Science News: New Monkey Species Discovered in the Amazon

New Monkey Species Discovered in the Amazon

Wow, a lot of new species from Brazil have been in the news recently. Here’s an article from Guardian about the discovery of a new type of titi monkey, found in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil.

Monkey belonging to the Callicebus genus found in Mato Grosso on an expedition backed by WWF-Brazil

Via GuardianUK…

“A monkey sporting a ginger beard and matching fiery red tail, discovered in a threatened region of the Brazilian Amazon, is believed to be a species new to science.

The primate was found in relatively untouched pockets of forest in Mato Grosso, the region that has been worst-affected by illegal deforestation and land conflicts…

The expedition, backed by conservation group WWF, also found probable new fish and plant species, all of which are now being studied.”

Protests Over Belo Monte Power Plant Construction

Sao Paulo Protests Against Belo Monte Dam

Global Voices reports that protests against Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam took place on Avenida Paulista in Sao Paulo from August 19th thru August 22nd. While construction is already underway, the protesters sought to advocate for the rights of the indigenous Xingu population.

Police say about 800 people attended, which, in my opinion, isn’t particularly impressive. I don’t mean to belittle the cause, by any means, but it will be interesting to see if this grows into any sort of movement or if it is simply isolated protest events.

The protests did occur in numerous other cities as well, though Global Voices didn’t report any numbers. Some good pictures and videos on their site, though:

Uncontacted Brazilian Tribe Apparently Slayed By Peruvian Drug Gang

Really? This is so sad. I was shocked when I heard in the video that “the Peruvian government suggests that these tribes don’t exist at all.” Umm…well, here’s the proof, Peru. The fact that this tribe may have just been wiped out so inconsequentially makes me really worry for humanity.

‘Uncontacted’ Tribe May be Lost Forever

The video footage of an “uncontacted” tribe in the Amazon shows scenes that look as if they're from a long-lost world. Sadly, this may be all too true, as suspected Peruvian drug-smugglers are thought to have scared this tribe away, if not killed them outright.

Via Daily Maverick…

In January the BBC broadcast footage of an “uncontacted” Brazilian tribe as part of its “Human Planet” documentary series. The first photos of this tribe, which lives in the Javari Valley in the Amazon, about 20km from the Peruvian border, had been released in 2008, and a video clip is also available on the website of NGO Survival International.

José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, who works for Brazil’s Indian affairs department, has been studying the tribe for the last 20 years. The decision to allow the pictures and footage to be shot, and released to the wider public, was a strategic one. “Without proof they exist, the outside world won’t support them,” Meirelles said. “One image of them has more impact than 1,000 reports.”

The pictures were taken from 1km away, with powerful zoom lenses, so as not to intrude unduly. The tribe has been increasingly exposed to the danger of unwanted contact. “If illegal loggers or miners contact these people, they won’t shoot images … they’ll shoot guns,” said Meirelles. However, one threat he didn’t specifically mention was that of drug dealers…

Brazil’s ‘Uncontacted’ Amazon Tribe Attacked by Drug Gang

In what authorities in Brazil have deemed a “massacre,” a remote tribe in the Amazon jungle was reportedly attacked by Peruvian drug traffickers last month. The tribe was thought to never have made contact with the outside world.

The Brazilian indigenous protection service had been guarding the tribe, but their outpost was attacked by a heavily armed group from Peru. Since the raid, which was allegedly perpetrated by cocaine smugglers, there have been no sightings of the tribespeople anywhere.

The tribal village sat in the jungle near the Peruvian border on the western edge of Brazil. State agencies, who initially left the indigenous people alone, are now searching for any survivors.

“We decided to come back here because we believed that these guys may be massacring the isolated [tribe],” Carlos Travassos, the head of Brazil’s department for isolated indigenous peoples, told the Brazilian news Web site IG.

“We are more worried than ever,” he said. “The situation could be one of the greatest blows we have seen to the work to protect isolated Indians in decades. A catastrophe … genocide!”

Guards reportedly found a backpack punctured with broken arrows on the tribe’s now-empty land. The bag is assumed to have belonged to one of the armed men who stormed the area with rifles and machine guns. Police have detained a Portuguese man with a criminal record in connection with the event.

“Arrows are like the identity card of uncontacted Indians. We think the Peruvians made the Indians flee. Now we have good proof,” Travassos added.

According to some accounts coming from Brazil, the Peruvian gang may still be present in the area, protecting the land with machine guns. It is assumed that the gang wants to use the territory to establish a trafficking route to Acre, Brazil, or to harvest the coca plant, used to make cocaine.

Read More Via IBTimes…

Areal Footage of Uncontacted Tribe in Brazil

Here Are Two Videos Showing Areal Footage of The Uncontacted Community in Brazil, One From The Website UncontactedTribes.Org and The Other From BBC One…VERY INTERESTING!

Weird Science News: New Photos Of Uncontacted Tribe in Brazil

I seriously cannot get enough of this…

New Uncontacted Group Confirmed in Brazil

so, it's not OK to "contact" them, and yet it is OK to fly right over them through the sky in airplanes

The Javari Valley

The newly-identified group lives in the Javari valley, a South Carolina-sized region set aside by the Brazilian government for indigenous people. About 2,000 uncontacted people are believed to live there, making it the last great stronghold of groups who’ve utterly eschewed industrial civilization.

“There are about seven groups who have been contacted, and what the Brazilian government says is that they’ve found references to about 14 uncontacted indigenous groups,” said Watson. “Some of those groups may be the same people. It’s hard to say exactly how many there are.”

The most recent contact was made in 1996 with a group of Korubo tribespeople. (Above is videotape from that encounter.) Though government policy is to avoid contact altogether, they were moving toward an area occupied by loggers, making it necessary to warn them away.

Via Wired Science…

Culture: Tribes of Brazil: Language and Cognition of the Amondawa, An Amazonian Tribe

Tribes of the Amazon: The Amondawa Tribe and Their Unique Conceptualization of Time

It’s pretty obvious to me that language influences thought. It dictates our concepts and shapes our worldview. We saw this with the Pirahã, and now with the Amondawa. I am completely fascinated by the diversity in language and customs of all of these tribal groups found in the Amazon, there is so much we don’t know, and that’s really exciting to me as it presents something to explore. Since I’ve been writing all morning about the unique languages of amazonian tribes, here’s another cool one that’s undermining our western notions of how language works:

Telling Time in Amondawa

In a new study published in the journal Language and Cognition “When Time is Not Space,” a team of researchers from University of Portsmouth and Federal University of Rondonia claim that the Amondawa, a small Amazonian tribe, speak a language with a very uncommon conceptualization of time. The story was recently picked up by BBC, revealing that the debate about whether language influences thought is very much alive and newsworthy.

The Amondawa lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space – as in our idea of, for example, “working through the night”.

The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the Amondawa recognise events occuring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept.

The idea is a controversial one, and further study will bear out if it is also true among other Amazon languages.

The Amondawa were first contacted by the outside world in 1986, and now researchers from the University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Rondonia in Brazil have begun to analyse the idea of time as it appears in Amondawa language.

“We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time’,” said Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth.

“Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events,” he told BBC News.

“What we don’t find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring; they don’t have a notion of time which is something the events occur in.”

The Amondawa language has no word for “time”, or indeed of time periods such as “month” or “year”.

The people do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their lives or as they achieve different status within the community.

But perhaps most surprising is the team’s suggestion that there is no “mapping” between concepts of time passage and movement through space.

Ideas such as an event having “passed” or being “well ahead” of another are familiar from many languages, forming the basis of what is known as the “mapping hypothesis”.

But in Amondawa, no such constructs exist.

“None of this implies that such mappings are beyond the cognitive capacities of the people,” Professor Sinha explained. “It’s just that it doesn’t happen in everyday life.”

When the Amondawa learn Portuguese – which is happening more all the time – they have no problem acquiring and using these mappings from the language.

The team hypothesises that the lack of the time concept arises from the lack of “time technology” – a calendar system or clocks – and that this in turn may be related to the fact that, like many tribes, their number system is limited in detail.

(Via BBC) Read the whole article…

Culture: Tribes of Brazil: Can The Pirahã, an Amazonian Tribe, Change our Understanding of Language?

From “The Good Blood”:

HAS ONE AMAZONIAN TRIBE CHANGED OUR UNDERSTANDING OF LANGUAGE?

 

Fascinating article in the New Yorker about a linguist and his lifetime adventure among the Pirahã tribe, in the Amazon. It is, at the same time, an über-geek search for the meaning of language, an academic drama involving Chomsky and the concept of “universal grammar” and the brain, a difficult spiritual journey for one man, and a description of a language that is so foreign and strange that might as well have come from another planet.

“For the first several years I was here, I was disappointed that I hadn’t gone to a ‘colorful’ group of people,” Everett told me. “I thought of the people in the Xingu, who paint themselves and use the lip plates and have the festivals. But then I realized that this is the most intense culture that I could ever have hoped to experience. This is a culture that’s invisible to the naked eye, but that is incredibly powerful, the most powerful culture of the Amazon. Nobody has resisted change like this in the history of the Amazon, and maybe of the world.”

According to the best guess of archeologists, the Pirahã arrived in the Amazon between ten thousand and forty thousand years ago, after bands of Homo sapiens from Eurasia migrated to the Americas over the Bering Strait. The Pirahã were once part of a larger Indian group called the Mura, but had split from the main tribe by the time the Brazilians first encountered the Mura, in 1714. The Mura went on to learn Portuguese and to adopt Brazilian ways, and their language is believed to be extinct. The Pirahã, however, retreated deep into the jungle. In 1921, the anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú spent time among the Pirahã and noted that they showed “little interest in the advantages of civilization” and displayed “almost no signs of permanent contact with civilized people.” (…)

To Everett, the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality—he called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle”—explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?” Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys’ model airplanes to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahã’s lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents.

The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?

News: Science: Brazilian Government Identifies Uncontacted Tribe

a closeup of uncontacted native peoples. "really? that exists?"

The Brazilian government confirmed this week the existence of an uncontacted tribe in a southwestern area of the Amazon rain forest.

Three large clearings in the area had been identified by satellite, but the population’s existence was only verified after airplane expeditions in April gathered more data, the National Indian Foundation said in a news release Monday.

The government agency, known by its Portuguese acronym Funai, uses airplanes to avoid disrupting isolated groups. Brazil has a policy of not contacting such tribes but working to prevent the invasion of their land to preserve their autonomy. Funai estimates 68 isolated populations live in the Amazon.

The most recently identified tribe, estimated at around 200 individuals, live in four large, straw-roofed buildings and grow corn, bananas, peanuts and other crops. According to Funai, preliminary observation indicates the population likely belongs to the pano language group, which extends from the Brazilian Amazon into the Peruvian and Bolivian jungle.

The community is near the border with Peru in the massive Vale do Javari reservation, which is nearly the size of Portugal and is home to at least 14 uncontacted tribes.

“The work of identifying and protecting isolated groups is part of Brazilian public policy,” said the Funai coordinator for Vale do Javari, Fabricio Amorim, in a statement. “To confirm something like this takes years of methodical work.”

The region has a constellation of uncontacted peoples considered the largest in the world, said Amorim. In addition to the 14 known groups, Funai has identified through satellite images or land excursions up to eight more tribes.

That adds up to a population of about 2,000 individuals in the reservation, Amorim said.

Their culture, and even their survival, is threatened by illegal fishing, hunting, logging and mining in the area, along with deforestation by farmers, missionary activity and drug trafficking along Brazil’s borders, Amorim said.

Oil exploration in the Peruvian Amazon could also destabilize the region, he said.

In spite of the threats, most of Brazil’s indigenous groups maintain their languages and traditions.

Many have long fought for control of land in which they’ve traditionally lived on. They won legal rights to reclaim that territory in Brazil’s 1988 constitution, which declared that all indigenous ancestral lands be demarcated and turned over to tribes within five years.

So far, 11 percent of Brazilian territory and nearly 22 percent of the Amazon has been turned over to such groups.

Aerial view of the Amazon rainforest: satellite pictures revealed small clearings where an uncontacted community is living. Photograph: Gerd Ludwig/ Gerd Ludwig/Corbis

*Sources: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=13897599; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/22/new-tribe-discovered-amazon

 

Environmental News: Brazil Sends Troops to Amazon to Protect Rural Workers on Loggers’ Death List

This past weekend, Brazil’s  National Public Security Force agents escorted a group of nine people (four adults and five children) from a model farming community settlement in Nova Ipixuna to the city of Marabá in the state of Pará.

The National Force was created in 2004 during the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration as part of an attempt to dealwith security on a national scale, as opposed to the local or regional focus of the Polícia Militar.

The ranks of the Force are filled by specially trained members of the Military Police and firemen and is subordinated to the Ministry of Justice’s National Secretariat of Public Security.

The model farming community at Nova Ipixuna has been targeted by loggers. The community practices sustainable use of natural forest resources. Last month, a married couple was assassinated there.

The couple, José Claudio and Maria do Espírito Santo, made a living mainly by harvesting nuts and were environmental activists who stood up to logging interests.

One of the people in the group escorted by Força Nacional troops was the sister of Jose Claudio, who is also on a death threat list. The escort operation was part of Operation Defense of Life, which is intended to combat land conflict assassinations in the states of Pará, Rondônia and Amazonas.

According to the Ministry of Justice, the Pará state Human Rights Center will begin to examine the Nova Ipixuna murders  this Monday, June 20. Meanwhile, the National Force will protect other people who have received death threats.

Besides the National Force, Operation Defense of Life is supported by the Federal Police, the Highway Police and representatives of the federal government: the Secretariat of Human Rights, the Presidency’s General Secretariat and the ministries of Agrarian Development, Defense, Environment, along with representatives of national councils of Justice and government attorneys.

At least 200,000 people make a living by using natural resources in the state of Amazonas. They fish, they gather nuts, vegetable oils or fibers. Others harvest fruit, such as açaí, or make handicrafts from wood.

Some are rubber tappers. In Portuguese, they are engaged in extrativisimo – sustainable exploitation of the forest, without destroying it. Many of them live in what are supposed to be protected areas known as “reservas extrativistas.”

Célia Regina das Neves, who lives in the Reserva Extrativista Mãe Grande, in Curuçá, in the state of Pará, says there are serious problems in the communities due to a lack of government presence.

“There is a huge demand for services. There are questions about production, family life, community organization and use of natural resources. But the biggest problem is certainly land ownership,” she declared.

The president of the National Council of Extrativistas, Manoel Silva da Cunha, says the problem is longstanding. He points out that people were given incentives to migrate during the rubber boom (at the beginning of the 20th century) and wound up occupying lands that had owners.

“This problem has not been resolved and just gets worse. Today there are ownership disputes even in areas that the federal or state governments have decreed to be conservation units,” he says.

At the ministry of Environment, the director of the Forest Department, João de Deus Medeiros, says the idea is to stimulate harmonious relations between people and the forest. “We support production, work with producers to obtain higher aggregated value and price guarantees. We assist producers place their goods on the market. All this has had interesting results,” he declared.

The director-general of the Brazilian Forest Service, Carlos Hummel, says his organization works to show people that conserving the forest (for exploitation) can generate income.

Meanwhile, the new government program, Brazil Without Misery, will distribute a Green Subsidy (“Bolsa Verde”) of 300 reais (US$ 188) for families that conserve the environment where they work.

*Sources: http://www.brazzilmag.com/component/content/article/99-june-2011/12605-brazil-sends-troops-to-amazon-to-protect-rural-workers-on-loggers-death-list.html

Environmental News: Brazil to Create ‘Botanical Wikipedia’ to Catalogue the Amazon

Alberto Vincentini, a scientist at the National Institute of Amazon Research, said the species logged so far represented only a fifth of the total area of the Amazon

The website, which will be called Wikiflora.org, is intended to allow high-school students and other internet users to get involved in mapping the country’s vast biodiversity.

They will be able to compare plants that they come across with the existing database and submit potential new entries for inclusion to an expert committee that will be asked to validate them.

Brazil’s Ministry of Science and Technology has reached an agreement with IBM to develop the website through the use of ‘citizen science’.

The website will offer descriptions of plants, geographical mapping of distribution and social networking tools.

Aloizio Mercadente, minister of science and technology, said that the idea came from a visit he made to the Adolpho Ducke forestry reserve in the Amazon earlier this year and the realisation that better systems of classification were needed.

“If we do not create a new methodology, then in a hundred years it will not be possible to know all of the Amazon,” he said.

“We must mobilise the community to know the protocols, the requirements, the rules, how to make classifications and how to manage this process.”

He said he believed the website would help promote sustainability by showing the importance of biodiversity in the development of drugs and in food supply.

The intention is to launch the site, with details of the 2,500 species already catalogued at the Adolpho Ducke reserve, to coincide with the United Nations’ Rio +20 conference on sustainable development in June 2012

Alberto Vincentini, a scientist at the National Institute of Amazon Research, said the species logged so far represented only a fifth of the total area of the Amazon.

He praised the idea of Wikiflora.org as a “giant step to revolutionise the way of acquiring knowledge.”

*Sources: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/8588013/Brazil-to-create-botanical-Wikipedia-to-catalogue-the-Amazon.html

Brazilian Traditional Medicine, New Plant Species, Deforestation & The Amazon

Deforestation – The Loss Of Cancer Drugs In The Rainforest

"for sale?"

Here’s a Wikipedia Article I found on traditional Brazilian medicine. Unsurprisingly, Brazilians incorporate many plants and fruits into their traditional remedies due to the country’s astounding biodiversity. In particular, scientists are constantly discovering new species of plants with pharmacological properties in the Amazon rainforest. In truth, the Amazon is a barely discovered pharmacopeia which is tragically being destroyed faster than we can identify and test the potential of newly discovered species. We could be missing out on the cure to cancer, leukemia, arthritis, or rich sources of antioxidants. The only ones who truly hold this knowledge are the native tribes who have called the Amazon their home for centuries, and these people are quickly being driven out of their homes and forced to adapt to conditions of poverty and assimilation into modern society as deforestation persists. They may soon lose their culture, and then the secrets of medicinal plants will perhaps be lost to us. Ok, that was pretty heavy, so here’s that article:

Traditional Brazilian Medicine

From Wikipedia

Several parts of the cashew plant, including the bark and seeds, are used medicinally.

Traditional Brazilian medicine (Portugues: Medicina indígena) includes many native South American elements, and imported African ones. It is predominant where indigenous groups and among the black-Native American mestizo population, and in the Northeast coast, nearly all interior regions including Amazon regions, savannahs, rainforest, foothills, and Pantanal. According to Dr. Romulo R. M. Alves, “although Brazil’s health system is public…use of traditional remedies and rituals provide an economical way of healing for much of the populace, but that also does not mean that wealthy Brazilians don’t seek it out as well. Traditional medicine is a deep part of Brazilian heritage.”

The Aruak, Tupi, Yamomami, Krahô, Guarani and other Indians groups are among the native tribes that together with isolated descendants of Africans or Quilombola, and Indians integrated (Caboclo) that are known to almost exclusively practice traditional medicine. Among the plants include edible foods like the cashew, peppers, mangosteen and coconut, but often include inedible parts like the fruits, leaves, husk, bark. Neighboring nations like the Patamona of Guyana also use the cashew.

There is growing interest in Brazilian medicine as the Amazon rainforest is the largest tropical forest in the world, and is home to immense biodiversity, including cures or treatments for many ailments. Japanese scientists have found strong anticancer activity in Brazilian traditional remedies. In one study in 1997 published in The American Journal of Chinese Medicine, only 122 species existing in Brazil could be related to the Chinese species (or 14.35% of the samples)., which means the vast majority of species are not known to Chinese traditional medicine. Thousands and possibly millions of species remain unstudied and/or susceptible to extinction by habitat destruction.

Examples

Examples of modern studies of Brazilian medicine the Acai Palm contains antioxidants active against leukemia. Alchornea glandulosa is used to treat assorted skin diseases, diarrhea, inflammations, leprosy and rheuma. Scientific studies have confirmed most of these effects, and also found extracts of certain species to kill off trypanosoma, some bacteria and fungi, and cancer cells.

Some others include psychoactive plants like Ayahuasca Epena and Jurema used in rituals currently being investigated for their potential use in psychiatry.

pt:Vacina do sapo (Frog Vaccine) is a secretion from the giant leaf frog used by indigenous groups, such as the Asháninka, that is injected into the bloodstream and used in traditional medicine to ward off bad luck, however, only recently have multiple patents are pending for use against ischemia and hepatic injury.

To wrap this up, here are a few vocab words:

desmatamento – deforestation

a amazônia – the amazon

Amazonas – the state in Brazil known for being home to the Amazon rainforest

tribos – tribes

biodiversidade – biodiversity