786. The Origins of Domestication of the Horse

Wild horses

By Sarah C. P. Williams, Science Now, May 7, 2012

Shards of pottery with traces of mare's milk, mass gravesites for horses, and drawings of horses with plows and chariots: These are some of the signs left by ancient people hinting at the importance of horses to their lives. But putting a place and date on the domestication of horses has been a challenge for archaeologists. Now, a team of geneticists studying modern breeds of the animal has assembled an evolutionary picture of its storied past. Horses, the scientists conclude, were first domesticated 6000 years ago in the western part of the Eurasian Steppe, modern-day Ukraine and West Kazakhstan. And as the animals were domesticated, they were regularly interbred with wild horses, the researchers say.

"This is a very good paper," says biologist Michael Hofreiter of the University of York in the United Kingdom. "Nobody has applied this method of population modeling to horses before."

Throughout their history, horses have been interbred, traded between populations of people, and moved across continents. All of this makes their genetic history hard to follow. Moreover, the wild ancestor of horses, Equus ferus, is extinct, complicating researchers' efforts to compare the genetics of domestic animals with wild ones. Previous research nailed down a broad area—the Eurasian Steppe, which stretches from Hungary and Romania through Mongolia—as the region where horses originated and were domesticated. But earlier genetic studies relied mostly on mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only from a mother, to try to understand horses' evolutionary history.

"The problem was that there was a lot of diversity in the mitochondrial DNA," says biologist Vera Warmuth of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, the first author of the new study. And the diversity didn't group the horses into their breed or place of origin. "Every horse breed has almost all the mitochondrial lineages represented," she says.

Warmuth instead studied sequences of horse DNA inherited from both parents and known to be diverse between horse populations. She and her colleagues collected genetic samples from more than 300 horses at 12 different sites across the steppe. Data were collected for only working animals bred within a local area, not those bred for show or appearance, to minimize any human-guided selection that would make some genes more common. Then, the researchers used computer programs designed to model the spread of a population to simulate how different locations of horse domestication and spread throughout the steppe would influence modern genetic diversity. They compared each model with the real data they had collected to see which fit best.

The best-fit model, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed the wild ancestor of domestic horses originating in eastern Eurasia 160,000 years ago and being domesticated in the western part of the Eurasian Steppe around 6000 years ago. The model also helped explain why there had been so many female lineages when previous studies had tried to rely on mitochondrial DNA. "We think that as domestic horses spread out of the western steppe, local wild females were continuously incorporated into the spreading herds," says Warmuth. The constant addition of new females made the genetic patterns—in particular, the female lineages—more complex than if the domestic population had been totally isolated.

Hofreiter is impressed. "They have still only narrowed down the domestication region to a fairly big area," he says, "but they did have enough genetic data to get a signal out of the noise."

Not all researchers are convinced, however. Archaeologist Marsha Levine of the University of Cambridge thinks using modern genetic samples to retrace horses' evolution is a dead end. "There's been mixing of cultures and mixing of horses in this region for many thousands of years," she says. "And so when you're looking at any modern horse, you just don't know where it's from."

Bringing together many kinds of evidence is what will ultimately answer the whens and wheres of horse domestication, Levine says. "What we need to be doing is using material from excavations, sequencing ancient genes, and combining that with what we know from archaeological evidence about how animals were used in the past."

Ultimately, says Hofreiter, getting to the bottom of horse domestication will reveal more than just the history of these animals. "Horse domestication has changed human cultures a lot. It has changed warfare, it has changed transportation," he says. "Studying the past of horses can tell us a lot about our own past."

785. Dogs Feel Your Pain

By Zuberoa Marcos, Science Now, May 7, 2012

Yawn next to your dog, and she may do the same. Though it seems simple, this contagious behavior is actually quite remarkable: Only a few animals do it, and only dogs cross the species barrier. Now a new study finds that dogs yawn even when they only hear the sound of us yawning, the strongest evidence yet that canines may be able to empathize with us.

Besides people and dogs, contagious yawning has been observed in gelada baboons, stump-tail macaques, and chimpanzees. Humans tend to yawn more with friends and acquaintances, suggesting that "catching" someone's yawn may be tied to feelings of empathy. Similarly, some studies have found that dogs tend to yawn more after watching familiar people yawning. But it is unclear whether the canine behavior is linked to empathy as it is in people. One clue might be if even the mere sound of a human yawn elicited yawning in dogs.

To that end, scientists at the University of Porto in Portugal recruited 29 dogs, all of whom had lived for at least 6 months with their owners. To reduce anxiety, the study was performed in familiar rooms in the dogs' homes and in the presence of a known person but with no visual contact with their owners.

The team, led by behavioral biologist Karine Silva, recorded yawning sounds of the dogs' owners and an unfamiliar woman as well as an artificial control sound consisting of a computer-reversed yawn. (To help induce natural yawning, volunteers listened to an audio loop of prerecorded yawns over headphones.) Each dog heard all of the sounds in two sessions, each carried out 7 days apart. During the sessions, the researchers measured the number of elicited yawns in dogs in response to sounds from known and unknown people.

As the team will report in the July issue of Animal Cognition, 12 out of 29 dogs yawned during the experiment. On average, canines yawned five times more often when they heard humans they knew yawning as opposed to control sounds. "These results suggest that dogs have the capacity to empathize with humans," says Silva.

That's not surprising, she says. People first began domesticating dogs at least 15,000 years ago, and since then we've bred them to perform increasingly complex tasks, from hunting to guiding the blind. This close relationship may have fostered cross-species empathy over the millennia.

"This study tells us something new about the mechanisms underlying contagious yawning in dogs," says Evan McLean, a Ph.D. student at Duke University's Canine Cognition Center in Durham, North Carolina, who was not part of the study. "As in humans, dogs can catch this behavior using their ears alone." Still, he notes, the experiments don't tell us much about the nature of empathy in dogs. "Do they think about our emotions and internal states the way we do as humans?"

Ádám Miklósi, an ethologist at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, agrees. "Using behaviors as indicators will only show some similarity in behavior," he says, "but it will never tell us whether canine empathy, whatever this is, matches human empathy." Previous work has shown, for example, that when dogs look guilty, they may not actually be feeling guilty. "Dogs can simulate very well different forms of social interest that could mislead people to think they are controlled by the same mental processes," says Miklósi, "but they may not always understand the complexity of human behavior."

784. Mariela Castro Leads Gay Rights March in Havana

Mariela Castro speaking at the rally in Havana

By Associated Press, Fox News, May 12, 2012

The daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro said during a rousing gay rights march Saturday that her father advocated eliminating sexual discrimination, and reiterated her own hope the country would soon legalize same sex marriage.

Mariela Castro, a noted gay rights advocate and head of Cuba's National Center for Sex Education, also repeated her praise for U.S. President Barack Obama's public remarks in favor of same sex marriage, saying the American leader's words "have great value because of the influence they might have" on others.

Still, she said Obama needed to back his words with action. While the U.S. president voiced support for same sex marriage, there were no plans in the U.S. to get behind federal legislation to mandate states to recognize such unions.

Castro's comments came during a colorful march by 400 advocates through the sweltering streets of the capital. The event is linked to the International Day Against Homophobia on May 17. Participants, including transvestites and transgender people, sang and danced in a conga line.

Castro has predicted for years that Cuba's parliament was on the verge of legalizing gay marriage, but it has yet to happen. She said she hoped legislators would finally follow through when they next meet in July.

Castro said her father had voiced support for the measure privately several times, and indicated he was working behind the scenes in support of a reform of the island's family law.

"It is surely part of his tactics and strategy; it is his style," she said. "I am not going to pressure him to say things publically, because I am more interested in concrete results."

In the early years after Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution, homosexuality was considered highly suspect, along with other "alternative" forms of expression.

Many gays were fired from government jobs, jailed, sent to work camps or left for exile. Fidel Castro later apologized for the discrimination, saying his past views on homosexuality were wrong, and a product of the times.

783. Book Review: Deep Green Resistance – How Not to Build a Movement

By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism, May 10, 2012

In its March-April issue, Canadian Dimension magazine featured a very positive review of Deep Green Resistance. The reviewer said it “made me a better strategist,” and endorsed author Derrick Jenson’s assertion that “this book is about winning.” 

In my view, the strategy and tactics advocated in this book are a path to certain defeat, so I submitted the following brief response, which CD editor Cy Gonick has kindly published in the May-June issue, available on newsstands now.

There is much to admire in Deep Green Resistance (DGR). The authors sincerely love the natural world. They write passionately about environmental destruction and the refusal of the powers that be to change course. Their criticism of the ineffectiveness of mainstream environmental organizations is powerful and convincing, as is their argument that radical greens must aim to “deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet.”

But the book is mostly about strategy and tactics, and that is where it fails.

In his previous book, Endgame, Derrick Jensen wrote:

“I don’t think most people care, and I don’t think most people will ever care…. The mass of civilized people will never be on our side.”

That elitist, greener-than-thou attitude permeates Deep Green Resistance.

The authors write:

“The vast majority of the population will do nothing unless they are led, cajoled, or forced. … there will be no mass movement, not in time to save this planet, our home.”

And:

“Humans aren’t going to do anything in time …[so] those of us who care about the future of the planet have to dismantle the industrial energy infrastructure as rapidly as possible.”

That elitist analysis leads to elitist strategy. Having written off most of humanity to as irredeemably apathetic or hostile to change, the enlightened ones of DGR propose to force change on the world through “Decisive Ecological Warfare” conducted by small groups.

“Well-organized underground militants would make coordinated attacks on energy infrastructure around the world … actions against pipelines, power lines, tankers, and refineries, perhaps using electromagnetic pulses ….”

If even partially successful, the social and economic chaos caused by such a campaign would be felt most severely by the poor and oppressed. DGR’s authors face that prospect with appalling equanimity:

“We’ll all have to deal with the social consequences as best we can. Besides, rapid collapse is ultimately good for humans — even if there is a die-off — because at least some people survive.”

Of course, Decisive Ecological Warfare is pure fantasy, a video-game vision of a heroic band saving the earth from evil-doers, enabling a handful of survivors to carry on as hunter-gatherers in a new Eden.

Missing from DGR’s scenarios is the outcome that history says is most likely – long before the underground groups achieve any significant size or ability to act, they are infiltrated by police spies and provocateurs and disrupted by arrests. Key activists are imprisoned for years; many more are isolated and demoralized.

Our rulers couldn’t ask for a more favourable result.

“We are,” DGR’s authors admit, “up against a system of vast power, global in scale, with no sympathetic population upon which to draw for either combatants or support.”

But instead of working to build an effective counter-power by educating and organizing the oppressed, they have somehow convinced themselves that the “system of vast power” is actually so vulnerable that it can be brought down by sabotage.

The socialist reply to such illusions was expressed a century ago by the great U.S. socialist leader Eugene V. Debs.

“It is not because these tactics involve the use of force that I am opposed to them, but because they do not…. The force that implies power is utterly lacking, and it can never be developed by such tactics.”

And, as István Mészáros wrote more recently,

“The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.”

782. Climate Change: Game Over for the Climate

James Hansen

By James Hansen, The New York Times, May 9, 2012 

GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.

If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground.

The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change.

We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control.

We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price.

But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.

President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public — which yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining that our continued technological leadership and economic well-being demand a reasoned change of our energy course. History has shown that the American public can rise to the challenge, but leadership is essential.

The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. This is a plan that can unify conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and business. Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations.

James Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is the author of “Storms of My Grandchildren.”

781. Art: The Life of Flowers

By Vorobyoff Production, 2011

780. Agroecology Can Double Food Production in Poor Regions in 10 Years, Says UN Report

Olivier De Schutter

By Olivier De Schutter,  United Nations Right to Food Report, March 8, 2011

GENEVA – Small-scale farmers can double food production within 10 years in critical regions by using ecological methods, a new UN report* shows. Based on an extensive review of the recent scientific literature, the study calls for a fundamental shift towards agroecology as a way to boost food production and improve the situation of the poorest.

“To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available,” says Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and author of the report. “Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live -- especially in unfavorable environments.”

Agroecology applies ecological science to the design of agricultural systems that can help put an end to food crises and address climate-change and poverty challenges. It enhances soils productivity and protects the crops against pests by relying on the natural environment such as beneficial trees, plants, animals and insects.

“To date, agroecological projects have shown an average crop yield increase of 80% in 57 developing countries, with an average increase of 116% for all African projects,” De Schutter says. “Recent projects conducted in 20 African countries demonstrated a doubling of crop yields over a period of 3-10 years.”

“Conventional farming relies on expensive inputs, fuels climate change and is not resilient to climatic shocks. It simply is not the best choice anymore today,” De Schutter stresses. “A large segment of the scientific community now acknowledges the positive impacts of agroecology on food production, poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation -- and this this is what is needed in a world of limited resources. Malawi, a country that launched a massive chemical fertilizer subsidy program a few years ago, is now implementing agroecology, benefiting more than 1.3 million of the poorest people, with maize yields increasing from 1 ton/ha to 2-3 tons/ha.”

The report also points out that projects in Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh recorded up to 92 % reduction in insecticide use for rice, leading to important savings for poor farmers. “Knowledge came to replace pesticides and fertilizers. This was a winning bet, and comparable results abound in other African, Asian and Latin American countries,” the independent expert notes.

“The approach is also gaining ground in developed countries such as United States, Germany or France,” he said. “However, despite its impressive potential in realizing the right to food for all, agroecology is still insufficiently backed by ambitious public policies and consequently hardly goes beyond the experimental stage.”

The report identifies a dozen of measures that States should implement to scale up agroecological practices.

“Agroecology is a knowledge-intensive approach. It requires public policies supporting agricultural research and participative extension services,” De Schutter says. “States and donors have a key role to play here. Private companies will not invest time and money in practices that cannot be rewarded by patents and which don’t open markets for chemical products or improved seeds.”

The Special Rapporteur on the right to food also urges States to support small-scale farmer’s organizations, which demonstrated a great ability to disseminate the best agroecological practices among their members. “Strengthening social organization proves to be as impactful as distributing fertilizers. Small-scale farmers and scientists can create innovative practices when they partner”, De Schutter explains.

“We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations. The solution lies in supporting small-scale farmers’ knowledge and experimentation, and in raising incomes of smallholders so as to contribute to rural development.”

“If key stakeholders support the measures identified in the report, we can see a doubling of food production within 5 to 10 years in some regions where the hungry live,” De Schutter says. “Whether or not we will succeed this transition will depend on our ability to learn faster from recent innovations. We need to go fast if we want to avoid repeated food and climate disasters in the 21st century.”

(*) The report “Agro-ecology and the right to food” was presented today before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. This document is available in English, French, Spanish, Chinese and Russian at: www.srfood.org and http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/food/annual.htm

For the PDF summary above and entire report click here. 

Olivier De Schutter was appointed the Special Rapporteur on the right to food in May 2008 by the United Nations Human Rights Council. He is independent from any government or organization.

Contact: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Palais des Nations CH-1211 Geneva 10 Switzerland  www.ohchr.org

Email: press-info@ohchr.org Tel: +41 22 917 9310 Tel: +41 22 917 9383