Vanessa Nakate and the Fight to Keep Mama Africa Green

“It’s really amazing to see that the numbers are really big in Europe. And I wish that the young generation in Africa would also pick up and fight for their future. Because it’s our future. But I think the problem is that most of them are either not confident enough or they don’t have the knowledge about it. Or their parents can’t let them do it. And some actually fear the government. But I’m really impressed by Europe. I’m seeing on Twitter there are many, many activists. And I really look for activists in Africa, I’ve really been looking.”

— Vanessa Nakate

This one is in praise of Vanessa Nakate.

Who, you ask?

Well, yes, exactly.

Nakate, who prefers to go by her Twitter handle of @Vanessa_Vash, is a 23-year-old climate activist from Uganda. She says, only half-jokingly, that she is the only climate activist from her home country, and while that may not strictly be true, chances are she was the only youth climate activist at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Davos is where the world’s elite, many of them flying in private jets, lecture Greta Thunberg and the other climate kids about how they should study economics before lecturing the rest of the world about what much of the rest of the world already knows.

Two days ago, Nakate posed for a now infamous news photo in Switzerland, alongside fellow youth climate activists Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg, Isabelle Axelsson and Loukina Tille.

The photo, by photographer Markus Schreiber for the Associated Press (AP)) news agency, was not the problem.

The problem was what happened afterwards.

The photo appeared online and in several news zines with Nakate cropped out of the frame.

Admittedly, Nakate was off to one side, and framed by a nondescript building behind her, while the other young climate activists were framed by snow-peaked Swiss mountains in the background.

It was one of those hurried decisions hard-news photo editors have to make all the time, where “Get It First” counts for more than “Get It Right.” (I worked much of my adult life in hard news, and I’ve seen from the inside how it works.)

The optics were bad enough — the young-woman-of-colour is edited out of the frame — but it wouldn’t have mattered so much if the decision hadn’t rattled Nakate to the core.

She made a video, which has since gone viral, in which she said she now understands what the word racism really means.

Worse — yes, the story gets worse — other news agencies, including Reuters, according to an account in, you guessed it, The Guardian, confused Nakate with fellow climate activist Natasha Mwansa, who’s from Zambia.

Africa is vast, as continents go; confusing Zambia with Uganda is a little like confusing Beijing with Tokyo.

Nakate shared another inconvenient truth — that while the industrialized world goes whole-hog on fossil fuels, it’s continents like Africa that bear the brunt of the worst effects of climate change. For now, anyway.

“Africa is the least emitter of carbons,” she said in her video, “but we are the most affected by the climate crisis.”

Residents of Kiribati, the Maldives and other low-lying tropical islands might disagree on that point, but she’s right on the broad strokes.

“You erasing our voices won’t change anything,” she added, sounding eerily like Thunberg on message.

“You erasing our stories won’t change anything.”

Nakate went to Switzerland hoping to shed a light on climate justice; instead, she inadvertently ended up in the harsh glare of the social justice spotlight.

AP scrambled to correct their initial oversight, and sent out a less hurriedly, more thoughtfully cropped version of the photo. In a statement, AP noted that Nakate was cropped out of the photo for compositional reasons, not anything to do with racism.

Photo editors work hurriedly and on-the-fly; there’s never enough time to do anything properly, especially when “Get It First” is the rule of the day. Corporate media organizations have fixed it, too, so that newsrooms are chronically short-staffed and over-worked. It’s perfectly understandable that a news photo might be cropped so that it’s easier to fit on a page, whether that page is a newspaper page or an image on the web.

It’s also true that, on a deeper, more subliminal level, race plays a part. One could argue that the photographer could have asked the five young women to move away from the building, so that he could get all five in the frame with the  mountains in the background, but for all I know he could have been rushed, or they could have been rushed, and he had only a split second to get the photo.

This is why many hard-news photographers make the best nature photographers, because their job demands that they get the image quickly, sometimes in a split second, while it’s  there.

This is also a teachable moment, though, about Nakate herself — who she is, what she’s done, and how hard she’s worked for her cause, and the world’s cause, and how she ended up representing her country.

In an interview last year with the group The Kids Are All Right published on the website Climate Kids — comments from which were extrapolated for an article in The Nation newspaper headlined Uganda’s Young Climate Activists Are Going on Strike, Nakate is pictured in the street in front of Uganda’s parliament, much like her spiritual mentor Thunberg, holding a hand-made sign about the climate, later posted on Twitter.

In some pictures, Nakate, like Thunberg, is sitting on the ground; in others, she’s standing.

The signs share a similar theme: Green love, peace and  continuing the fight against single-use plastic, polythene and pollution.

Nakate, a business major and recent university graduate from the Kampala suburb of Nakawa, explained she’s afraid for the future of her country.

Uganda sits on the equatorial belt of Africa, in a region made green by the bands of year-round rain that extend through the heart of the continent and across coastal West Africa — hence the name “rain forest.”

Like much of equatorial Africa, though, Uganda is feeling the effects of desertification, which manifests itself in drought and higher temperatures, exacerbated by man-made deforestation.

According to a 2016 country report by the group Future Climate for Africa, the total number and frequency of unseasonably hot days in Uganda increased by 20% between 1960 and 2010.

Temperatures are projected to rise a further 0.9 to 3.3 degrees by the 2060s.

Ironically, developing countries like Uganda contribute the least to the fossil-fuel emissions that are accelerating climate  change worldwide, and yet are most vulnerable to its consequences.

Entire regions of Africa have already suffered the widespread loss of farmland and resulting mass starvation, which in turn leads to political and social instability.

Foreign-affairs analysts across the world warn that many of the next wars will be fought over water and dwindling natural resources. 

Nakate has said she wants more people in her home country to know what ’s going on, and why.

Right now, she says, too many of the people she knows don’t know enough about climate change. 

Climate activism is — or rather was — virtually unknown in Africa. Nakate first learned of it when she came across Thunberg’s #FridaysForFuture movement on Twitter.

Most young people in urbanized areas of Africa now connect, communicate and get most of their news from social media.

“When it comes to my friends, most of them support me, but then of course there’re the ones that laugh about it,” Nakate said. “They say, how can I go and just hold a poster — like, how can I do that? But there’s always people who put you down. You just have to stand your ground. My parents, they don’t even know about it. I do it alone.”

Not anymore.

https://climatekids.net/ugandan-business-student-brings-climate-strike-to-central-africa-meet-vanessa-nakate/

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Monkey Do, Human See: Emotional Intelligence v. Scientific Interpretation

“The Anthropocene, often called “the age of humanity,” really is “the rage of inhumanity,” and some people feel very comfortable killing other animals while at the same time claiming to love them.”

— Dr. Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado (Boulder)

The article in Psychology Today landed in my in-box alongside a ringing endorsement from a Facebook friend, so who was I to argue? The article, as it turned out, about anthropomorphism and our habit of applying human traits to animals, was incomprehensible — turgid and badly written — but it had some interesting points to make nonetheless.

I’ll spare you the academic details — the writing is the kind of academic navel-gazing that should never, ever see light-of-day in a public forum, if the idea is to win converts over to a new, if not entirely novel idea.

Never mind what we think of animals. Dr. Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado (Boulder) has dedicated much of his career to trying to figure out what animals think of us. His writing on Twitter, in flagging a Washington Post article about how conservation is turning a natural laboratory into a time capsule (“We’re trying to keep the Galapagos Islands pristine. That might destroy them”), is clearer and more succinct than his writing for Psychology Today (“Geese-Human Relationships Offer Lessons for Coexistence:  A consideration of geese-human relationships has wide-ranging importance”), but that’s the nature of the beast. He’s on firmer ground — or easier to understand, anyway — when discussing “compassionate conservation,” not to be confused with compassionate conservatism, which many would argue doesn’t exist.

A clue to the nature of his life’s work is evident in the fact that, together with Jane Goodall — no introduction needed — he co-founded the self-explanatory group Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He’s a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society, and a former Guggenheim fellow.

He knows his stuff, in other words, insofar as it’s possible to ever know what an animal is thinking.

Seeing a part of ourselves in the animals we see and surround ourselves with, is only natural, Bekoff insists. 

Most of us agree, after all, that people and animals — or mammals anyway — share

many traits, including emotions. We’re not imposing our way of thinking onto animals, in other words, but rather identifying what we share in common.

The scientific community used to dismiss the notion of imprinting our own thoughts, feelings and emotions on animals as sentimental and unprofessional; much of Goodall’s early observations of chimpanzee behaviour in the wild was dismissed out-of-hand, because she lacked an advanced degree in zoology at the time.

The scientific community is coming round to a new point of view, though, Bekoff insists: Seeing our own desires, values  and emotions reflected in animals is not such a wild idea after all. In the eyes of science writer Brandon Keim, who Bekoff cites at length in Psychology Today, it’s becoming “both common and common-sense.”

And rightly so, Bekoff says.

The conservation debate comes down to a simple question: Do you hold with the statement that, “Humans should manage fish and wildlife populations so that humans benefit,” or do you lean more toward the idea that, “All living things are part of one big family.”

Or to put it more simply, do you view the world in terms of domination (as in, humans’ right to rule the planet) or co-existence? The guiding principle of compassionate conservation, Bekoff says, is, ‘First, do no harm.’

It’s all about empathy.

“The best guard against the inappropriate use of anthropomorphism is knowledge or the detailed study of the minds and emotions of animals,” Bekoff writes in Psychology Today. “And, in fact, all sorts of scientific research, ranging from observational studies to neuroimaging projects, strongly support the fact that we’re not alone in the emotional arena.”

Animals and people share emotions, in other words.

And that gives us added reason, as if more were needed, to conserve and protect what remains.

©Pixabay-CC0 Creative Commons

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Saving Nature or Nurturing Profit: Zootopia and the Ongoing Debate Over Zoos.

“When countries are becoming increasingly urbanized, zoos make people more aware of the wider environment. They may watch David Attenborough, but that’s no comparison to actually seeing a tiger up close.”

— David Phalen, University of Sydney (Australia)

Here’s one of those “meanwhile” moments-of-irony that slipped by in the recent wave of news headlines about the Australian bushfires.

Early last month Sydney, Australia’s first major new zoo in more that 100 years opened in a city now under siege from some of the worst fire conditions in centuries.

The zoo’s opening touched off renewed debate over those who say the world has outgrown zoos, just as we’ve — thankfully — outgrown circuses with live, performing exotic animals, thanks to access to the Internet and the growing popularity of David Attenborough-style nature programs — and those who insist zoos are the last line of defence in the fast looming sixth mass extinction.

Zoo animals are ambassadors for their cousins in the wild, one argument goes — and it’s hard to disagree if, like I did, you happened to grow up in a big city and the local zoo was the only way you could see for yourself that exotic animals like polar bears and West African mona monkeys are real, they actually exist. “The city is not a concrete jungle,” the zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morris said. “It is a human zoo.”

The argument that zoos are an excellent place to study the habits of human beings is less convincing, unless by studying the habits of human beings they mean the often shocking behaviour of zoo visitors, which is not what they mean at all. Science can learn about as much about human behaviour from a caged animal as animals might learn from studying prison inmates on death row.

“People forget the good that zoos do” is a common refrain, but that argument would be more convincing if zoos concentrated more on the preservation side of things — they don’t, for the most part — and less on profiting from tired parents looking to distract their hyperactive toddlers for an afternoon with some safe, family-friendly entertainment that doesn’t involve a Game Boy or video screen.

Here’s the comedian David Sedaris: “A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.”

Leave it to Michael J. Fox — a Hollywood actor — to put things in their proper perspective. “Zoos are becoming facsimiles or perhaps caricatures of how animals once were in their natural habitat,” he has said. “If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.”

Zoos have evolved significantly since they first appeared, unlike, some might argue, Homo sapiens.

Their original purpose, BBC’s Gary Nunn noted recently, was braggadocio, a way for the wealthy and well-to-do to showcase their wealth and influence through private collections of exotica. At first, there was a half-hearted nod toward scientific research but it was only a matter of time before their true raison d’être revealed itself, as tourist attractions the public would pay to see. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that conservation emerged as a priority.

©Daniel Brachlow-Pixabay

While it’s true that zoo enclosures have improved markedly over the past 50 years — the new zoo in Sydney is a good example — but detractors remain unconvinced, where they aren’t overtly hostile.

Sydney Zoo is 40kms (25 miles) from Sydney’s city centre. Even before the catastrophic bushfires that ravaged New South Wales’ Blue Mountains, at a terrible cost to the local, indigenous wildlife, Sydney Zoo was promoted as being home to Australia’s largest collection of not just iconic Australian species like the koala and kangaroo but less glamorous reptiles and birds.

From the start, Sydney Zoo invested in climate control technology, because it’s situated inland from the coast where temperatures were hotter even without the bushfires. The enclosures are designed to keep visitors and animal exhibits alike cool. Many enclosures include air conditioned “back-of-house” spaces which allows animals to rest comfortably, away from the heat and out of view of prying spectators. Some of those enclosures also feature self-explanatory “misting stations” and plenty of shade.

Detractors insist we don’t need more zoos; research studies at the University of Colorado show that confined animals in claustrophobic zoo enclosures experience an inordinate amount of boredom, stress and even fear. Zoo enclosures, obviously, reflect a tiny percentage of a wild animal’s natural range and territory.

Life spans are an unreliable indicator of how well wild species fare in captivity. Studies have shown that elephants in zoos have significantly shorter life spans than elephants in the wild.

Predators, lions for example, often live longer in captivity than they do in the wild. That may be because predators in the wild have the additional stress of hunting for their own food and staving off competition from other predators, and even their own kind.

The better zoos are designed to promote conservation, education and animal welfare. The accreditation group World Association of Zoos and Aquariums recommends that member zoos commit 10% or more of their operational expenditures to wider conservation projects.

Australia’s 103-year-old Taronga Zoo has promoted animal welfare as a core element of its mission since its inception: Nick Boyle, Taronga’s director of animal welfare, conservation and science, cites seven amphibians and reptile species he says would be extinct by now if not for the zoo’s intervention, such as the Lister’s gecko, Bellinger River turtle and Booroolong frog.

As wild habitat shrinks and animal species face extinction, the zoo debate is likely to get more heated. As it stands, though, one thing is abundantly clear. For all the talk about zoos connecting people in cities to the welfare of animals living in the wild, there’s can little evidence that zoos educate in any meaningful way. The primary market for zoos remains bored parents with hyperactive children in tow.

“We don’t need more zoos,” Marc Bekoff, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado, told BBC. “The lessons zoos teach? That it’s OK to keep animals in cages.”

©Gerd Altmann-Pixabay

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The 'Shadow Catcher' Who Caught Greta Thunberg’s Shadow in Time.

“With four children at home, the youngest being just six-years-old, I worry about her and her future and the future of her children, if she decides to have any. We humans are amazing creatures, but we are also so plagued by our own ignorance and ego. When I was with Greta I found myself wanting to say, ‘These plates will be here hundreds and hundreds of years from now,’ but I stopped myself because Greta’s generation may not have another 50 years.”

— Shane Balkowitsch

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Ansel Adams said that.

“You don't make a photograph just with a camera,” Adams also said. “You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

©Shane Balkowitsch. Greta Thunberg, “Standing for Us All.”

For Shane Balkowitsch, the glass wet-plate collodion image maker  from Bismarck, North Dakota whose nostalgia-steeped image of 17-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg graced the pages of Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year issue and now has pride of place in the Library of Congress, photography has become a life calling, even though he only picked up a camera in 2012.

Balkowitsch may have started late in life but from the beginning each one of his images now is a reflection of the pictures he has seen, the books he has read, the music he has heard and the people he has loved.

Balkowitsch was born and raised in the windswept flatlands of North Dakota, a metaphorical stone’s throw from the Standing Rock Sioux territory of pipeline protests and Kevin Costner westerns. He grew up steeped in the history and culture of America’s First Nations indigenous tribes: the Sioux are arguably the defining tribe of the Old World — geographically, culturally and quite literally located in America’s heartland.

Thunberg, from Sweden, was passing through,

an old soul in a child’s body, traversing the New World that has changed dramatically since that first buffalo hunt, eons ago.

In a wide-ranging interview by email, Balkowitsch talked about his early influences, his passions, and how he had just 20 minutes to set up and compose his now famous wet plate image of the teenage climate activist unknown a year ago outside her native Sweden but is  today a household name around the world.

The two connected on one of those intangible, instinctive levels — the reluctant child climate activist and the photographer who came across his calling late in life.

Balkowitsch forged his reputation as an artist with his nostalgia-tinted glass portraits of the Native Americans who call the Dakotas home, and evolved from there to portraits of other artists, historical figures and local celebrities.

His glass wet plate portraits, with their echoes of Edward S. Curtis, have an eerie, otherworldly quality to them, and yet they, like their subjects, are clearly of this Earth.

©Shane Balkowitsch - Debra Anne Haaland, Congresswoman, New Mexico (D)

Adams again: “No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.”

Balkowitsch knew from the beginning, instinctively and without needing to be told, Adams’ other mantra: “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”

Balkowitsch learned early on that wet-plate collodion photography is a painstaking process that demands great skill. He worried that the 20 minutes he was allowed with Thunberg wouldn’t cut it — but, as so often happens with artistic inspiration, the imposed time limit had a way of focusing the mind. Thunberg and her father, Svante, proved willing and patient subjects, once they saw the potential of the results, and everything fell into place. It was as if it had been written.

In 1851, Frederick Scott Archer, an Englishman, discovered that collodion — a flammable, syrupy solution of pyroxylin found in ether and alcohol — could be used as an alternative to

egg white (albumen) on glass photographic plates. Collodion reduced the exposure time necessary for making an image — ironic, considering the time constraints Balkowitsch was operating under.

This method became known as the 'wet-plate collodion' method. Collodion was relatively grainless and colourless, and allowed for one of the earliest high-quality duplication processes in photography, which we know today as negatives.

“I never owned a camera before 2012,” Balkowitsch explains. “Sure I had a camera on my phone, but as far as taking a photograph with any sort of intent, that never happened until I took my first wet plate on Oct. 4th, 2012, a portrait of my brother Chad. 

“I have no formal training, never took a class in photography, had no hands-on mentor, I just dove headfirst into this very archaic and difficult process, with no other photography background. I had never even seen film developed before. I saw a wet plate online, and I was immediately drawn to it.  I don’t know how else to describe it. I was 44-years-old, had no artistic outlet whatsoever. I just started creating.”

©Shane Balkowitsch - Ernie Wayne LaPointe, Great Grandson of Sitting Bull. Curated at the Historical Society of South Dakota

As of today, Balkowitsch has made more than 3,400 plates. In 2019 alone, he made 400 plates, each one roughly 8’x10” in size.

At first, he was perceived as the nutty eccentric, working away in his studio using a time-consuming, long-since-forgotten photographic process while, outside, people were happily snapping selfies of themselves with smartphones. He became known by his Native American Hidatsa name, Maa’ishda tehxixi Agu’agshi — Shadow Catcher.

“I was just creating in the back corner of my warehouse where I work, no windows, just me, some chemicals and my camera.  At first you can imagine I needed people to sit for me, so many of my initial photographs are of my family and friends. They were the ones who trusted me first. But then word-of-mouth got around to what I was doing. Photographers started to flock to my studio, wanting to see the process firsthand. I have never done any sort of advertising for my work or my studio. It is just one person telling another.”

That was then, this is now. He is presently fully booked for the next seven months, for his weekly Friday sessions. His images of descendants of the Sioux — including Sitting Bull’s great grandson — have been showcased in galleries and private collections across North America, but North Dakota is, and always will be, home.

He hosts college groups, other photographers, anyone interested in the collodion process.

“I have had as many as 40 people in my studio at one time witnessing the process first hand.  It is very important for me to share the process, I want to prove that not only analog photography is still alive, but that wet plate should never have been abandoned in the 1880’s for something more convenient and simple.”

The past is another country now.

“At the time, I had no idea where I would be going with all this. I would never have dreamed that I would have original plates in 20 archives around the world, including the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery and the Library of Congress.

“I would have never guessed that I would publish a book on my body of work on my Native American friends. That I would be able to capture people like Greta Thunberg using my beloved process. Her plates have received more than two million likes on social media. There have been more than 75 articles written and published and distributed around the world through my work with her.”

Balkowitsch himself is interested in the present, be it the heavyweight boxer Evander Holyfield or Ernie LaPointe, great grandson of Sitting Bull.

©Shane Balkowitsch - Samuel Louis Seaboy

“When Evander Holyfield and Ernie LaPointe trusted me and came into my studio, it dawned on me that what is most important today is to capture real people who are here in the present day. Why pretend to take photographs of people in the past when in fact there are so many interesting people today who warrant a proper portrait? When I realized I could make history today, in the present, I stopped doing any sort of reenactment work.”

He’s not putting on a costume show, either.

“The biggest misconception I face on an almost weekly basis is that my friends are playing dress-up in my studio, that these are somehow costumes that were bought and we’re pretending.

“I never introduce any outfits or props into this important work. I want to keep the integrity of the series, and in order to do that, I introduce nothing into the shots. They bring it themselves, or it doesn’t get used. These are not costumes, this is their formal regalia. This their personal, traditional clothing and it must be respected for what it is.  I never touch or pick up any clothing or item in my studio without first asking permission to do so. There are traditions that I’m learning, and I always do my best to respect such sacred items.

“I have thousands of followers all around the world, and there is this  misconception that these may not be real Native Americans but actors of some sort. I have had people say, ‘I

thought real Native Americans were long gone.’ That simply is not the truth, and I hope my work proves that.

“I do not only capture Native Americans. I have many artistic shoots that I work on. I do large collaborations each year, but by far my most rewarding work is my work with my Native American brothers and sisters.”

His now famous portraits of Thunberg came together as part of his natural creative process, the unique perspective — and work routine — he brings to his craft. 

“I had only 20 minutes with Greta. I was promised time for one  portrait. After they saw the first image come to life, her father Svante said ‘Absolutely’ to a second portrait, which became the most iconic of the two, Standing For Us All. 

“That image should never have happened. In fact, neither of the images would have happened if it were not for my friends down on the Standing Rock Reservation. They went to bat for me and gave me the opportunity. A relationship of trust I had been fostering for years  came back around and opened the door for me, and I am so grateful.

“What I feel is magical about those images is the long exposure. Both wet plates required three seconds of exposure. All of that life, Greta’s life, is captured on the plate — her heartbeats, a shallow breath, a quick blink, all of that life is on the plate in pure silver on glass.

©Chad Nodland. Greta Thunberg watches Shane Balkowitsch as her silver-on-glass image comes to life.

“If you asked a film or digital photographer that they were going to be given 20 minutes with Greta to capture her image, and told them they could only take two exposures, they would tell you that you were crazy, but that is what I was up against.”

It worked.

“Standing For Us All is now at the Library of Congress, and the close-up Greta plate is with the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, in her home country.  A promise I made to her father when we were together was that I would not keep the original plates for myself but give them to appropriate archives.

“I feel really happy that I was able to pull this off for her and her legacy.

“As a kid growing up, we always knew we were doing damage to the environment. But we always had the feeling that it was a thousand years away before it would really do any damage. The Earth was simply so big, how could we possibly affect it? Well now we know that that timeframe has been moved up considerably. With four children at home, the youngest being just six-years-old, I worry about her and her future and the future of her children, if she decides to have any. We humans are amazing creatures, but we are also so plagued by our own ignorance and ego. When I was with Greta I found myself wanting to say, ‘These plates will be here

hundreds and hundreds of years from now,’ but I stopped myself because Greta’s generation may not have another 50 years. It is truly sad and gives me a new perspective. I am making works of art out of pure silver on glass that will last a thousand years, but humans may not be here to see them. That is a sobering thought.

I do not only capture Native Americans. I have many artistic shoots that I work on. I do large collaborations each year, but by far my most rewarding work is my work with my Native American brothers and sisters.”

Balkowitsch was drawn to Thunberg’s climate campaign out of concern for  the future of his own children and the world it looks increasingly like they will inherit.

“The biggest frustration for me is ignorance and, to be frank,  stupidity. Ninety-eight percent of all scientists around the globe are telling us that climate change is real and that we need to start listening. I think Greta is the lighting rod to get this done, but she is only one young girl. We need to all work together in whatever fashion necessary to start tackling this problem in earnest.

“Getting rid of plastic straws in the environment will do nothing. We must stop burning fossil fuels.”.

http://sharoncol.balkowitsch.com/wetplate.htm

©Shane Balkowitsch

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Learning About Ourselves by What We Leave Behind

“These hominid groups and large carnivores such as hyenas and wolves left a wealth of microscopic traces that illuminate the use of (caves) over the last three glacial-interglacial cycles.”

— Mike Morley, study author, Flinders University

Know them by what they left behind. In one of the less reported but fascinating anthropological finds about early humankind is that earth scientists are gaining new insights into the day-to-day lives of early human groups, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, thanks to analysis of dirt and dust found on the floors of a cave complex in Siberia.

As Arctic ice melts and glacial caps shrink, earth scientists are gaining access to secrets that previously lay buried under thick layers of prehistoric ice.

Researchers from Russia and Australia — yes, that Australia — are using modern geoarchaeological technology to examine tiny fragments of bone and fossilized animal droppings, as well as remnants of charcoal from the fires of early humans.

As reported late last summer in the journal Scientific Reports, the Denisova cave complex in Siberia’s Altai Mountains was frequented by hyenas, cave bears and wolves, alongside Neanderthals and, scientists now believe, early Homo sapiens. 

These early would-be cave dwellers would not have made comfortable companions, nor would they have cohabited willingly.

The abundance of animal droppings suggests that large carnivores of the time — species that have long since gone extinct — were the apex predators of the labyrinthine cave systems all through Siberia and northern Europe, and presumably northern Canada as well. The theory that early humans, nomads for the most part, would have shared the caves with such predators is now considered unlikely. To a cave bear, or one of the early progenitors of the wolf or hyena, early humans would have been just another source of protein. 

These new findings suggest that Neanderthals and early humans visited periodically but only stayed for brief periods of time. 

Most studies depend almost exclusively on trace amounts of DNA to unravel the secrets of humankind’s origins, alongside visible artifacts, such as stone tools and animal or plant remains.

The latest findings suggest evidence can also be found by sifting through sediment that has remained undisturbed over not just centuries and millennia but entire epochs. Caves have traditionally shown themselves to be treasure troves for palaeoanthropologists and early earth scientists because the lack of direct light and outside air ensures that what’s left in the cave over time, stays in the cave.

Findings are subject to interpretation, of course, and some interpretations are bound to be controversial. DNA evidence suggests a previously unknown group of early hominids, Denisovans — named after the Siberian cave system — interbred with Neanderthals. Genomic analysis shows that between three and five percent of the DNA found in today’s Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians can be traced back to these very same cave complexes. The people of Papua New Guinea derive as much as six percent of their DNA from these same Denisovans.

There was never a single source population in the human past, the Harvard University geneticist David Reich wrote in Who We Are and How We Got Here. “The genome revolution has shown that we are not living in particularly special times when viewed from the perspective of the great sweep of the human past.”

Highly divergent groups have mixed and intermarried time and time again, “homogenizing populations as divergent from one another as Europeans, Africans and Native Americans.”

We are not unique, in other words, no matter how much some of us  would like the rest of us to believe.

©Logga Wiggler-Pixabay

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