An arid thorn-scrub model for invention of clothing

A news item in Archaeology Headlines for January 10 (www.archaeology.org/news/) showing that humans began wearing clothing between 83,000 and 170,000 years ago repeats a common assumption that I think is wrong. The lead scientist on the team, David Reed, was quoted as saying, “I find it surprising that modern humans were tinkering with clothing probably long before they really needed it for survival,” i.e., before they left Africa for the colder climate of Europe. Archaeologist Ian Gilligan at the Australian National University in Canberra, who did not take part in this research, was quoted in the article, saying "It means modern humans probably started wearing clothes on a regular basis to keep warm when they were first exposed to ice age conditions" that began about 130,000 to 180,000 years ago.

Why does no one think about why clothes might have been needed in a hot arid environment where modern humans evolved? These research findings were reported in our local newspaper on the same day as an article about the “Lost Boys of Sudan.” This article quoted a southern Sudanese man of the Dinka tribe, now at Simon Fraser University, describing his long trek at age six with other orphaned boys to a refugee camp after their village had been destroyed by raiders from the north and their parents murdered. They had fled without shoes, but when their feet became bloody, they made sandals from dried antelope skins. If these six-year-olds could invent sandals to enable travel across stony, thorny ground, why would not archaic Homo sapiens do so? Moreover, anyone who has walked through the arid thorn-scrub that characterises much of eastern and southern Africa knows how difficult it is to avoid thorns. After inventing sandals, how long would it be until people began throwing animal skins over their shoulders to ward off thorns?

Strategic Implications of Climate change

In my prevous post, I mentioned the crisis in Sahelian countries as what we can expect from climate change. This post enlarges on the first paragraph. The climate change crisis is not about when it will affect us, but which country it will destroy next. Darfur is a prime example.
The carnage in the Sudan continues, even though climate change has pushed it to the back pages. Meanwhile, the neo-climate change news coverage is framed as, “if we don’t act now, then sometime in the future we will be in trouble.” It turns out that climate change and the humanitarian crisis in the Sudan are related.
The trouble in Darfur results from camel-riding nomads, or young men from nomadic cultures, who are mainly Muslim, attacking settled farming peoples of the south and west, who are mainly Christian. Clearly, the nomads have government support and encouragement, making the current phase of this crisis a political and religious crusade.
No one, except, apparently the jinjaweed themselves, can countenance their murderous attacks on the settled (mostly black) farmers, but the nomads from the north are not to blame for this crisis.
We are. The roots of this crisis are in the colonial enslavement in the first half of the last century, and in misguided international aid efforts that began in the 1960s. Prior to these western interventions, the nomads moved their flocks with the seasons in a relationship with their dry environment that had been stable for at least five millennia. Forced settlement by the colonial masters, followed by well-drilling to ease poverty and encourage farming, disrupted the pastoral patterns and caused large-scale desertification and loss of wildlife habitat. This resulted in continuous famine in various parts of the Sahel since 1968. The famines of 1973–1975 and 1984 were especially severe and burned into our minds the plight of starving people in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Biafra (now returned to Nigeria) and other Sahelian countries. Climate change that began to be felt in the 1980s made it worse. The connection with climate change has been known for more than two decades and was discovered by Canadian wildlife biologists.
Firs, let’s correct an error that has crept into the new reports. The camel-riding nomads from the Sahel, the vast dry savanna and semi-arid desert that lies between the Sahara desert and the green jungles of tropical Africa, are not ethnic Arabs. Although Arabic has been widely spoken in the region since Muslim conquests around 1200 years ago, many people of Chad, northern Sudan and Ethiopia speak endemic minority languages such as Nubian, in the Nilo-Saharan language group; Beja, in the Cushitic language groups; and Kordofanian languages. Nilo-Saharan languages predominate in the south. To the west, in Niger, Mali and southern Algeria, the nomad peoples, such as the Tuareg, speak Berber languages. To lump these people in with “Arabs” as is so often seen in newspaper articles, distorts our perspective.
After forced settlement in the colonial era, desertification intensified with well-intentioned but short-sighted and misinformed development aid projects. Canadian wildlife biologists A. R. E. Sinclair and J. M. Fryxell of the University of British Columbia noted in 1985 (C J. Zool. 63:987-994) that until the mid 1950s, the normal land use in the north of Sudan and indeed throughout the southern fringe of the Sahel—the semi-arid rangeland that is drier than the grasslands to the south but moister than the arid Sahara to the north—was pastoralism with migration following the rain. Human movements mimicked wildlife movements.
In the southern part of the region, the migration was annual and regular. This was the pattern, or example, of some 800,000 white-eared kob, an antelope of southeastern Sudan. Human migration mirrored that of wildlife: pastoralists in the southern fringe of the Sahel took their livestock, mostly cattle, south to the grasslands and fringes of flood plains of Lake Chad and the Senegal, Niger and Chari river basins where vegetation was dominated by perennial grasses.
In the north, however, closer to the Sahara where rainfall was less, the vegetation was dominated by annual grasses, forbs, desert shrubs, and acacia trees. The large wild ungulates of this region, such as the red-fronted and dorcas gazelles, fringe-eared and scimitar-horned oryx, and addax, did not follow annual north-south migrations, and neither did the people. Cattle cannot survive in this dry country, and cannot be driven far enough to reach grasslands and water in summer. Instead, people raised sheep and goats, which can subsist on dry brush and need less water. They and their flocks, like the wildlife, moved nomadically within the region in search of forage. They camped where they found water and forage, and when it was gone they covered large distances in search of rainfall and grass.
After the Second World War, western countries increased their food and development aid to Africa. That encouraged the pastoralists and others to settle around dug and drilled wells. With the wells, farmers and settled pastoralists could increase their flock and herd sizes, but this caused severe overgrazing around the new wells. The famine of 1973–1975 followed periods of below-average rainfall, but the pastoral grazing system had withstood such droughts before. Those droughts were well within the naturally high variability of rainfall in the Sahel. The human tragedies were caused by massive starvation of livestock because of overgrazing, not lack of rainfall. What Sinclair and Fryxell, the wildlife biologists, discovered was that the climate had changed, rainfall was declining over time, and this had exacerbated desertification. Later famines, such as the one of 1984, were climate-related.
They did not know then that the climate change that they detected resulted in part from greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Instead, they hypothesized that the human-caused overgrazing itself caused a decline in rainfall by making less moisture from plant transpiration available uptake by air currents and redistribution to the drier environments to the north. This is no doubt part of the story.
In 1988, a biologist writing about wildlife conservation (John E. Newby: Aridland Wildlife in Decline), also connected the deterioration of range conditions in the Sahel with conflict between nomad herders and farmers and began early in the colonial period:
“In the past, permanent use of sub-Saharan grasslands was not only difficult, since water resources were largely ephemeral, but also constrained by tribal warfare that dissuaded the establishment or activities of isolated groups of people. With the subjugation of the powerful nomadic tribes during the early colonial period, large areas of no-mans’ land, previously inhabited by wildlife, became available to man. Farmers were tree to extend their fields...farmers were perhaps for the first time able to extend their activities into the northern Sahel.”
The colonial masters brought large numbers of black slaves and serfs into the nomads’ territory, and with emancipation, they settled there. Newby further wrote that,
“With independence in the early 1960s, the new Sahelian states began to benefit from international aid programmes, foremost of which was the development of the waterless pastoral lands. Boreholes were sunk, deep wells cemented, and pumping stations installed, and for a short time the nomads had access to rich, new pastoral resources. What the developers failed to foresee, however, was the gross overgrazing that was to take place, the subsequent erosion and the desertification. Neither did they take into account the droughts of the late 1960s and 1970s. With changed herding patterns and increased livestock numbers, millions of head of cattle died for want of food, not water.”
The nomads were being hit from both ends: the wildlife that they had hunted for meat and leather was disappearing along with forage for their livestock in the arid north, and farmers were moving into their traditional dry-season territories areas to the south. The loss of wildlife such as oryx, addax, barbary sheep, two species of gazelles, and ostriches, was acute because these animals were important not only for meat, but for their importance in the cultures of these desert nomads. Oryx hide, for example, has particular uses not easily replaced by sheepskin or cowhide. Giraffes, which occur in the southern fringe of the Sahel where the nomads summer, provide another unique product: their tails are valued as wedding gifts (Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma by J. Michael Fay and Michael Nichols, National Geographic, March 2007). The cultural disruption caused by desertification has de-stabilized nomadic societies as much as the loss of livestock.
Since the rangeland and wildlife research in the 1980s, climate research has shown that global warming is playing a large part in desertification of the Sahel, and has done so for a quarter of a century.
In Darfur, the on-going human tragedy, although abetted by the current government for political reasons (albeit with a religious veneer), is fundamentally an ecological crisis caused first by poor land use, and second by climate change. The nomads are not to blame, except for those actually riding the camels and wielding the weapons. They are victims as much as the farmers they are attacking. The fight is not about religion, politics, or even land. It is about forage for livestock and the loss of rangeland productivity that has sustained the nomadic cultures of the Sahel for at least 5000 years. Disputes like these will spread as a consequence of global warming. We cannot sit in our comfortable homes and worry about what will happen to us in 50 or 100 years if we do not deal effectively with climate change. Canadian soldiers, diplomats, and, yes, even wildlife biologists, have already experienced the results of climate change in the Sahel and a good proportion of our international aid goes there. If we consider “us” to be all of us on this planet, the tragedy of climate change has already begun and it will get worse unless we stop it.
References consulted in this essay
Berger, Joel. 2004. The last mile: how to sustain long-distance migration in mammals. Conservation Biology 18:320–331.
Fryxell, J. M. 1987. Food limitation and demography of a migratory antelope, the white-eared kob. Oecologia 72:83-91.
Hulme, Mike, Ruth Doherty, Todd Ngara, Mark New, and David Lister. 2001. African Climate Change: 1900-2100. Climate Research 17:145-168.
Kabii, T. 1996. An Overview of African Wetlands. Ramsar Bureau, Switzerland. 6 pp.
Newby, John E. 1988. Aridland wildlife in decline, Pp 146-166 in A. Dixon, and D. Jones, (eds) Conservation and Biology of Desert Antelopes. London, Christopher Helm Ltd.
Sinclair, A. R. E., and J. M. Fryxell. 1985. The Sahel of Africa: ecology of a disaster. Canadian Journal of Zoology 63:987-994.

Why the Copenhagen meeting on Climate Change is important

Like Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his delegation going to Copenhagen this week, I, too, have been thinking about global warming—since 1985 when I read an article in the Canadian Journal of Zoology by two Canadian wildlife biologists (Sinclair, A. R. E. and J. M. Fryxell. 1985. The Sahel of Africa: ecology of a disaster. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 63:987-994). The article gave evidence that the weather was changing in the Sahel, the arid grassland region on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, and that this was partly the reason for the mass starvations of livestock and people in the 1970s and 1980s. Remember the television images of people starving and dying in their thousands in Eritrea, and Biafra? Sinclair and Fryxel proposed that the cause of the climate change in the Sahel was desertification caused by land mis-management and they got it partly right. But they could not have known then, as we now do, that part of the drying was caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. Yes, you and I share responsibility for countless deaths from starvation in Africa. Our culpability grows when we realize that conflicts like those in Sudan and Somalia derive from the same source: too many goats, sheep, cows and camels competing for too little forage and forcing families, clans and countries to confront each other over water and territory.
(please let me know if you would like a more detailed discussion of the agove paragraph, with references).
In 1987, as a middle manager with Environment Canada, I attended my first briefing on climate change. That was the year Canada hosted an international meeting in Montreal that resulted in an agreement to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), a gas used in refrigeration systems that causes atmospheric ozone depletion, another aspect of climate change.
Five years later I had risen enough in the ranks, as well as in the science, to be the briefer instead of the briefee. In 1993, in a briefing to the Regional Director General and the regional executives of Environment Canada, Pacific & Yukon Region in Vancouver, I quoted this from John H. Gibbons and his colleagues in the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in a 1989 article from Scientific American on "Managing Planet Earth.":
“Even if industrial countries managed to halve their carbon dioxide emissions...population growth and economic development in the less developed countries would most likely drive up their carbon dioxin emissions from 450 to 900 kilograms per person per year by 2030. Annual worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide would then be 2.5 times what they are today....The path of industrial development in China, for instance, could have a greater effect on the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide that of any other nation. China's critical role stems from its large and growing population, its tendency toward energy intensive processes, its poor energy efficiency and its massive reliance on coal.”
I prepared that briefing after my first visit to China and before the publication of my Environment Canada report, Biodiversity in British Columbia: our changing environment, which was in peer review at the time and was published in early 1994. It contained a chapter, which I wrote with co-author Eric Taylor of the Atmospheric Environment Service, “Atmospheric change in British Columbia.” The title itself says quite a lot, because, back then, Environment Canada had not officially accepted that climate change would, in fact, occur with continuing increases of greenhouse gases. I was not allowed to use the term, nor to imply that the changes that I documented as already occurring in British Columbia—increasing precipitation on the coast, drying and winter warming in the interior, increased frequency of forest fires and increased spread of destructive forest insects—were the result of human-caused climate change.
The purpose of my 1993 briefing to the regional executives was to explain why Canada should support the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the precursor to the Kyoto Protocol. I pointed out the example of China as one of several vigorously developing countries whose air emissions would be crucial to success in controlling global warming:
• China led the world in per capita economic growth during 1965-1989, and would continue to do so at least through 2025,
• World economic growth assumptions, and hence the projected rate of increase in greenhouse gasses, had to be revised upwards for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 1992 supplementary report, partly because of China's unexpectedly strong performance,
• In 1990 China's carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GNP were four times higher than the global average, and five time higher that OECD countries, owing to inefficient production, transportation/ transmission systems, and patterns of consumption,
• The greenhouse gas emission projections are highly sensitive to population and economic growth assumptions, and most of the uncertainty over future growth in greenhouse gas emissions was likely to depend on how developing countries such as China chose to meet their economic and social needs.
As an example of this last point, I noted that if China did not build the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River—the world’s largest, which was extremely controversial at the time—it would forgo electricity equivalent to the consumption of 40-50 million tons of raw coal, or to 10 nuclear generating stations, or to seven 2.4 million KW thermal generating stations and associated coal mines and railroad transportation. The dam would, according to Chinese official estimates, cut carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen-oxide emissions by 100 millions tons, 2 million tons, 10,000 tons and 370,000 tons, respectively. Against these energy and climate change benefits, the dam would displace 1.2 million people and endanger many rare Yangtze River species, such as the unique Chinese river dolphin.
(The conservationists were right: the Chinese river dolphin was officially declared extinct on December 13, 2007.)
My take-home message to the Environment Canada executives was that the stability of our own ecosystems here at home, and the industries and commerce that they support, depend on the success of international agreements such as the UNFCCC.
Another chapter in Biodiversity in BC, “Threats to diversity of forest ecosystems in British Columbia” showed that insect infestations had increased exponentially during the 1980s and 1990s, coinciding with record warm winters. One species, the mountain pine beetle, had recently overwintered further north than ever before, and reproduced earlier. The damage had gone from an annual average of about 250,000 hectares to a peak of 1.1 million hectares and I warned that, with global warming, forest pests could increase further. Sure enough, by 2004, the scale had scale of insect damage had grown to 9.0 million in 2004, and the BC Government acknowledged that it was at least in part due to global warming.
In 2005, the federal government chipped in $100 million, on top of British Columbia’s $101 million, to combat the mountain pine beetle, just one of the two dozen species that regularly damage our forest. This a cost of not controlling climate change. Others include damage to forest and residences from forest fires, damage from increasing floods stronger storms, rising costs of insurance payouts and premiums, and so on. These costs grow annually are not hypothetical: British Columbians and other Canadians are paying cash for them.
There are even more ominous threats that centre on global trade. Canada sells a lot of food (mainly wheat) to other countries and buys a lot of food (mainly fresh produce and specialty foods) from them. Our selling depends on being able to produce surpluses and finding buyers who can afford them. Our buying depends on being able to afford it and finding sellers with surpluses. Given the climate change impacts in the most recent IPCC report, completed February 3, 2007, these are matters of increasing uncertainty. Climate change disruptions in food production and wealth generation systems in other countries will affect us. Our survival may depend on joining with other countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, in 1997, as Canada prepared for the negotiations on greenhouse gas controls under the UNFCCC, to be held in Kyoto later that year, Canada asked its top scientists to prepare an eight-volume “Country Study.” Its purpose was to brief negotiators and the bureaucracy that supported them on the implications of Climate change for Canada. Volume I, British Columbia and Yukon, contained my chapter on ecosystem response to climate change and 25 other chapters detailing the potential impacts on Canada’s environment and a range of response options that focused on greenhouse gas emission reductions. As a result, Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol in April 1998 and, with even stronger science evidence, ratified it in December 2002.
When I was first in Shanghai in 1993, the city’s 14 million people owned seven million bicycles and almost no private cars. Busses, trucks and a few taxis inched their way through streets filled with bicycles, pedestrians and handcarts. By 2003, the human population had increased by another 2 million (6 million, if outlying cities are included), the number of bicycles had increased at a lower rate than the people, and 200,000 private cars were in use
China’s CO2 emissions rose rapidly from 1978 to 1996, mostly as a result of increasing automobile use and new coal-fired power plants. Coal-fired power plants now provide 70% of its electricity supply, compared to 24% hydroelectric power. China gets just 2.3% of its electricity from nine nuclear power plants, but plans to build another 30 by 2020. Its CO2 emissions fell 7% by 2000, however, as a result of new hydroelectric power (principally from the Three Gorges Dam) and the closing of coal-fired plants. US emissions grew by 5% in the same period. Canada’s also grew. In 2005, China stopped construction of 22 more coal-fired power plants, possibly to try to embarrass the United States into signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.
The amount of pollution in China’s air is becoming legendary. In 1995, my wife and I visited Qingdao, a coastal city blessed with sea breezes that blow its pollution inland from its popular sandy beaches. We did not notice any particularly thick air. In December 2007, however, I returned to Qingdao, taking with me our 1995 tourist map of the city. A new edition of the map showed that the city had expanded to about 3 times its former size and the air pollution was more than noticeable: inland from the beach, it was so dirty that it hurt my eyes and lungs. One day the highway west (downwind) of the city was closed because drivers couldn’t see the road. My pictures taken in a nature sanctuary some 400 km northwest of Qingdao, halfway between there and Beijing, show migratory birds in a thick soup of air pollution on an otherwise clear, sunny winter day.
The data on China’s, the United States,’ India’s and other countries’ air emissions make a mockery of Canada’s politicians’ sudden efforts to convince us to give up our SUVs. (I drive one because as a wildlife biologist and I need it for fieldwork, but my wife and I gave up our second car years ago and willingly arrange our schedules accordingly.) Of course we as citizens need to do that because it is the right thing to do. We should recognize, however, that to make a meaningful impact on global warming, we will have to set rigorous emission limits for commercial vehicles and our most polluting industries. Even this will not actually dent global CO2 emissions much, but it will buy us a place at the table—the Copenhagen table—where we can hopefully influence the countries whose emissions do matter, such as the United States, China, and India. Our future depends on it.