Not Created by our Species

Paleontologists in South Africa said they have found the oldest known burial site in the world, containing remains of a small-brained distant relative of humans previously thought incapable of complex behavior.


Led by renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, researchers said in 2023 they had discovered several specimens of Homo naledi – a tree-climbing, Stone Age hominid – buried about 30 meters (100 feet) underground in a cave system within the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO world heritage site near Johannesburg.​


"These are the most ancient interments yet recorded in the hominin record, earlier than evidence of Homo sapiens interments by at least 100,000 years," the scientists wrote in a series of preprint papers published in eLife.​


The findings challenge the current understanding of human evolution, as it is normally held that the development of bigger brains allowed for the performing of complex, "meaning-making" activities such as burying the dead.​


The oldest burials previously unearthed, found in the Middle East and Africa, contained the remains of Homo sapiens – and were around 100,000 years old.​


Those found in South Africa by Berger, whose previous announcements have been controversial, and his fellow researchers, date back to at least 200,000 BCE.       READ MORE...

Humans Thrived - Neanderthals Perished

Why did humans take over the world while our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, became extinct? It's possible we were just smarter, but there's surprisingly little evidence that's true.

Neanderthals had big brains, language and sophisticated tools. They made art and jewellery. They were smart, suggesting a curious possibility. Maybe the crucial differences weren't at the individual level, but in our societies.


Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, Europe and western Asia were Neanderthal lands. Homo sapiens inhabited southern Africa. Estimates vary but perhaps 100,000 years ago, modern humans migrated out of Africa.


Forty thousand years ago Neanderthals disappeared from Asia and Europe, replaced by humans. Their slow, inevitable replacement suggests humans had some advantage, but not what it was.     READ MORE...

New Twist in Human Origins

A study published in the journal Nature has proposed a new model for human evolution, asserting that modern Homo sapiens stemmed from multiple genetically diverse populations across Africa rather than a single ancestral population. This conclusion was reached after researchers analyzed genetic data from present-day African populations, including 44 newly sequenced genomes from the Nama group of southern Africa.

Contemporary DNA evidence suggests that humans emerged from the interaction of multiple populations living across the continent.

A new study in Nature challenges prevailing theories, suggesting that Homo sapiens evolved from multiple diverse populations across Africa, with the earliest detectable split occurring 120,000-135,000 years ago, after prolonged periods of genetic intermixing.

There is broad agreement that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. But there remain many uncertainties and competing theories about where, when, and how.


In a paper published on May 17, 2023, in Nature, an international research team led by McGill University and the University of California-Davis suggest that, based on contemporary genomic evidence from across the continent, there were humans living in different regions of Africa, migrating from one region to another and mixing with one another over a period of hundreds of thousands of years. 

This view runs counter to some of the dominant theories about human origins in Africa.

Competing theories about human origins in Africa
One theory holds that, about 150,000 years ago, there was a single central ancestral population in Africa from which other populations diverged. 

Another suggests that this central ancestral population was the result of the mixing of modern humans with a Neanderthal-like hominins (human-like beings), resulting in a leap forward in human evolution, as has been suggested took place in Eurasia.  READ MORE...

Africa Takes Action

Demonstrators at the COP27 climate summit on Novmber 15, 2022, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. A new climate financing mechanism for Africa, by Africa could reduce the continent's dependence on the West to deliver on its promises. [Peter Dejong/AP Photo)


Failure can, at times, inspire wins. Just ask Africa.

The recently concluded COP27 global climate talks witnessed the continent triumph over a status quo of consistent failed promises of $100bn in climate financing from rich nations.


The launch of the African Climate Risk Facility – a $14bn local, market-based funding tool to help African countries increase the resilience of their vulnerable communities – is a wake-up call for a world frustrated by the hollow commitments of wealthy countries. The financing is a climate solution designed by Africa, for Africa, to support losses and damage (L&D in climate negotiations jargon) caused by climate change. And it should serve as an example to Asia.

Of course, COP27 did eventually reach a historic agreement to set up an L&D fund. But the developing world is used to hearing big promises that never see the light of day. The $100bn in climate financing was supposed to reach poorer nations by 2020. That year has passed, and the figure has since become irrelevant. Pakistan alone requires more than $30bn to recover from just the direct losses caused by this year’s catastrophic floods.

Why should the new loss and damage fund prove any different? At the moment, it is an empty account. Who will contribute what is yet to be decided. It took the United Nations-sponsored COP process more than a decade and thousands of natural disasters to agree on establishing the fund, so one can only imagine how much loss and damage climate-vulnerable countries will have to bear before the money begins to flow.

There’s another risk too. By establishing an L&D fund while omitting language on phasing out fossil fuels, COP27 has come dangerously close to allowing rich countries to damage the planet as much as they please as long as they promise to pay for it after the fact.  READ MORE...

Tesla Turns Up The Heat

Jan 13 (Reuters) - Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) has slashed prices globally on its electric vehicles by as much as 20%, extending an aggressive discounting effort and challenging rivals after missing Wall Street delivery estimates for 2022.

The move marks a reversal from the automaker's strategy over the last two years when new vehicle orders exceeded supply. It comes after CEO Elon Musk warned that the prospect of recession and higher interest rates meant it could lower prices to sustain growth at the expense of profit.

Musk acknowledged last year that prices had become "embarrassingly high" and could hurt demand. Shares were down 2.6% on Friday, following the stock's worst year since its inception due to delivery issues and growing competition.

Tesla lowered prices across the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, following a series of cuts last week in Asia, in what analysts saw as a clear shot at both smaller rivals that have been bleeding cash and legacy automakers aggressively ramping up electric vehicle production.  READ MORE...

All About Nigeria

Nigeria, country located on the western coast of Africa. Nigeria has a diverse geography, with climates ranging from arid to humid equatorial. However, Nigeria’s most diverse feature is its people. Hundreds of languages are spoken in the country, including Yoruba, Igbo, Fula, Hausa, Edo, Ibibio, Tiv, and English. The country has abundant natural resources, notably large deposits of petroleum and natural gas.

The national capital is Abuja, in the Federal Capital Territory, which was created by decree in 1976. Lagos, the former capital, retains its standing as the country’s leading commercial and industrial city.

Modern Nigeria dates from 1914, when the British Protectorates of Northern and Southern Nigeria were joined. The country became independent on October 1, 1960, and in 1963 adopted a republican constitution but elected to stay a member of the Commonwealth.

Nigeria is bordered to the north by Niger, to the east by Chad and Cameroon, to the south by the Gulf of Guinea of the Atlantic Ocean, and to the west by Benin. Nigeria is not only large in area—larger than the U.S. state of Texas—but also Africa’s most populous country.
Relief

In general, the topography of Nigeria consists of plains in the north and south interrupted by plateaus and hills in the centre of the country. The Sokoto Plains lie in the northwestern corner of the country, while the Borno Plains in the northeastern corner extend as far as the Lake Chad basin. The Lake Chad basin and the coastal areas, including the Niger River delta and the western parts of the Sokoto region in the far northwest, are underlain by soft, geologically young sedimentary rocks. Gently undulating plains, which become waterlogged during the rainy season, are found in these areas. 

The characteristic landforms of the plateaus are high plains with broad, shallow valleys dotted with numerous hills or isolated mountains, called inselbergs; the underlying rocks are crystalline, although sandstones appear in river areas. The Jos Plateau rises almost in the centre of the country; it consists of extensive lava surfaces dotted with numerous extinct volcanoes. Other eroded surfaces, such as the Udi-Nsukka escarpment (see Udi-Nsukka Plateau), rise abruptly above the plains at elevations of at least 1,000 feet (300 metres). 

The most mountainous area is along the southeastern border with Cameroon, where the Cameroon Highlands rise to the highest points in the country, Chappal Waddi (7,936 feet [2,419 metres]) in the Gotel Mountains and Mount Dimlang (6,699 feet [2,042 metres]) in the Shebshi Mountains.  SOURCE:  Britannicai

Slave Traders Cheated

Copper manilla bracelets from a late 17th-century Royal African Company trader in the Western Approaches. Photograph: Seascape Artifact Exhibits Inc.

Early English enslavers sourced copper from Cornwall to create manilla bracelets, the grim currency of the transatlantic slavery trade, and used an impure mix to maximise their profits, according to a study.

Dr Tobias Skowronek, a German scientist, has conducted a scientific analysis of horseshoe-shaped bracelets that were exchanged over hundreds of years for enslaved people from Africa who were transported to Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean.

His study revealed that copper had been sourced from Cornwall decades earlier than previously thought, overturning assumptions that it had come primarily from Sweden and Flanders until the 1720s.  READ MORE...

Self-Determination Shaped the Modern World

Fifty independent countries existed in 1920. Today, there are nearly two hundred. One of the motivating forces behind this wave of country-creation was self-determination—the concept that nations (groups of people united by ethnicity, language, geography, history, or other common characteristics) should be able to determine their political future.

In the early twentieth century, a handful of European empires ruled the majority of the world. However, colonized nations across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere argued that they deserved the right to determine their political future. Their calls for self-determination became rallying cries for independence.

Ultimately, the breakup of these empires throughout the twentieth century—a process known as decolonization—resulted in an explosion of new countries, creating the world map largely as we recognize it today.

But now that the age of empires is over, is that map set in stone? Not quite. Self-determination continues to play a role in deciding borders, but the landscape is more complicated.

Many people around the world argue that their governments—many of which emerged during decolonization—do not in reality represent the entire country’s population. The borders of colonies seldom had anything to do with any national (or economic or internal political) criteria. So when decolonization occurred, many of the newly created countries were artificial and thus rife with internal division.

However, for a group inside a country to achieve self-determination today, that country’s sovereignty—the principle that guarantees countries get to control what happens within their borders and prohibits them from meddling in another country’s domestic affairs—will be violated. In other words, creating a country through self-determination inherently means taking territory and people away from a country that already exists.

Whereas many world leaders openly called for the breakup of empires, few are willing to endorse the breakup of modern countries. Indeed, the United Nations’ founding charter explicitly discourages it. And the fact that so many modern countries face internal divisions means few governments are eager to embrace the creation of new countries abroad, fearing that doing so could set a precedent that leads to the unraveling of their own borders.

A road to self-determination still remains, but it is far trickier in a world in which empires no longer control colonies oceans away.  READ MORE...

As Our Planet Burns

While nations rally to reduce their carbon emissions, and try to adapt at-risk places to hotter conditions, there is an elephant in the room: for large portions of the world, local conditions are becoming too extreme and there is no way to adapt. People will have to move to survive.

Over the next fifty years, hotter temperatures combined with more intense humidity are set to make large swathes of the globe lethal to live in. Fleeing the tropics, the coasts, and formerly arable lands, huge populations will need to seek new homes; you will be among them, or you will be receiving them. 

This migration has already begun—we have all seen the streams of people fleeing drought-hit areas in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where farming and other rural livelihoods have become impossible.

The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent as the planet heats.

We can—and we must—prepare. Developing a radical plan for humanity to survive a far hotter world includes building vast new cities in the more tolerable far north while abandoning huge areas of the unendurable tropics. 

It involves adapting our food, energy, and infrastructure to a changed environment and demography as billions of people are displaced and seek new homes.  READ MORE...

Nigerian Scifi

Nigerian Teenagers Are Making Slick Scifi Films With Their Smartphones

Someone should really snap up the rights for a movie about The Critics, a collective of self-taught teenage filmmakers from northwestern Nigeria.

The boys’ dedication, ambition, and no-budget inventiveness calls to mind other filmmaking fanatics, from the sequestered, homeschooled brothers of The Wolfpack to the fictional Sweding specialists of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Be Kind, Rewind.

While smartphones and free editing apps have definitely made it easier for aspiring filmmakers to bring their fantasies to fruition, it’s worth noting that The Critics saved for a month to buy the green fabric for their chroma key effects.

Their productions are also plagued with the internet and power outages that are a frequent occurrence in their home base of Kaduna, slowing everything from the rendering process to the Youtube visual effects tutorials that have advanced their craft.

To date they’ve filmed 20 shorts on a smart phone with a smashed screen, mounted to a broken microphone stand that’s found new life as a homemade tripod.

Their simple set up will be coming in for an upgrade, however, now that Nollywood director Kemi Adetiba has brought their efforts to the attention of a much wider audience, who donated $5,800 in a fundraising campaign.  READ MORE...

Earliest Evidence of Species

The course of human evolution never did run smooth. The emergence of hominins on the continent of Africa is full of twists, turns, gaps, and dead ends, which makes it all the more difficult to retrace the rise of our own species.


Today, we still don't really know when or where the first Homo sapiens appeared on the scene, although an archaeological site in southwestern Ethiopia is one of our best lines of evidence.

It was here, in the 1960s, that paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey uncovered the earliest examples of fossils with undisputedly modern human anatomies.

To be clear, older remains attributed to Homo sapiens exist, dating back hundreds of thousands of years. But the line between us and our ancestors is a smear of characteristics, leaving us with the remains known as Omo I as a starting point for what is unequivocally modern.

The ancient bones of this long lost ancestor, named for the nearby Omo River, were buried with mollusk shells, which were, at the time, dated to about 130,000 years of age.

In the decades since, radioactive dating of the surrounding soil has allowed us to push back that age even further to about 200,000 years. And yet even that could be an underestimation.  READ MORE...

Unknown Ghost Ancestor

Desinova Cave, Russia

Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: a teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such strange uniqueness she looked to be a 'hybrid' ancestor to modern humans that scientists had never seen before.

Only recently, researchers have uncovered evidence she wasn't alone. In a 2019 study analysing the complex mess of humanity's prehistory, scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify an unknown human ancestor species that modern humans encountered – and shared dalliances with – on the long trek out of Africa millennia ago.

"About 80,000 years ago, the so-called Out of Africa occurred, when part of the human population, which already consisted of modern humans, abandoned the African continent and migrated to other continents, giving rise to all the current populations", explained evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.

As modern humans forged this path into the landmass of Eurasia, they forged some other things too – breeding with ancient and extinct hominids from other species.

Up until recently, these occasional sexual partners were thought to include Neanderthals and Denisovans, the latter of which were unknown until 2010.

But in this study, a third ex from long ago was isolated in Eurasian DNA, thanks to deep learning algorithms sifting through a complex mass of ancient and modern human genetic code.

Using a statistical technique called Bayesian inference, the researchers found evidence of what they call a "third introgression" – a 'ghost' archaic population that modern humans interbred with during the African exodus.

"This population is either related to the Neanderthal-Denisova clade or diverged early from the Denisova lineage," the researchers wrote in their paper, meaning that it's possible this third population in humanity's sexual history was possibly a mix themselves of Neanderthals and Denisovans.  READ MORE...

African Tech Giant JUMIA

It could not have got off to a much better start for Jumia's historic stock market listing. The hoopla on the day it became the first Africa-focussed tech firm to list on the New York Stock Exchange was massive.

International media took note and investors piled in, its share price rose more than 70% in value on the day but the excitement would prove to be short-lived.

"In our countries where we operate there are 700 million people and last year we served more than four million consumers" co-chief executive officer Sacha Poignonnec told the BBC on the floor of the stock exchange.

When I sat down to speak with his co-CEO, Jeremy Hodara, in September the firm had had a humbling few years. Share prices plummeted and came back, backers had bailed out, and it had withdrawn from trading in three of the fourteen countries it was operating in - and that's not to mention reports of fraud lawsuits in New York courts and a public relations disaster over its identity.

But the promise of millions of consumers newly connected to the internet has not gone away and neither has interest in Jumia which is still by far the largest e-commerce company focussed on the African continent - although its management and much of technical expertise is based outside of Africa.

IMAGE SOURCE,JUMIAImage caption,The promise of deliveries to more than a billion consumers in Africa drove interest in Jumia


By 2030, consumer spending across Africa is expected to reach $2.5tn. Jumia still sells goods in 11 of those countries. It operates a marketplace where thousands of other businesses sell goods on its platform and has a finance arm, Jumia pay, so customers can go about their shopping, pay utility bills and order pizza, all without leaving the Jumia's platforms.  TO READ MORE ABOUT JUMIA, CLICK HERE...

Kenya: Ending FGM

IMAGE SOURCEGETTY IMAGES

John can barely remember a time when having sex with his wife did not end with her in tears.  It was just too painful because she had undergone female genital mutilation (FGM).  "Anytime I go to Martha, she recoils, curling like a child. She cries, begging me to leave her alone. She doesn't want to have sex any more," the 40-year-old says. John and Martha come from Kenya's Marakwet community in western Kenya.

Although FGM is illegal in Kenya, girls in their community often undergo FGM between the ages of 12 and 17, as a rite of passage in preparation for marriage.  Martha was cut when she was 15.

Sex as an endurance test
"It is painful when we have sex. I wish this practice would end," she says, adding that it had also made childbirth very difficult for her.  Recounting their first sexual experience, the couple describe it as traumatising.  Martha says she felt a lot of pain and it is not how she had imagined sex would be. She had to ask her husband to stop.

"I didn't realise a part of her [vulva] had been stitched, leaving only the urethra and a tiny vaginal opening," John tells the BBC. "I try to be very compassionate with my wife. I don't want her to feel like I don't respect her, yet we are a couple."

They lived in agony with little hope that things would ever change - not just for them, but they feared for their young daughter as well.  That was until John heard of an anti-FGM campaign meeting in his village, targeting men.  READ MORE

Chocolate Success

There is a lot of money in chocolate but the producers of the raw material see very little of it.

Last year the retail industry was worth $107bn (£78bn), according to one projection, but Ghana - the world's second largest cocoa producer - earned just around $2bn.

This is a familiar pattern for many African countries where the economy is still shaped by a colonial relationship in which they export commodities to be processed elsewhere.

Ghana's President, Nana Akufo-Addo, served notice on this last year when he told an audience in Switzerland that "there can be no future prosperity for the Ghanaian people" if this way of doing things continues.

The country currently processes about 30% of its cocoa crop, but despite plans for growing the domestic chocolate industry there are still many obstacles in the way.

Ambitious cocoa farmer Nana Aduna II - a traditional ruler, who inherited his 80-acre plantation two decades ago - is well aware of the difficulties.  READ MORE

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-56687427

The Rest of the World Baby...

Millions are starving in South America

Millions are starving in Africa

Millions are starving in China

Millions are starving in Asia

How many people in America really care about that?

Americans care about only one thing...   GREED...

It may seem hard to believe at times but all you have to do is look around your little corner of the world (here in the US of A) wherever that might be and simply take in and appreciate all that you see.

How many obese people do you know that have no desire to quit eating as much as they do?

How many people do you know that refuse to exercise?

How many of you co-workers only work for that raise or bonus or both and could care less about anything else they are doing for the company?

How many of you went to college not for the education but to get more money during your lifetime?

How many of you are planning on buying a bigger house?

How many vehicles do you own?

How often do you drink alcohol and how much is consumed?

How often do you smoke a joint or snort a line?

How many of you are DEBT FREE?

In a way...   Americans are pathetic in how they try to live their lives and then on Sundays attend church and say otherwise...  Our entire ECONOMIC SYSTEM is based upon GREED and it is ONE GIANT PYRAMID SCHEME with the wealthy sitting on the top of the pyramid trying to convince us to buy more...  and when the wealthy are tired of poking the bear, they try to open markets in other countries and convince them that they need more...

THE WEALTHY ARE ONLY WEALTHY BECAUSE OF US....

BUT...  more importantly...

WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF THE WORLD...  BABY...

Warm and Toasty

While East TN is not as cold as the deepest parts of Canada, Alaska, or the Artic Circle, it is nonetheless colder than what I had expected for this time of the year...  and, it is getting to the point where any temperatures falling below 60 degrees now has got me shivering...  but, in my gas heated house, I am warm and toasty...  although, gas heat is not that great on my sinuses...  still, I am better off than the way that billions have to live in the naturally heated continent of Africa.

Living in East TN, one does not think too much about those living in Africa but the Africans for the most part and except for certain areas, are starving, without water, and oftentimes without shelter even though the shelter is to hide them from the sun.

Africa is the second largest continent and the second most populated continent after Asia and since Asia is farther north is is not as warm year round either.  Africa has 1.3 billion people living on or in its continent and it is difficult for me to think in those high numbers regardless of whether it pertains to money or people...  billions is a high amount.

55 States (September 2018) – Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau. Kenya, the Kingdom of Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Kingdom of Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

It is still hard to believe, at least for me sometimes, that our world is not just composed of many, many continents and their respective countries or states, but that there are so many people that are financially worse off than WHITE TRASH SOUTHERN AMERICANS to which our liberal Democrat friends have referred to us.

Some of our MORE WEALTHY AMERICANS have finally realized that Africans do not have much of anything so they have decided that they will IN ADDITION TO HELPING THE BLACKS IN AMERICA...  now help the Africans as well...  I admire where they want to spend their money, but that still will not buy them a feather bed in heaven....  since in God they do not believe...  not even for a second...  not even around Christmas that has just come and gone.

Pyramids of Giza