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I wrote about the US military's attempt at using social scientists and anthropologists in the field, the Human Terrain System, as well as the 'cultural turn' and counter-insurgency doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan. A forgotten era now.
Stone Age Herbalist
Stone Age Herbalist
26.9K posts
Stone Age Herbalist
@Paracelsus1092
Pygmy Futurism | Beserker Yoga Revival | Narcoanthropology & Yamnilote Studies | Nganga R&D | Mandeville Explorer Archive | 
Stone Age Herbalist’s posts
In 1990 a tiny tribe of Native Americans donated some blood samples to researchers at Arizona State University, to try and understand their soaring rates of diabetes. The controversy that followed went on to shape Native American DNA research and modern bioethics.
You have my attention
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Daily Mail Online
@MailOnline
Psychoactive drug made from HUMAN BONES that has seen addicts digging up GRAVES to get high sparks Sierra Leone to declare national emergency trib.al/KimHk78
"why did your clan invade the north and start the Gombe Chimpanzee War?" "Dr Goodall, you are a student of the natural sciences yes? We must begin with the divergence of the hominidae family around 8 million years ago... maybe you are not used to this kind of interview?"
In 2015 a pair of orcas - Port & Starboard - arrived in Cape Town and began hunting local sharks, surgically targeting the liver. The great whites fled, causing a collapse in marine tourism, but it gets stranger.
What if your religion required you to be eaten by vultures after you died, but all the vultures suddenly disappeared? A look at the twilight of contemporary Zoroastrianism and India's vulture crisis.
Did you guys know that MONGOOSE WARFARE? They even draw up into battle lines and rotate through the front line like a phalanx.
0:11
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TheBadoe 713
@TheBadoe
Replying to @Paracelsus1092
I really wish we had more documentation on animal wars like the Gombe War. Closest thing we had aside from that was Meerkat Manor. There’s just something about learning how political structures form in animals that’s just so fascinating.
A quick thread on what's happening in Haiti: Hard to know where to begin, but let's pick 2019, the year Haiti was supposed to have parliamentary elections.
I regret to inform you all that the Zimbabwean goblin menace continues to be a problem.
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Stone Age Herbalist
@Paracelsus1092
Checking in on Zimbabwe.
Percy Fawcett keeps being right. More and more cities keep appearing in the Amazon. At this point we have to accept that the 'pristine' rainforest is a post-collapse regrowth, not a timeless primeval forest.
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Stone Age Herbalist
@Paracelsus1092
Replying to @Paracelsus1092
In 2003 a huge archaeological discovery was made almost exactly where Fawcett was last seen. A city named Kuhikugu was uncovered, complete with roads and aquaculture facilities, capable of supporting 50,000 people. Fawcett had been right.
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In 2003 one of the tribe, the Havasupai, attended a doctoral presentation, and discovered that their previously donated blood had been used for purposes other than diabetes research.
"why did the Triple Alliance invade the Tlaxcala Confederation?" "...please, is this a serious conversation? As I was saying - Tlāhuizcalpantēcuhtli, the morning star, rose to the heavens when Quetzalcoatl threw himself onto a pyre, and the Age of the Fifth Sun..."
Moche culture was cartoonishly heinous - expert metalworkers garroting teenage girls, necrophiliac ceramic work, an arachnid sacrificial deity called 'the Decapitator', a jaguar-fanged creator...
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All hell broke loose. A university investigation uncovered about 12 papers that had used the blood research data in some way over the last 10 years.
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Two particularly egregious studies involved analysing the Havasupai blood for markers of schizophrenia, and claiming that their genetics proved the tribe migrated from elsewhere, contrary to their beliefs.
"It's Thermopylae, it's Stamford Bridge, it's the Alamo, it's Gandamak, it's Norf's Last Stand"
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Football Away Days
@AwayDays_
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2 West Ham fans managing to stop a mob of AZ Alkmaar fans from getting to the hospitality section where all the players families are seated
There's an insect border between Colombia and Panama to keep the screw-worm fly out of North America, which involves dropping 14.7 million sterilised screw-worms over the rainforest *every week*
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Stone Age Herbalist
@Paracelsus1092
America eradicated the disgusting screw-worm fly in 1982. Nobody misses it, nobody mourns it. There's probably a dozen or so more species we could get rid of, would people accept that?
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The outcome was a financial settlement, and the right for the Havasupai to reclaim their samples, which they did, with great solemnity and ritual.
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The tribe sued ASU and the lead geneticist, Dr Teri Markow. It's hard to know how many claims were filed and pursued, how many courts, private investigators and committees were involved, but the line was clear - the Havasupai did not consent to research beyond diabetes.
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The story has entered the textbooks as a classic example of postcolonial exploitation, bioethical injustice and inequality.
This is a result of inbreeding, not some Lamarckian effort to become more like sloths
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Dane
@UltraDane
The VaDoma People: also known as Doma or Dema, is the only hunter-gatherer tribe in Zimbabwe living in the Kanyemba region around the basins of a tributary of the Zambezi River Valley. Interestingly, they have two toes on each foot, which experts believe aids in tree climbing
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Readers added context
There’s no evidence that having this foot shape (Ectrodactyly) gives any advantage at all. In this case it’s formed due to prolonged inbreeding. researchgate.net/publication/32…
Today we're thinking about archaeological forgeries, fakes and hoaxes. Some do it for the money, to prove their theory correct or to boost their reputation, for others it seems compulsive. Let's look at some of the most infamous forgers of the last few hundred years:
His historical illiteracy is astounding, if you were a child born in the 1780's the next few decades would see the most astonishing transformations - general anesthesia, canned food, morphine, steam locomotion, electromagnetic induction, the hydraulic press...
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Tsarathustra
@tsarnick
Yuval Noah Harari: we have no idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in 20 years
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The media ran multiple gleeful stories: the Phoenix New Times led with “Indian Givers, The Havasupai trusted the white man to help with a diabetes epidemic. Instead, ASU tricked them into bleeding for academia.” The narrative was too perfect to let up.
America eradicated the disgusting screw-worm fly in 1982. Nobody misses it, nobody mourns it. There's probably a dozen or so more species we could get rid of, would people accept that?
A thread of excerpts from Daniel Everett's book 'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes' about his time with the Amazonian Pirahãs. I don't think there's another people quite as unusual as the Pirahã, and it's not just their famous language:
Afrocentrism is probably unique amongst ethnocentric ideologies for its claims that basically every nation and people everywhere on earth were originally black. A thread:
An Apologia for English Food Scorned and maligned, the cuisine of the Anglo comes under daily fire for being bland and unpleasant. Here is my defence of the Roast, the Pie and the Pudding.
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