Bacteria isolated from rock art paintings: the case of Atlanterra shelter (south Spain).

The Sierra de la Plata is an Aljibe yellow sandstone formation from the Acheulian period. There are a few shelters, some of them with rock art paintings. The most representative one, and subjected to anthropogenic pressure, is that of Atlanterra, situated in a residential area. This shelter contains some rock art paintings made with iron oxides. The bacteria present in these paintings were isolated and identified using an automatic method: fatty acid methyl esters profiling. Most of the bacteria belong to the Bacillus genus, B. megaterium being the most abundant species. The isolated strains are able to reduce hematite. This is significant due to the fact that Fe(III)-(hydr)oxides are the most abundant pigments in rock art.     

Personnages dans l’art saharien : le réel et l’imaginé

In the Sahara, wherever there are naked rock surfaces, engravings and paintings have been found in large numbers. This rock art includes various types of images — the oldest dating about ten millenniums — among which human beings, wild or domesticated animals, therianthrops and non-explicit images can be identified. According to periods and styles, the human being has been represented under extremely varied aspects from particularly realistic — similar to the reality — till very simplified, even caricatural drawings. For some realistic representations of women and men, we can observe anatomical or morphological peculiarities which, without being frequent, show cases of steatopygy and gynoïd or androïd obesity, pathological or not. For certain periods, we also find imaginary, fantastic or caricatural representations. These images characterize particularly styles previous to that called “Round Heads”. So, in the Saharan art, the human being has been represented either in his physical truth, or according to multiple stylistic conventions or graphic stereotypes, which could characterize certain ethnic groups.     

Art,Culture and Ambiguity in Wilcannia,New South Wales

The claim of most town whites that Aboriginal people of Wilcannia make art but have no culture and the claim by Aboriginal people of the town that their art work and art designs demonstrate their culture and cultural traditions opens up the powerful and productive dimensions of art and culture for closer scrutiny. In so doing, the ambivalence and ambiguity which saturates these categories is ethnographically revealed. How can the presence and production of artworks in Wilcannia and the white denial of culture be considered? Why indeed do these questions matter, in what ways do they matter, and to whom do they matter? How do the categories of traditional/remote, urban/settled and their avatars intersect with black and white notions of Aboriginal art and Aboriginal culture discursively and experientially?     

L’apport de l’ethnographie au concept de « chasse magique par empathie » (ou compatissante) et de chamanisme dans l’art préhistorique d’Afrique australe

African rituals and beliefs have been recorded by various observers (travelers and anthropologists) in different areas in southern Africa within the last two centuries, and these are useful for interpreting prehistoric rock art (paintings and engravings). Notably, Lichtenstein (1812) recorded rituals among Nguni (who interacted with San) in South Africa, where a hunter took on the form of an animal which was symbolically wounded and which was symbolically killed in the belief that this would contribute to success in a forthcoming hunt. In Namibia, Lebzelter (1934) recorded another ritual in which a San hunter symbolically wounded and symbolically killed an animal represented in a drawing. Such rituals relate to the principle of sympathetic hunting magic. The ethnological evidence is discussed in relation to prehistoric rock art in different areas of southern Africa (Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia, and Melikane Shelter in Lesotho), and in relation to an important photograph of a ritual presumed to be associated with hunting, recorded at Logageng in the southern Kalahari, South Africa. When taken together with linguistic as well as ethnographic evidence, these sources of information support the view that the so-called trance hypothesis (relating to shamanism) and the principle of sympathetic hunting magic are not mutually exclusive, at least in southern Africa (if not elsewhere).     

Pictographs At The Desrosier Rockshel Ter

Abstract

The DesRosier rockshelter is located in the Smith River drainage in central Montana, just east of the Continental Divide. Although the deep, stratified, culture-bearing deposit in the shelter has been test excavated and the recovered artifacts described, pictographs in the shelter and in an associated rock structure have never been discussed. My analysis of these pictographs demonstrates that they are representative of the Columbia Plateau rock art style, and in conjunction with the rock structure, were used as part of a vision quest ceremony.     

The Burning Question: Aborigines,Fire and Australian Ecosystems*

The 'fire stick farming model, which suggests that Aborigines changed the frequency and nature of fires in order to manipulate animal and plant resources, is now widely accepted in Australian phehistory. A re-examination of the biological evidence suggests that Aboriginal use of fire had little impact on the environment and that the patterns of distribution of plants and animals which obtained 200 years ago would have been essentially the same whether or not Aborigines had previously been living here. It is further suggested that 'fire stick farming’, had it been attempted, would in fact have been counter productive economically because of the adverse effects it would have had upon small species of animals. Aborigines observed and made use of an existing natural fire regime in Australia, they did not attempt to develop a new one.     

Shelter availability and human attitudes as drivers of rock hyrax (Procavia capensis) expansion along a rural–urban gradient

While anthropogenic land‐use changes threaten wildlife globally, some species take advantage of such changes and disperse into urban areas. The wildlife in urban areas often promotes conflicts with humans, notably when the animals are associated with the spread of zoonotic diseases. In Israel, current urban invasion of rock hyraxes (Procavia capensis) draws public attention, since the species is a reservoir host of cutaneous leishmaniasis, a serious skin disease. The rock hyrax, however, has seldom been studied in densely populated areas, and the drivers for its urban expansion, as well as its abilities to live and spread in core urban areas, are relatively unknown. Here, we explore the rock hyrax expansion to urban areas process by examining the availability, characteristics and use of shelter along an urban gradient. Our findings suggest that a series of factors determines shelter availability and quality for the rock hyrax, which facilitates its dispersion across the urban gradient. We found that rock hyraxes from the Judean Desert expand to the peri‐urban region of Jerusalem by colonizing new rocky shelters formed as by‐products of urban development. With their populations reaching extreme densities in this area and saturating the available shelters, there is some spill over to the adjacent core urban areas where they colonize littered sites, which are made available due to the local socio‐economic conditions and cultural norms of waste disposal and illegal placement of temporary structures. Our work emphasizes the significance of the urban gradient approach for studying the mechanisms promoting wildlife expansion to cities. Our findings suggest that changes in shelter availability and quality due to urban development, and cultural norms promote shifts of the hyrax population by pushing from the already established areas and pulling into new environment across the urban gradient.     

Interspecific conflict in lizards: Social dominance depends upon an individual's species not its body size

Abstract Animals frequently compete for resources (food, shelter, etc.) against conspecifics as well as against individuals of other species; larger animals typically are dominant over smaller ones. Although body size thus correlates with social dominance in interspecific as well as intraspecific encounters, the causal connection remains unclear. That is, one species might dominate another not simply because of larger size, but some other species‐specific attribute. In such a case, we expect an animal of the subordinate taxon to be subservient to all members of the ‘dominant’ species, even those too small to pose a physical threat. This scenario can be tested by staging encounters over resource use in the laboratory. We conducted such trials using a guild of sympatric montane lizards (Reptilia: Scincidae), that compete for shelter sites (rock crevices), with larger species routinely displacing smaller taxa. Remarkably, neonates of larger species effectively deterred adults of smaller species from entering occupied retreat sites – even when the neonates were much smaller than the adults they displaced. Thus, the outcomes of interspecific interactions in this system depend upon the species of the participants, not their relative body sizes. Measurements of bite force confirm that the neonates of the most dominant species posed little physical threat to heterospecific adults, so that species‐specific variation in fighting ability cannot explain this puzzling result. However, juveniles often share shelter sites with conspecific adults, so that avoidance of neonates may reduce the risk of attack by an unseen adult resident.     

Ghost Dancing the Grand Canyon. Southern Paiute Rock Art, Ceremony, and Cultural Landscapes

Combining rock art studies with ethnohistory, contemporary ethnographic analysis, and the interpretations of people who share the cultural traditions being studied, this paper documents a rock art site in Kanab Creek Canyon that appears to have been the location of a Ghost Dance ceremony performed by Southern Paiute and perhaps Hualapai people in the late 1800s. Using the site as a point of departure, it focuses on the way in which synergistic associations among place, artifact, resources, events, and historic and contemporary Indian people contribute to the construction of a contextual cultural landscape.     

Exploring Responses to Art in Adolescence: A Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Study

Adolescence is a peculiar age mainly characterized by physical and psychological changes that may affect the perception of one''s own and others'' body. This perceptual peculiarity may influence the way in which bottom-up and top-down processes interact and, consequently, the perception and evaluation of art. This study is aimed at investigating, by means of the eye-tracking technique, the visual explorative behavior of adolescents while looking at paintings. Sixteen color paintings, categorized as dynamic and static, were presented to twenty adolescents; half of the images represented natural environments and half human individuals; all stimuli were displayed under aesthetic and movement judgment tasks. Participants'' ratings revealed that, generally, nature images are explicitly evaluated as more appealing than human images. Eye movement data, on the other hand, showed that the human body exerts a strong power in orienting and attracting visual attention and that, in adolescence, it plays a fundamental role during aesthetic experience. In particular, adolescents seem to approach human-content images by giving priority to elements calling forth movement and action, supporting the embodiment theory of aesthetic perception.     

Describing Art – An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Effects of Speaking on Gaze Movements during the Beholding of Paintings

Ever since the Renaissance speaking about paintings has been a fundamental approach for beholders, especially experts. However, it is unclear whether and how speaking about art modifies the way we look at it and this was not yet empirically tested. The present study investigated to the best of our knowledge for the first time in what way speaking modifies the patterns of fixations and gaze movements while looking at paintings. Ninety nine university students looked at four paintings selected to cover different art historical typologies for periods of 15 minutes each while gaze movement data were recorded. After 10 minutes, the participants of the experimental group were asked open questions about the painting. Speaking dramatically reduced the duration of fixations and painting area covered by fixations while at the same time increasing the frequencies of fixations, gaze length and the amount of repeated transitions between fixation clusters. These results suggest that the production of texts as well-organised sequences of information, structures the gazes of art beholders by making them quicker, more focused and better connected.     

Plant macro-remains from a rock shelter in the temperate forests of southern Chile

The study of plant macro-remains from archaeological sites provides substantial information on the activities occurring in a settlement and living conditions during its occupation. This article reports the plant macro-remains (charred seeds and wood charcoal) recovered from a rock shelter in the temperate forests of southern Chile (Latitude 39°S). The main goal of the study was to assess the potential of these remains to indicate collection, use and consumption of plant resources available in this ecosystem by hunter-gatherer groups during the Holocene. Remains from three cultural periods were collected using wet sieving and flotation techniques. Macro-botanical remains found in the rock shelter represented a variety of native trees, shrubs and herbs, both native and introduced. Charred seeds included 19 plant taxa, divided into three groups according to their source: collected foods, including pulses (1 species) and grains (3 taxa, 1 probably cultivated); seeds introduced with food items, including fruit stones and nutshells from several native shrubs and trees; seeds introduced with non-food items, mainly from tree species with no evident use. Wood charcoal fragments represented 28 different native taxa (26 dicotyledons, 1 monocotyledon and 1 gymnosperm), none with a specific identifiable use. Analysis of seed remains indicated the use of grains and, to some extent, collection of fruits and nuts over summer and autumn. The analysis of dispersed charcoal fragments and those accumulated in hearths were especially useful to describe the vegetation surrounding the rock shelter, infer successional events, and identify taxa undetectable in the seed record.     

Utilitarian art and art-related objects in the Urals’ Palaeolithic

Stone and bone artefacts serving as expedient food-procurement and processing implements are the principal and most frequent findings at Palaeolithic sites. Utilitarian art items, often aesthetically fashioned artefacts, are much less common. Emergence of cognitive art within the broader Ural region was determined by progressive cultural developments and adaptations of anatomically modern human beings to mosaic mountain settings and parkland-steppes. At the Urals’ Late Pleistocene cave sites, objects, which were made frequently of unusual and rare materials and are presumed to be of a ritual nature, are represented by adornments and artworks bearing stylized pictorial images. Zoomorphic figurines produced from flint and mammoth ivory document the high skills of Stone Age artisans. The earliest, utilitarian, art-related works of the Urals include sculptures using natural pre-forms such as river pebbles and animal bones, occasionally ochre-painted or ornamented by incising or engraving. Personal decorations are represented by pendants and beads made of stone, shell, bone, and teeth of animals. Rare exemplars are made from material of non-local provenance, such as petrified wood or segments of fossil sea-lily (crinoids) and are indicators of a broad geographic activity-range and/or regional interactions among local groups of hunter-gatherers. Artisanal instruments associated with rock art, for example, lamps made from stone and clay as well as pieces of ochre, belong to a specific category. Aesthetic-looking minerals with appealing colours and textures, such as serpentine, rock crystal, chalcedony, and jasper, it may be assumed, were intended for religious or cultic purposes, but also may have been curated simply because of their natural rarity. These art-related items likely had symbolic value and spiritual meaning apart from purely decorative function. Understanding utilitarian art objects offers insights to every-day life of the Palaeolithic people of the Urals, and their behavioural and environmental adjustments, which culminated in multifarious, iconographic expressions at the end of the Last Glacial stage.     

Emplacement and Displacement: Perceiving the Landscape Through Aboriginal Australian Acrylic Painting

Aboriginal Australian acrylic paintings have long been considered representations of mythologically invested landscape. This understanding has been made problematic by recent writings on ‘dwelling’. As common usage of the term ‘landscape’ seems to prioritize vision, to suggest that the acrylic paintings are landscapes only strengthens the suspicion that they are artifacts of displacement or distancing, rather than examples of the emplacement emphasized in this ‘dwelling perspective’. However, this paper will demonstrate that the relationship between acrylic painting and the land is more complex than such an interpretation. It will argue that the Aboriginal objectification of their relationship to the land is not inherently a distancing of the land.     

Niche construction and Dreaming logic: aboriginal patch mosaic burning and varanid lizards (Varanus gouldii) in Australia

Anthropogenic fire is a form of ecosystem engineering that creates greater landscape patchiness at small spatial scales: such rescaling of patch diversity through mosaic burning has been argued to be a form of niche construction, the loss of which may have precipitated the decline and extinction of many endemic species in the Western Desert of Australia. We find evidence to support this hypothesis relative to one keystone species, the sand monitor lizard (Varanus gouldii). Paradoxically, V. gouldii populations are higher where Aboriginal hunting is most intense. This effect is driven by an increase in V. gouldii densities near successional edges, which is higher in landscapes that experience extensive human burning. Over time, the positive effects of patch mosaic burning while hunting overwhelm the negative effects of predation in recently burned areas to produce overall positive impacts on lizard populations. These results offer critical insights into the maintenance of animal communities in the desert, supporting the hypothesis that the current high rate of endemic species decline among small animals may be linked to the interaction between invasive species and mid-century removal of Aboriginal niche construction through hunting and patch mosaic burning.     

Microhabitat use affects goby (Gobiidae) cue choice in spatial learning task

This study investigated whether spatial learning ability and cue use of gobies (Gobiidae) from two contrasting habitats differed in a spatial task. Gobies were collected from the spatially complex rock pools and dynamic, homogenous sandy shores. Fishes were trained to locate a shelter under the simulated threat of predation and it was determined whether they used local or extra‐maze (global) and geometric cues to do so. It was hypothesized that fishes from rock pools would outperform fishes from sandy shores in their ability to relocate shelter and the two groups would differ in their cue use. It was found that rock‐pool species learnt the location of the correct shelter much faster, made fewer errors and used a combination of all available cues to locate the shelter, while sand species relied significantly more on extra‐maze and geometric cues for orientation. The results reported here support the hypothesis that fishes living in complex habitats have enhanced capacity for spatial learning and are more likely to rely on local landmarks as directional cues than fishes living in mundane habitats where local cues such as visual landmarks are unreliable.     

The fauna of Greece and adjacent areas in the Age of Homer: evidence from the first written documents of Greek literature

Aim To study the composition of fauna in Greece and adjacent areas around 3000 years ago based on the knowledge of Homeric man about the animal kingdom. Location Greece and adjacent areas. Method Analysis of information derived from a thorough study of the first written documents of Greek literature, the epics, attributed to Homer and Hesiod. Results Records of 2442 animals were found, corresponding to 71 different animal names. All animal names were attributed to recent taxa, at different category levels; the majority (65%) were assigned to taxa at the species level and the rest to supraspecific taxa. Most of the animal names recorded in the epics have been retained as integral words or roots in Modern Greek and they have been used in the formation of the Latin scientific taxa names. Five animal phyla appear in the texts: (1) Chordata (mostly birds and mammals), (2) Arthropoda, (3) Mollusca, (4) Porifera, and (5) Annelida. Information in the epics also includes morphology, biology, ecology (habitat and prey–predator relationships), and behaviour. The presence of several species in the area in that period is documented on the basis of archaeological and/or palaeontological findings from various Greek localities. Main conclusions The knowledge of Homeric man about animals, as reflected in the epics, seems to concentrate mainly, but not exclusively, on animals involved in human activities. The populations of some common animal species of the Homeric Age in Greek populated areas have become extinct or reduced at the present time. On the other hand, some common animals of the present time do not appear in the epics, since they were introduced later. Useful zoological information can be derived from the study of classical texts, which may help historical biogeographers as a supplement to archaeology and art, in the reconstruction of faunas of older periods.     

Scaling in the animal kingdom

Several of the known scaling laws in the animal kingdom are based on a so-called allometric correlation in which some physical quantity is presumed to scale as some power of the mass of the animal. Such a simple correlation, when deduced purely as an empirical result, often hides the physical balances that fix the relevant scaling law. In particular, the emphasis on a simple allometric scaling has often masked the fundamental role played by time scales associated with the physical balances being struck. In this paper I have concentrated on three different attributes to which the use of dimensional analysis, scaling arguments and some judicious guesswork have led to new results and an understanding of some balances that occur in the animal kingdom. The running speed of animals is examined and a rationale deduced for the resolution of a conundrum first posed by A.V. Hill of why it is that many animals appear to have approximately the same maximum speed. A complete dimensional analysis for scaling the basal metabolic rate for a class of animals suggests that a detailed understanding of the physical balances that fix the metabolic rate could be quite subtle. However, the use of such an analysis has led to the discovery of a new correlation for mammals, relating the metabolic rate to the mass and the pulse rate of the animal. At the heart of many scaling laws for animal motion is the provision of an estimate of how the skeletal structure depends on the mass of the animal. It has been known for some time that the assumption of isometry between the builds of animals is too constrictive to describe the observed scaling laws. It is shown here how to relax the isometric assumption and deduce scaling laws in good agreement with observation. Thus, it appears that the skeletal dimensions of many animals with exoskeletons are fixed by the need to support static rather than dynamical loads. The scaling laws associated with endoskeletons are more complex, apparently, though the analysis does suggest that it is dynamical loading which is decisive for the skeletal design of land mammals.     

华南晚更新世晚期人类行为复杂化的个案——江西万年吊桶环遗址的发现

吊桶环遗址位于江西万年县境内的大源盆地,是一处坐落在盆地西南边缘的孤立小山顶山的岩厦遗址。岩厦内发现晚更新世晚期以来文化堆积厚达4 m以上。1993-1999年期间曾经过三次发掘,出土了数以千计的石制品,包括石片石器、砾石石器及局部经过磨制加工的石制品,数量众多的动物骨骼遗存。尤为重要的是时代早,数量较多,类型复杂的骨、角及蚌制品的发现,如鹿角斧、骨鱼镖及穿孔蚌壳刀等。与此同时,还有多处用火与居住活动遗迹的发现。这些新发现清楚地记录了晚更新世人类在岩厦内活动的历史,为认识华南地区晚更新世晚期人类的"行为现代性"或"复杂化"进程提供了重要的新证据。     

The occurrence and comparative phenotypic characteristics of Staphylococcus spp. from healthy and diseased, household and shelter dogs, based on routine biochemical diagnostic methods

To determine the staphylococcal colonization pattern in healthy and diseased dogs, living in two particular environments, a number of microbiological samples were taken. Overall, twenty dogs, either healthy or with infected skin lesions, were examined. In each case bacterial swabs were collected from the nasal mucosa, ear, perineum, lumbo-sacralis triangle, and from the infection sites if such were present. A total number of 104 isolates representing different staphylococcal species were isolated and identified using routine biochemical methods applied in diagnostic laboratories. Among 17 isolated staphylococcal species, Staphylococcus intermedius was the most common species isolated from both healthy or diseased dogs living either in animal shelter or household environments. The pattern of Staphylococcus sp. colonization differs considerably for animals living in the two tested habitats. In particular, S. aureus MRSA and MSSA isolates were detected only in infected skin lesion samples from animals that dwelled in the animal shelter. As could be expected, S. intermedius was found to be a predominant causative agent in canine skin infections. In our study, we demonstrated that S. intermedius in its carrier-state, inhabits mainly the mucosal membrane of the nasal vestibule. It was also found in the samples taken from the skin, the lumbo-sacralis triangle and perineum, but was rarely isolated from the ears.