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Adult male baboons are bad dudes. They regularly square off in bloody fights over access to food and females, whom they will also attack. In this vicious pecking order, males at the top bully bottom dwellers into a demoralized state of submission.

So, it startled Stanford University biologists Robert M. Sapolsky and Lisa J. Share to find a baboon troop in which even top-rung males exhibited remarkably peaceful behaviors. The big honchos often left weak males alone and refrained from attacking females, focusing instead on fighting each other.

It's a uniquely "pacific culture" among wild baboons, Sapolsky and Share conclude.

A decade earlier, the most aggressive males in this troop had died. The current top males arrived later and have no close genetic ties to the other members, past or present. Male baboons typically migrate into a troop as adolescents.

To achieve the big chill-out in male behavior, the researchers theorize, resident females must behave in ways that induce males to be tolerant and cooperative.

The findings provide the first known example of the cultural transmission of social attitudes by primates other than people, the researchers report in the April Public Library of Science Biology.

"Social behavior observed in nature may be a product of culture, and even the fiercest primates do not forever need to stay this way," remarks chimp researcher Frans B.M. de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta in an editorial published with the new report.

Possible cultural traditions of tool use and social communication in various animals now attract considerable scientific interest (SN: 4/3/04, p. 218: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040403/bob9.asp).

Sapolsky and Share began studying Forest Troop, a group of olive baboons living in an animal reserve in Kenya, in 1978. The size of such troops varies from about 30 to 150 animals.

In 1982, the most aggressive Forest Troop males began foraging in a garbage pit at a tourist lodge in the reserve. The next year, infected meat in the dump killed all these dominant males, so only the troop's relatively easygoing males survived. By 1986, aggressive behavior in the troop had declined markedly.

The most interesting observations began in 1993. By that time, the troop contained high-ranking immigrant males. From 1993 to 1996, these males behaved as cooperatively as the original set of lower-ranking male survivors had, the scientists say. Compared with males in another troop in the same area, Forest

Troop males were friendlier with each other and spent less time jockeying for power.

Moreover, low-ranking Forest Troop males didn't display high stress-hormone concentrations that have been observed among their counterparts in other troops.

Forest Troop females somehow steer male newcomers into adopting cooperative outlooks, the investigators propose. Intriguingly, Sapolsky and Share have observed that these females approach new male arrivals and begin to groom them after waiting about 3 weeks, one-quarter the time required by females in the nearby group. Forest Troop females then continue to spend much time in mutual grooming with these males.

Sapolsky and Share make "a strong case" that norms of peaceful behavior were transmitted to new Forest Troop members, comments baboon researcher Joan B. Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles. Only more-intensive study can establish how this process occurs and whether the troop attracts males of all temperaments or only those already inclined to a placid lifestyle, Silk says.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

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charred

Researchers have already established that people living in the Middle East around 23,000 years ago fished and hunted. Excavations along the shore of the Sea of Galilee in Israel now indicate that the menu for these Stone Age folk also included a plentiful portion of seeds from wild grasses along with a side of grains from wild cereals, such as wheat and barley. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

This discovery pushes back by 10,000 years Homo sapiens' shift to a plant-rich diet, say Ehud Weiss of Harvard University and his coworkers. That transition in eating habits set people on the path to farming, a practice that began in the Middle East between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago, according to the researchers.

Weiss' group recovered more than 90,000 charred plant remains at a site called Ohalo II. Waterlogged soil there had preserved the delicate edibles. Around a grinding stone located in one of the site's huts, the researchers uncovered many wild-grass seeds and smaller numbers of wild-cereal grains. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Other evidence at Ohalo II and at nearby sites suggests that from 23,000 to 8,000 years ago, wild-grass seeds gradually disappeared from inhabitants' diets as the cereals gained favor.

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brains

Educated brains stave off declines in memory that typically occur as people age, a new brain-imaging investigation suggests.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

College-educated older adults do better on memory tests than their less-educated peers do and also display pronounced frontal-brain activity during memory testing, say Mellanie V. Springer of the University of Toronto and her colleagues. College-educated young adults scored higher than either their less-educated peers or comparably educated elders do and, during memory tests, exhibited intense responses in their temporal lobes, which are on the brain's flanks.Louis J. Sheehan

The opposite neural pattern characterizes adults without college educations. During memory tests, the older volunteers showed strong temporal-brain activity and the younger ones displayed notable frontal responses.

Highly educated older adults recruit the frontal brain into a memory system that partly compensates for declining efficiency in neural structures of the temporal lobes, Springer's group proposes in the March Neuropsychology.Louis J. Sheehan

Memory tests were administered to 14 young adults, ages 18 to 30, and to 19 older adults, ages 67 to 80. Members of both groups ranged from high school dropouts to recipients of graduate degrees. The scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood flow, a marker of neural activity, in participants' brains.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

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conflcting

A new analysis of the locations and ages of ancient farming sites reinforces the controversial idea that the groups that started raising crops in the Middle East gradually grew in number and colonized much of Europe, replacing many native hunter-gatherers in the process.

Hunter-gatherers in some European locales may have adopted farming rather than surrender their home territories to the newcomers. Overall, though, the data indicate that newly arrived farmers reproduced at a rate high enough to keep their boundary moving steadily northwestward at roughly 1 kilometer per year, say anthropologist Ron Pinhasi of Roehampton University in London and his colleagues.

One of Pinhasi's coauthors, Albert J. Ammerman of Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., proposed much the same scenario more than 30 years ago with Stanford University's L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Their wave-of-advance model rested on an analysis of 53 farming sites.http://www.bebo.com/LouisS205

Pinhasi's team considered the geographic arrangement of 735 farming sites that previous radiocarbon measurements had dated to between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago. The researchers calculated the most likely paths by which farmers who started out in any of 10 possible Middle Eastern spots would have traveled into Europe.

"I was surprised at how well the wave-of-advance model holds up with a much larger data set," Pinhasi says. "It took more than 3,000 years, or 100 generations of people, for the [agricultural] transition to reach northwestern Europe."

The new analysis, published in the December PLoS Biology, indicates that agriculture spread in a widening arc from an area that encompasses parts of modern-day Syria, Turkey, and Iraq.

If agriculture had taken root primarily through the adoption of cultivation techniques by people already living in Europe, the model would have depicted a much faster spread of farming settlements, Pinhasi's team contends.

In contrast, other researchers remain convinced that agriculture expanded primarily by the spread of cultivation techniques and year-round settlements among native Europeans (SN: 2/5/05, p. 88: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050205/bob9.asp). The latest evidence for this perspective appeared in the Nov. 11 Science.

For that report, a team led by anthropologist Joachim Burger of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, examined mitochondrial DNA, which is passed to offspring only from the mother. The researchers isolated this type of DNA from the bones of 24 adults who died in central European farming villages about 7,500 years ago. One-quarter of these individuals displayed a mitochondrial-DNA pattern that rarely occurs in modern Europeans. That pattern would be more common today if that early population had made a substantial genetic contribution to today's Europeans, the researchers contend.

If early farmers who moved into Europe didn't reproduce in large numbers, then native groups must have picked up the slack, Burger and his coworkers conclude.

Other DNA studies, including previous analyses of Y chromosomes in European men today, suggest that early Middle Eastern farmers had a substantial genetic impact in Europe, Pinhasi notes.

These conflicting DNA data may reflect intermarriage of immigrant farmer males with females native to Europe, suggests anthropologist Alex Bentley of the University of Durham in England.

Although he is sympathetic to the wave-of-advance model, archaeologist Peter Bogucki of Princeton University suspects that further research will show "a much more complicated combination of very rapid [agricultural] advances with long standstills."

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spain

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Neandertals that 43,000 years ago inhabited what's now northern Spain faced periodic food shortages and possibly resorted to cannibalism to survive, according to a new investigation। http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com

These Neandertals evolved shorter, broader faces with a less pronounced slope than northern European Neandertals did, say Antonio Rosas of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid and his colleagues। http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com

Since 2000, the researchers have recovered more than 1,300 Neandertal bones and teeth from an underground-cave system known as El Sidrón. The fossils come from at least eight individuals, including one infant, one child, two adolescents, and four young adults.

Close examination of the ancient teeth revealed disturbances of enamel formation, especially in the children and teens, that Rosas and his coworkers attribute to near starvation. The team reports its results online and in the Dec. 19 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Furthermore, skulls and limb bones at El Sidrón display cut marks suggestive of butchering and show crushed areas, presumably where brains and marrow were removed during cannibalism, the scientists say.

In another analysis, they compared three Neandertal jaws from the site with jaws from 32 Neandertals and 23 modern Homo sapiens previously found at Stone Age sites throughout Europe and western Asia. Reconstructions of the lower faces indicate that Neandertals evolved into northern and southern varieties, the team claims.

zircons

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What a juxtaposition: About 800 million years ago, East Antarctica, now one of the coldest regions on Earth, abutted what is now California’s Death Valley, one of the hottest। http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com

Both locales were part of an equatorial supercontinent called Rodinia, says John Goodge, a geologist at the University of Minnesota Duluth। http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com

The motion of tectonic plates continually rearranges Earth’s continents, sometimes cramming most or all of them into immense groupings called supercontinents.

One of those assemblages, Rodinia, existed between 750 million and 800 million years ago. Debate has long raged about how today’s landmasses were arranged then, says Goodge. The orientation of magnetic lines locked into rocks that formed at the time — which often can be used to estimate the location and orientation of ancient landmasses — are in many cases contradictory, he notes.

In previous studies, various teams have argued that Australia, southern China, or even Siberia lay along the southwestern edge of Laurentia, a landmass that held most of what is now North America.

Now, geochemical analyses of rock samples taken from the Transantarctic Mountains hint instead that portions of East Antarctica occupied that spot, Goodge and his colleagues report in the July 11 Science. http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.comFor one thing, the ratios of neodymium isotopes in the ancient sediments in the Transantarctic Mountains are the same as those in what was then Laurentia, says Goodge. Also, the hafnium isotope ratios in the 1.44-billion-year-old zircons found in East Antarctica match those of the zircons found in the distinctive granites now found primarily in North America.

Finally, the researchers note, the ratios of various isotopes and elements in a basketball-sized chunk of granite found in East Antarctica — a chunk ripped by a glacier from bedrock now smothered by thick ice, the team speculates — match those of granite found only in what was southwestern Laurentia, which today is the American Southwest.

rumors

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Nothing additional from the West. Several thousand Georgia mounted troops have arrived during the last 24 hours, in readiness to march to Lee. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.comOne Georgia regiment has 1200, and a South Carolina regiment that went up this morning 1000 men.

Lee’s army is at Ashland—17 miles distant. The enemy are marching down the Pamunky, north side. They will doubtless cross it, and march through New Kent and Charles City Counties to the James River, opposite Butler’s army. Grant probably intends crossing his army to the south side, which, if effected, might lose us Richmond, for the city cannot subsist a week with its southern communications cut. We should starve.

But Beauregard means to make another effort to dislodge Butler, immediately. It will probably be a combined movement, the iron clads co-operating. It is a necessity, and it must be done without delay, no matter what the cost may be. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.comIf Butler remains, the railroads will be cut. If the city be taken, not only will the iron-clads be lost, but a large proportion of the army may be cut off from escape. Immense munitions would certainly fall into the hands of the enemy.

The Whig and Enquirer both denounced Gen. Bragg to-day.

Senator Orr’s assault in the Senate on Gen. Bragg was followed by another from Wigfall, who declared there was a want of confidence in the President. Mr. Orr said his appointment was discourtesy to the Secretary of War, whereupon the Secretary fell ill yesterday, but to-day he is well again. Nevertheless, the Senate voted Gen. B. the salary, etc. allowed a general in the field.

And Gen. Winder has been treated as cavalierly as he treated me. Retribution is sure.

The city is excited with rumors. One is that Beauregard, when about to engage the enemy last week, was ordered by Bragg to evacuate Petersburg—certainly an insane measure. Gen. Beauregard (so the story runs) telegraphed the President (who was with him, as I heard) to know if such an order had his sanction. The President replied that Gen. Bragg’s orders were authorized by him. Beauregard disregarded the order and fought the battle, saving Petersburg. Then Beauregard tendered his resignation, which was not accepted. It is also said that the order was directed to the commandant of the garrison; but the courier was stopped by Generals Wise and Martin, who gave the paper to Beauregard.

There is another rumor that Bragg’s orders caused Lee to fall back; and, of course, the credulous people here are despondent; some in despair. There may be some design against the President in all this.