Ancestors In Africa Research Articles

Communities and the Dead in Africa and Ancient Ethiopia (50–800 CE)

AbstractIn the Global North, death is often treated as the departure of a person. However, across Africa, families and communities often include living and dead members, usually called “ancestors.” In this article, we use archaeology to support educators in communicating key aspects of deathways and the study of ancestors in Africa. We do this through an example drawn from the ancient kingdom of Aksum in Ethiopia (50–800 CE). Archaeologist Dilpreet Singh Basanti previously analyzed human remains from Aksum and reconstructed an ancient community’s burial and ongoing engagement with a young woman. Artist Naomi Mekonen has created a surrealist lens to present this woman’s story of death in this article’s figures. Surrealism is a rising perspective in modern art from the Tigray region and is used here to shift the tone from death as a grim tale of loss to death as a love story. We show how ongoing actions around the young woman’s tomb relate to her continued role in her family and community. Our example illustrates that ancestors are elements of healthy community life. Ancestors provide a guiding voice that helps to define people’s values and experiences of the world. In this way, ancestors are inseparable from “culture,” and exploring these themes helps us to appreciate the role of culture as a guiding way that connects generations of loved ones, living and dead.

Disappearing Kilimanjaro snow-Are we the last generation to explore equatorial glacier biodiversity?

Glaciation accompanied our human ancestors in Africa throughout the Pleistocene. Regrettably, equatorial glaciers and snow are disappearing rapidly, and we are likely the last generation who will get to know these peculiar places. Despite the permanently harsh conditions of glacier/snow habitats, they support a remarkable diversity of life ranging from bacteria to animals. Numerous papers have been devoted to microbial communities and unique animals on polar glaciers and high mountains, but only two reports relate to glacial biodiversity in equatorial regions, which are destined to melt completely within the next few decades. Equatorial glaciers constitute “cold islands” in tropics, and discovering their diversity might shed light on the biogeography, dispersal, and history of psychrophiles. Thus, an opportunity to protect biota of equatorial glaciers hinges on ex situ conservation. It is timely and crucial that we should investigate the glacial biodiversity of the few remaining equatorial glaciers.

Reconstructing the phylogenetic history of the tribe Leucocoryneae (Allioideae): Reticulate evolution and diversification in South America

At present, the Allioideae is included within the Amaryllidaceae, which is an economically important bulb crop subfamily that includes onion, garlic, and ornamental species worldwide. The Allioideae includes four tribes geographically disjunct namely: Allieae, widespread in the northern hemisphere, tribe Tulbaghieae distributed in South Africa, and tribes Leucocoryneae and Gilliesieae are endemic to South America. Although we agree with the current tribal circumscription of the Leucocoryneae including Beauverdia, Ipheion, Latace, Leucocoryne, Nothoscordum, and Tristagma, there are still taxonomic and phylogenetic uncertainties regarding the monophyly, phylogenetic relationships, and divergence time of several lineages in a biogeographic context. In this study, a comprehensive molecular phylogeny of the tribe Leucocoryneae was inferred based on nuclear ribosomal ITS and plastid (ndhF and matK) sequences. We used Bayesian inference and maximum parsimony analyses to predict ancestor-descendant relationships. Our results confirmed the monophyly of the four tribes of subfamily Allioideae. Similarly, within the Leucocoryneae, Ipheion, Leucocoryne, and Nothosocordum Sect. Inodorum were also monophyletic; Tristagma and Nothoscordum would be monophyletic if including Ipheion and Beauverdia, respectively. Network analyses were implemented to reveal putative scenarios of reticulate evolution. Both, current and ancestral hybridization events have presumably occurred among species of Nothoscordum Sect. Nothoscordum and Beauverdia favored by spatial overlapping of populations, flowering synchrony and a puzzling pattern of cytogenetic attributes. The estimation of divergence time indicates that the tribe Leucocoryneae originated in the Late Oligocene in southern South America with possible ancestors in Africa. Most crown lineages within the tribe diversified in conjunction with biogeographical events during the Late Miocene to Pliocene. We posit that new suitable environments available after the Andean uplift and during the Age of the Southern Plains provided the favorable geographic setting for the major lineages of Leucocoryneae in southern Pampas, extra-Andean Patagonia, Andean mountains, and in Chile. Hybridization, polyploidization, and Robertsonian translocations of chromosomes have been the driving forces and major sources of speciation in the evolution of tribe Leucocoryneae.

“The Glory-Beaming Banjo!”

“The Glory-Beaming Banjo!” Philip F. Gura (bio) Laurent Dubois. The Banjo: America’s African Instrument. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016. 364pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. In the mid-1990s when James F. Bollman and I began to discuss writing a book on the history of the banjo that treated its physical development as well as its cultural significance, the topic had not received extended scholarly attention. To most people, “the banjo” was a round-bodied wood-and-metal stringed instrument associated, since the mid-twentieth century, with bluegrass music, whose most accomplished player was Earl Scruggs. In the 1960s some aficionados of the folk revival began to collect earlier, simpler examples, because the sound of these instruments better fit the kinds of tunes they played. Most of these people, though, were more interested in the repertoire rather than in the history of their instruments. Bollman was a notable exception. His extensive collection of banjos, plus written and graphic ephemera, formed the core of our book, America’s Instrument: The Banjo in the Nineteenth Century (1999). Since that book’s publication, much new information about the banjo’s early history has emerged. In The Banjo, Laurent Dubois, a scholar who is best known for his work on the history of Haiti, effectively summarizes what is known and adds some new information.1 His study is wide-ranging: from the instrument’s ancestors in Africa before the commencement of the international slave trade to the death of American folk-singer Pete Seeger in 2014. The author’s original contribution comes in his discussion of the area he knows best, the early Caribbean, where he has ferreted out many new accounts of the instrument. For its pre-history in Africa and its subsequent development in the United States proper, he provides a generous and accurate summary of other scholars’ work and a suggestive, if sometimes speculative, narrative of the banjo’s larger significance. He wants to provide, he says, “a biography of the banjo” (p. 3). Why all the fuss about this particular instrument? Why not the guitar, or the accordion, or the piano? What about the banjo makes it so special that it has attracted an ever-increasing number of scholars, who now include historians of music, musical instruments, popular culture, the slave trade, folklore, and performance history, among others? According to Dubois, over several centuries, [End Page 505] the banjo became iconic of a crucial aspect of Western civilization—the formation and maintenance of community among enslaved Africans in their diaspora—and subsequently, in increasingly complicated ways, it was a central conduit between black and white cultures. Arguably, no other instrument has performed such complicated cultural work. His book helps us to understand how and why this is true, as the banjo passed back and forth between blacks and whites in a strange and vexed history. “In this curious instrument,” Dubois writes, “lives a history of American culture, a culture born out of the layered encounters between Africa, Europe, and the diverse societies of the Americas, from north to south” (p. 2). He begins his story by reviewing briefly the African stringed instruments of the banjo’s general appearance—“a rounded or oval body covered with an animal skin” (p. 21)—and argues that, while the instrument’s “shape, aesthetics, and meaning were influenced by the entire spectrum of stringed instruments on the continent,” including various kinds of lutes and harps, the form as we know it eventually emerged “from a cross-pollination between West and Central African musical cultures” (p. 23). For many years, scholars (Bollman and I included) pointed to the xalam or molo as the banjo’s immediate ancestor; but recent work by a diligent group of historians has located the akonting, still played today by the Jola in Gambia, as its most likely ancestor. The akonting’s “construction,” Dubois writes, “playing style, and the fact that it was a popular and vernacular instrument all suggest that it was likely one of the influential examples in the formation of the banjo in the Caribbean” (p. 47).2 Most experts now agree. The important point is that there was never anything in Africa called a...

A brief illustrated history on sunscreens and sun protection

AbstractNobody exactly knows when human beings begun protecting their skin from the sun. Our dark-skinned ancestors in Africa had the benefit of natural melanin to avoid sunburn. With migration to cooler regions, humans clothed themselves to avoid frost, losing their protective pigmentation. For cultural reasons, occidentals continued to cover their body up to the XIXthcentury. After World War I fashion wanted tanned bodies. Oils without protection to UV radiation were used. In 1935 Eugène Schueller, founder of L’Oreal, formulated the first radiation filtering product,“Ambre Solaire Huile”. Benjamin Green produced for the soldiers battling in the Pacific a red jelly substance as a physical blocker. The hazards of sun overexposure were already apparent. The product boomed under the brand Coppertone. In 1946 Franz Greiter developed the“Gletscher Créme”. In 1956 R. Schulz introduced the concept of the sun protection factor (SPF). All those products protected only against UVB radiation, whose main visible result is erythema. There was still no concern on the more penetrating UVA radiation, and skin cancer prevention nor on several other contemporary issues. Today we benefit from very high SPF products with broad UV protection. Solubility limitations and sensorial properties make them difficult to formulate and stabilize.

The Date of Interbreeding between Neandertals and Modern Humans

Comparisons of DNA sequences between Neandertals and present-day humans have shown that Neandertals share more genetic variants with non-Africans than with Africans. This could be due to interbreeding between Neandertals and modern humans when the two groups met subsequent to the emergence of modern humans outside Africa. However, it could also be due to population structure that antedates the origin of Neandertal ancestors in Africa. We measure the extent of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the genomes of present-day Europeans and find that the last gene flow from Neandertals (or their relatives) into Europeans likely occurred 37,000–86,000 years before the present (BP), and most likely 47,000–65,000 years ago. This supports the recent interbreeding hypothesis and suggests that interbreeding may have occurred when modern humans carrying Upper Paleolithic technologies encountered Neandertals as they expanded out of Africa.

PALEOEPIDEMIOLOGY OF INTESTINAL PARASITES AND LICE IN PRE-COLUMBIAN SOUTH AMERICA

Some human parasites originated in prehominid ancestors in Africa. Nematode species, such as Enterobius vermicularis (pinworm), hookworms and Trichuris trichiura are shared by humans and other close phylogenetic primates (Pan and Gorilla), showing that they infected a common ancestor to this group. When humans migrated from Africa to other continents they carried these parasites wherever climate conditions allowed parasite transmission from host to host. Other parasites, however, were acquired throughout human biological and social evolutive history when new territories were occupied. Paleoparasitology data is a valuable source to recover emergence and disappearance of parasite infections through analysis of archaeological remains. Parasites can be used as biological markers of prehistoric human migrations. They are also indicators of diet, as parasite life cycles are related to specific kinds of food consumed by human groups in the different habitats they occupied. We review paleoparasitological findings in South America, comparing human-host and intestinal parasites with life conditions and environmental relationships through time.

Christianity and Ancestor Veneration in Botswana

This paper is about Christianity and ancestor veneration in Botswana. It will be argued in this paper that though Botswana is predominantly a Christian country, belief in and veneration of ancestors continues unabated to the present day. It will be noted in the paper that the resilience of the belief in ancestors in Botswana is based on the fact that it is the core of Tswana Traditional Religion. It gives the people a sense of self-identity. Christian attempts to supplant this belief have failed, and many Christians today – especially those belonging to the African Independent Churches – live ambivalent lives with one foot entrenched in African traditional beliefs and the other in Christian beliefs and practices. The paper starts by analysing the belief in ancestors in Africa generally and then in Botswana in particular and concludes by observing that the Christian stand against belief in and veneration of ancestors has only created another brand of Christianity which is attracting many Batswana Christians because they feel it is relevant to them as Africans in their struggle for human existence both spiritually and materially.

A selective difference between human Y-chromosomal DNA haplotypes.

DNA analysis is making a valuable contribution to the understanding of human evolution [1]. Much attention has focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) [2] and the Y chromosome [3] [4], both of which escape recombination and so provide information on maternal and paternal lineages, respectively. It is often assumed that the polymorphisms observed at loci on mtDNA and the Y chromosome are selectively neutral and, therefore, that existing patterns of molecular variation can be used to deduce the histories of populations in terms of drift, population movements, and cultural practices. The coalescence of the molecular phylogenies of mtDNA and the Y chromosome to recent common ancestors in Africa [5] [6], for example, has been taken to reflect a recent origin of modern human populations in Africa. An alternative explanation, though, could be the recent selective spread of mtDNA and Y chromosome haplotypes from Africa in a population with a more complex history [7]. It is therefore important to establish whether there are selective differences between classes (haplotypes) of mtDNA and Y chromosomes and, if so, whether these differences could have been sufficient to influence the distributions of haplotypes in existing populations. A precedent for this hypothesis has been established for mtDNA in that one mtDNA background increases susceptibility to Leber hereditary optic neuropathy [8]. Although studies of nucleotide diversity in global samples of Y chromosomes have suggested an absence of recent selective sweeps or bottlenecks [9], selection may, in principle, be very important for the Y chromosome because it carries several loci affecting male fertility [10] [11] and as many as 5% of males are infertile [11] [12]. Here, we show that one class of infertile males, PRKX/PRKY translocation XX males, arises predominantly on a particular Y haplotypic background. Selection is, therefore, acting on Y haplotype distributions in the population.

Rethinking ancestors in Africa

Analyses of ancestor-related practices were a crucial component of structural-functional models of social organisations in Africa. In the 1970s the theories of lineage and segmentary social organisation upon which these studies depended were called into question. Ethnographic and historical research indicated a preponderance of migratory activities and a high degree of discontinuity and reorganisation in kin relations. As a result most anthropologists turned from lineage-based functional theory to historical models of social organisation. With the waning of lineage theory, studies of ancestors in Africa became a marginal issue for most scholars of African societies. Ancestor-related practices, however, continued to be important in the lives of many African people. On the basis of data from Ohafia, Nigeria, the article suggests that the structural-functional model of social structure and the historical model of social dynamics both have parallels in indigenous representations of the ancestral past. In academic discourse these two models are taken as 'schools of thought' which pro-pound incompatible explanatory arguments. However, these apparently contradic-tory representations unite as an irreducible whole in the lived experience of the people of Ohafia. It is suggested that this indigenous paradigm of knowledge about the past provides valuable insights, not only into how we might productively theorise the social, but also for how we evaluate the contributions of our own intellectual ancestors.