The Conversation

Life endured inside the snowball

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 18:31:15 +0000

Life endured inside the snowball Rachel Sauer Wed, 11/13/2024 - 11:31

Liam Courtney-Davies , Rebecca Flowers and Christine Siddoway

Evidence from Snowball Earth found in ancient rocks on Colorado’s Pikes Peak—it’s a missing link

Around 700 million years ago, the Earth cooled so much that scientists believe massive ice sheets encased the entire planet like a giant snowball. This global deep freeze, known as Snowball Earth, endured for tens of millions of years.

Yet, miraculously, early life not only held on, but thrived. When the ice melted and the ground thawed, complex multicellular life emerged, eventually leading to life-forms we recognize today.

�� Boulder researchers Liam Courtney-Davies (left) and Rebecca Flowers (right), along with Colorado College colleague Christine Siddoway, have found that life endured during Snowball Earth.

The Snowball Earth hypothesis has been largely based on evidence from sedimentary rocks exposed in areas that once were along coastlines and shallow seas, as well as climate modeling. Physical evidence that ice sheets covered the interior of continents in warm equatorial regions had eluded scientists – until now.

In new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our team of geologists describes the missing link, found in an unusual pebbly sandstone encapsulated within the granite that forms Colorado’s Pikes Peak.

Solving a Snowball Earth mystery on a mountain

Pikes Peak, originally named Tavá Kaa-vi by the Ute people, lends its ancestral name, Tava, to these notable rocks. They are composed of solidified sand injectites, which formed in a similar manner to a medical injection when sand-rich fluid was forced into underlying rock.

A possible explanation for what created these enigmatic sandstones is the immense pressure of an overlying Snowball Earth ice sheet forcing sediment mixed with meltwater into weakened rock below.

An obstacle for testing this idea, however, has been the lack of an age for the rocks to reveal when the right geological circumstances existed for sand injection.

We found a way to solve that mystery, using veins of iron found alongside the Tava injectites, near Pikes Peak and elsewhere in Colorado.

Earth was covered in ice during the Cryogenian Period, but life on the planet survived. (Illustration: NASA)

Iron minerals contain very low amounts of naturally occurring radioactive elements, including uranium, which slowly decays to the element lead at a known rate. Recent advancements in laser-based radiometric dating allowed us to measure the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes in the iron oxide mineral hematite to reveal how long ago the individual crystals formed.

The iron veins appear to have formed both before and after the sand was injected into the Colorado bedrock: We found veins of hematite and quartz that both cut through Tava dikes and were crosscut by Tava dikes. That allowed us to figure out an age bracket for the sand injectites, which must have formed between 690 million and 660 million years ago.

So, what happened?

The time frame means these sandstones formed during the Cryogenian Period, from 720 million to 635 million years ago. The name is derived from “cold birth” in ancient Greek and is synonymous with climate upheaval and disruption of life on our planet – including Snowball Earth.

While the triggers for the extreme cold at that time are debated, prevailing theories involve changes in tectonic plate activity, including the release of particles into the atmosphere that reflected sunlight away from Earth. Eventually, a buildup of carbon dioxide from volcanic outgassing may have warmed the planet again.

The Tava found on Pikes Peak would have formed close to the equator within the heart of an ancient continent named Laurentia, which gradually over time and long tectonic cycles moved into its current northerly position in North America today.

Dark red to purple bands of Tava sandstone dissect pink and white granite. (Photo: Liam Courtney-Davies)

The origin of Tava rocks has been debated for over 125 years, but the new technology allowed us to conclusively link them to the Cryogenian Snowball Earth period for the first time.

The scenario we envision for how the sand injection happened looks something like this:

A giant ice sheet with areas of geothermal heating at its base produced meltwater, which mixed with quartz-rich sediment below. The weight of the ice sheet created immense pressures that forced this sandy fluid into bedrock that had already been weakened over millions of years. Similar to fracking for natural gas or oil today, the pressure cracked the rocks and pushed the sandy meltwater in, eventually creating the injectites we see today.

Clues to another geologic puzzle

Not only do the new findings further cement the global Snowball Earth hypothesis, but the presence of Tava injectites within weak, fractured rocks once overridden by ice sheets provides clues about other geologic phenomena.

Time gaps in the rock record created through erosion and referred to as unconformities can be seen today across the United States, most famously at the Grand Canyon, where in places, over a billion years of time is missing. Unconformities occur when a sustained period of erosion removes and prevents newer layers of rock from forming, leaving an unconformable contact.

Our results support that a Great Unconformity near Pikes Peak must have been formed prior to Cryogenian Snowball Earth. That’s at odds with hypotheses that attribute the formation of the Great Unconformity to large-scale erosion by Snowball Earth ice sheets themselves.

We hope the secrets of these elusive Cryogenian rocks in Colorado will lead to the discovery of further terrestrial records of Snowball Earth. Such findings can help develop a clearer picture of our planet during climate extremes and the processes that led to the habitable planet we live on today.

Liam Courtney-Davies is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder; Rebecca Flowers is a �� Boulder professor of geological sciences. Christine Siddoway is a professor of geology at Colorado College.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Evidence from Snowball Earth found in ancient rocks on Colorado’s Pikes Peak—it’s a missing link.

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Pursuing long-awaited justice for victims of Nepal's 'People's War'

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 17:59:39 +0000

Pursuing long-awaited justice for victims of Nepal's 'People's War' Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/20/2024 - 11:59

Tracy Fehr

Nepal’s revamped truth commissions will need to go beyond ‘ritualism’ to deliver justice to civil war victims

Nepal’s attempt to deliver justice and accountability following the country’s decade-long civil war froze more than two years ago with little progress—but a recent development has raised hopes that it could soon be revived and revamped.

In August 2024, the country’s parliament passed a long-awaited bill that sets the stage for appointing a third —and hopefully final—round of truth commissions to carry out investigations into the more than 66,000 conflict victim cases that have been collecting dust since the last commissions ended in July 2022.

The two main bodies involved—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons—were created by Nepal’s government in 2015 to deal with crimes that were committed during Nepal’s conflict, commonly known as “The People’s War.”

Tracy Fehr (right, with a woman living in Gorkha, Nepal) is a PhD student in the �� Boulder Department of Sociology who researches Nepal's transitional justice process. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

In 1996, Maoist rebels began an insurgency against the Nepali government in western Nepal that escalated into a 10-year civil war across the country. According to United Nations estimates, the conflict resulted in the deaths of 13,000, with 1,300 people still missing and an unknown number of torture and conflict-related sexual violence victims.

The People’s War ended with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord that, among other obligations, required the Nepal government to create a high-level truth commission.

To date, the commissions have completed two rounds. The first, which collected the majority of the victim cases, began with a two-year mandate in 2015 that the government extended by an additional year three times. The second round, mandated from 2020 to 2022, was shut down for months due to COVID-19.

The commissions were tasked with three main objectives: to reveal the truth about gross human rights violations; to create an environment of peace, trust and reconciliation; and to make legal recommendations for victim reparations and perpetrators from the conflict.

However, despite seven years of work, little progress toward any of these objectives has been made. No case investigations have been completed, no perpetrators have been held accountable, and no victim reparations have been distributed. Reconciliation in a country that still bears the scars of conflict remains a distant thought.

From 2022 to 2023, I conducted research in Nepal about the country’s transitional justice process. During my research, I heard people refer to Nepal’s prolonged process as “a judicial merry-go-round,” “Groundhog Day” and “transitional injustice.”

Many Nepali people I spoke to believe that the government has strategically prolonged the transitional justice process to avoid accountability, hoping that people will eventually tire of the process and forget. Indeed, a heavy cloud of hopelessness and frustration had settled over the commissions as legal and resource limitations and political biases plagued the first two rounds, severely slowing progress and impairing the commissions’ functionality and local trust.

Justice ‘adjourned’

In 2022, I interviewed a conflict victim in the rolling hills of Rolpa, in the country’s west, where the conflict began. She had submitted her case to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission seven years before but had heard nothing since. “In a way, our complaints are in adjournment,” she said. “They have not ended, yet they are not being forwarded either.”

She was one of approximately 300 women who officially submitted a case of conflict-related sexual violence to the TRC.

A woman looks over the village of Thabang, Rolpa, Nepal. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

However, a former truth commissioner told me that this number may be as high as 1,000 because some victims of sexual violence submitted their case as “torture” to distance themselves from the stigma and shame often associated with sexual violence in Nepal.

I also met leaders at several women’s organizations who have documented thousands of cases of conflict-related sexual violence in Nepal, but they have not yet submitted these cases to the TRC due to ongoing concerns of confidentiality and trust.

The lack of progress by Nepal’s truth commissions suggests that they are being used to carry out what I refer to as “transitional justice ritualism”—the act of a state creating hollow institutions designed without the support to produce actual consequences.

As part of this transitional justice ritualism, I believe that Nepal’s post-conflict coalition government has, up to this point, been using the truth commissions as a political tool to show the international community that it is upholding its obligations under the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Accord and to avoid universal jurisdiction—that is, the international legal principal that allows other nations to prosecute individuals for serious human rights violations regardless of where the crimes took place.

The threat of universal jurisdiction has been a particular concern for alleged perpetrators in Nepal since 2013 when Colonel Kumar Lama, a former Royal Nepal Army commander during Nepal’s conflict, was apprehended in the United Kingdom on charges of torture and war crimes. While Lama was acquitted there due to a lack of evidence, the threat of universal jurisdiction for war crimes perpetrators in Nepal still looms for those in positions of power during the civil war.

A contested step forward

But a recent change in the political leadership of Nepal and the passing of the new law, which amended the Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act, mark an opportunity for the government to move beyond transitional justice lip service.

Under the amended law, a third round of appointed commissioners will operate for a period of four years – hopefully enough time to complete their unaccomplished mandates. A government committee is working to appoint new truth commissioners before the country’s major holiday Dashain in October 2024. The amended act also provides for creating specialized subunits within the TRC—concerning truth-seeking and investigations, reparations, sexual violence and rape, and victims coordination—that could potentially improve the streamlining of resources and move some of these stalled parts of the commissions forward.

Maoist victims protest in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2023. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

Nonetheless, hope has been tempered by apprehension and uncertainty. Some victim groups support the legislation, while others protest provisions they argue could undermine justice, especially by protecting perpetrators with decreased sentencing.

International human rights groups have recognized positive and long-awaited amendments to the existing law, but also warn of serious accountability gaps that could undermine the transitional justice process.

U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said the revised law was “an important step forward” but added: “It is imperative that the legislation is interpreted and implemented in a manner that upholds victims’ rights, including to truth, justice and reparations, and that guarantees accountability in full compliance with international human rights standards.”

Potential for international support

Although it seems the transitional justice process will still be Nepali-led, doors may be opening for international support in the form of financial or technical assistance—marking a significant shift in the process.

The amended act provides for a “fund” to finance the investigations process and victim reparations that will be supported by the Nepali government and is open to contributions from other national and international organizations.

Sushil Pyakurel, a former member of Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission, is among a group of human rights defenders, lawyers and victims establishing a civil monitoring committee to serve as a watchdog for the revived process. Pyakurel stressed the need for Nepali civil society, alongside the international community, to pressure the government to fulfill its promises of a victim-centric implementation.

“You can make whatever law you want, but it is how you implement it that really matters,” Pyakurel told me. “Although the law is different, if the mentality remains the same, then nothing will change.”

The revival of Nepal’s truth commissions provides the government a chance to demonstrate a commitment to a transparent and legitimate process. But I believe it must move beyond the transitional justice ritualism of the previous two commissions to actually provide justice and acknowledgment for the country’s civil war victims.

Top image: A Nepali man looks at photographs of people 'disappeared' during Nepal's civil war in Kathmandu Aug. 30, 2017. (Photo: Niranjan Shrestha/AP Photo)

Tracy Fehr is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nepal’s revamped truth commissions will need to go beyond ‘ritualism’ to deliver justice to civil war victims.

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Amid growing war fatigue, some Ukrainians more willing to cede land

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 15:36:49 +0000

Amid growing war fatigue, some Ukrainians more willing to cede land Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/19/2024 - 09:36

Growing number of war-weary Ukrainians would reluctantly give up territory to save lives, suggests recent survey

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is trying his best to shake up the dynamics of the Russia-Ukraine war. He recently undertook a major cabinet reshuffle in which he replaced no fewer than nine ministers, including his foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba. Announcing the changes, Zelensky said he wanted his government to be “more active” in pressing for aid from its western allies.

These cabinet changes came as Ukraine pressed ahead with its offensive in the Kursk oblast in Russia. Zelensky has said that holding some Russian territory will give Kyiv leverage for future territorial exchange negotiations with Russia.

And, while criticism of Zelensky’s gamble has increased as Ukraine’s position in the Donbas in the east of the country has deteriorated, seeing Ukrainian soldiers turn the table on Russia has undeniably given Ukrainians a morale boost.

John O'Loughlin, a �� Boulder professor of geography, is a political geographer especially interested in the spatial and territorial aspects of conflict. He and co-researchers Kristin M. Bakke and Gerard recently conducted telephone surveys of 2,200 adults in government-controlled areas of Ukraine.

Ukrainians needed this. As the war has endured and its costs mounted, morale and public health have suffered.

We have tracked Ukrainian sentiment for years. In June and July 2024, in cooperation with the Kyiv International Institute for Sociology (KIIS), we conducted a telephone public opinion survey of 2,200 respondents representative of the adult population of government-controlled areas of Ukraine. This was to follow up on a survey from Oct. 2022.

We should treat wartime polls with caution. But our survey findings suggest people are worried about war weariness among their fellow Ukrainians. It also suggests that there is growing, if reluctant, support for negotiations and territorial concessions.

Open to compromise

Attitudes among Ukrainians toward territorial concessions have also started to shift—but only slightly. Most people have opposed giving up land since 2014, but KIIS’s own regular omnibus survey provides evidence of growing recognition, now shared by one-third of Ukrainians, that territorial concessions may be necessary.

In June-July 2024 we repeated a question we asked in Oct. 2022 on territorial concessions, shown in the figure below. “All choices about what to do during this current Russian aggression have significant, but different, costs. Knowing this, which of the following four choices should the Ukraine government take at this time?”

The biggest change was this: in 2022, 71% of respondents supported the proposition to “continue opposing Russian aggression until all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, is liberated," but in 2024 the support for that option had dropped to 51%.

In 2022, just 11% agreed with “trying to reach an immediate ceasefire by both sides with conditions and starting intensive negotiations." In 2024, that share had increased to 31%.

But there are differences in how people look at these choices. Much depends on whether they have been displaced (though whether they lost family members or friends does not seem to make a difference), whether they worry about war fatigue among their fellow Ukrainians, and whether they are optimistic or pessimistic about western support.

There is more at stake in this war than territory—not least, saving lives, ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty, and protecting the country’s future security. KIIS’s own recent research has shown that in a hypothetical negotiation scenario, people’s views on the importance of preserving territorial integrity might depend on how any possible deal might safeguard other things they care about.

For two and a half years, the brutal war has affected everyday lives of Ukrainians, and many (43%) believe that the war will last at least another year. Most of the respondents in our survey had not been physically injured in Russian violence (12% had), but about half had witnessed Russian violence, and most had lost a close family member or friend (62%). �� one-third had been displaced from their homes.

Consistent with an increasing number of reports, the survey shows growing recognition of war fatigue. Rather than asking directly about whether respondents felt this themselves, we asked whether they worried about it among fellow Ukrainians. The results were revealing: 58% worry “a lot” and 28% worry “a little," whereas only 10% report that they do not worry about war fatigue.

People in Ukraine mark the second anniversary of the beginning of the war in February. (Photo: Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo)

While there are signs of war weariness among Ukraine’s western allies, our surveys show that Ukrainians are still broadly optimistic about continued western support, though less so than in October 2022. �� 19% believe western support will grow (down from 29% in 2022), while 35% believe it will stay the same (41% in 2022). Almost a quarter (24%) believe it will continue but at a lower level than now (up from 16% in 2022), and 13% believe it is unlikely to continue (up from 3% in 2022).

Life or death

Research from early on in the war showed that Ukrainians strongly preferred strategies that preserved the country’s political autonomy and restored the entirety of its territory. This would hold, “even if making concessions would reduce projected civilian and military deaths, or the risk of a nuclear strike over the next three months."

As the authors of the study pointed out: “Russian control of the government in Kyiv or of territories in the east would put the lives of many Ukrainians at risk, as it is well documented that Russia has committed widespread human rights violations in temporarily occupied territories.”

Given the war’s accumulating death toll, in our 2024 survey we designed a simple framing experiment that can give us an indication of whether considerations about loss of life may shape people’s views on negotiations. We asked half of the respondents, randomly selected, if they would accept that “Ukraine concede some of its territories to end the war”. �� 24% said yes.

For the other half, we asked if they would accept that “Ukraine concede some of its territories to save lives and end the war." In that case, 34% said yes. So, if—rightly or wrongly—territorial concessions are associated with saving lives, it increases support for them.

But when asked directly in the 2024 survey if they agreed with the statement “Russia should be allowed to control the territory it has occupied since 2022," 90% disagreed. So, while there is still majority—if diminished—support for fighting to restore full territorial integrity, there is growing support for negotiations.

What we also know from our surveys is that there is very little evidence that Russia’s territorial annexations will ever have any legitimacy among Ukrainians.

John O'Loughlin is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. His co-authors are Kristin M Bakke, a professor of political science and international relations at University College London, and Gerard Toal, a professor of government and international affairs at Virginia Tech.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Growing number of war-weary Ukrainians would reluctantly give up territory to save lives, suggests recent survey.

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Studying complex networks of plants and pollinators

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 18:42:15 +0000

Studying complex networks of plants and pollinators Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/11/2024 - 12:42

Julian Resasco

I’ve visited the same Rocky Mountain subalpine meadow weekly for a decade of summers looking at plant-pollinator interactions—here’s what I learned

Imagine a bee crawling into a bright yellow flower.

This simple interaction is something you may have witnessed many times. It is also a crucial sign of the health of our environment—and one I’ve devoted hundreds of hours of field work observing.

Interactions between plants and pollinators help plants reproduce, support pollinator species like bees, butterflies and flies, and benefit both agricultural and natural ecosystems.

Julian Resasco is an assistant professor in the �� Boulder Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

These one-on-one interactions occur within complex networks of plants and pollinators.

In my lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, we’re interested in how these networks change over time and how they respond to stressors like climate change. My team emphasizes long-term data collection in hopes of revealing trends that would otherwise be unnoticed.

Working at Elk Meadow

Ten years ago, I began working in Elk Meadow, which is located at 9,500 feet (or 2,900 meters) elevation at the University of Colorado’s Mountain Research Station.

I wanted a local field site that allowed for frequent observations to study the dynamics of plant-pollinator networks. This beautiful subalpine meadow, bursting with wildflowers and just 40 minutes from campus, fit the bill perfectly.

Since 2015, often joined by members of my lab, I have made weekly hikes to Elk Meadow. We visit from the first flower in May to the last in October. We observe pollinators visiting flowers at plots scattered throughout the meadow, walking the periphery to minimize trampling. The morning is the best time to visit because pollinator activity is high and thunderstorms often roll in at midday during the summer in the Rocky Mountains.

Observing the network

Elk Meadow is rich in biodiversity. Over the years, we have observed 7,612 interactions among over 1,038 unique pairs of species. These pairings were made by 310 species of pollinators and 45 species of plants.

Pollinators include not only a wide variety of bees, but also flies, butterflies, beetles and the occasional hummingbird. Expert entomologists help us identify some of the insects.

Plants include species that are widespread, like the common dandelion, and some that are only found in the Rocky Mountains, like the Colorado columbine.

Common but vital

Collecting data in Elk Meadow is fun, but it is also serious science. Our data is useful for understanding the dynamics of plant and pollinator interactions within and across seasons.

For example, we learned which interactions between plants and pollinators are stable and which change over time and space. We consistently observed interactions between generalist species and their many partners over time and in different plots across the meadow.

Generalist species can tolerate a range of environmental conditions, meaning they are more frequently available to interact.

In other words, generalist species are more likely to be alive, active and foraging in the case of pollinators—or flowering in the case of plants—compared with species that can only survive if environmental conditions like temperature, sunlight and rainfall are just right to support them.

Generalist species are vital in networks, but they often don’t receive the same conservation attention as rare species. Even these common species can decline due to environmental changes destabilizing entire ecosystems. Protecting these species is important for maintaining biodiversity.

Julian Resasco at Elk Meadows at �� Boulder's Mountain Research Station. (Photo: Julian Resasco)

In it for the long term

As we gather more years of data, our study is becoming increasingly useful for understanding how networks and pollinator populations are changing—especially with signs of climate change increasingly emerging. Most ecological studies are only designed or funded for one or a few years, making our 10-year dataset one of only a few for plant-pollinator networks.

It is only with long-term ecological data that we can detect trends in responses to climate change, particularly because of high year-to-year variability in weather and populations.

The National Science Foundation supports a network of long-term ecological research stations across the U.S., including the Niwot Ridge Long-term Ecological Research Program near Elk Meadow, which is dedicated to the study of high-mountain species and ecosystems.

Colorado’s climate, like much of the world, is experiencing significant changes, such as rising temperatures, earlier snow melt and more late-winter and spring rain instead of snow. These changes lead to earlier water runoff from mountains, drier soils and more severe droughts. These shifts can have important consequences for plants and pollinators, including changes in where species are found, how many there are, and when they flower or forage.

High-elevation plant and pollinator communities may be especially vulnerable to climate change impacts since these areas are experiencing greater temperature increases compared with lower elevations.

We have seen warmer and drier conditions at Elk Meadow. Overlaid in this trend, we have observed annual variation in temperature and drought conditions that can help us understand and predict how different species will fare in a hotter and drier future.

Climate change is a driver of pollinator declines and is predicted to become increasingly important in the coming decades. Immediate threats also include pesticide use, light pollution and the destruction of wild habitats for farming and development.

The state of Colorado recently commissioned a study to gauge the health of Colorado’s native pollinators and make recommendations on how to protect them.

Appreciating the current pollinator landscape

Working at Elk Meadow has provided opportunities for my students to conduct independent research and receive valuable training and mentoring.

Seeing the beauty of the living things in the meadow and observing their cycles inspires my students and me.

Elk Meadow is a place to clear my mind and come up with new research ideas. It is also a place to observe and record how one tiny patch of our planet is changing in reaction to bigger changes happening around it.

Julian Resasco is an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I’ve visited the same Rocky Mountain subalpine meadow weekly for a decade of summers looking at plant-pollinator interactions—here’s what I learned

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Rewriting the story of horse domestication

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 21:41:20 +0000

Rewriting the story of horse domestication Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/03/2024 - 15:41

William Taylor

Domesticating horses had a huge impact on human society—new science rewrites where and when it first happened

Across human history, no single animal has had a deeper impact on human societies than the horse. But when and how people domesticated horses has been an ongoing scientific mystery.

Half a million years ago or more, early human ancestors hunted horses with wooden spears, the very first weapons, and used their bones for early tools. During the late Paleolithic era, as far back as 30,000 years ago or more, ancient artists chose wild horses as their muse: Horses are the most commonly depicted animal in Eurasian cave art.

Following their first domestication, horses became the foundation of herding life in the grasslands of Inner Asia, and key leaps forward in technology such as the chariot, saddle and stirrup helped make horses the primary means of locomotion for travel, communication, agriculture and warfare across much of the ancient world. With the aid of ocean voyages, these animals eventually reached the shores of every major landmass—even Antarctica, briefly.

In his new book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, William Taylor, a �� Boulder assistant professor of anthropology, draws together new archaeological evidence revising what scientists think about when, how and why horses became domesticated.

As they spread, horses reshaped ecology, social structures and economies at a never-before-seen scale. Ultimately, only industrial mechanization supplanted their near-universal role in society.

Because of their tremendous impact in shaping our collective human story, figuring out when, why and how horses became domesticated is a key step toward understanding the world we live in now.

Doing so has proven to be surprisingly challenging. In my new book, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, I draw together new archaeological evidence that is revising what scientists like me thought we knew about this story.

A horse domestication hypothesis

Over the years, almost every time and place on Earth has been suggested as a possible origin point for horse domestication, from Europe tens of thousands of years ago to places such as Saudi Arabia, Anatolia, China or even the Americas.

By far the most dominant model for horse domestication, though, has been the Indo-European hypothesis, also known as the “Kurgan hypothesis.” It argues that, sometime in the fourth millennium BCE or before, residents of the steppes of western Asia and the Black Sea known as the Yamnaya, who built large burial mounds called kurgans, hopped astride horses. The newfound mobility of these early riders, the story goes, helped catalyze huge migrations across the continent, distributing ancestral Indo-European languages and cultures across Eurasia.

But what’s the actual evidence supporting the Kurgan hypothesis for the first horse domestication? Many of the most important clues come from the bones and teeth of ancient animals, via a discipline known as archaeozoology. Over the past 20 years, archaeozoological data seemed to converge on the idea that horses were first domesticated in sites of the Botai culture in Kazakhstan, where scientists found large quantities of horse bones at sites dating to the fourth millennium BCE.

Other kinds of compelling circumstantial evidence started to pile up. Archaeologists discovered evidence of what looked like fence post holes that could have been part of ancient corrals. They also found ceramic fragments with fatty horse residues that, based on isotope measurements, seem to have been deposited in the summer months, a time when milk could be collected from domestic horses.

The scientific smoking gun for early horse domestication, though, was a set of changes found on some Botai horse teeth and jawbones. Like the teeth of many modern and ancient ridden horses, the Botai horse teeth appeared to have been worn down by a bridle mouthpiece, or bit.

A Kazakh man on horseback with a golden eagle in an image made between 1911 and 1914. (Photo: public domain)

Together, the data pointed strongly to the idea of horse domestication in northern Kazakhstan around 3500 BCE—not quite the Yamnaya homeland, but close enough geographically to keep the basic Kurgan hypothesis intact.

There were some aspects of the Botai story, though, that never quite lined up. From the outset, several studies showed that the mix of horse remains found at Botai were unlike those found in most later pastoral cultures: Botai is evenly split between male and female horses, mostly of a healthy reproductive age. Killing off healthy, breeding-age animals like this on a regular basis would devastate a breeding herd. But this demographic blend is common among animals that have been hunted. Some Botai horses even have projectile points embedded in their ribs, showing that they died through hunting rather than a controlled slaughter.

These unresolved loose ends loomed over a basic consensus linking the Botai culture to horse domestication.

New scientific tools raise more questions

In recent years, as archaeological and scientific tools have rapidly improved, key assumptions about the cultures of Botai, Yamnaya and the early chapters of the human-horse story have been overturned.

First, improved biomolecular tools show that whatever happened at Botai, it had little to do with the domestication of the horses that live today. In 2018, nuclear genomic sequencing revealed that Botai horses were not the ancestors of domestic horses but of Przewalski’s horse, a wild relative and denizen of the steppe that has never been domesticated, at least in recorded history.

Next, when my colleagues and I reconsidered skeletal features linked to horse riding at Botai, we saw that similar issues are also visible in ice age wild horses from North America, which had certainly never been ridden. Even though horse riding can cause recognizable changes to the teeth and bones of the jaw, we argued that the small issues seen on Botai horses can reasonably be linked to natural variation or life history.

This finding reopened the question: Was there horse transport at Botai at all?

Leaving the Kurgan hypothesis in the past

Over the past few years, trying to make sense of the archaeological record around horse domestication has become an ever more contradictory affair.

A re-enactment of Botai hunter-herders (Photo: Niobe Thompson)

For example, in 2023, archaeologists noted that human hip and leg skeletal problems found in Yamnaya and early eastern European burials looked a lot like problems found in mounted riders, consistent with the Kurgan hypothesis. But problems like these can be caused by other kinds of animal transport, including the cattle carts found in Yamnaya-era sites.

So how should archaeologists make sense of these conflicting signals?

A clearer picture may be closer than we think. A detailed genomic study of early Eurasian horses, published in June 2024 in the journal Nature, shows that Yamnaya horses were not ancestors of the first domestic horses, known as the DOM2 lineage. And Yamnaya horses showed no genetic evidence of close control over reproduction, such as changes linked with inbreeding.

Instead, the first DOM2 horses appear just before 2000 BCE, long after the Yamnaya migrations and just before the first burials of horses and chariots also show up in the archaeological record.

For now, all lines of evidence seem to converge on the idea that horse domestication probably did take place in the Black Sea steppes, but much later than the Kurgan hypothesis requires. Instead, human control of horses took off just prior to the explosive spread of horses and chariots across Eurasia during the early second millennium BCE.

There’s still more to be settled, of course. In the latest study, the authors point to some funny patterns in the Botai data, especially fluctuations in genetic estimates for generation time – essentially, how long it takes on average for a population of animals to produce offspring. Might these suggest that Botai people still raised those wild Przewalski’s horses in captivity, but only for meat, without a role in transportation? Perhaps. Future research will let us know for sure.

Either way, out of these conflicting signals, one consideration has become clear: The earliest chapters of the human-horse story are ready for a retelling.

William Taylor is an assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Domesticating horses had a huge impact on human society—new science rewrites where and when it first happened.

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Who is Kamala Harris?

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 21:46:19 +0000

Who is Kamala Harris? Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/06/2024 - 15:46

Jennifer Ho

Kamala Harris’ identity as a biracial woman is either a strength or a weakness, depending on whom you ask

Who is Kamala Harris?

Though Harris has had a very public life in politics for decades, speculation about who exactly she is and what she stands for has circulated across social media platforms and news stories for several years.

Many of these conversations focus on the historic nature of Harris’ presidential candidacy, since she is a mixed-race, Jamaican and Indian woman who does not have biological children and who was born to two immigrant parents in Oakland, California.

Jennifer Ho is a professor of Asian American studies in the �� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts.

As I’ve previously written about Harris’ mixed-race identity, some have questioned how authentic her Black or Asian identities are. Interest in Harris’ familial background and race was reignited on July 31, 2024, when Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely suggested that Harris has misled voters about her racial and ethnic identity.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump asked during an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago.

By saying this, Trump tapped into the long history of racism in America, where some white people have defined racial categories and policed the boundaries of race.

More than 33 million Americans identify as multiracial and likely see themselves reflected in Harris’ layered background. But many Republicans are also trying to use Harris’ identity against her.

For ardent Trump supporters, Harris may seem to represent all that they oppose, including woke politics and Democrats being “controlled by people who do not have children,” as Trump’s running mate JD Vance has said.

For Democrats, Harris represents the U.S.’s multiracial, feminist future.

Which means, what people believe about Harris largely depends on the party they already plan to vote for more than who the Democratic presidential nominee really is.

Harris and her many firsts

Many political observers and voters alike agree that Harris has breathed new life into the Democratic Party, precisely because she is a Black-South Asian woman. Many Asian American, Black, Latino and female voters see elements of themselves in Harris: the celebration of her ethnic cultures, her achievements as a person of color, and her unprecedented and pathbreaking model being a woman of color who is the nominee of a major party seeking the highest office in the country.

A variety of fundraising meetings in July and August centered on the identities of those who support Harris.

Black women for Harris, Black men for Harris, white women for Harris, white dudes for Harris, South Asians for Harris, LGBTQ+ people for Harris, among others, have all gathered in Zoom meetings that had tens of thousands of attendees—one even had a record-breaking 200,000 attendees. These online gatherings have jointly raised more than $15 million for Harris.

The number and diversity of people rallying for Harris shows her widespread appeal. Harris’ white male supporters – a key voting demographic for Democrats—also show how Harris’ candidacy is inclusive to many different kinds of people.

Inclusivity may be a keyword of Harris’ campaign, especially in opposition to her rival’s campaign. Vance’s comments about childless cat ladies has spawned endless memes tapping into the rancor of people who recognize the insensitivity and ignorance of such a remark.

Audience members cheer for Kamala Harris at a rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 23. (Photo: Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

Harris’ supporters have responded to the GOP’s critiques of her and turned them into positive political memes celebrating her identity, attesting to Harris’ popularity with a younger, media-savvy electorate.

Using Harris’ identity against her

Republicans, meanwhile, are questioning Harris’ qualifications precisely based on her ethnic and racial identity, calling her a “DEI” candidate. This is a reference to the term “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The exact definitions of DEI can vary, but in workplaces or school settings it can look like treating everyone equally and fostering a culture where all people, regardless of their background or identities, feel welcomed. DEI policies intend to respond to the historic oppression that marginalized people have faced.

As the scholar Susan Harmeling wrote recently, “The term ‘DEI hire’ actually implies that only heterosexual, white men are qualified for such high leadership positions.”

Some in the GOP have renamed the DEI acronym “Didn’t Earn It.” U.S. Reps. Tim Burchett and Harriet Hageman both have disparaged Harris as a DEI hire, with Hageman going a step further by saying that Harris is “intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.”

The gender factor

Harris is the second woman major-party presidential nominee, following Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016. So far, Harris doesn’t seem to be facing persistent questions about whether women are fit to lead, as Clinton once did.

But Harris has faced both sexist and racist comments, particularly online. One 2021 study found that 78% of disparaging sexist and racist comments on Twitter, now called X, during November and December 2020 were directed at Harris.

Some Republicans have continued making sexist attacks on Harris in this election campaign. In a July 3, 2024, social media post, Jackson Lahmeyer, the head of the group Pastors for Trump, called Harris a “ho,” or whore, riffing off a right-wing meme of “Joe and the Ho.”

Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau took to social media on July 22 to call Harris a representative of the “spirit of Jezebel.” Other conservative pundits have claimed that Harris slept her way to the top, citing an early relationship she had with Willie Brown, a prominent Democratic politician from San Francisco and later speaker of the California State Assembly, as the reason for her success.

This false story of Harris’ romantic past aligns with old stereotypes of Black women being promiscuous, rooted in the rape of Black women by white slave owners during antebellum slavery.

And the tactic of questioning Harris’ authentic racial background could apply not just to Harris but to nearly all multiracial people.

Yet there are millions of Americans who identify as multiracial and see in Harris their own story.

Top image: Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally in West Allis, Wisconsin, July 23. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

Jennifer Ho is a professor of Asian American studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Kamala Harris’ identity as a biracial woman is either a strength or a weakness, depending on whom you ask.

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Honoring the diversity in two distinct but linked communities

Anonymous — Thu, 16 May 2024 22:35:48 +0000

Honoring the diversity in two distinct but linked communities Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 05/16/2024 - 16:35

Samira Mehta

Asian Jewish Americans have a double reason to celebrate their heritage in May

May is both Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Jewish American Heritage Month. Two entirely separate commemorations for two entirely separate communities, right?

Think again. Not only do Asian American Jews exist, but we come from a variety of places and come to Judaism in a range of ways.

Centuries of history

Some Asian American Jews come from long-standing Jewish communities in Asia. The two most famous of these are the Kaifeng Jews of the Henan Province in China and the Jewish communities of India.

Samira Mehta is director of the Program in Jewish Studies and an assistant professor of women and gender studies at �� Boulder.

Today, the Kaifeng Jews are a tiny number of people to which very few, if any, Chinese American Jews trace their heritage. The community likely arrived in China from India or Persia around 1000 C.E. and probably had about 5,000 people at its peak.

Indian Jews, however, are another matter. In fact, they consist of three separate communities: The Bene Israel, the Jews of Cochin and the Baghdadi Jews. Each arrived in India at different moments – with the Baghdahi community being the most recent – and therefore their traditions sometimes differ. For instance, the Jews of Cochin are known for their musical traditions, and the Bene Israel give particular importance to the Prophet Elijah.

In 2020, there were about 4,800 Jews in India, but almost 85,000 Jews with Indian roots live in Israel and a few hundred in the United States.

Indian Jewish communities have distinct cultures that come from living in a majority Hindu and Muslim society. Indian American Jewish artist Siona Benjamin, for example, creates art that fuses her American and Jewish identities with her Indian childhood – “inspired by both Indian miniature paintings and Jewish and Christian illuminated manuscripts,” as the Brooklyn Museum described her work. Figures in her paintings are often blue, reminiscent of Hindu depictions of incarnations of Vishnu, and they include images of lotus flowers.

Multiple heritages

Many other Asian American Jews are children of one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish Asian parent – like Angela Buchdahl, the Korean American rabbi of New York City’s Central Synagogue. Buchdahl has an Ashkenazi Jewish father, meaning that his ancestors came from Central or Eastern Europe, and a Korean Buddhist mother.

Raised in a synagogue that her Jewish grandparents helped to found, Buchdahl has written and spoken publicly about the pain that she experienced as a teen and young adult when she was the only Asian person in Jewish spaces. At other times, she was not recognized as Jewish – for instance, by the Chabad rabbis on her undergraduate campus.

She has also talked about moments when her family blended their heritages. During Passover, for example, the traditional plate for the Seder meal includes “maror”: bitter herbs to remind Jews of the pain of slavery. Many families use horseradish, but one year, Buchdahl’s mother swapped in kimchee.

When the rabbi appeared on the PBS program “Finding Your Roots,” she talked about the resonances that she sees between Jewish and Korean Buddhist culture, such as respect for elders and education.

It is this type of experience – growing up the child of an interfaith, interracial marriage – that sociologists Helen Kim and Noah Leavitt focus on in their 2016 book “JewAsian,” the first major study of Asian American Jews.

‘You’re Jewish?’

Other Asian American Jews were adopted into Jewish families, most of whom are white and Ashkenazi – an experience studied by the Adoption and Jewish Identity Project. Many families raising Asian American Jewish children face challenges that are shared with other transracial adoptive families, such as adoptive parents not knowing much, at least initially, about their child’s culture of origin.

A Jewish man lights a lamp inside the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue in Mumbai, India, after restoration work in 2019. (Photo: AP/Rajanish Kakade)

Some challenges, however, are more unique, such as the reality that Hebrew School and Chinese School are often at the same time. In fact, in my hometown when I was growing up, they were at the same time and in the same place, such that there was a Hebrew School-Chinese School car pool – but also such that no one could participate fully in both programs.

In addition, Asian Jewish adoptees and other Jews of color face assumptions from many white Jews that Jews of color are not Jewish or are converts. Usually, children adopted into Jewish families do undergo a formal conversion. They grow up in Jewish homes, as familiar – or not – with Jewish traditions as people born into Judaism.

Converting to Judaism

Some Asian American Jews are adult converts to Judaism, like SooJi Min-Maranda, the Korean American executive director of Aleph: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, a movement that trains and ordains Jewish leaders from a range of Jewish backgrounds. So am I, a half-South Asian scholar of American Jewish religious history.

I usually do not look for ways to combine my Indian heritage and my Jewish religious life, but every now and then I find myself doing so – as at Hanukkah, when I have celebrated with deep-fried Indian food, and during the festival of Sukkot, when I have imagined making the holiday’s signature booths out of Indian bedspreads.

As with all people who choose to live Jewish lives, Asian Americans convert to Judaism for many reasons. After conversion, we often find ourselves fending off the assumption that either we are not Jewish or that our conversions were motivated exclusively by marriage.

In fact, there are enough Asian American Jews out there that several organizations serve them. For instance, the Lunar Collective “cultivates connection, belonging and visibility for Asian American Jews.” They host Seders and Friday night Shabbat events for Asian American Jews, along with a range of other programming. Other organizations, such as the Mitsui Collective, founded by Chinese American Jewish activist Yoshi Silverstein, address a broader range of the Jewish community but carefully include and make space for Asian Jewish experiences.

Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Jewish American Heritage Month come every May. They offer us a moment to remember that both of those communities are far more diverse than one might initially imagine, that they overlap, and that in their overlap, there is truly amazing diversity.

Samira Mehta is director of the Program in Jewish Studies and an assistant professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Asian Jewish Americans have a double reason to celebrate their heritage in May.

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Putting climate on the ballot

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 21:04:27 +0000

Putting climate on the ballot Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/19/2024 - 15:04

Matt Burgess

Climate change matters to more and more people–and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election

If you ask American voters what their top issues are, most will point to kitchen-table issues like the economy, inflation, crime, health care or education.

Fewer than 5% of respondents in 2023 and 2024 Gallup surveys said that climate change was the most important problem facing the country.

Despite this, research that I conducted with my colleages suggests that concern about climate change has had a significant effect on voters’ choices in the past two presidential elections. Climate change opinions may even have had a large enough effect to change the 2020 election outcome in President Joe Biden’s favor. This was the conclusion of an analysis of polling data that we published on Jan. 17, 2024, through the University of Colorado’s Center for Social and Environmental Futures.

Matt Burgess is a �� Boulder assistant professor of environmental studies and institute fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

What explains these results, and what effect might climate change have on the 2024 election?

Measuring climate change’s effect on elections

We used 2016 and 2020 survey data from the nonpartisan organization Voter Study Group to analyze the relationships between thousands of voters’ presidential picks in the past two elections with their demographics and their opinions on 22 different issues, including climate change.

The survey asked voters to rate climate change’s importance with four options: “unimportant,” “not very important,” “somewhat important” or “very important.”

In 2020, 67% of voters rated climate change as “somewhat important” or “very important,” up from 62% in 2016. Of these voters rating climate change as important, 77% supported Biden in 2020, up from 69% who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. This suggests that climate change opinion has been providing the Democrats with a growing electoral advantage.

Using two different statistical models, we estimated that climate change opinion could have shifted the 2020 national popular vote margin (Democratic vote share minus Republican vote share) by 3% or more toward Biden. Using an Electoral College model, we estimated that a 3% shift would have been large enough to change the election outcome in his favor.

These patterns echo the results of a November 2023 poll. This poll found that more voters trust the Democrats’ approach to climate change, compared to Republicans’ approach to the issue.

What might explain the effect of climate change on voting

So, if most voters–even Democrats–do not rank climate change as their top issue, how could climate change opinion have tipped the 2020 presidential election?

Our analysis could not answer this question directly, but here are three educated guesses:

First, recent presidential elections have been extremely close. This means that climate change opinion would not need to have a very large effect on voting to change election outcomes. In 2020, Biden won Georgia by about 10,000 votes–0.2% of the votes cast–and he won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes, 0.6% of votes cast.

Second, candidates who deny that climate change is real or a problem might turn off some moderate swing voters, even if climate change was not those voters’ top issue. The scientific evidence for climate change being real is so strong that if a candidate were to deny the basic science of climate change, some moderate voters might wonder whether to trust that candidate in general.

Third, some voters may be starting to see the connections between climate change and the kitchen-table issues that they consider to be higher priorities than climate change. For example, there is strong evidence that climate change affects health, national security, the economy and immigration patterns in the U.S. and around the world.

People march from the U.S. Capitol to the White House protesting former President Donald Trump’s environmental policies in April 2017. (Photo: Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)

Where the candidates stand

Biden and former President Donald Trump have very different records on climate change and approaches to the environment.

Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax.”

In 2017, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international treaty that legally commits countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Biden reversed that decision in 2021.

While in office, Trump rolled back 125 environmental rules and policies aimed at protecting the country’s air, water, land and wildlife, arguing that these regulations hurt businesses.

Biden has restored many of these regulations. He has also added several new rules and regulations, including a requirement for businesses to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions.

Biden has also signed three major laws that each provides tens of billions in annual spending to address climate change. Two of those laws were bipartisan.

On the other hand, the U.S. has also become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, and the largest exporter of natural gas, during Biden’s term.

In the current campaign, Trump has promised to eliminate subsidies for renewable energy and electric vehicles, to increase domestic fossil fuel production and to roll back environmental regulations. In practice, some of these efforts could face opposition from congressional Republicans, in addition to Democrats.

Public opinion varies on particular climate policies that Biden has enacted.

President Joe Biden speaks about his administration’s work to combat climate change on Nov. 14, 2023. (Photo: Susan Walsh/Associated Press)

Nonetheless, doing something about climate change remains much more popular than doing nothing. For example, a November 2023 Yale survey found 57% of voters would prefer a candidate who supports action on global warming over a candidate who opposes action.

What this means for 2024

Our study found that between the 2016 and the 2020 presidential elections, climate change became increasingly important to voters, and the importance voters assign to climate change became increasingly predictive of voting for the Democrats. If these trends continue, then climate change could provide the Democrats with an even larger electoral advantage in 2024.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that the Democrats will win the 2024 election. For example, our study estimated that climate change gave the Democrats an advantage in 2016, and yet Trump still won that election because of other issues. Immigration is currently the top issue for a plurality of voters, and recent national polls suggest that Trump currently leads the 2024 presidential race over Biden.

Although a majority of voters currently prefer the Democrats’ climate stances, this need not always be true. For example, Democrats risk losing voters when their policies impose economic costs, or when they are framed as anti-capitalist, racial, or overly pessimistic. Some Republican-backed climate policies, like trying to speed up renewable energy projects, are popular.

Nonetheless, if the election were held today, the totality of evidence suggests that most voters would prefer a climate-conscious candidate, and that most climate-conscious voters currently prefer a Democrat.

Matt Burgess is an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Climate change matters to more and more people–and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election.

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Enjoying an old holiday in new ways

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 22:02:46 +0000

Enjoying an old holiday in new ways Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/05/2023 - 15:02

Samira Mehta

Hanukkah celebrations have changed dramatically—but the same is true of Christmas

Hanukkah is not the Jewish Christmas. Articles and op-eds in newspapers remind readers of that fact every year, lamenting that the Jewish Festival of Lights has almost become an imitation of the Christian holiday.

These pieces exist for a reason. Hanukkah is a minor festival in the Jewish liturgical year, whose major holidays come in the fall and spring—the High Holidays and Passover, respectively. Because of its proximity to Christmas, however, Hanukkah has been culturally elevated into a major celebration.

American shops and schools nod to diversity by putting up menorahs next to Christmas trees or including the dreidel song in the “holiday concert” alongside Santa, Rudolph or the Christ child. Even Chabad, an Orthodox Jewish movement, holds public menorah lightings that look remarkably like public Christmas tree lightings.

�� Boulder researcher Samia Mehta is director of the Program in Jewish Studies.

Store windows, doctors’ offices and college dining halls display Christmas trees and menorahs side by side, though the latter is a ritual object, not merely a decoration. A menorah, or “hanukkiah,” is lit in a specific way, on specific days, with accompanying prayers—more akin to a Christian Advent wreath than to the holly decking the halls.

Much of my Jewish studies and gender research focuses on interfaith families, for whom these issues can be especially tricky. I empathize with Jewish Americans worried about Hanukkah growing too similar to Christmas—but the history of both holidays is more complicated than these comparisons let on.

Ancient revolt

There’s a deep irony, of course, in seeing Hanukkah as a prime example of assimilation: The festival itself celebrates a victory against assimilation.

In 168 B.C.E., Antiochus IV Epiphanes, king of the Seleucid Empire, sent his army to conquer Jerusalem. He outlawed Jewish holidays, Shabbat observance and practices such as circumcision. His troops set up altars to the Greek gods in the Jewish temple, dedicating it to Zeus.

The Maccabees, a Jewish resistance movement led by a priestly family, opposed both Antiochus and Jews who assimilated to the conquering Greek culture. Hanukkah celebrates the rebels’ victory over the Seleucid army.

In the temple, the Jews kept an eternal flame burning—as synagogues do today. When the Maccabees reclaimed the temple, however, there was enough oil to last for only a day. Miraculously, the story says it lasted for a week: enough time to bring in more oil.

Traditional holiday celebrations, therefore, include lighting the menorah each night for eight days and eating food cooked in oil. Spinning dreidel games are also traditional, as are songs like “Maoz Tzur.”

“Hanukkah bushes” topped with a Star of David, extravagant presents, community menorah lightings in the park, blue and white lights on houses and Hanukkah Advent calendars? Not traditional, if “traditional” means things that have happened for hundreds of years.

Carols and carousing

Assimilation to the United States’ Christian-majority culture has played a role in Hanukkah’s modern transformation. That said, the story of how Hanukkah came to have the commercial, kids-and-gifts focus that it has in the U.S. today is a bit more complicated.

When people worry that Hanukkah is simply a Jewish adaptation to the Christmas gift season, I think they are imagining that Christmas itself has always been as most Americans today know it—with the presents, the tree and the family togetherness. But, in fact, both contemporary Christmas and contemporary Hanukkah grew up together in response to the Industrial Revolution.

Before the Industrial Revolution, both Europe and North America were primarily agrarian societies. When the harvest was completed, the entire Advent season took on an air of revelry—there was caroling in the streets and a certain amount of drunken carousing. For the more wealthy, it was a season of parties and balls. Sometimes, there would be class-based conflict—like vandalism or other crimes—between the wealthy partygoers and the working-class street parties.

The highlight of the season was New Year’s rather than Christmas. Gifts, if any, were small and usually handmade. The wealthy gave end-of-the-year bonuses to servants and tradespeople. All in all, the season was as much about friends as family, and celebrated in public as much or more than in private.

For a variety of reasons, social campaigners in the early 19th century looked to make Christmas into the domestic celebration of consumption that we have today. The shift from seasonal farm work to round-the-clock factory work made the evenings of carousing problematic, for example – hungover workers are not good workers—and moving the celebration to a single day solved that problem. Meanwhile, religious voices tried to emphasize Christmas as a celebration of Christ in Christian homes.

But more to the point, the Industrial Revolution created a huge market of relatively affordable goods that needed a market. Christmas provided an abundant market. And so did Hanukkah.

Adapting Hanukkah traditions has given people new ways of engaging Judaism in a new space and time. (photo: iStock)

New needs, new traditions

Jews received the same advertisements for gifts and festive foods as their Christian neighbors, and it was hard to resist the pull of the celebratory season. However, the late American studies scholar Dianne Ashton’s book “Hanukkah in America: A History” suggests that Hanukkah did not take its current form only because American Jews were imitating Christmas in some sort of religious version of keeping up with the Joneses.

Hanukkah, which is celebrated mostly in the home, gave Jewish women a place to shine—much like a domestic Christmas gave such opportunities to Christian women. It allowed Jews to focus on the family bonds, which often felt fragile and precious in the shadow of immigration and relatives left behind.

And focusing on children, such as by having them light the candles – a job traditionally done by adult men—offered a way to engage the next generation in a time and place where being Jewish felt like a choice.

In America, Jews were full citizens, free from the laws that had previously kept their communities isolated in many parts of Europe. That freedom also made it easier for each individual to choose how much to engage with Jewish community, if at all. In America, you could leave your Judaism behind without converting to Christianity—and many Jews did. Hanukkah was a fun way to build attachments to the holiday.

American Jews adapted Hanukkah to their own needs, emphasizing aspects of the religion that made it work in this new environment. One can see that as assimilation, sure, but it was also adaptation for survival. Joining in the “holiday season” did mitigate the feeling of being an outsider, and a minority, at the holidays. But it also allowed for the creation of a new way of engaging Judaism in a new space and time.

Samira Mehta is director of the �� Boulder Program in Jewish Studies.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hanukkah celebrations have changed dramatically—but the same is true of Christmas.

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Searching shadowed lunar landscapes for water

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 22:55:13 +0000

Searching shadowed lunar landscapes for water Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 11/15/2023 - 15:55

Paul Hayne

Scientists suspect there’s ice hiding on the Moon, and a host of missions from the U.S. and beyond are searching for it

Building a space station on the Moon might seem like something out of a science fiction movie, but each new lunar mission is bringing that idea closer to reality. Scientists are homing in on potential lunar ice reservoirs in permanently shadowed regions, or PSRs. These are key to setting up any sort of sustainable lunar infrastructure.

In late August 2023, India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander touched down on the lunar surface in the south polar region, which scientists suspect may harbor ice. This landing marked a significant milestone not only for India but for the scientific community at large.

For planetary scientists like me, measurements from instruments onboard Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander and its small, six-wheeled rover Pragyan provide a tantalizing up-close glimpse of the parts of the Moon most likely to contain ice. Earlier observations have shown ice is present in some permanently shadowed regions, but estimates vary widely regarding the amount, form and distribution of these ice deposits.

Paul Hayne is an assistant professor in the �� Boulder Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.

Polar ice deposits

My team at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics has a goal of understanding where water on the Moon came from. Comets or asteroids crashing into the Moon are options, as are volcanic activity and solar wind.

Each of these events leaves behind a distinctive chemical fingerprint, so if we can see those fingerprints, we might be able to trace them to the source of water. For example, sulfur is expected in higher amounts in lunar ice deposits if volcanic activity rather than comets created the ice.

Like water, sulfur is a “volatile” element on the Moon, because on the lunar surface it’s not very stable. It’s easily vaporized and lost to space. Given its temperamental nature, sulfur is expected to accumulate only in the colder parts of the Moon.

While the Vikram lander didn’t land in a permanently shadowed region, it measured the temperature at a high southern latitude of 69.37°S and was able to identify sulfur in soil grains on the lunar surface. The sulfur measurement is intriguing because sulfur may point toward the source of the Moon’s water.

So, scientists can use temperature as a way of finding where volatiles like these may end up. Temperature measurements from Chandrayaan-3 could allow scientists to test models of volatile stability and figure out how recently the sulfur may have accumulated at the landing site.

Tools for discovery

Vikram and Pragyan are the newest in a series of spacecraft that have helped scientists study water on the Moon. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched in 2009 and has spent the past several years observing the Moon from orbit. I’m a co-investigator on LRO, and I use its data to study the distribution, form and abundance of water on the lunar poles.

Both India’s Chandrayaan-1 orbiter and LRO have allowed my colleagues and me to use ultraviolet and near-infrared observations to identify ice in the permanently shadowed regions by measuring the chemical fingerprints of water. We’ve definitively detected water ice in some of these regions inside the coldest shadows at the lunar poles, but we’re still not sure why the ice isn’t more widespread.

Some dark craters on the Moon (shown in blue) never get light and researchers think these areas could contain ice. (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

On Mercury, by contrast, the permanently shadowed regions are practically overflowing with ice. For several years, scientists have recognized the need to get down on the surface and make more detailed measurements of lunar volatiles. With its sulfur detections, the Vikram lander has now taken the first tentative steps as part of a larger exploration program.

Future lunar missions

NASA has its sights set on the lunar south pole. Leading up to the Artemis III mission to deploy astronauts to investigate ice on the surface, the Commercial Lunar Payloads Services program will send multiple landers and rovers to search for ice starting later in 2023.

While uncertainty surrounds the timeline of Artemis launches, the first crewed mission, Artemis II, is on track for a late 2024 or early 2025 launch, with a looping trajectory passing behind the Moon’s far side and back to Earth.

The Lunar Compact Infrared Imaging System, of which I’m the principal investigator, is an infrared camera that will take temperature measurements and study the surface composition of the Moon.

Dubbed L-CIRiS, this camera recently underwent its final review before delivery to NASA, and the completed flight instrument will be prepared to launch on a commercial lander in late 2026.

Prior to L-CIRiS, the VIPER rover mission is planned to launch in late 2024 to the lunar south polar region, where it will carry instruments to search for ice in micro-cold traps. These tiny shadows, some no larger than a penny, are hypothesized to contain a significant amount of water and are more accessible than the larger PSRs.

One long-term goal of L-CIRiS and NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program is to find a suitable place for a long-term, sustainable lunar station. Astronauts could stay at this station, potentially similar to the one at McMurdo station in Antarctica, but it would need to be somewhat self-sufficient to be economically viable. Water is extremely expensive to ship to the Moon, hence locating the station near ice reservoirs is a must.

During the Artemis III mission, NASA astronauts will use the information gathered by the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and other missions, including Chandrayaan-3, to assess the best locations to collect samples. Chandrayaan-3 and L-CIRiS’s measurements of temperature and composition are like those that will be needed for Artemis to succeed. Cooperation among space agencies young and old is thus becoming a key feature of a long-term, sustainable human presence on the Moon.

Paul Hayne is an assistant professor in the �� Boulder Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scientists suspect there’s ice hiding on the Moon, and a host of missions from the U.S. and beyond are searching for it.

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