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.”

Handyman in Brazil Discovers a New Flower Species That Plants Its Own Seeds

Amateur Botanists in Brazil Discover a Flower That Plants Its Own Seeds

This is very cool….One more awesome thing that someone discovered in Bahia. Via ScienceDaily…

The newly discovered Spigelia genuflexa has pink and white star-shaped blossoms...it was identified as a new species after this picture was uploaded to flickr

A new plant species that buries its seeds – the first in its family – was discovered in the Atlantic forest of Bahia, Brazil, by an international team of amateur and professional scientists.

José Carlos Mendes Santos (a.k.a. Louro) is a handyman in rural northeastern Bahia, Brazil – one of the areas of the world with the highest biodiversity. Two years ago, he found a tiny, inch-high plant with white-and-pink flowers in the backyards of the off-the-grid house of amateur botanist and local plant collector Alex Popovkin.

Thanks to solar power and a satellite connection, Popovkin had access to the Internet, and as was his habit, he uploaded some photographs of the plant to Flickr and contacted several taxonomic experts around the globe. The family (strychnine family, or Loganiaceae) and genus (Spigelia) of the plant were soon established, with a suggestion from a Brazilian botanist that it might be a new species.

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?

Weird Science News: Glow-In-The-Dark Brazilian Mushroom Back After 170 Years

Glow-In-The-Dark Brazilian Mushroom Back After 170 Years

What do you mean “back“?… A glow-in-the-dark mushroom that has not been seen since 1840 has been found in a Brazilian rainforest. And may I just point out:

“To catch the green glow of the bioluminescent mushroom, Dr Desjardin and his research partner in Brazil, Dr Cassius Stevani, had to ‘go out on new moon nights and stumble around in the forest, running into trees’, while keeping an eye out for poisonous snakes and prowling jaguars.”

ahahaha. ha.

brazilian glow in the dark mushrooms. "wouldn't it be lovely if all the forests were like those in avitar!"

A long-forgotten glow-in-the-dark mushroom that had not been seen since 1840 has been discovered in the lush forests of Brazil, according to the Daily Mail.

The flashy fungi was rediscovered by scientist Dennis Desjardin and his team in 2009.

The mushroom’s bioluminescence, or an organism’s ability to produce light on their own, was first discovered by British botanist George Gardner, according to LiveScience. Desjardin’s newly-collected specimens led to it being reclassified as Neonothopanus gardner.

The forgotten fungus shines so brightly that you can read by it, and the team hopes that by studying it and its bioluminescent cousins, scientists will be able to shed light on how and why some fungi glow, according to Wired.

Catching the ‘shroom shrouded in secrecy was no easy task. According to his release, Desjardin and his long-time research partner in Brazil, Dr. Cassius Stevani, had to “go out on new moon nights and stumble around in the forest, running into trees,” wary of nearby poisonous snakes and prowling jaguars.

Scientists aren’t sure why the 65 luminescent fungi species glow, but the ability may have evolved to attract nocturnal animals to aid in dispersal of the fungi’s spores — spreading their offspring around.

“We want to know how this happens, how it evolved, and if it evolved multiple times,” Desjardin said. “Each one of these is a fascinating question that we are close to answering.”

(Via Fox News) Read more…

Society News: Rising of the Brazilian Middle Class: Pedicures Lead Woman From Rio Slum To Home Ownership

Here’s a really interesting story written by CSM about how giving pedicures lead one hard-working Brazilian woman from the Brazilian slum (favela) to owning her own home. It’s the story of how one woman in Brazil used her high school education as a way out of poverty. Already, universal education has boosted half the Brazilian population into the middle class.

Meire, a Brazilian pedicurist, has lifted herself out of a Rio de Janiero slum and bought a house. She qualified for the mortgage using ‘social capital’ – that is, with help from her friends.

 

Rio de Janeiro

A paper cap corralling her long, curly hair and a white paper mask muffling the lilt of her salon gossip, Meire adjusts a neon ring of light and peers businesslike at the calloused foot of a client lying on a white leatherette recliner. Pedicures are serious business in this mecca of sun worship and sandals.As lowly a job as it may seem to bathe, poke, pluck, and massage other people’s feet, this job is golden. It has boosted Meire up the socioeconomic ladder and out of the slums: By serving the middle and upper classes in her cubicle at Ipanema’s Spa do Pé (Foot Spa), she has herself entered Brazil‘s burgeoning middle class.

“I love what I do,” she often says, as she straightens up from hunching over a client’s newly buffed feet. And that’s despite a three-hour round-trip bus commute to work five days a week – and frequent house-call detours she makes for extra cash.

Meire, who asked that the Monitor not use her real name for security reasons, is living the middle-class dream that is spreading across the globe. Her income – the equivalent of $1,000 a month – has enabled her to get a mortgage on a small house on a tree-lined street 15 minutes from her parents’ home in the giant Jacarezinho favela, or slum. Brazil’s middle class, swelling with people like her who have achieved higher levels of education than their parents, is now estimated to include half the nation’s population of 191 million. The burgeoning consumer appetite, say economists, buffered the country from the world recession that began in 2008: Unlike the United States and much of Europe, Brazil’s economy is booming, with 7.5 percent gross domestic product growth in 2010.

Thanks to a constitutional provision for universal education enacted in 1987, Meire got a high school diploma. She worked at a General Electric light bulb factory for six years after high school. But when incandescent bulbs lost market share, the factory closed. Meire’s diploma saved her: It qualified her to take an 18-month specialized salon course.

“Brazilians are consuming more because they’re working more, and they’re working more because they went to school,” says economist Marcelo Neri, who last year produced the Getúlio Vargas Foundation study “The New Middle Class in Brazil: The Bright Side of the Poor.” Mr. Neri adds that enrollment in technical schools such as the one where Meire got her training grew 75 percent from 2004 to 2010.

The favela where Meire grew up is famous for a section where drug addicts openly use crack, undisturbed. And security is hardly provided by police: She recalls how she and a companion awoke in a favela apartment four years ago surrounded by police who threw a packet of cocaine on their bed in a mistaken-identity extortion bid…

Read More: (Via CSM)

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