"The Sweetness of Human Evolution" is a lovely piece by Heather Pringle at The Last Word on Nothing on the honey-passionate Hadza in Tanzania ... though I want to know more about the interactions of the Hadza, the honeyguide bird, and the honey badger. So, below the "Top of the Story" bit, I've put a couple of links to YouTube videos that show some of the interactions.
Top of the story:
Quite by accident last week, I came across something, an ethnographic detail really, that captured my imagination, and that has clearly delighted and puzzled anthropologists and even contributed to a new theory of human evolution. The detail concerned the Hadza, 1000 or so modern hunter-gatherers who speak an ancient click language and who live in the woodlands around Lake Eyasi, Tanzania, not far from Olduvai Gorge.
The Hadza, as I discovered, prize honey above all else in their
diet. Hadza mothers wean their young on liquid honey, and during the wet season, particularly the months of February and April, Hadza families gorge for weeks on its sticky sweetness. The men possess an expert knowledge of bees and bee behavior, giving the honeys produced by different species different names. Those who forage for honey figure prominently in Hadza mythology.
And there is indeed something almost magical about the way that Hadza collect honey.
While out hunting, the men listen for the call of a small, robin-size bird known as the greater honeyguide (
Indicator indicator). The bird dines almost entirely on beeswax and bee larvae, but it needs help to crack open hives. So the honey guide calls to both honey badgers and Hadza hunters ...
[Rusten: as promised, some video links to follow up on that last suggestion of interaction.]
And here's a bit bringing in the honey badger:
In 1988, Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist now at Michigan State University, launched the longest running experiment on natural selection. It started with a single microbe–E. coli–which Lenski used to seed twelve genetically identical lines of bacteria. He placed each line in a separate flask, which he provisioned with a scant supply of glucose. The bacteria ate up the sugar in a few hours. The next day, he took a droplet of microbial broth from each flask and let it tumble into a new one, complete with a fresh supply of food. The bacteria boomed again, then starved again, and then were transferred again to a new home. Lenski and his colleagues have repeated this procedure every day for the past 24 years, rearing over 55,000 generations of bacteria.
The cheetah's spots look like the work of a skilled artist, who has delicately dabbed dots of ink upon the animal's coat. By contrast, the king cheetah – a rare breed from southern Africa – looks like the same artist had a bad day and knocked the whole ink pot over. With thick stripes running down its back, and disorderly blotches over the rest of its body, the king cheetah looks so unusual that it was originally considered a separate species. Its true nature as a mutant breed was finally confirmed in 1981 when two captive spotted females each gave birth to a king.
Quite by accident last week, I came across something, an ethnographic detail really, that captured my imagination, and that has clearly delighted and puzzled anthropologists and even contributed to a new theory of human evolution. The detail concerned the Hadza, 1000 or so modern hunter-gatherers who speak an ancient click language and who live in the woodlands around Lake Eyasi, Tanzania, not far from Olduvai Gorge.
HULK GREEN BUT NO CAN FIX OWN CARBON. THAT MAKE HULK ANGRY!
Eagle regains ability to preen & drink w/ 3D-printed prosthesis. [Rusten: The sequelae to the prosthesis are interesting. Not a simple story.]
Mmmm… natural fractals as seen through Google Earth [Rusten: Go to the Google Earth Fractals site for more.]
