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The mausoleum of Buganda kings in Kasubi, Uganda is both an innovative burial site and an architectural marvel. Built with all natural materials and balancing on wooden poles stuck firmly in the ground, this UNESCO world heritage site is a must see for tourists.
Kabaka Muteesa I was born in 1837 at the Batandabezaala Palace. He ascended the throne upon the death of his father in October 1856. He built himself a palace on the Kasubi Hill in 1881, and was buried there in a tomb when he died in 1884. Interestingly enough, he was the first of his line to be buried with his jawbone. Traditionally, the jawbone was placed in a shrine because it was believed to contain the spirit of the deceased.
From the Upcoming 
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Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that the ability to cook food contributed to human evolution:
“Cooked food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.”
He continues: “The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.” Put simply, Mr. Wrangham writes that eating cooked food — whether meat or plants or both —made digestion easier, and thus our guts could grow smaller. The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling our brains, which also consume enormous amounts of energy, to grow larger. The warmth provided by fire enabled us to shed our body hair, so we could run farther and hunt more without overheating. Because we stopped eating on the spot as we foraged and instead gathered around a fire, we had to learn to socialize, and our temperaments grew calmer.
Wrangham also asserts that cooking strengthened the bonds within early hominid communities and established lasting gender roles.
Link via Choice | Photo: flickr user flowcomm, used under Creative Commons license
Anthropologist Pierre Pica has spent ten years studying the Munduruku tribe of the Brazilian Amazon region. Their language has no tenses, plural forms, or numbers greater than five. Pica described life in a society where quantification was largely unnecessary:
To get to the Munduruku, Pica had to wait for some locals to take him to their territory by canoe.
“How long did you wait?” I inquired.
“I waited quite a lot. But don’t ask me how many days.”
“So, was it a couple of days?” I suggested tentatively. A few seconds passed as he furrowed his brow: “It was about two weeks.”
The more I pushed Pica for facts and figures, the more reluctant he was to provide them. “When I come back from Amazonia, I lose sense of time and sense of number, and perhaps sense of space.” This inability to give me quantitative data was part of his culture shock. He had spent so long with people who can barely count that he had lost the ability to describe the world in terms of numbers.
The rest of the article describes at length how people understand numbers cross-culturally.
Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Today, Slate‘s Explainer feature asserts that humans began wearing clothing about 100,000 years ago. Here’s how anthropologists came up with the answer:
Human raiment is not typically preserved in the fossil record, so researchers have turned to lice genetics for hints. Body lice diverged genetically from other louse species about 100,000 years ago. Because body lice live primarily in our clothing, scientists use that moment of differentiation as the likely era when humans started dressing themselves.
It’s possible, however, that humans started wearing clothes even earlier. We know that pubic lice jumped over to humans from gorillas—our genetically distinct head lice migrated from chimpanzees—about 2 million years ago. And since pubic and head lice probably couldn’t have coexisted on the same body if there was a hairy highway connecting their favorite anatomical spaces (one would have beaten out the other for all the available resources), it’s likely that we had lost our body hair by then. Some claim that humans donned clothing shortly after that, but others argue that there’s no reason our ancestors would have needed clothing in steamy Africa.
Link | Photo: US Department of Energy
A team of archaeologists on the Greek island of Crete found a tool way older than what they expected to find. Thomas Strasser of the University of Providence and his crew hoped to find artifacts dating back as far as 11,000 years. The five-inch axe they uncovered was something completely different.
Knapped from a cobble of local quartz stone, the rough-looking tool resembled hand axes discovered in Africa and mainland Europe and used by human ancestors until about 175,000 years ago. This stone tool technology, which could have been useful for smashing bones and cutting flesh, had been relatively static for over a million years.
Crete has been surrounded by vast stretches of sea for some five million years. The discovery of the hand ax suggests that people besides technologically modern humans—possibly Homo heidelbergensis—island-hopped across the Mediterranean tens of thousands of millennia earlier than expected.
More digging unearthed a total of 30 hand axes plus other tools at nine locations on Crete. The rock terraces the tools were taken from are thought to range from 45,000 years old to 130,000 years old.
“I was flabbergasted,” said Boston University archaeologist and stone-tool expert Curtis Runnels. “The idea of finding tools from this very early time period on Crete was about as believable as finding an iPod in King Tut’s tomb.”
It was thought that humans earlier than Homo sapiens were incapable of long deliberate sea voyages. Link
(image credit: Thomas Strasser)
I can’t get enough of the video series at Big Think featuring Dr. Spencer Wells and his Genographic Project. Here’s a guy who I’d pick to be my professor of anthropology, molecular science, ancient history, and other topics that could use clear yet exciting delivery.
Wells’s own journey of discovery began as a child whose zeal for history and biology led him to the University of Texas, where he enrolled at age 16, majored in biology, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa three years later. He then pursued his Ph.D. at Harvard University under the tutelage of distinguished evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin. His landmark research findings led to advances in the understanding of the male Y chromosome and its ability to trace ancestral human migration.
All of the topics are intriguing and made more accessible through Wells’ evident passion for the subject matters. Here he talks about how the human population went from the brink of extinction (world poulation: 2,000, all in Africa) to migration and adaptation with development of better tools, art, and language.
Link to video. Link to bio and video directory.
Photo: Wikipedia
A new set of tombs have been found near the great pyramids of Egypt, belonging to the workers who built the pyramids 4,000 years ago. The discovery points away from the idea that the monuments were built by slaves. Instead, Egyptologists now believe they were paid professionals, according to Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
“These tombs were built beside the king’s pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves,” said Hawass in the statement. “If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king’s.”
Evidence from the site, Hawass said, indicates that the approximately 10,000 laborers working on the pyramids ate 21 cattle and 23 sheep sent to them daily from farms in northern and southern Egypt.
Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
In his new book Manthropology, Peter McAllister argues that human physical strength and endurance have deteriorated over time. John Mehaffey writes for Reuters:
Many prehistoric Australian aboriginals could have outrun world 100 and 200 meters record holder Usain Bolt in modern conditions.
Some Tutsi men in Rwanda exceeded the current world high jump record of 2.45 meters during initiation ceremonies in which they had to jump at least their own height to progress to manhood.
Any Neanderthal woman could have beaten former bodybuilder and current California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an arm wrestle.
McAllister blames technology that, for all the good it has done, has reduced the physical demands of human existence. Even our comparatively recent ancestors could best us:
* Roman legions completed more than one-and-a-half marathons a day carrying more than half their body weight in equipment.
* Athens employed 30,000 rowers who could all exceed the achievements of modern oarsmen.
* Australian aboriginals threw a hardwood spear 110 meters or more (the current world javelin record is 98.48).
Link via Jules Crittenden | Image: American Museum of Natural History
(image credit: José C. Jiménez López)
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
