Comments on: What a Difference a Century Can Make https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/04/what-a-difference-a-century-can-make/ Wed, 05 Oct 2011 03:41:54 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.6 By: stacy https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/04/what-a-difference-a-century-can-make/#comment-12420 Wed, 05 Oct 2011 03:41:54 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/xblog/?p=549#comment-12420 @Phledge #9

Until the part where one of them traveled with the writer as a servant, I was thinking the strange people might be bonobos.

]]> By: John Page https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/04/what-a-difference-a-century-can-make/#comment-12419 Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:32:52 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/xblog/?p=549#comment-12419 How do you pronounce Efe?

]]> By: sailor https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/04/what-a-difference-a-century-can-make/#comment-12418 Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:21 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/xblog/?p=549#comment-12418 Those damn chimps can be pretty good at carrying bags, though maybe not where you want them.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/04/what-a-difference-a-century-can-make/#comment-12417 Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:12:40 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/xblog/?p=549#comment-12417 In reply to Phledge.

Had it been the previous century, then that would be more than a good guess!

]]> By: Phledge https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/04/what-a-difference-a-century-can-make/#comment-12416 Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:02:13 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/xblog/?p=549#comment-12416 I honestly thought that the writer was referring to chimpanzees. Color me surprised.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/04/what-a-difference-a-century-can-make/#comment-12415 Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:26:12 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/xblog/?p=549#comment-12415 I did ethnoarchaeology with the Efe (Pygmies) mainly, meaning that THEY were there, and I was studying them from an archaeological perspective. Though I also excavated a bunch of sites that mostly had bits of stone and broken pottery.

In another part of Africa, also in the Congo (then Zaire) I worked on a bunch of other sites some of which were among the oldest in the world. Or maybe not. That turned out to be a fairly interesting time, and I’ve blogged about much of it. If you want to read that, start here:

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2008/12/the_zodiac.php

and at the end of every post (usually in the last sentence or paragraph) there is a link to the next post.

]]> By: martha https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/04/what-a-difference-a-century-can-make/#comment-12414 Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:38:53 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/xblog/?p=549#comment-12414 Oh! Oh! Please! Please! Tell more about Africa! (Imagine squeaky, fan-girl noises if it helps.) Only yesterday, my son pointed out to me, courtesy of the history atlas, that there are megaliths in Africa and an hour later I learned, courtesy of a sci-fi novel & the web, about Nabta Playa, and despite being a fan of megaliths, interested in world history and particularly wanting to fill in the gaps left by my education in my knowledge of long-ago & non-Western history, I knew none of this. I’ve noticed, in fact, that in the general sorts of books & websites accessible to a non-expert reader like me, it’s difficult to find out what went on in Africa before the Middle Ages (not counting the bits connected to Egypt & Rome, of course). One of my best friends is a Women’s Studies professor married to a West-African Chemistry professor, and among her favorite people-ignore-Africa rants is the one about there not being enough African archeology.

What kind of archeology did you do among the pygmies? What was there?

]]> By: msm https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/04/what-a-difference-a-century-can-make/#comment-12413 Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:39:36 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/xblog/?p=549#comment-12413 I think the difference between you and your late victorian counterpart is the fact that you were actually acting as a scientist. I find it interesting, as a historian, looking back at the soft-sciences in the 19th c. and early 20th c. They seemed to think that they could be “scientists” without following the same method that the hard scientists did. This led to some weird places as you note here.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/04/what-a-difference-a-century-can-make/#comment-12412 Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:27:02 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/xblog/?p=549#comment-12412 During my time in the ituri, in the 1980s, there were no vaccination programs of any kind. The people who were afflicted with polio all got it about the same time, I think during the maximum extent of plantation development which peaked in the late 50s or early 60s and the receded, with population density and development going down and reversing. That region was not on anyone’s radar anywhere. Whatever might be said among the WHO-ish experts and agencies, nothing of the Ituri would be included.

I remember having dinner with the WHO guy in charge of certain diseases in Africa (we were somewhere in Africa but not the Ituri) and challenging his claim that leprosy had been wiped out in the region. It was actually hard to get leprosy medicine because WHO didn’t think it was there. It was, but “there” was simply not on their radar screen.

]]> By: Mu https://gregladen.com/blog/2011/10/04/what-a-difference-a-century-can-make/#comment-12411 Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:15:49 +0000 http://freethoughtblogs.com/xblog/?p=549#comment-12411 Greg, the Congo is usually not mentioned as one of the few remaining areas where polio is still active (typically Nigeria and Bangladesh). Has there been some form of vaccination campaign that actually reached that far into the jungle?

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