Language

Part 1 was pretty tough because I could not describe anything. I can only direct my friend towards an object or illustrate an emotion or happening with bold body language. My friend talked to me like I was a child who didn't have good speaking skills. Almost like playing charades, he had to decipher what I was explaining then build from that. If these were cultures meeting for the first time, the speaking culture would have a much better opportunity to convey complex ideas. Just like my instance, they would talk to the other culture with an ill-competent demeanor; and until they understood their specific language would they both be able to share complex ideas. Stephen Hawking is a prime example. Although people already understand he is a genius, we still have to decipher what he is saying through written text - which takes a lot longer than speaking.

Part 2 was also difficult because it was hard to not move at all while speaking. Although, it was a bit easier than part one, because I can actually clarify what I'm trying to express. It was not as fun though because I could only sit there with a stoic face, it got a little boring for the both of us after 15 minutes. Being able to demonstrate while analyzing is critical, otherwise it would be strenuous to communicate freely. An environmental condition where it is very important to sense body language is when an animal is being intimidating and wants to be aggressive - it is that time to back away and sense the danger. Considering the benefits of not being able to read body language, I don't think there are any. It is extremely valuable to have.

It would have been a lot easier to use written language. It is the same as speaking, but it takes longer (as I said with Hawking). A culture can become very rich in ideas with a solid and developed language. Most of the time only the huge and ground-breaking ideas come through writings and books, rather than speech; and being able to share these ideas are a lot more effective than spoken word, since they can be shipped and travel a lot quicker than a person.

Environmental Adaptations

Population A:

1. The Zulu population inhabits KwaZulua-Natal, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, and the Free State of South Africa. Where 80% of Zulu people are, KwaZulua-Natal, the climate is varied yet verdant thanks to diverse, complex topography. Generally, the coast is subtropical with inland regions becoming progressively colder. The south coast has an annual rainfall of 1009 mm, with daytime max peaking from January to March at 28 degrees Celsius with a minimum of 21 degrees Celsius, dropping to daytime highs from June to August of 23 degrees Celsius with a minimum of 11 degrees Celsius.

2. It is essential to be fit when in such a broad landscape. It takes time to 

get resources for everyday things. Usually, rural women do not have appliances such as electric stoves, electric kettles, vacuum cleaners, and electric lights. Men traditional clothing consists mainly of cowhide that is used to cover the bottom front and back. Traditionally, women and men walk barefooted when they wear these clothes. Women have to do chores in order to get anything that they need, like going to the forest to collect wood for cooking and for bringing warmth. This chore sometimes keeps women away from home for the whole day. Oftentimes women have to leave early in the morning and only come back home late in the afternoon. Women usually walk long distances in search of water. They often carry steel buckets, clay pots, or plastic containers. Most women master the art of carrying the water container without hand support at a very early age. There are rural areas that have water taps, but many places still use natural spring water, in which frogs and crabs are commonly seen moving freely. Without doing this, they would definitely not reach homeostasis because they would starve.

Woman carrying pottery

3. The Zulus live in homesteads instead of villages. Each homestead is known as umuzi. Each of the homesteads are surrounded by a hedge, and consist of several "beehive-like" huts, known as kraals. They are beehive-shaped and are built around flexible saplings. Over the top thatching of grass mats are laid and tied down with grass ropes. The floor is made of clay and cow-dung and is polished with a stone to make a hard surface making the floor look like marble. The huts form a circle, with an opening at one end that serve as an entrance. There iss also an inner circle, which iss fenced off by poles. This serves as a cattle pen, where the livestock are kept at night. Each homestead has farmable land around it for the use of growing crops. Cattle are grazed on common pastures short distances away from a family. 

 

 Zulu huts

4. The high majority of the Zulu's race is black. Favoring 79.5% of South Africa's population is black, this is a good estimate.

Population B:

1. The climate is not the same throughout the Andes because there are places nearer to the equator than others. The Andes are separated into three natural regions: the southern, central, and northern regions. In the northern region, it is hotter because it is closest to the equator. There are rain forests in this region, due to the more humid, rainy climate. In the southern region, the mountains are nearer to the Antarctic and it is much colder. It is not very populated in the southern area. In the central region, the weather is more mild because it is not near either the equator or the cold Antarctic.

2. Humans have occupied the Andes for more than 10,000 years, and millions 

of people, indigenous and otherwise, currently live on these plains, high in the 

mountains of South America, at altitudes exceeding 3000 m. While, to some 

extent, acclimatisation can accommodate the one-third decrease in oxygen 

availability, having been born and raised at altitude appears to confer a 

substantial advantage in high altitude performance compared with having 

been born and raised at sea level. Being in this environment gives these people 

only one choice in the climate in which they live, and they adapt.

Farming at high altitude

3. The temperature in the Andes can be rather pleasant. The seasons change more by rainfall than by temperature. Nights are a bit cold to chilly and days can require a winter jacket to short sleeve shirts. In the cities many of the people wear modern clothing, yet in some cities and in the smaller towns and countryside the women usually wear a long skirt and have a collar or shawl. Many women also prefer to wear bowler hats. Each community has a different pattern of weaving of their textiles and  their hats. You can immediately know what community a man is from by identifying his hat. The woven pattern of their special ponchos is also an identifying item. Hats can also tell you by color and design a person’s status in the community and whether or not they are single, in a trial marriage, or married.

Andes clothing

4. A large part of the population of the Andes are Mestizo, meaning mixed 

ancestry. So it can be a largecombination of ethnicity that are the majority 

of peoples. Much blood comes from ancient Incas and ancient Peru populations, 

also from European and Indian natives. It is much too diverse to name one 

race the majority.

Summary: Adaptations have nothing to do with race. It is all the environment. Explaining how they are raised and understanding an individual's environmental influence and immunities is the only route to understanding their culture, as an anthropologist.

Zulu

http://www.south-africa-tours.com/zulu-culture.html

http://izmo.tripod.com/project/zulu.htm

Andes

http://www.andeanawakening.com/andean-culture.html

http://jeb.biologists.org/content/204/18/3151.full.pdf

Cultural Description

Part A

Primal

Without modern civilization, it is only natural for these people to act this way. It is a very primal thing for humans to look for cause and effect, and this is what works for them, it is all they know. Without a reasonable breakdown of why something is the way it is, it is only rational for people to create it themselves.

Ignorance

Ignorance is strength, and if the rituals prove to be working in the eyes of the 'higher-ups', it must work. People want answers to their problems, and since the rituals are accepted by their entire society, it is understandable that they all follow through, even if it is miserable and painful. "The more powerful individuals in the society have several shrines in their houses and, in fact, the opulence of a house is often referred to in terms of the number of such ritual centers it possesses. Most houses are of wattle and daub construction, but the shrine rooms of the more wealthy are walled with stone. Poorer families imitate the rich by applying pottery plaques to their shrine walls."

Worship

Again, people need an explanation for their illnesses and woes. If that means worshiping a shrine with charms, so be it. The magic-men appear to be god-like in the way they are perceived by the civilization, who "... write them (ingredients for potions) down in an ancient and secret language; [t]his writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists."

Economy

If something costs something, then it has value. The 'hospital' in this civilization requires substantial gifts to give their ritual healing, so people assume it has merit. "No matter how ill the supplicant or how grave the emergency, the guardians of many temples will not admit a client if he cannot give a rich gift to the custodian. Even after one has gained and survived the ceremonies, the guardians will not permit the neophyte to leave until he makes still another gift."

Education

The way people are manipulated is to keep them uneducated, and to portray deep respect for the 'trained' medicine-men who run the latipso, or the 'listeners' who merely act as a psychologist. They are deemed special because they have been trained to do their acts. "[The] ceremonies involve not only the [medicine-men] but a permanent group of vestal maidens who move sedately about the temple chambers (latipso; hospital) in distinctive costume and headdress."

Part B

1. I feel the words I used are not so different than how I would describe religion, the medical field and things of those nature in America. In churches they sometimes persuade people to donate money, whether it be for a good or bad cause; and medical insurance is in many ways similar to the tribe described in the article, you have to pay beforehand and afterward in order to get treatment - which to me seems preposterous in our society - we deserve universal healthcare.

2. I kept this in mind as I read the article, no I don't think I was biased at all. All people are ignorant to some extent. Replace the terms latipso, nacerima etc. and change the context, I would have the same opinions I have about America.

3. I guess I would remove the word primal and replace it with fear in the context of our culture. A lot of our mannerisms and the ways people present their opinions derive from that.

4. Yes I think it is possible to avoid cultural bias with enough education and experience. This is important because, if you are being an ethnocentric, it only leads to judgements, not facts.

Human variation and race

The effect of heat on our bodies varies with the relative humidity of the air.  High temperatures with high humidity make it harder to lose excess body heat.  This is due to the fact that when the moisture content of air goes up, it becomes increasingly more difficult for sweat to evaporate.  The sweat stays on our skin and we feel clammy.  As a result, we do not get the cooling effect of rapid evaporation. In dry, hot weather, humidity is low and sweat evaporates readily.  As a result, we usually feel reasonably comfortable in deserts at temperatures that are unbearable in tropical rain forests.  The higher the desert temperatures, the more significant of a cooling effect we get from evaporation.

A short term adaptation, as stated above, to this is sweating. The warm water evaporates off of your skin very quickly, bringing the heat with it.

A facilitative adaptation is to have the ability to physiologically acclimatize to hot conditions over a period of days to weeks.  The salt concentration of sweat progressively decreases while the volume of sweat increases.  Urine volume also reduces.  In addition, vasodilation of peripheral blood vessels causes flushing, or reddening, of the skin because more blood is close to the surface.  That blood brings heat from the core body areas to the surface where it can be dissipated easily into the environment by radiation.

A developmental adaptation to this is that some human nerve cells have proteins on their surfaces that enable them to differentiate between several different temperatures in the mildly warm to hot range.  This sensing ability may play an important role in the way we respond physiologically to hot temperatures. The building blocks, or subunits, of heat-sensitive ion channels can assemble in many different combinations, yielding new types of channels, each capable of detecting a different temperature. In cell cultures, this demonstrates that only four genes, each encoding one subunit type, can generate dozens of different heat-sensitive channels. Ion channels are pores in cell membranes. Their ability to open and close controls the flow of charged ions, which turns neuron signalling on or off -- in this case to inform the body of the temperature the neuron senses. It says 'I remember this temperature. I will make a really loud noise to tell the system that it is coming.'

A cultural adaptation is the turban. A turban is a piece of cloth wrapped over the head that immensely helps as a barrier between the hot sun and your skin.  Turban styles vary from region to region. The Sikh turbans are simple cloths wound round the head with a prominent front fold above the forehead. Muslim men often wrap turbans around their caps, known as kalansuwa. Afghan men often favor longer turbans that leave a tail hanging down the back. The turbans of Iran are usually black or white and wound flat and round against the top of the head. Indian turbans can be some of the most elaborate, covered with gems, jewels and embroidery. Some of the simplest turbans are those worn by African desert dwellers that swaddle the cloths about their heads and face for protection.

If you take anything away from this, it is to help you remember to keep hydrated so you can keep sweating in hot climates, and that the more you let your body be in these climates, it will be able to sustain itself easier over time and 'practice' so-to-speak.

Human race does not really have an effect on the way a human retains heat. It is some relevancy to study the effects of heat on different people close or further away from the equator, but even this is not trustworthy due to the vast variation of peoples today in different cultures. It is all the individual, so it is much more productive to study the environmental effects on humans rather than race.

Language

Part one was difficult, because I had to use my hands to even conceptualize what I'm trying to say. Bold facial expressions are the most help, because it shows them the broad idea of what the thought is coming from. I mostly just tried to illustrate objects and then build on that, sort of like playing charades. The person I was conversing with (my brother) had to resort to easier subjects to converse with. We only really talked about what was around us, if something made us laugh or if something made us angry. If a speaking culture was talking to a culture that didn't use symbolic language, they would think of them very primitively. Being able to speak is the only way to convey complex ideas. People who are mute are dealt with very easily, by either writing down on paper what they want to say or what we want to say, hand gestures, or just tell them if they aren't deaf.

Part two was fairly easy because I could just paint a picture in my brother's mind by describing what I'm trying to get across. It was slightly difficult for my brother and I to not show any emotion and just have a poker face the entire time, but it was easier to lose body language than to lose spoken language. Using signs with our hands and emotion in our faces is definitely important though. With it, it is much easier to both illustrate our ideas and speak about them. Oblivious people can sometimes not pick up on body language, but it is easier to hone it on and understand it when in social situations.

Piltdown man hoax

The bones were originally found by Charles Dawson in a gravel pit in Piltdown, East Sussex, England. It consisted of part of a jaw bone and some parts of the cranium. For many years since it's discovery, many scientists were cynical at his validity of actually finding them. Arthur Keith and Smith Woodward were very prestigious and since they were involved, no one really doubted it intensely.

Scientists desperately wanted to know what the missing links between apes and humans were, very passionately. So just by ignorance and goggled observations, the faults in the bones were overlooked. Letting this happen dents the scientific process' trustworthiness as every aspect of observing something that has never been observed before becomes so much a contest that cheaters come about.

Examining the carbon dating of the bones and teeth gave substantial evidence it was a fraud. The skull was a 500 year old Medieval man and the jaw was of an orangutan, with the teeth of a chimp. Also, while under a microscope, it can be seen clearly that someone had filed down the teeth to make them look like they had been chewing side to side.

You can't remove the human factor. Or else why would there be science in the first place? It is the study of our history, so removing 'our' would be a misstep. It takes the human factor to want to find new discoveries if there isn't a piece found in the large puzzle of evolution. If there isn't that want, nothing will be found, and may never be found.

The lesson to take from this hoax is that it happens. Science can be taken very royally and have an 'unwritten' rule that we will take each others word for it that your findings are legitamite, since we are colleagues. But that may sometimes not be the case, and there will be con that invalidates that trust.

Comparing Primates - Diet

Lemurs (Prosimians/Strepsirhini)

a.    Lemurs are known specifically to Madagascar. It has two different climatic zones, the rainforests of the east the dry regions of the west. With these challenges, along with poor soils, low plant productivity, wide ranges of ecosystem complexity, and a lack of regularly fruiting trees have made their survival the ability to endure the persistent extremes, not yearly averages.

b.      At least 109 of all known plant families in Madagascar (55% of all plants) are exploited by lemurs. Most of these are woody plants, including trees, shrubs, or lianas (woody vines).

c.       By being on an island, lemurs are geographically isolated, so they have no choice of what they need to eat, they eat what is plentiful.

Spider Monkey (New World Monkey/Platyrrhini)

a.       Spider monkeys are frequent in southern North America below Mexico and northwest South America, mostly in tropical forests.

b.      Their diet consists of 90% fruits and nuts. They can live for long periods only eating one or two types of them.

c.       They most likely eat these foods because they spend their time hanging from trees and scanning the forest for something with protein and sugar.

Baboon (Old World Monkey/Cercopithecidae)

a.       Baboons are found throughout Africa. They are split into 5 species, all which inhabit their own section of the continent - papio hamadryas (east), papio papio (west), papio anubis (central), papio cynocephalus (south central), and papio ursinus (south).

b.      Being terrestrial and found in open savannah, open woodland and hills across Africa, their diet is mixed. They are mostly herbivorous but can be omnivorous, they eat insects and occasionally prey fish, hares, birds, other monkeys, and small antelopes. They are also foragers, and can raid human dwellings throughout Africa.

c.       Because most of Africa is open terrain, they have to scavenge whatever food they can, so they aren’t picky. 

Gibbon (Lesser ape/Hylobatidae)

a.       Gibbons can be found in Southeast Asia, their separate species are hylobates (southern China and central west Java), hoolock (extending from northeast India to Myanmar), nomascus (China and southern Vietnam), and symphalangus (Malaysia, Thailand, and Sumatra).

b.      Gibbons thrive on the abundant fruit trees in their tropical range, and are especially fond of figs. They will occasionally supplement their diet with leaves and insects.

c.       Many forests are in China and southeast Asia, just like the spider monkey, they are slender, which means less omnivorous diet.

Chimpanzee (Great ape/Hominidae)

a.       Chimpanzee’s are in central Africa. They have two species – pan troglodytes (western and central Africa) and pan paniscus (central Africa

b.      Just like the baboon, they are foragers, and have a mix of an herbivorous and omnivorous diet, a tremendously varied diet that includes hundreds of known foods.

c.       Again, like the baboons, Africa is an open terrain, so whatever is in front of them and will give them calories, they cannot resist.

      I found that the primates that are in Africa (baboon and chimpanzee) have a more savage and foraging diet than the other primates who live in humid tropical forests (lemur, spider monkey, and gibbon). The later primates are definitely more slender because of their environment also, they need  to swing from branches and vines, so are a lot less bulky than the ground dwelling baboons and chimps.