Massive, 1.2 Million-Year-Old Tool Workshop In Ethiopia Made By ‘Clever’ Group of Unknown Human Relatives

💭 ግዙፍ መረጃ፤ ‘1.2 ሚሊዮን አመት’ ያስቆጠረ የመሳሪያ አውደ ጥናት በኢትዮጵያ በ’ብልጥ’ ቡድን ባልታወቁ የሰው ዘመዶች የተሰራ

“እናንተ ግን ወዳጆች ሆይ፥ በጌታ ዘንድ አንድ ቀን እንደ ሺህ ዓመት፥ ሺህ ዓመትም እንደ አንድ ቀን እንደ ሆነ ይህን አንድ ነገር አትርሱ። ለአንዳንዶች የሚዘገይ እንደሚመስላቸው ጌታ ስለ ተስፋ ቃሉ አይዘገይም፥ ነገር ግን ሁሉ ወደ ንስሐ እንዲደርሱ እንጂ ማንም እንዳይጠፋ ወዶ ስለ እናንተ ይታገሣል” [፪ኛ ጴጥሮስ ፫፥፰፡፱]።

AXE — AXUM

💭 An unknown group of hominins crafted more than 500 obsidian hand axes more than 1.2 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia.

More than 1.2 million years ago, an unknown group of human relatives may have created sharp hand axes from volcanic glass in a “stone-tool workshop” in what is now Ethiopia, a new study finds.

This discovery suggests that ancient human relatives may have regularly manufactured stone artifacts in a methodical way more than a half-million years earlier than the previous record, which dates to about 500,000 years ago in France and England.

Because it requires skill and knowledge, stone tool use among early hominins, the group that includes humans and the extinct species more closely related to humans than any other animal, can offer a window into the evolution of the human mind. A key advance in stone tool creation was the emergence of so-called workshops. At these sites, archaeologists can see evidence of hominins methodically and repeatedly crafting stone artifacts.

The newly analyzed trove of obsidian tools may be the oldest stone-tool workshop run by hominins on record. “This is very new in human evolution,” study first author Margherita Mussi, an archaeologist at the Sapienza University of Rome and director of the Italo-Spanish archeological mission at Melka Kunture and Balchit, a World Heritage site in Ethiopia, told Live Science.

Oldest known hominin workshop

In the new study, the researchers investigated a cluster of sites known as Melka Kunture, located along the upper Awash River valley of Ethiopia. The Awash valley has yielded some of the best known examples of early hominin fossils, such as the famous ancient relative of humanity dubbed “Lucy.”

The scientists focused on 575 artifacts made of obsidian at a site known as Simbiro III in Melka Kunture. These ancient tools came from a layer of sand dubbed Level C, which fossil and geological data suggest is more than 1.2 million years old.

These obsidian artifacts included more than 30 hand axes, or teardrop-shaped stone tools, averaging about 4.5 inches (11.5 centimeters) long and 0.7 pounds (0.3 kilograms). Ancient humans and other hominins may have used them for chopping, scraping, butchering and digging.

Obsidian proved far more rare at Simbiro III before and after Level C, and scarce in other Melka Kunture sites. The new excavations also revealed that Level C experienced seasonal flooding, with a meandering river likely depositing obsidian rocks at the site during this time of Level C. Obsidian axes from this level were far more regular in shape and size, which suggests mastery of the manufacturing technique.

Ancient hominins “are very often depicted as barely surviving, struggling with a hostile and changing environment,” Mussi said in an email from the field in Melka Kunture. “Here we prove instead that they were clever individuals, who did not miss the opportunity of testing any resource they discovered.”

This nearly exclusive use of obsidian at Level C of Simbiro III is unusual during the Early Stone Age, which ranged from about 3.3 million to 300,000 years ago, the researchers said. Obsidian tools can possess extraordinarily sharp cutting edges, but the volcanic glass is brittle and difficult to craft without smashing. As such, obsidian generally only found extensive use in stone tool manufacture beginning from the Middle Stone Age, which ranged from about 300,000 to 50,000 years ago, they said.

“The idea that ancient hominins of this era valued and made special use of obsidian as a material makes a lot of sense,” John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who did not take part in this research, told Live Science. “Obsidian is widely recognized as uniquely valuable among natural materials for flaking sharp-edged tools; it is also highly special in appearance. Some historic cultures have used obsidian and traded it across distances of hundreds of miles.”

That trading may have gone on farther back than widely acknowledged.

“There has been evidence since the 1970s that obsidian may have been transported across long distances as early as 1.4 million years ago,” Hawks said. “That evidence has not been replicated by more recent excavation work, but the new report by Mussi and coworkers may be a step in that direction.”

It remains uncertain which hominin may have created these artifacts.

Previously, at other Melka Kunture sites, researchers have discovered hominin remains about 1.66 million years old that may have been Homo erectus, and fossils about 1 million years old that may have been Homo heidelbergensis, Mussi said. H. erectus is the oldest known early human to possess body proportions similar to modern humans, whereas H. heidelbergensis may have been a common ancestor of both modern humans and Neanderthals, according to the Smithsonian. Since the age of Level C at Simbiro III is more than 1.2 million years old, the hominins that made the obsidian hand axes there may have been closer in nature to H. erectus, Mussi said.

The scientists detailed their findings Jan. 19 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

👉 Courtesy: Livescience

______________

ተወዳጁ የኮምፒውተር ጨዋታ ‘ሥልጣኔ ፮’ | ኢትዮጵያ በሚኒልክ መሪነት ዓለምን ትገዛለች

ጨዋታው Civilization VI ((CIV6) / ሥልጣኔ ፮ – የኢትዮጵያ ጥቅል ብሎ ተብሎ ይጠራል።

የዚህ በጣም ተወዳጅ የሆነውና በትናንትናው ዕለት ለገበያ የወጣው የኮምፒውተር ጨዋታ ጥቅል ይዘት ዳግማዊ አፄ ምኒልክን እንደ ኢትዮጵያ መሪ ያስተዋውቃል። ኢትዮጵያ ሳይንስ እና ባህሏን ለማሳደግ እምነቷን በማመንጨት እና የምኒልክን “የሚኒስትሮች ምክር ቤት” ችሎታ በመጠቀም ኢትዮጵያ በተራራማ ቦታዎች ላይ በተገነቡ ከተሞች ላይ ታተኩራረች።

ይህ ጨዋታ “ጨዋታ” ብቻ አይደለም፤ ዛሬ መውጣቱም በአጋጣሚ አይደለም! ጊዜው መገጣጠሙ በጣም አስገራሚ ነው። እንግዲህ ለኢትዮጵያ አንገዛም ያሉት የኢትዮጵያ ጠላቶች ያብዳሉ! ይቃጠላሉ! የጨዋታውን ባለቤት ካልገደልን በማለት እየተንፈራፈሩ ወደ ጥልቁ ይገባሉ!

ለተጨማሪ መረጃ፦ https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/sid-meiers-civilization-vi/ethiopia-pack

______________________________________

Modern Love

From Romeo and Juliet to the one-night stand— modern societies are torn between the ideal of fidelity and the thirst for freedom.

Most civilizations have been based on some comprehensive idea of justice, but ours alone is based on love, both in its religion and in the principles that guide its relations between the sexes. Christianity and chivalry, from which our practices in part descend, recognized clearly that love (like freedom) must be disciplined and may require sacrifice. Today both of these moral commitments—indeed, all forms of commitment among us—are rather vestigial, and the whole idea of love is in danger of sinking to the level of sentimental tosh.

Modern Western states have, of course, always been graded into various kinds of class and status, but they have also been notably individualistic. The result has been a freedom of association, an exploration of the passions, that could not generally happen where a society conformed to comprehensive rules of justice, such as a caste system or a tribal hierarchy. Little wonder that the packaging of our Western morals as “rights” has been found so disruptive in other cultures.

The most common form of society has always been one in which social status tells people where they stand in relation to one another. Seniority, sex or just brute force located everyone in a hierarchy. As bad as the ranking might be, people knew where they stood. Human beings often prefer such knowledge to the hazards of a free society, for freedom leaves us at the mercy of the likes and dislikes of others and also (no less fickle) our own likes and dislikes.

We in the West, then, have opened ourselves up to the risks of both love and freedom. That means that our societies are (as Tocqueville noted) vastly more vulnerable to changing manners and mores. As we have lost a sense of the rigors that love requires, and the discipline that freedom needs, we have evolved, over little more than two generations, from the consuming passion of “Romeo and Juliet” to the fleeting encounter of the one-night stand. Falling in love has given way to endless testing and experiment. Now two French academics offer to make sense of our new situation.

The novelist and philosopher Pascal Bruckner’s “The Paradox of Love” is a brilliant account of the sexual muddles of our time. Paradox abounds in a time like our own, when the didactic impulse chases after wisdom in every possible direction. “We have to find in the interminable nonresolution of [love’s] problems,” he writes, “the charm of a possible solution.” We should be so lucky!

Paradox piles on paradox, but soon Mr. Bruckner gets down to realities. Adultery is a symptom, he says, of an individualist society torn between the ideal of fidelity and a thirst for freedom. But not everything fits into this tension between desire and restraint. “The vertiginous increase of divorce rates in Europe,” he tells us, “is not the result, as is often said, of our selfishness, but rather of our idealism: the impossibility of living together combined with the difficulty of remaining alone.”

In short, our sense of the “impossibility of living together” is directly related to the freedom we pursue so heedlessly—at the expense, too often, of happiness (“the difficulty of remaining alone”). Mr. Bruckner points to “a new conformism that waves the flag of transgression in order to sing the praises of the status quo.” In the end, he wants to synthesize the stability of the past with some of the liberations of our own time, and he ends with wise if familiar words: “Don’t allow yourself to be intimidated! There is more than one road to joy.”

The sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann in “The Curious History of Love” has, by contrast, a plot to explain our travails. What we call “love,” he says, comes to us in the contrasting forms of “agape” (or universal) love, which derives from Christianity, and passion, which emerges from medieval cults and various versions of chivalry. Passion, being focused on a single object, does not consort happily with agape. The reason of the Greek philosophers in some degree could make these two drives lie down together, but the modern world has been dominated by economics, alias capitalism.

Mr. Kaufman thinks that it is self-interest that makes capitalism tick, but he identifies self-interest with the vice of greed. Putting bad things down to human greed is, of course, the fashion of the moment. Modern Western societies no doubt have their share of this particular vice, but greed is certainly not lacking in other cultures. Mr. Kaufman’s view—that a society based on love is at war with the calculating individualism of modern reason—is distinctly theoretical. Take away greed, and we would all love one another? Unlikely!

Mr. Kaufmann wants to replace individualism—and greed and other bad things—with a proper community, and he speaks of “love’s revolution” as if this abstraction might take over the role of the proletariat in Marxism. As he sees it, love is defeated by the calculating habits of market economics—but “it also lives to fight another day.” The way we respond to our emotions, he believes, has major repercussions for society at large. The conclusion Mr. Kaufmann draws is that “knowing how to surrender to our emotions is political.” Everything personal, these days, is political. The habit of seeing politics under every bush, one might rather say, constitutes the predicament from which we suffer.

Neither Mr. Bruckner nor Mr. Kaufmann tangles with the problem of feminism, but feminism is central to the state of love today because it rejects the complementary character of men and women—an idea that is central to our cultural tradition. As different as we are, we need one another, and any theory that does not understand that pattern will be destructive.

When the 1960s idea of liberation needed content, the only thing the unimaginative feminists of those days could think to do with their new free time and expensive education was to plunge into the labor force. Mr. Kaufmann is certainly right to believe that there is no room for chivalry in an economy. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why feminists hate chivalry. It doesn’t fit in with women as labor units.

Feminism, as it is too often defined, makes women essentially economic agents, and children and family life are marginalized in ways that may suit some female graduates but certainly not lots of other women. The whole outlook presumes an end to complementarity—the destruction of the feminine. An ever-increasing scaffolding of politically correct regulation, bureaucracy and law has been needed to sustain the illusion that men and women are indistinguishable agents.

In the chivalric practices of our history, women depended for protection upon the concern of men who respected them as women. The feminist project was to equip women with rights and transfer the job of protection to the state. The results have been mixed, to say the least. To take but one vexed area of social custom and legal practice: Laws about sexual harassment impose penalties on luckless employers who fail to protect female employees from their co-workers. But the presumption that women are so weak as to need protecting from rude male behavior was something that feminism, with its emphasis on empowerment and equal status, seemed eager to attack. It is all marvelously absurd. The zones of love and desire are now invaded by statutes and committees of inquisition.

Mr. Bruckner’s central paradox is that of persecution in the name of love, but that has been an attribute of “loving” relations from time immemorial. He cites, in evidence, both Christianity and communism, in the name of which harm has come to those who were to be loved or saved. He appears to believe that communism is nothing more than a Christian heresy that “allows us to see magnified Christianity’s defects.” Marxism, it seems, “imagined a future society as the terrestrial fulfillment of the promises made by the Gospels.” This claim makes Marx and Jesus prophets in the same line of business, but you do not have to be a Christian to see that Marx is way out of his league here. It is clear that Mr. Bruckner is better at paradoxes than at affinities.

Can love lead to persecution? As a passion, it can lead to anything at all, including death, but the point about both Christianity and the Soviet state is that they were institutions, and institutions have drives of their own. Marriage is an institution, too, and the point of institutions is to discipline us. Love, by contrast, is a spontaneity, always rather intermittent. Neither can be a substitute for the other.

Both Mr. Bruckner and Mr. Kaufmann deplore love as a market. The consumer’s greed in this new condition of love is to accumulate not only material objects but people as well. Men and women sink to the level of mere commodities, giving and receiving satisfactions of an ever-fluctuating kind. Mr. Bruckner thinks that the state of commodified love is worse in America: “Whereas in the United States the co-existence of the sexes always seems on the verge of exploding, Europe is better protected against this plague by the age-old culture of gallantry.”

And that claim perhaps suggests the ultimate mistake of our time: Manners have been erased by doctrine. Individualists—men and women alike—may pursue any enterprise that fits their desires and their talents, but doctrine traps some people into the masquerade of trying to be what they are not. It drains reality from them. Those who live by doctrine rather than passion are diminished by it.

Mr. Minogue is the author, most recently, of “The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life.”

 

Source: Washington Post, March 10, 2012

_______________________________

Endangered Ethiopians

Ethiopians living side by side in the past, present and future

Let’s encounter some of the most remarkable tribal peoples on this planet of ours. These are some of the most wonderful Ethiopians, whose cultures are threatened to vanish, whose million-year-old existence is acutely endangered by aggressive ‘civilization’.

We are probably experiencing this sort of physical coexistence only for a very few years to come.

The Ari

The Ari inhabit the northern border of Mago National Park in southwestern Ethiopia. Ari Villages have neat compounds in fertile and scenic land with coffee plantations. They have large livestock herds and produce large quantities of honey.

The women wear skirts from the banana like tree, called Enset. Ari women are famous for their pottery which they sell to support their families.

 

The Bodi

The Bodi are of Nilo-Saharan stock and pastoral background. Although they do cultivate sorghum along the banks of the Omo River, their culture is very much cattle centered.

Similar to the Mursi, livestock plays an important role in marriage, divination, and name-giving rituals. The Bodi classification of cattle is complex, with over eighty words to denote different colors and patterns.

Bodi dress is simple. The women wear goatskins tied at the waist and shoulder, while men fasten a strip of cotton or bark-cloth around their waist.

 

The Bumi

Also known as the Nyangatom or the Bume, the Bumi live south of Omo National Park and occasionally migrate into the lower regions of the park when water or grazing is scarce. Numbering around 6 – 7000 in population, the Bumi are agro-pastoralists, relying on cattle herding and flood-retreat agriculture (consisting mainly of sorghum harvesting on the Omo and Kibish Rivers). The Bumi tend to indulge in honey and frequently smoke out beehives in the Park to get to the honey inside the nests.

The Bumi are known to be great warriors and, quite frequently, active warmongers, they are often at war with the neighboring tribes including the Hamer, the Karo and the Surma.

Small groups of Bumi living along the Omo are specialized crocodile hunters using harpoons from a dugout canoe. The elders of both sexes wear a lower lip plug, the men’s being made from ivory and women’s made from copper filigree.

 

The Hamer

The Hamer are pastoralists and number about 30,000. They are known for their practice of body adornment and wearing a multitude of colorful beads. Women adorn their necks with heavy polished iron jewelry.

Hamer society consists of a complex system of age groups. To pass from one age group to another involves complicated rituals. The most significant ceremony for young men is the “jumping of the bull” – the final test before passing into adulthood.

Several days before the ceremony, initiates pass out invitations in the form of dried knotted grass. The ceremony lasts three days. Late in the afternoon on the final day, ten to thirty bulls are lined up side by side. The naked initiate rushes towards the animal, vaults onto the first bull’s back and then runs across the line of animals. At the end of the line he turns back to repeat the performance in the opposite direction. He must make this unstable journey without falling.

The Hamer men have a reputation of being less than adoring husbands. The Hamer women submit to the ritual floggings proudly and love to show the deep scars that are regarded as a proof of devotion to their husbands.

 

The Karo

The Karo, who number only about 3,000 people, mainly live on the practice of flood retreat cultivation on the banks of the Omo River in South-western Ethiopia.

The Karo excel in face and body painting, practiced in preparation of their dances and ceremonies. They pulverize locally found white chalk, yellow mineral rock, red iron ore and black charcoal to decorate their bodies, often imitating the spotted plumage of a guinea fowl. Feather plumes are inserted in their clay hair buns to complete the look. The clay hair bun can take up to three days to construct and is usually re-made every three to six months. Their painted face masks are spectacular.

Karo women scarify their chests to beautify themselves. Scars are cut with a knife and ash is rubbed in to produce a raised welt.

The Karo tribes’ existence is somewhat precarious today. The inevitability of the encroaching populace and the introduction of modern weaponry has affected their already delicate ecosystem.

Being the smallest tribe in the area, this group obviously struggles with direct threats from nearby tribes that have more gun power, greater numbers, and likely coalitions with one another.

 

The Mursi

The Mursi live between their dry season range in the Mursi Hills, and their wet season range on the Tama Plains, north of Mago Park in the Omo River region of South-Western Ethiopia. They care for livestock and plant some crops. They have a war-like reputation given their strong desire to control as much grazing land as they can for their livestock. And although the Mursi have been relatively isolated from the world outside the Omo River region, it is not unusual to see the men carrying AK-47 rifles.

The men practice light scarification on their shoulders after killing an enemy, and shave geometric patterns on their head. During dances and ceremonies they adorn literally every part of their body with white chalk paint. Young unmarried men practice group stick fights. The winner is carried on top of poles to girls waiting beside the arena, who decide among themselves which of them will ask his hand in marriage.

When a young Mursi girl reaches the age of 15 or 16, her lower lip is pierced so she can wear a lip plate. The larger the lip plate she can tolerate, the more cattle her bride price will bring for her father.