HENRY

Just a quick apology - the posting frequency here will decrease (and already has) until I finish my Ph.D. I’m in the last stages now (touch wood) and am hoping to be done by May.

This is an excellent post on how to boycott locked-down academic journals. It goes beyond the usual pro-open-access arguments and suggests ways that we can all help promote open-access journals, without jepeordising our careers.

One of the best, and easiest suggestions is this -

All scholars: Go out of your way to cite articles from open-access journals. One of the best ways for a journal to build its reputation is for its articles to be cited broadly. Read open-access journals and cite them. Oh, and while you’re at it, if you have a choice between citing a living author and a dead one, support the living one. The young scholar at Santa Cruz who’s extending Durkheim’s argument needs the cite more than Durkheim. Don’t forget that citations have politics and you can vote for the future with your choice of citations.

Today in PNAS, Domestication of the donkey: Timing, processes, and indicators (doi):

Domestication of the donkey from the African wild ass transformed ancient transport systems in Africa and Asia and the organization of early cities and pastoral societies. Genetic research suggests an African origin for the donkey, but pinpointing the timing and location of domestication has been challenging because donkeys are uncommon in the archaeological record and markers for early phases of animal domestication are hard to determine.

We present previously undescribed evidence for the earliest transport use of the donkey and new paleopathological indicators for early phases of donkey domestication. Findings are based on skeletal data from 10 ~5,000-year-old ass skeletons recently discovered entombed in an early pharaonic mortuary complex at Abydos, Middle Egypt, and a concurrent study of 53 modern donkey and African wild ass skeletons. Morphometric studies showed that Abydos metacarpals were similar in overall proportions to those of wild ass, but individual measurements varied. Midshaft breadths resembled wild ass, but midshaft depths and distal breadths were intermediate between wild ass and domestic donkey.

Despite this, all of the Abydos skeletons exhibited a range of osteopathologies consistent with load carrying. Morphological similarities to wild ass show that, despite their use as beasts of burden, donkeys were still undergoing considerable phenotypic change during the early Dynastic period in Egypt. This pattern is consistent with recent studies of other domestic animals that suggest that the process of domestication is slower and less linear than previously thought.

Aside: I was going to make some cheap joke about African Wild Asses (yes, I’m feeling that childish), but then saw that the lead author of this paper, Stine Rossel, died “in a tragic hiking accident shortly after the manuscript was submitted”. Very sad, but having something published is a little bit like immortality, right?

Is anyone out there attending evolang 2008? I would love to hear what’s happening there.

The reviews of Roland Emmerich’s new movie, 10,000 B.C. (”A prehistoric epic that follows a young mammoth hunter’s journey through uncharted territory to secure the future of his tribe”) are starting to come through, and it sounds like a bigger crapfest than Apocalypto:

In 10,000 BC, you’ve got Egyptian pyramids being built by guys using woolly mammoths. I mean, it’s the goddamn ice age, and then our main character walks over a hill and suddenly he’s in the Nile Valley of 2,000 BC? And these anachronistic bad guy Egyptians (from the ice age) have got ships, horseback riding, and freakin STEEL. Steel? C’mon, guys, you couldn’t even consult Wikipedia? I mean, why not just call the movie 2,000 BC and make it about ancient Egypt? Or keep it in 10,000 BC and come up with some other kind of bad guys? Jeezus.

Even BETTER are the comments on the IMDB’s forums:

This movie is set before God created heaven and earth and it’s an abomination to create man before god even thought of him.

If the producers of this film would have tried this blasephemous crap 5,300 years ago, Adam and Seth would have thrashed them with their pet Triceratops.

Yes. Thrashed them with a pet Triceratops, indeed.

Dear Zoo Visitor:

Sorry to hear about your disappointment during your visit, but, yes, “sexual” behavior is normal for bonobos in the wild, including juveniles. In fact, most behaviors, obviously all those involving juveniles, that involve two or more bonobos in “sexual” activity are not really sexual in the sense of procreation, rather they are social. “Homosexual” behavior in bonobos like what you may have witnessed is not analogous to that seen in humans, regarding either intentions or anatomy. It appears that much of the sexual activity is a form of bonding, appeasement and displacement that replaces some of the grooming and aggression seen in other species.

Read the rest of the letter here

One of my favorite bits of science trivia is that the great physicist Richard Feynman was an avid player of the bongo drum:

(Thanks MeFi)