SLA Biomedical & Life Sciences Division Blog

Elephants

Elephants constitute the largest living land animals today and their ancestors have held that status going back to the mammoths and mastodons (Rohland et al 2010). There are actually three species of extant elephants. One is found in India (Elephas maximus indicus) and two live in Africa. The two African species feature one that primarily lives in dense jungle/woodlands mostly in equatorial and west Africa  (Loxodonta Africa cyclotis) and one that sprawls across the savannahs of eastern and southern Africa (Loxodonta Africana Africana). There is a small zone of hybridization in central Africa, although this is not as common in the wild as it is in zoos.

Elephants in Asia

Elephants now number a few hundred thousand in Asia, where perhaps as many as a million used to roam. They are more common in India than any other state although Bangladesh and all the Southeast Asian countries have significant populations.

A particular feature of the lives of some elephants in Asia, as opposed to Africa, is that at one time a  significant proportion of them were used in hauling operations in remote areas (generally in the lumber industry) and some still are. (They have largely been supplanted by trucks, tractors, and specialized mechanized equipment).

A much smaller percentage today are housed in temple quarters owing, in part, to their connection with Hindu religious traditions, and for use in ceremonies and festival parades. (This is not to say they live a cosseted life, owing to factors that will be discussed shortly).  The majority that remain in India and Sri Lanka, at least, live in forest preserves, where some attempts are made to conserve them (Badola et al 2010, Baskaran, Udhayan & Desai 2010, Govindaraj 2010, Gubbi 2011).

While both Asian and forest elephants in Africa routinely prefer leaves and twigs from trees and bushes, they can switch to grasses opportunistically. One of the favorites of Asian elephants  (and forest elephants in Africa) are tree fruit, which are a major cash crop, which puts them in conflict with farmers, although ironically in Sri Lanka at least, farmers are, in consequence,  turning to citrus production, in part because elephants there do not prefer it. However, by far the  the largest cash crop in all Asia, rice, is often raided by elephant bands at harvest time (Chelliah et al 2010, Jotikapukkana,  Berg, &  Pattanavibool 2010, Santiappillai & Reed 2010, Santiapillai et al 2010). Deaths to both elephants and humans are not infrequent  in trying to scare off the elephants and preserve the harvest (Doyle et al 2010).

Elephants in Africa

While a tiny percentage of African elephants can be found in  zoos and circuses, they are overwhelmingly wild, undomesticated animals, whose  present population numbers are  in the hundreds of thousands,  down from the millions as recently as the early twentieth century.

The forest type are significantly more threatened (Bechem & Luhunu 2010, Bouche et al 2010, Lindsell, Klop & Siaka 2011, Lindsell, Klop, &  Siaka 2011, Rood, Ganie  & Nijman 2010 ) than the savannah species.

While there are some truly gigantic game parks (large relative to European and even most North American equivalents), a significant number of African elephants of both types are still living close to the park borders  or in unrestricted areas where deadly clashes with ivory poachers (Martin & Martin 2010, Messer 2010) and  natives hunter-gatherer tribespeople and indigenous farmers are a sorry fact of life (Graham et al 2010, Monney,  Dakwa, & Wiafe 2010, Ouattara, Soulemane, Nandjui & Tondoh 2010). Elephants are scarcely alone in their fatal encounters with humans and their crops. To the surprise of many who think them solely placid water plant eaters, hippos also frequently raid crops and attack and kill humans who try to fend them off (Kendall 2011).

The Diet & Water Needs of Elephants Actively Determine the Landscape

Because they are so large, elephants (particularly African Savannah elephants) are seen as much as shapers of their surroundings rather than as being shaped by their surroundings.  They do this largely through the long term effects of  their dietary  habits and water-seeking (Buitenwerf, Swemmer & Peel 2011, de Knegt et al 2011, O’Connor 2010).

Probably no other animal in the wild has its diet and travel ways  so thoroughly analyzed through the seemingly continuous analysis of their poop: largely because the droppings are  enormous and  easily located  with  fresh new specimens available to researchers at least once daily from individual elephants  so changes in thier diet can be  monitored (Codron et al 2011).  

When African savannah elephants enter a field which contains a mixture of trees, shrubs, and grasses, they may choose any one of them for forage to obtain the 400 lbs. or so of vegetation that they typically ingest every day. However the choice most likely to be adverse to the local ecosystems occurs when they forage on  the youngest trees or the mid-level shrubs.

Why would they do this? At certain times of the year (mostly during dry spells) ordinarily grass-loving  savannah elephants are likely to find  greater nutritional density in the browse from trees and bushes than from the available grasses.  The impact of savannah elephant browsing in terms of lost shade and diminished topsoil retention  can be immediate , and recovery can take quite a while, particularly if an area has already been logged commercially (Bonnell, Reyna-Hurtado, & Chapman 2011).

However, during the rainy season almost all savannah elephants switch back almost exclusively to tall lush (and presumably more nutrient-dense)  grasses, sparing the damage to trees and mid-level shrubs (Codron et al 2011).

Interestingly a number of trees and mid-level shrubs have evolved mutualisms with insects, which do not appreciably harm the trees,  whereby the insects will instead bite/harass the elephants who attempt to browse on them (Goheen & Palmer 2010).

This savannah elephant tree and mid-level brush browsing would seem to be entirely detrimental to the landscape save for perhaps three offsetting behaviors.

First, elephant dung is a tremendous source of food to burrowing insects, such as termites and dung beetles,  whose ferocious level of industry further mixes  the animal waste into the substrate (60% of which is actually relatively undigested  and serves as an excellent mulch) actually enriching the soil (Aarrestad et al 2011, Banks et al 2010, Levick 2010) and supporting  more green growth.

Second, savannah elephants are also among the first to return to areas of the veldt that have been burned via lightning storms, as they can better tolerate the coarse remnants digestively, and their subsequent droppings actually speed the recovery of the local ecosystem in terms of small grazers returning to well fertilized tender growth (Sensenig, Demment & Laca 2010).

 

Third, elephants are actually rather good at finding underground water and will use their tusks to dig up what become temporary water holes that a wide variety of other animals can subsequently share (Augustine 2010,  Franz  et al 2011). These water holes may become more permanent when the rains come, changing the landscape for the better on the largely arid savannahs. This behavior is perhaps even more altruistic than might be expected since it is almost exclusively only during water hunting forays and "well digging"  that the distracted elephants experience the otherwise rarely  successful attacks of lions on their drought-weakened young (Joubert 2006, Loveridge et al 2006). 

However, elephant overpopulation may not be entirely offset by the good the herds  do, and even abundant rainfall may not provide enough vegetation to sustain densely crowded elephant  populations (Hayward &  Zawadzka 2010).

Elephant Sensory Capacity, Intelligence & Sociability

Elephants have enormous and exceptionally well developed brains (Fowler &  Mikota2006, Hakeem et al. 2009, Hart & Pinter-Woman 2008, Shoshani, Kupsky & Marchant 2006). They possess self-awareness, recognize themselves in mirrors (Plotnik, de Waal, & Reiss 2006, Plotnik et al 2010), and demonstrate innate intelligence at least on a par with primates and are possibly as bright as dolphins (Byrne, Bates &  Moss 2009).

They have excellent hearing and communicate with a wide variety of vocalizations that seem to convey not only specific information but also mood states (Nair et al 2009, Soltis, Blowers, & Savage 2011).

While they have a keen sense of smell (Santiapillai &  Read 2010) they have terrible eyesight (Baproda et al 2010, Pettigrew et al 2010).

They are highly social and live for the most part in matriarchal groups and practice a great deal of caring for one another’s offspring  (Bates 2008, Bradshaw &  Schore 2007, De Waal 1998, De Waal 2006,  Lee 1987).

They appear to show sadness at the death of important individuals from their group, especially matriarchs (Douglas-Hamilton et al 2006).

There is much that we still do not understand about an elephant’s interior life  (Irie &  Hasegawa 2009) but we do know that it seems built for cooperativity with its own kind (Schulte 2000) and that elephants actually suffer in captivity when kept alone and isolated from other elephants (Nolen 2011).

Perhaps the most intriguing insight into elephant intelligence and willingness to cooperate is documented by Plotnik et al (2011). In an experiment conducted with the cooperation of mahouts (handlers who maintain a special lifelong welfare oversight and training  relationship with a particular elephant ) conducted in a Thai elephant refuge center, a  series of elephants were trained to pull a rope, for which they were rewarded with corn in a bowl.

The table on which the corn was placed was later rigged with a special rope with two ends, both ends of which had to be pulled in order for the table to slide within reach, and for the bowl then to be emptied of its corn.

No elephant acting on his or her own could pull the rope and make the table slide forward. Instead, the rope merely pulled out from the table.

If, in a pair of elephants one of them pulled at the rope but the other did not, the table would not slide forward, and no reward was forthcoming either.

Eventually, the elephants determined that they would somehow have to do this rope-pulling task together without any prompting from their mahouts, and did so.

Their techniques varied. Some pulled from their side using their trunk and their mouth. Others used only their trunk.

One particularly clever female managed to have her male elephant partner do all the real work, for she simply trapped the rope on her side under her foot, making her partner have to pull twice as hard on his end  to get the table to slide forward.

Elephants who saw no rope around the table eventually did not bother going forward to manage in some other way to obtain the corn. They sensed (correctly as it turned out) that without the rope there was no use wasting their time.  

However, the elephants developed a sense of patience. Some elephants who knew that another elephant might be nearby would advance  to the  usual location of the rope on  his or her side alone, and wait for another elephant to show up on the other side.

 If none showed up, the dsappointed elephant  moved away. But they had an unusually long period in which they were content to stay in hope: 45 seconds. This is much longer  than chimps and a variety of other animals tested along similar lines.

Interestingly, their intent to seek cooperative opportunities was not extinguished if no one showed up. They would try again later, and as test showed, they often succeeded.

What is the future of the elephant?

Despite the fact that encroaching human population and elephant habitat loss are very real threats, there is a significant shift among many citizens in countries where elephants are native. They have come to see that elephant conservation and resultant eco-tourism may well be a better way to make a living than subsistence farming or ivory poaching (Fischer, Muchapondwa & Sterner 2011), and in addition, that such preserves as are being set up allow  for as much space as possible about which elephants might forage and roam, especially including protection of incoming sources of water (Jotikapukkana,  Berg,  & Pattanavibool 2010), and that temple and zoo animals be allowed to live in groups where they could develop a social life or elephant culture (Vanitha, Thiyagesan, & Baskaran 2011).

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Southerners In The Stroke Belt Eat A Lot of Fried Fish And Have A Lot Of Strokes: Is It The Fish? The Frying Of It? Both? Neither? Or Actually Not a Bad Choice of A Meal Compared to Common Southern Alternatives?

 

Clinical researchers (AHRQ 1998, Borhani 1965, Clinical Advisor for Nurse Practitioners 2006 ) have long been calling much of the Southeastern United States, including  Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi,  (and more recently East Texas-----see Ramshaw 2011) as part of a stroke belt, and the medical literature has long used the term “the Stroke Belt Buckle” for both North & South Carolina and Georgia.  

But now, stories in the New York Times (Rabin 2009) and USA Today (Brophy Marcus 2010) , have heightened public awareness of that Stroke Belt & Belt Buckle, particularly with regard to the eating of fried fish (Bakalar 2011) as possibly a contributing dietary factor.

Are Stroke Belt Dwellers Not Getting Enough Fish-Provided Omega-3 Fatty Acids?

The key study (Nahab et al 2011) places no clear cut blame on any particular type of fish, but suggests that  of the 21,675 study participants,  only 5,022 ate the recommended two servings per week of fish high in omega-3 fatty acids, a nutraceutical associated with good cardiovascular health.

 

By this,  the authors imply that the majority of Southerners were  not eating  fish like mackerel, herring, salmon (coldwater ocean-going species for the most part, which were cited as examples of fish one should eat to obtain omega-3s). This is not surprising since none are particularly common to Southern cuisine, nor are they quite as available in supermarkets,  and in the case of salmon, not  as affordable relative to alternative fish.

Additionally one feature of those Southerners  with a higher rate of stroke was that many had two or more servings of other fried fish not so notably rich in omega-3s.  

Where  are Stroke Belt Dwelling Fried Fish Eaters Eating Their Fried Fish Meals?

To most people in the Stroke Belt ( I now count myself among their numbers)  it would seem  important for any study to be more definitive to distinguish between home-cooked and restaurant-cooked, in determining which fish are most likely to be involved in any study implicating fried fish, although it is not clear that the authors  did this with the survey instrument that they used. The reason that "where the fish is typically eaten",  is important is that both the type of fish and the type of frying vary, sometimes dramatically between home-cooked and restaurant-cooked, here in the South.

Are The Freshwater Fish Favored By Those In the Stroke Belt Somehow at Fault?

 Home-cooked fish in the South means predominantly freshwater fish. First and foremost, it’s farm-raised catfish, then farm-raised tilapia, followed by sport-fished, wild-caught  crappie or bass. Along the Gulf Coast, home-cooked saltwater fish like red snapper is also common.

 Restaurant-cooked fish in the South vary further by whether one is eating at a large, generally nationwide chain, or at a locally-owned or regionally-concentrated operation.

The overall fisheries marketing consideration  here in the South (and actually increasingly for the rest of the US),   is that there is a strong preference among restaurant-goers for fish whose flesh is white and whose taste, unlike the taste of herring, mackerel, and sometimes salmon, is mild.  

Fishy tastes and oily, dark flesh do not sell well in the South, and indeed, have been bred out of today’s farm-raised catfish, one of the reasons for its sustained popularity. Unfortunately, perhaps, oily, dark-fleshed fish are usually very rich in omega-3s.

But The Stroke Belt is Not the Only Place in the Country Where Fried Fish Relatively Lower In Omega-3s is Frequently Eaten

The local/regional fish found in the restaurants of the Stroke Belt  are today overwhelmingly farmed catfish and farmed tilapia.

Wild-caught cod,  haddock, and pollock,  are sometimes available but are expensive and far more characteristic of homes and restaurants New England, New York, & New Jersey, than the South. (I lived my first 56 years in New England, so I know whereof I speak).

However, today’s restaurant pollock and haddock, whether served at local, regional, or national restaurants---- outside of the local, coastal New England market------  is  much more likely to come from Alaskan waters than from New England, today).

Judging from their corporate websites,  it is sometimes possible to sort trying to sort out which “mild, white fish” is used for larger restaurant chains. Given that “mild white fish” can vary quite a bit in terms of their omega-3 levels, it  ought to make a difference if it is the omega-3s that matter the most.

Unfortunately for our purposes in tacking down which fish was in the “fish-wich,” so to speak, many national chains,  particularly outside the South,  use a number of differing fish interchangeably without necessarily cueing the consumer.

 None of the following is to be taken as indicative of a lack of concern on the part of the restaurant chain for the wholesomeness of whatever fish it is. There is no proof that any of the species discussed is unsafe to eat, just that some fish have more omega-3s than others.

Denny’s appears to use an assortment of fish including pollock and “pangasius” (generally these are farmed catfish-like fish imported from Vietnam or the People’s Republic of China, but are not to be confused with the arguably much  more closely monitored, more  quality-controlled US farm-raised catfish.) Denny's also sometimes uses haddock.

Long John Silvers uses a similar variety of white, mild fish, but also include hake ( a relative of the cod family), and tilapia.

Wendy’s uses primarily cod.

Ruby Tuesdays uses the usual assortment of white fish, but has premium seafood entries that include farmed salmon and farmed trout. Of those, only the salmon and the trout would have notably higher omega-3 levels.

Are All Types of Frying Equally Bad, Assuming That It’s the Frying That’s the Problem?

The study’s authors  suggest that frying seems to reduce or destroy natural omega-3 levels in the fish. But there  is no indication if by "frying"  the authors mean deep-fat frying, like French fries and donuts, or pan-frying as in pork chops or bacon.

As a practical matter in Southern kitchens, most home-cooked fish is likely  to be shallow-pan-fried, and most restaurant fish is likely to be battered and deep-fat fried, although grilled fish is coming on strong, particularly at eat-in restaurants in national chains.

Do the Cooking Fats & Oils Matter More than the Fish Within Which They Were Fried?

In any case, if the infusion of oil caused by deep fat frying  is the culprit, then this should be explicitly mentioned or separately analyzed.

It should be understood, however, that battered and deep-fried fish probably has a lot less penetration of the cooking oil into the fish than might be imagined, because the oil, if sufficiently hot when the battered fish is placed in it, quickly seals off  the fish.  

Nor do we know which homes or restaurants use butter, lard, partially hydrogenated semi-solid shortening oils (similar to Crisco) or polyunsaturated oils in liquid form.

This is likely to be a significant matter since, at various times, a number of these fats have been implicated as being unhealthy for the heart, while others (typically olive oil, sunflower oil, and safflower oil and certain other more exotic types, are regarded as downright heart-healthy).

Omega-3 Levels vs. Arachidonic Acid Levels In Fish

There is, an as yet, unresolved debate as to whether eating some fish with lower levels of omega-3 fatty acids but possibly higher levels of a somewhat similar fatty acid, called arachidonic acid (ARA) is as “heart healthy” as eating only high omega-3 fish.

Some farmed fish, particularly catfish and tilapia, have a higher ratio of ARA to omega-3s. Some authors (Weaver et al. 2008) suggest that ARA may promote inflammatory responses within the body, and that may have some implications for cardiovascular disease processes, although the experimental animals on which this position is based is the African green monkey (Parks et al 1990)  whose physiology provides a  good, but scarcely infallible road map to likely human consequences.   

But other authors (Clandinin et al 2005) point out that ARA is demonstrably crucial to the development of infants and is actually added to infant formula.

Tests of significantly larger amounts of ARA in the diet of healthy adults showed no adverse consequences (Brenna & Diau 2007, Nelson et al 1997).

ARA seems to promote healthy immune responses (Kelley et al 1997)  and cell and tissue repair (Bonnans & Levy 2007).

In a study of Japanese fishermen, who not only ate fish, but were  given additional ARA  (Kusumoto et al 2007) there was some adverse blood and platelet chemistry, but this was a rather extreme situation.

 By extreme we mean that one would have to eat about five times as much US farm-raised tilapia, or eight times as much US farm-raised catfish, to get even close to the levels of ARA in the Japanese study (Nettleton 2008).

But this debate may be best resolved by a compromise suggested by Chilton (2008) one of the authors of the “fear of ARA ratios in some fish paper,” in answering a critique of that study. Perhaps, Chilton notes, there are simply certain people with chronic inflammatory diseases that might be specially advised to avoid certain fish, (or for purposes of our discussion, certain fish fried in some particular way), while the vast majority of people may eat fried fish gladly, particularly in preference to “bacon, hamburgers, or doughnuts.”

If Farmed Freshwater Fish Are the Problem, Can the Fish Be Farmed In A Different Way?

The answer is yes, if the fish  is actually the problem, which is by no means clear. Including certain dried algae (Menghe et al 2009) in catfish feed would improve their lipid profiles beneficially, but whether or not this is commercially feasible in an industry that already has problems with its feed costs (Stankus 2010) or if the supply of the dried algae is sufficient has not yet been determined.

What Factors, Other Than Fried Fish,  Might Be Involved in Making the Stroke Belt the Stroke Belt?

The answer is: There are so many posible confounding factors, in the study and in the Stroke Belt, that it would be hard to know when to stop counting.

Lower levels of education and income are also associated with the South and with strokes.

High blood pressure is associated with strokes and higher blood pressure is more common in the South.

Consumption of high saturated fats (particularly lard, pork, ham, bacon, etc.) is common in the South.

As is a high rate of diabetes, obesity, cigarette smoking, and salt consumption

Geography itself in some way, seems to play a persistent role in the incidence of stroke. People who are born in the South but live as adults in other parts of the country seem to have a persistently higher rate of stroke anyway (El-Saed & Kuller 2007, Glymour, Avendaño & Berkman 2007 ) and adults who were born and raised elsewhere who move to the South (much like myself) also have a raised probability of having a stroke (Glymour, Kosheleva & Boden-Albala 2009).

But we should not be too quick to blame somehow being in the Southern United States for causing strokes.

The US Stroke Belt is scarcely the only one in the world: Andalusia in Spain (Castilla Guerra, Del Fern & Marín-Martín 2010) has one of its own, and there is no evidence whatsoever that fried fish, farmed, freshwater, omega-3 poor or arachidonic acid high, has anything to do with it, even as many of the other factors discussed in the latter portion of this blog seem to come together, much as they do in the American South.  

Tony Stankus FSLA, [email protected] Life Sciences Librarian, Science Coordinator & Professor

University of Arkansas Libraries MULN 233 E

365 North McIlroy Avenue

Fayetteville AR 72701-4002

Voice: 479-409-0021

Fax: 479-575-4592

 

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Pullicino, P. M., V. G. Wadley, L. A. McClure, M. M. Safford, R. M. Lazar, M. Klapholz, A. Ahmed, V. J. Howard, and G. Howard. 2008. Factors contributing to global cognitive impairment in heart failure: Results from a population-based cohort. Journal of Cardiac Failure 14 (4) (05): 290-5.

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Is Organized Anthropology Losing Its Senses As It Downplays Its Sciences? Non-Science Areas Might Lose Funding That Comes From Anthropology’s Hard Won but Now Endangered Position as Being one of the “Real” Science Departments on Campus

Anthropology is basically the study of mankind in the past, present and the future. Evolutionary anthropologists would also admit our primate relatives as subjects, and cultural anthropologists would probably go with a definition that included mankind in given societies with particular heritages and customs. The flagship organization for this pursuit is the American Anthropological Association, an organization of about 10,000 academics, museum workers, and expeditionary researchers.

Ordinarily, this is a quiet group that does not much rouse public attention when it engages in internal debates about its mission statement, but in a Tuesday, December 14, 2010, article in the New York Times by Nicholas Wade, it was reported that those in the  organization whose work is science-based were understandably incensed when the word “science” was dropped from the association’s long range planning document, and replaced in some cases with the phrase “the public understanding of humankind.”

What’s going on?

According to the organization, not as much as one would think. In a press release, entitled “AAA responds to Public Controversy Over Science in Anthropology,” http://www.aaanet.org/issues/press/AAA-Responds-to-Public-Controversy-Over-Science-in-Anthropology.cfm these changes “have been taken out of context and blown out of proportion” and “On the contrary, the Executive Board recognizes and endorses the crucial place of the scientific method in much…. [but emphatically not all and maybe not even in the majority anymore of]…. anthropological research.” The association regards anthropology as a “holistic and expansive discipline that covers the full breath of human history and culture…..and draws on the methods of both the humanities and the sciences.”

 

If the reassurances expressed in this press release fairly represent the case, why would scientists in anthropology still be upset? The answer most likely lies in a quote in Wade’s article referencing anthropologists who were aghast at this distancing of the organization from being evidence-based: “How could they [meaning science-based anthropologists at universities where they have to compete with other academic units for funding] justify their department’s existence if their national organization did not regard anthropology as a science?”

 

What I think this means is that many anthropologists whose work involves physical and biological evidence that generates real data based on measurement, who use robust statistics, and develop testable hypotheses do not want to trade being associated with the Biology Department or the School of Medicine for being likened to university departments associated more with performance art, post-modern literary criticism, political activism, social engineering, and assorted gender and race studies. 

This is a real worry because as Dr. Frank Marlowe , President-Elect of the Evolutionary Anthropology Society, an American Anthropological Associate affiliate group, says in Wade’s article: “We evolutionary anthropologists are outnumbered by the new cultural or social anthropologists, many but not all of whom are postmodern, which seems to translate into anti-science.”

This is not to say that university departments which   feature any of these latter non-science approaches are not serious or important to someone.

Recent articles in the flagship publication of the American Anthropological Association, American Anthropologist, and in Current Anthropology, another well respected publication of the University of Chicago Press for the Wenner-Gren Foundation, include studies of torture in South Sudan (Deal 2010),  Palestinian cultural festivals as protests against Israeli occupation (De Cesari 2010),  Intertextuality and Christian ethnotheologies”  (whatever that  means)  (Handman 2010), or the even more cryptic “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity (Dawdy 2010).

It’s just that while there may very well now be  a voting majority of the kinds of anthropologists who are interested in, and do the kinds of work represented by titles like this within the membership of the AAA, efforts like these are  probably not as important to major private and governmental agencies (think NSF & NIH, for example)  who are willing to fund  empirical research that will yield  reasonably plausible and provable ----- or at least seriously debatable-----  knowledge about the natural history of our species and its nearest relatives.

And it is the latter group, the funders of scientific research, that have endorsed  the academic respectability and drive the advance of anthropology as much as anyone else.

One of the most curious aspects of the seeming demotion of the science-based anthropologist by the humanities and social-science-based anthropologists is the fact that fields like history, psychology, sociology, and even economics probably benefit as much from science-based anthropological studies as do fields like biology and medicine.

What follows is a small sampler of some recent studies where science can inform humanities and social science scholars and even public policy and gender studies.

A question in the History of Religion: Did early Christians in Roman England value their children more & treat them better than did the pagans?

It is often thought that since some Greeks and Romans basically abandoned babies with birth defects and cast off those young boys lacking military potential, that the introduction of a new religion which preached that at least in some matters, little children should have a place of honor (Matthew 19:14, Mark 10:14) would have greatly improved their lot. However, in a study by Lewis (2010) of burials in graveyards used in the times of the Roman occupation of Britain, the bones of Christian babies and young children (which were buried for religious regions in a east-west alignment) showed vastly more signs of anemia, rickets, and scurvy, than those of pagan babies and young children (which were aligned for religious reasons in a north-south alignment).  The author attributes the adverse outcomes to the practice of early Christians to go so far as to make even infants engage in penitential fasts and their propensity to keep their babies and young children in swaddling clothes for a much longer time than was customary among pagan families (perhaps in the manner of the Baby Jesus in the Gospels (Luke 2:6-7) although the practice was widespread among many different cultures even then).  This longer term swaddling was hypothesized to reduce the Christian child’s exposure to sunshine induced vitamin D production, relative to pagan children who were freed sooner and presumably encouraged to play and exercise outdoors more.

A question in Foreign Affairs & Diplomacy: Is the practice of giving food as foreign aid equally likely to improve the health & nutritional status of the majority of populations living under democratic vs. authoritarian regimes?

While it may seem to be a stretch, there has been a study testing just such a proposition among our primate relatives (Jaeggi, Stevens & Van Scheik 2010). It turns out that the alpha males among chimpanzees held in captivity, despite being particularly fierce hunters of monkeys in the wild,  permit and even encourage food-sharing and other acts of reciprocity among members of their troop, while their closest relatives, the bonobos, despite being a generally matriarchal species who less frequently hunt other primates in the wild, have dominant males who are particularly despotic in captivity, especially around the sharing of food, to the point of sometimes precluding its wider distribution, leading to progressive nutritional impoverishment despite increases in food supply.  Therefore it is not at all improbable that before sending foreign aid in the form of food, it would be wise to determine whether one was dealing with a chimp or bonobo kind of political hierarchy in captivity. (Think Kim-Jong-Il and the question of food aid to North Korea, which goes first and foremost to that country’s massive military and party apparatchiks).

A question in Government, Political Science & Economics: Is the military-industrial complex an entirely new concept or something that has a kind of evolutionary basis in prehistoric weapons production?

There is abundant evidence from strike markings on the bones of humans and large prey animals that Paleolithic men used stone tipped spears to lethal effect.  This is still the case with many indigenous people in remote locations who have not mastered metallurgy and still survive as hunter-gatherers and defend territories or raid the territory of others.  While it may be hard to prove whether or not there was a formal separation of the weapons producers from the weapons users in ancient times, Williams, Gordon & Richmond (2010) have shown through kinematic analysis of the limb and wrist motions of modern day “knappers” (modern day hobbyist makers of stone tools, usually including a fair number of archeologists or anthropologists) that the anatomical mechanics  of making these stone tools expertly  just happen to be the same ones that optimize spear-throwing.  This suggests that it could well be that the original “military-industrial complex” was not differentiated into  manufacturers vs. warriors but rather composed of men who coevolved both to make and use the weapons efficiently, because proficiency in both was essential to survival, particularly in small family groups and tribes which could not spare stay-at-home manpower during hunts or warfare.

A question in Gender Studies: Did women have any health advantages when compared to men in medieval times?

There is little doubt that over the course of history, a great many women died in childbirth while their husbands went on to remarry, and that the maintaining of fires for cooking and heating seemed to have disproportionately left women exposed to the chance of fatal burns, and even that that menstruation and perhaps unfairly shared food supplies left many women chronically anemic and prone to fatal illness. This is apart from fatalities of women visited upon them by their husbands as part of domestic violence or by strangers during wartime rape rampages and pillaging. The question arises: Were there particular times or historical events when being a woman conferred a particular health or survival benefit? The answer would seem to be that only in relatively recent centuries, and even then  seemingly only when the men were at war, have women typically outlived men and this scarcely seems to make up for millennia of their excess morbidity and mortality. However, Sharon DeWitte (2010) has excavated and examined remains in the medieval cemetery in Smithfield, England, that suggest a different outcome during the course of a major epidemic: the Black Plague.  It was pretty clear that there was something operating at least at that time, that made adult men die at a rate almost 50% higher than women.

A question in Psychology: Are there differences in behavioral genetics between indigenous peoples who more quickly become stable and generally law-abiding agriculturalists and those who those who remained significantly longer hunter gatherers living outside the mainstream economic and legal system?

Latin America still possesses significant populations of indigenous peoples who live in locations adjacent to well settled territory but still live by subsistence hunting, fishing, and wild roots and fruits, and have generally resisted attempts to include them into the modern mainstream of agriculture, commerce and law, even as other indigenous peoples in the region  have long adopted agriculture or other occupations and have become well integrated.  While explanations based on cultural beliefs about the sacredness of the land, the enduring value of  being seen as tribes who value bravery in hunting and battle, and taboos about intermarriage or fear of insulting the memory or traditions of their ancestors have all been invoked as explanations, could there be a biological basis that distinguishes those indigenous peoples who have acculturated at some level to modernity and agriculture versus those who, given a choice, would  still wander the jungle or  undeveloped grasslands? The Guarani (whose name comes from the word “warrior” in Spanish, and Kaingang peoples of Central South America (both living primarily in Paraguay and parts of Brazil) were among the last peoples to acculturate in the sense of adopting the agricultural lifestyle assigned them by the colonial Spanish or Portuguese conquerors of their countries, and rarely showed any inclination or success in well-ordered agriculture until the last century,  with the exception of some benign communally run  plantations founded by the Jesuits during the latter 1600s and early 1700s. (It should be noted however, that these same Guarani maintained a particularly fierce home army that, led by Jesuits who were themselves veterans of wars In Europe, was  able to repulse attacks by modern-fire-armed Portuguese slave capturing gangs  numbering in the hundreds to low thousands for decades).  Given that it is now recognized that some genes  contribute to behavioral propensities or special skills, (without necessarily predestining choice of occupation or one’s worldview) Tovo-Rodrigues et al (2010) analyzed the frequency  of dopamine receptor D3 alleles among these two tribes compared to other Amerindian and mixed Amerindian-European populations in Latin America and noted a markedly higher frequency of molecular markers for traits such as novelty-seeking, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, particularly among the Guarani.  It turns out, that these genes and the traits with which they are associated, are extremely common worldwide (and almost predictive) of members of warrior and hunter-gatherer cultures. This is not intended to indicate that these peoples are somehow inferior  to those without these alleles, although it could be appreciated that with them they might not be as adaptable to the sometimes tedious, focused and long-time-commitment demanding nature of modern agriculture, but rather that this genetic endowment  may represent special adaptations to a people who formerly had constantly be on the move, be brave in confronting dangers, and be less predictable to enemy tribes or animal predators who  were seeking to do them harm.

In sum, there is lot that science has to offer to the rest of anthropology, but in short, it is very likely that unless the concerns of science-based anthropologists are surely assuaged the organizational cleft between them and “holistic”, humanities-based anthropologists is going to widen.  It is very likely that the scientists will soon more closely identify with groups like the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the American Society of Primatologists, the Human Biology Association, as well as organizations in archaeology, biology and medicine that have special interest groups that welcome anthropologists, rather than the American Anthropological Association.

Good riddance, might some cultural anthropologists say!

But the latter may be forgetting that the scientists will take their entrée to funding sources with them as they leave.

Tony Stankus, FSLA, Life Sciences Librarian, Science Coordinator, & Professor

Editor-in-Chief, Science & Technology Libraries

University of Arkansas Libraries MULN 233 E

365 North McIlroy Avenue

Fayetteville AR 72701-4002

Voice: 479-409-0021

Fax: 479-575-4592

 

Dawdy, Shannon Lee. 2010. Clockpunk anthropology and the ruins of modernity. Current Anthropology 51 (6): 761-793.

 Deal, Jeffrey L. 2010. Torture by Cieng: Ethical theory meets social practice among the Dinka Agaar of South Sudan. American Anthropologist 112 (4): 563-575.

 DeCesari, Chiara. 2010. Creative Heritage: Palestinian geritage NGOs and defiant acts of government. American Anthropologist 112 (4): 625-637.

 DeWitte, Sharon N. 2010. Sex differentials in frailty in medieval England. American Journal of Physical Anthropology  143: 285-297.

 Handman, Courtney. 2010. Events of translation: Intertextuality and Christian ethnotheologies of change among Guhu-Samane, Papua New Guinea. American Anthropologist  112 (4): 576-588.

 Jaeggi, Adrian V., Jeroen M.G. Stevens & Carel Van Svhaik. 2010. Tolerant food sharing and reciprocity is precluded by despotism among bonobos but not among chimpanzees. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 143: 41-51.

 Lewis, Mary E. 2010. Life  and death in a civitas capital: Metabolic diseases and trauma in the children from late Roman Dorchester, Dorset. American Journal of Physical Anthropology  142: 405-416.

 Tovo-Rodrigues, Luciana, Sidia Callegari-Jacques, M. Petzle-Erler, Luiza Tsuneto, Francisco Solzano, & Mara H. Hutz. 2010. Dopamine receptor D4 allele distribution in Amerindians: A reflection of past behavior differences?  American Journal of Physical Anthropology 143:458-464.

 Wade, Nicholas. 2010. Anthropology group tries to soothe tempers after dropping the word “Science.” New York Times CLX (55,254): A23.

 Williams, E.M., A.D. Gordon & B.G. Richmond. 2010. Upper limb kinematics and the role of the wrist during stone tool production. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 143: 134-145.