People In a Zoo

Hamburg, Germany 1874-1931_______________________________________________________

Just less than 100 years ago, one  could visit a Zoo near Hamburg, Germany, where, alongside the animals, were displayed Lapps and Nubians, Ethiopians and Indians.

During the times of Emperor Wilhelm ll when Zoos were keen to show, not only wild animals, but, men, women and children from exotic countries – displayed like cattle. Africans and Asians were exhibited as human figures with kinship to specific animal species, thus literalizing the colonialist zeugma yoking “native” and were less than human.

People came in droves to watch the controversial spectacle

“You could not exactly call our guests beautiful”, jokes the animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck in the summer of 1874 on the extension of the park to the latest delivery from Lapland “Their skin color is a dirty yellow, the skull is round with firm black hair overgrown, they have slant-eyes, the nose is small and flat.”

The idea was a resounding success, and Hagenbeck was proud of his Human-Zoo/Menagerie project: “It was granted to me, The first exhibits in the civilized world of this sort were granted to me,” said the entrepreneur in his own memoirs. Though, people from other continents have been presented since the Middle Ages at fairs and Prince farms, but, Carl Hagenbeck was the first animal-dealer and subsequent Zoo-founder who made the idea a commercially success – and the first organizer of large-scale “anthropological-zoological exhibits,” as he himself called his spectacles.

“Hottentots” for Science

The concept of Hagenbeck’s ethnic-event in the Menagerie was something completely new: For the first time in human history, a complete group of people, including animals, housing and equipment was shown together. The intention of such an exhibition was to let the European observers make for themselves a realistic picture of the daily life of each ethnic group. After the sensational success with the Northern Lapps, Hagenbeck’s agents advertised all over the world more exotic “guests” to the white audience: Nubians from Sudan, Inuits from Greenland and Canada, Ethiopians, Somalis, Indians and Sinhalese, even “Hottentots” from the German colony of Southwest Africa. Hagenbeck and his peoples-show will soon be on tour throughout Europe with a pleasant shiver in front of the “savages” to admire.

The famous doctor from Berlin, Rudolf Virchow, through his ethnological studies, gave an academic coating or application to these commercial performances. Virchow, now considered as one of the founding fathers of modern medicine, was also chairman of the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and prehistorical Studies. He examined many of the participants of the peoples-shows, surveyed their body and head shapes, and made assumptions about the intelligence of the various specimens of exotic people.

Thus, he was in line with the science of his time, which tried to define the human “races” and to examine them in a hierarchical order. In one article, Virchow praises the scientific importance of Hagenbeck’s exhibitions: “This sort of imagination about people is very interesting for anyone who wants to be convinced about the position, human in Nature ever takes in, and on the development, which the human race has traversed.

Such expositions gave Utopian form to White supremacist ideology, legitimizing racial hierarchies abroad and muting class and gender divisions among Whites at home by stressing national agency in a global project of domination.

This successful Peoples-Exposition took place at the peak of European colonialism, just before the beginning of the First World War. This was an era in which Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany demanded a “Place in the Sun” for Colonial Germany. Most contemporaries, as well as Hagenbeck himself, did sense the issue of exhibiting exotic people parallel to exotic animals not as offensive – after all, they were firmly convinced of the superiority of the “white man”. Carl Hagenbeck’s sons continued displaying the Exposition even up until 1931, visitors were forced to look away from the famous exhibition, when Cinema, in the late 1930s, had replaced the productions as a venue for exotic.

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This Is The Face of The First European

All Humans Ethiopians

This is the face of the first anatomically-modern human to live in Europe. It belonged to a man – or woman – who inhabited the ancient forests of the Carpathian Mountains in what is now Romania about 35,000 years ago.

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The artist’s reconstruction – a face that could be male or female – is based on the partial skull and jawbone found in a cave where bears were known to hibernate. The facial features indicate the close affinity of these early Europeans to their immediate African ancestors, although it was still not possible to determine the person’s sex.

Richard Neave, the forensic artist who reconstructed the facial features in this clay model, based his assessment on a careful measurement of the bone fragments and his long experience of how the soft tissues of the face are built around the bones of the skull.

The reconstruction was made for the forthcoming BBC 2 series The Incredible Human Journey which documents human origins and evolution, from our birthplace in Africa to the long migratory routes that led us to populate the most distant parts of the globe. It is impossible from the bones to determine the skin colour of the individual, although scientists speculate it was probably darker than modern-day Europeans, reflecting a more recent African origin.

Mr Neave’s clay head of the “first modern European” now sits on the desk of Alice Roberts, the Bristol University anthropologist who will introduce the BBC series, which is scheduled for screening next Sunday evening on BBC 2. “It’s really quite bizarre. I’m a scientist and objective, but I look at that face and think ‘Gosh, I’m actually looking at the face of somebody from 40,000 years ago’, and there’s something weirdly moving about that,” Dr Roberts told the Radio Times.

“Richard creates skulls of much more recent humans and he’s used to looking at differences between populations. He said the skull doesn’t actually look European, or Asian, or African. It looks like a mixture of all of them. And you think, well, that’s probably what you’d expect of someone who was among the earliest populations to come to Europe.”

Potholers discovered the lower jawbone of the first modern European in 2002 in Pestera cu Oase, the “cave with bones”, located in the south-western Carpathians. The remaining fragments of skull were unearthed in 2003.

Scientists have dated the bones using radiocarbon analysis to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago when Europe was occupied by both Neanderthal man, who had lived in the region for tens of thousands of years, and anatomically-modern humans – Homo sapiens – who had recently arrived on a migratory route from Africa via the Middle East.

Although the skull shares many modern feature of human anatomy, it also displays more archaic traits, such as very large molar teeth, which led some scientists to speculate the skull may belong to a hybrid between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals – an idea discounted by other experts.

Erik Trinkaus, professor of anthropology at Washington University in Missouri, and one of the first specialists to study the bones in detail, said the jaw was the oldest, directly-dated modern human fossil. “Taken together, the material is the first that securely documents what modern humans looked like when they spread into Europe,” he said.

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BLUE EYED

JANE ELLIOTT AND THE “BLUE-EYED/ BROWN-EYED” EXERCISE

“We live in a different World”

 

Jane Elliott, a pioneer in racism awareness training, was first inspired to action by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. As a third grade teacher in an all-white, all-Christian community, she struggled for ways to help her students understand racism and discrimination. She adopted the “Blue-Eyed/brown eyed” exercise, (in which participants are treated as inferior or superior based solely on the color of their eyes) as a result of reading about the techniques the Nazis used on those they designated undesirable during what is now called the Holocaust.

 

The purpose of the exercise is to give white people an opportunity to find out how it feels to be something other than white. The exercise gained national attention when it was featured on the Johnny Carson Show in 1968 and again when it aired on the ABC News show, Now, in a segment called Eye of the Storm.

 

After 16 years of teaching, Jane Elliott began to offer her training to scores of corporations, government agencies, colleges and community groups. Millions of people have been exposed to her powerful message through her appearances on Today, The Tonight Show, Donahue, Oprah Winfrey and PBS’ Frontline series in a program entitled A Class Divided.

Jane Elliott does not intellectualize highly emotionally charged or challenging topics. She creates a situation in which participants experience discrimination themselves and therefore feel its effects emotionally, not intellectually. She throws aside conventional wisdom about adult learning. Instead of respecting students’ existing knowledge, affirming their sense of self, etc., she uses participants’ own emotions to make them feel discomfort, guilt, shame, embarrassment and humiliation.

 

Jane Elliott would say that protecting white people from the pain of racism only serves to perpetuate it. Her skillful use of confrontation is intended to dislodge white people from their comfortable privilege long enough for them to learn. In organizational settings where constructive confrontation is not always appropriate, watching Jane Elliott on video can achieve some of the same benefits vicareously.

 

Jane Elliott focuses on white people as the targets for change. She sees white people as “owning” the problem of racism and having the power to eradicate it. For this reason, she does not look at “both sides of the problem” the way training programs about cultural difference, communication or performance often do. Facilitators should be aware that Jane Elliott’s focus on white people can lead viewers to the wrong impression that people of color are passively molded by white people’s behavior when, in actuality, people of color can and do respond to racism in a variety of ways.

 

Blue Eyed lets viewers participate vicariously in the “Blue-Eyed/brown eyed” exercise. In the video, we see adults from Kansas City, Missouri, who were invited by a local organization, “Harmony,” to take part in a workshop about appreciating diversity. We watch as the group is divided according to eye color. Since the blue-eyed people are “on the bottom” they are crowded into a small, hot room without enough chairs and watched by strict security.

 

Jane Elliott leaves them for a long while without any information while she prepares the brown-eyed people to be “on the top.” The brown-eyed people are given answers to test questions and instructed to demean the blue-eyed people. When the blue-eyed people are brought into the room, some are required to sit at the feet of the brown-eyed people as Jane Elliott treats them according to negative traits that are commonly assigned to people of color, women, lesbians and gay men, people with disabilities, and other non-dominant members of society.

 

Jane Elliott is unrelenting in her ridicule and humiliation of the blue-eyed people. When participants express sadness, shame, or tears, she drills in the point that participants only have to live this reality during the workshop, while people of color receive this treatment for a lifetime. Despite the fact that the group is participating voluntarily and, to some extent, knows what to expect, it seems clear that the exercise is painful.

 

The blue-eyed participants experience humiliation and powerlessness. The participants of color watch as white people learn what they already know to be true. Later in the film, people of color talk about the stress of being denied housing, job opportunities, and dignity as parents.

 

Interspersed between clips of the exercise we see Jane Elliott in her home and on the streets of her community describing the origins and consequences of the exercise. She describes, with great emotion, how her family has been harassed and ostracized as a result of her efforts to educate white people about racism.

 

 

The Thirty-Minute Blue Eyed

 

Ethiopian High-Altitude Natives Are Different

 

Ethiopian high-altitude natives respond to hypobaric hypoxia differently than Andean (South America) or Tibetan highlanders.

 

In Ethiopia, a third successful pattern of human adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia is amazingly puzzling. In contrast with both the Andean “classic” (erythrocytosis with arterial hypoxemia) and the more recently identified Tibetan (normal venous hemoglobin concentration with arterial hypoxemia) patterns, the Ethiopian adaptation is very unique.

 

A field survey of 236 Ethiopian native residents at 3,530 m (11,650 feet), 14–86 years of age, without evidence of iron deficiency, hemoglobinopathy, or chronic inflammation, found an average hemoglobin concentration of 15.9 and 15.0 g/dl for males and females, respectively, and an average oxygen saturation of hemoglobin of 95.3%. Thus, Ethiopian highlanders maintain venous hemoglobin concentrations and arterial oxygen saturation within the ranges of sea level populations, despite the unavoidable, universal decrease in the ambient oxygen tension at high altitude.

 

The demonstration in the past 20 years that the “Andean man” model of high-altitude human adaptation does not generalize to natives of the Tibetan Plateau changed scientific understanding of human adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia. Comparisons of Andean and Tibetan high-altitude natives residing at the same altitudes [usually in the range of 3,500–4,000 m, or 11,600–13,200 feet, where partial pressure of inspired oxygen (P_IO₂) is 64–60% that of sea level] have revealed quantitative differences in traits associated classically with offsetting ambient hypobaric hypoxia.

 

For example, a hematocrit or hemoglobin concentration elevated over normal sea level values was long considered a hallmark of lifelong adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia; however, studies of Tibetans have demonstrated that it is not a necessary response to ambient hypoxia or arterial hypoxemia.

 

The population contrast extends to other traits as well: a comparative study reported that Andean high-altitude natives at 4,000 m had hemoglobin concentration and oxygen saturation of hemoglobin more than 1 standard deviation higher than Tibetans at the same altitude. The mean hemoglobin concentration of Tibetans was not elevated above sea level values despite very low oxygen saturation. The third major high-altitude population, natives of the Semien Plateau of Ethiopia, has not been studied for these traits.

 

These findings suggest there are three patterns of adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia among indigenous populations . Learning why the three populations differ will require two lines of future investigation. One is understanding the biological mechanisms and the underlying genetics that allow successful high-altitude adaptation with quantitatively different suites of traits for oxygen sensing, response, and delivery. The other is understanding the evolutionary processes that produced these patterns to explain how and why several successful human adaptations to high altitude evolved.

 

Adam & Eve

One can with certainty speak that the Biblical Garden of Eden lies in Ethiopia. We know that all people are descended from Adam and Eve, and more recently from Noah and his wife. Both the Biblical and scientific documents confirm that Adam & Eve were created in Ethiopia.

Could the Volcanoes in Ethiopia, have been the birth place of life? Could the active volcano, “Erta Ale” in the Danakil area, be the very first kitchen, where God mixed his secret genetic soup? Could Lake Tana, the Garden of Eden, to the west and 300 miles from Erta Ale be the very first dining place where Adam & Eve had their first meal of the grain of paradise?

Did Volcanoes Spark Life on Earth?

Science.com
16 October 2008

A once-discarded idea about how life started on our planet has been given a new life of its own, thanks to a serendipitous find.

The story traces back to the early 1950s, when chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey of the University of Chicago in Illinois tried to recreate the building blocks of life under conditions they thought resembled those on the young Earth. The duo filled a closed loop of glass chambers and tubes with water and different mixes of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane–gases presumed at the time to be the main constituents of the atmosphere billions of years ago. Then, in an attempt to confirm a hypothesis that lightning may have triggered the origin of life, they zapped the mixture with an electrical current. The researchers then analyzed the gunk that began to collect after a few hours.
The residue contained traces of some of the amino acids that make up proteins. Their presence suggested that the molecular precursors of life could form through a simple electrochemical process. The problem was that theoretical models and analyses of ancient rocks eventually convinced scientists that Earth’s earliest atmosphere was not rich in hydrogen.

Last year, after Miller’s death, two of his former graduate students–geochemists Jim Cleaves of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) in Washington, D.C., and Jeffrey Bada of Indiana University, Bloomington–were examining samples left in their mentor’s lab. They discovered the vials of products from the original experiment and decided to take a second look with updated technology. Using extremely sensitive mass spectrometers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Cleaves, Bada, and colleagues found traces of 22 amino acids in the experimental residues. That is about double the number originally reported by Miller and Urey and includes all of the 20 amino acids found in living things, the scientists report tomorrow in Science.

So could lightning have helped jump-start life on Earth? Possibly, Cleaves says. Although Earth’s primordial atmosphere was not hydrogen-rich, as were the chambers in the Miller-Urey experiment, gas clouds from volcanic eruptions did contain the right combination of molecules. It is possible that volcanoes, which were much more active early in Earth’s history, seeded our planet with life’s ingredients. The big question is what happened next–how did those molecules turn into self-replicating organic compounds? “That’s the frontier,” Cleaves says, “and we’re sort of stuck there.”

The new study “highlights how easy it is to make the building blocks of life in plausible prebiotic conditions,” says geochemist Robert Hazen of CIW, who was not involved in the research. At the same time, he says, the findings reinforce “the pioneering insight and experiments of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey.”

Seeing Race And Seeming Racist

 

 

Whites go out of their way to avoid talking about race

Efforts to appear unbiased lead to misunderstandings between the races, studies find

http://www.apa.org/ 6-Oct-2008

White people – including children as young as 10 — may avoid talking about race so as not to appear prejudiced, according to new research. But that approach often backfires as blacks tend to view this “colorblind” approach as evidence of prejudice, especially when race is clearly relevant.

These results are from two separate sets of experiments led by researchers from Tufts University and Harvard Business School. Their findings are reported in the October issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the September issue of Developmental Psychology. Both journals are published by the American Psychological Association.

“Efforts to talk about race are fraught with the potential for misunderstandings,” said the studies’ lead author, Evan Apfelbaum, a PhD candidate at Tufts University. “One way that whites try to appear unbiased is to avoid talking about race altogether, a tendency we refer to as strategic colorblindness.”

In one study, 101 white undergraduate students were paired with either a white or black female partner who pretended to be another participant. The pairs were presented with 30 photographs of faces that varied in race, gender and background color. Each white participant’s objective was to guess which of the photographs the partner was holding by asking as few yes-or-no questions as possible.

Even though asking about the race of the person in the photograph was a sound strategy for completing the task, white participants were far less likely to do so with a black versus a white partner. Moreover, when the black partner was the first one to have a turn asking questions, whether she mentioned race had a dramatic effect. White participants whose black partner asked about race mentioned race on their own turn 95 percent of the time. When the black partner never asked about race, white participants only did so 10 percent of the time.

“There was clear evidence the white participants’ behavior was influenced by the precedent set by their partner, but especially when that partner was black,” said Samuel Sommers, assistant professor at Tufts and co-author of both papers. “Whites are strategically avoiding the topic of race because they’re worried that they’ll look bad if they admit they notice it in other people.”

The researchers also wanted to see how outsiders interpreted such interactions. In another experiment, 74 black and white college students evaluated videos of whites engaging in the photo task. The results showed that whites’ effort to appear colorblind backfired. Black observers rated whites’ avoidance of asking about race as being evidence of prejudice. What’s more, when the researchers showed silent video clips of whites from the study to another group of individuals, those whites who avoided asking about race were judged as less friendly, just on the basis of their nonverbal behavior.

“The findings suggest that when race is clearly relevant, whites who think that it is a wise social strategy to avoid talking about race should think again,” said Apfelbaum.

Even children appear to adopt this strategically colorblind approach. In another set of experiments, 101 white children between the ages of 8 and 11 were asked to perform a similar photo task. The children were told that asking as few yes-or-no questions as possible would mean they would get a higher score on the task.

The results showed that the older children, ages 10 and 11, avoided asking about race more than the younger children, even though this led them to perform less efficiently than their younger counterparts on the task. In a control version where all the faces in the photos were white, the older children outperformed the younger children, as expected. “This result is fascinating because it shows that children as young as 10 feel the need to try to avoid appearing prejudiced, even if doing so leads them to perform poorly on a basic cognitive test,” said Kristin Pauker, a PhD candidate at Tufts and co-author of this study.

The authors associated with both studies said their findings offer several important implications. “Our findings don’t suggest that individuals who avoid talking about race are racists,” Apfelbaum explained. “On the contrary, most are well-intentioned people who earnestly believe that colorblindness is the culturally sensitive way to interact. But, as we’ve shown, bending over backward to avoid even mentioning race sometimes creates more interpersonal problems than it solves.”