenario the adult male of the group is a vital resource in the groups survival. There are periods when the female is pregnant or nursing very young children and cannot hunt for meat which is a vital component of their diet. During this time it is the male that carries the bulk of the responsibility for finding food.
So what happens when the male is killed. The group is in real trouble unless it can acquire another male. This is a period of great risk for the children of the first male. We know from primate behaviour, including our own, that these children are risk of being killed by the new male. A young girl, however, has an option that her brothers do not have.
If she enters puberty early she increases her chances of survival by being attractive either to the new male or by finding a mate of her own outside the family unit.
Evolutionary theory says that if something provides a greater chance of an individual surviving to reproduce, passing their genes to the next generation, then it will gradually become prevalent in the population. So it is with this characteristic in young females.
Research has shown that female children who live in a household where their father is absent enter pubity earlier than normal, have their first sexual encounter earlier, have children earlier, have more sexual partners and have a short duration of marriage. We don't why yet but it is hypothesised that pheromones may play a part. The pheromones of the new male triggering the early development.
The presence of the biological father in a young girls life is far more important than was once thought. For a girl to develop normally a loving and attendant biological father must be part of the family unit. To corrupt a phrase that was popular early in the feminist movement
"A girl needs a father like a fish needs a river"
In promiscuous baboon societies females mate with numerous males. You would think that this would obscure the blood lines but recent research indicates that baboons fathers know which of the offspring of a female are theirs. Fathers will rush to protect their own children when they become involved in an altercation.
Here is a baboon father sheltering its child as another young baboon approaches.
We know which baboon children are fathered by which male through blood testing of the group. How the baboon fathers know is still a question to be answered, one could hypothesise it may be smell.
Evolutionary theory would suggest that fathers who can correctly identify their offspring and support/protect them would have an advantage. Accordingly it is understandable that this has developed as a trait. Prehistoric humans males had a similar problem. How do you know whether a child was yours? Being a species that relies mainly on visual clues it is natural that this sense was used for this purpose. Research by Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany shows that, even today, fathers favour children that look like them over children who do not.
More about baboon families here. More about the link between facial similarity and affection here.
Research published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that are two closest animal relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobo, should be reclassified into the genus Homo. This research claims that we share 99.4% of functionally important genes with our near relatives.
Noone would argue that humans do not possess some special traits that set them apart from other animal species, the capacity for communicating complex abstract thought between one another being an obvious example. Not withstanding this, this research reminds us that we are also animals, bound by the rules of nature and by our own biology.
Sadly, we may not be sharing our genus with other living "homo" species for very much longer unless we make significant efforts to protect and support them.
