#migration to australia from south africa

[tri-nationsmigration]

Migration to Australia from South Africa

A stone's throw away from the Royal Courts of Justice, Australia House sits on a visitors island at a busy intersection in central London. Its imperial structure and navy blue flags are peppered with mini Union Jacks marking out the diplomatic territory of certainly one of Britain's most devoted former colonies. The fee proudly boasts that Australia House is the longest repeatedly occupied foreign migration to australia mission in London (Australian High Commission United Kingdom n.d.). Inside the building's sandstone walls, the Australian High Commission works alongside Tourism Australia and The Britain Australia Society to carry out the day-to-day work of representing the Australian state within the coronary heart of the colonial motherland.

Like the 189, the a hundred ninety is a permanent residency visa, which means that you’re a everlasting resident of Australia from the moment you arrive and might work in any profession you want without worrying about visa renewals. Andrew and his staff is outstanding in their work, they carried and coached us all through the entire course of, preparing us for what is to return and tips on how to handle the process. All our worries, questions and issues migration to australia from south africa were dealt with in our time frames and with the utmost respect. I will refer Network Migration to anybody who's serious about emigrating. We utilized their service by way of word of mouth after potentially shedding the opportunity to to migrate because of using another firm who was all but skilled. Andrew and his group saved the day in our hour of need with their professional help, steerage and help with communication.

Migrants can transfer valuable knowledge and expertise to their international locations of origin and vacation spot, serving to to help expertise improvement, research and innovation. Decent jobs and secure and safe work environments for migrants are important if they're to become productive members of society and contribute to financial progress. In 2019, USD 714 billion in international remittances have been transferred globally by migrants and diaspora again immigration to australia to origin international locations. Addressing the health and well-being of migrants is a precondition for social and economic growth. Before the pandemic, almost 400,000 worldwide college students and 250,000 working holiday makers have been employed annually in Australia, many in pubs, motels and eating places. That provide evaporated when the nation closed its borders and asked momentary residents to depart because the pandemic struck.

Please ensure you deliver books / toys and so on with you to keep them entertained as the medical course of may be seen as lengthy. Generally speaking the primary obtainable appointment shall be offered to you, nevertheless this could range from the subsequent couple of days to possibly a week or two or three – the general rule could be to permit at least for 10 days prematurely. Once all of this information has been obtained, a consultant will contact you by way of email to rearrange an appointment based mostly in your appointment choice selected. Tickets are free, so begin your journey to international citizenship at present. There are many occupations on the regional expertise lists which you will not discover on the 190 and 189 lists.

Instead, refugees are offered resettlement in "third countries" with a significantly lower standard of living and the place they're prone to be subjected to further violence and persecution, similar to PNG, Nauru or Cambodia . The specific motivation behind the "Pacific Solution" and the third country migrate to australia resettlement scheme is to topic refugees to such dire circumstances that others might be deterred from attempting the journey. It is a spectacular performance of cruelty by way of which Australia asserts and defines itself, each in relation to the area and the world.

A chook was tagged in Staffordshire – a rustic within the west midlands of England, and later found in KwaZulu Natal – South Africa. In our summer, from October/November, they travel back to the south, after the tasty meals such as bugs. Hi Kylie, the greatest way to get an accurate quote is to fill out our on-line quote type via the website. There is just one quarantine station in Australia and it is located australia migration in Melbourne. Should your pet have to journey onward after the quarantine interval, Global Paws would be succesful of assist with the onward preparations by way of certainly one of our partnered IPATA brokers, to any Australian metropolis or vacation spot. Then you’ll be ready to pick and choose the nation that’s one of the best match for your beloved ones.

The kids who had been forcibly migrated under the system became generally recognized as the Lost Generation. Catholic Church established properties to accommodate and help migrant youngsters. In 1987 the Child Migrant Trust under the leadership immigrate to australia of Margaret Humphreys began to publicise the abuse of kid migrants. A variety of scholars agree that race was part of the Enlightenment project that resulted from the need to categorise folks into distinct categories.

Another utility we all certainly contemplate as fundamental these days is the web. The value for uncapped data over ADSL or a cable at 60mbps or more, will value just about the identical in each nations. Numbeo tells us that the common costs of shopper goods and companies, lease, and groceries are lower in New Zealand than in Australia. However, New Zealand’s purchasing energy is 17.49% lower than Australia’s.

[reasonsforhope]

"Winning what’s been called the ‘Green Nobel’ an Indian environmental activist has been recognized for saving a 657 square-mile forest from 21 coal mines.

From the New Delhi train station to high-end hotels to the poorest communities, virtually no one in India is free from periodic blackouts. As part of the Modi regime’s push for a developed and economically dominant India, power generation of every sort is being installed in huge quantities.

GNN has reported this drive has included some of the world’s largest solar energy projects, but it also involves coal. India is one of the largest consumers of coal for electricity generation, and Hasdeo Aranya forests, known as the “Lungs of Chhattisgarh,” are known to harbor large deposits.

The state government had been investigating 21 proposed coal mining blocks across 445,000 acres of biodiverse forests that provide crucial natural resources to the area’s 15,000 indigenous Adivasi people.

Along with the Adivasi, tigers, elephants, sloth bears, leopards, and wolves, along with dozens of endemic bird and reptile species call this forest home. It’s one of India’s largest intact arboreal habitats, but 5.6 billion metric tons of mineable coal threatened to destroy it all.

Enter Alok Shukla, founder of the Save Hasdeo Aranya Resistance Committee, which began a decade ago advocating for the protection of Hasdeo through a variety of media and protest campaigns, including sit-ins, tree-hugging campaigns, advocating for couples to write #savehasdeo on their wedding invitations, and publishing a variety of other social media content.

Shukla also took his message directly to the legislature, reminding them through news media coverage of their obligations to India’s constitution which enshrines protection for tribal people and the environments they require to continue their traditional livelihoods.

Beginning with a proposal to create a single protected area called Lemru elephant reserve within Hasdeo that would protect elephant migration corridors and cancel three of the 21 mining proposals, Shukla and the Adivasi began a 160-mile protest march down a national highway towards the Chhattisgarh state capital of Raipur.

They hadn’t even crossed the halfway mark when news reached them that not only was the elephant reserve idea unanimously agreed upon, but every existing coal mining proposal had been rejected by the state legislature, and all existing licenses would be canceled.

“We had no expectations, but the legislative assembly voted unanimously that all of the coal mines of Hasdeo should be canceled, and the forest should be saved,” Shukla says in recollection to the Goldman Prize media channel.

“That was a very important moment and happy moment for all of us.”

Shukla shares the 2024 Goldman Environmental Prize with 5 other winners, from Brazil, the US, South Africa, Australia, and Spain."

-via Good News Network, May 20, 2024. Video via Goldman Environmental Prize, April 29, 2024.

[kimyoonmiauthor]

Europe without trade, a worldbuilding exercise

This exercise pissed off a bunch of white people for all the wrong reasons, but facts are facts and I can link you to all the major resources. You all should be insulted at the idea that Europe can't trade, that melanin dictates that white people can't get along and find ways to trade. But that's not why they were upset. They were upset at the idea that a single region couldn't provide for people. And that's the wrong thing to get upset about. And I'm telling you that's white supremacy ideology you need to boot. Europe, too, traded and used people from other regions who migrated and were physically there on foot. Stop thinking that your lack of melanin is a force field.

So the exercise goes like this: Shortly after Homo Sapiens interbred with the Neanderthal and migrated to Europe, there was a magical force field put around Europe to cut off Europe from the Middle East, Africa, etc. ^^;; I'm sure people from the Caucuses aren't very pleased with this since they get commandeered into this exercise which racists somehow love. Later people also deemed them inferior (which takes a while to travel through but there is a wikipedia page dedicated to the term Caucasian meaning white [link] that goes over this ranking thing and the racist origins and ties to Nazis). But whatever, Nanowrimo a*holes were determined to argue against trade, fine, let's play this game and cut the whole of the Middle East/West Asia.

The other rule is that the Gulf Stream still exists, so you can have that unusual European climate which is a fluke. (This also ticked off people? But seriously, to get the gradient of Europe that far north, you need to Gulf of Mexico otherwise the latitude range would look more like the US than Europe, more south, and larger, much larger. And most people don't make a continent that large. Why people get ticked off at true facts is a whole thing.)

If you cut off the Gulf of Mexico, which a lot of world building of European-like continents do, you get Siberia. So the Gulf of Mexico has to stay for our Hypothetical Europe. (Not getting into continentality either.)

We're not counting the little bit of Turkey here, BTW. Turkey gets to stay whole. And Russia gets kicked out because it always gets kicked out anyway and besides, people were preaching about stupid things when these racists were posting, like all of Russia is white. And then people were arguing over if Russia counts. Fine. We'll kick Russia out. BTW, Australia was called all white. Haha. Aboriginals don't exist according to them. Like WTF. But whatever.

The question is what civilization can Europe grow with only the resources found naturally in Europe? Can you build a European civilization with only things found naturally occurring in Europe?

The first issue is STAPLE CROP.

Yeah, if you notice, you've cut off all of the major grains to Europe. You've also cut off the Beaker people. Oops.

Some Anthropology here, Beaker people brought agriculture to Europe. They were also from Turkey.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/february/the-beaker-people-a-new-population-for-ancient-britain.html

So, Stone Henge, Long burrows, and all of that are suddenly cut off.

Honestly, this one is terrible to overcome. Most of the BBC docs I watched argued that the ancient people of Britain before Brown people from Turkey brought agriculture and the Cheddar Man, were boiling and eating reeds. Think like cattails type of thing, which is really hard to eat.

Upside, you still have fire in the form of rush lights, though you can't use tallow or beeswax--comes from outside of Europe. And horses are too lean. So, likely the European bison? However, this limits technology quite a bit as advancements can't be made by night and only by camp fire. (Fire is safely pre-modern humans—homonins and some say Homo Erectus, though still debated. But at least Homo Hedelberengensis)

Without a staple crop, you're going to have it tough to make enough surplus to build anything. You need free time and enough food supply to build things like castles.

The closest you might get is maybe peas? The best you get is pea flour, and have you worked with pea flour? It doesn't do anything like the wheat family does. Nutritionally, it's also low carbs, which is great if you're on a low carb diet, but not great for a civilization. Pea flour: 100 kcal, 18 g carbohydrate, 8 g fiber, 0 g fat, and 8 g protein

White rice:

Total Fat 0.4 g

Saturated fat 0.1 g

Cholesterol 0 mg

Sodium 2 mg

Potassium 55 mg

Total Carbohydrate 45 g 15%

Dietary fiber 0.6 g

Sugar 0.1 g

Protein 4.3 g

https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/brown-rice-vs-white-rice

68-82 amounts of energy in rice.

So peas aren't a bad choice, but the problem is that you don't have a binder. You need a binder to make bread, etc. Even this one here: https://www.powerhungry.com/2024/02/06/split-pea-bread-vegan-oil-free-gf/ Uses a binder from India. But the majority of your people aren't eating Bread. The recipes I can find include non-European things like rice or things outside of Europe. This severely hinders your tech advancements. Being able to eat on the job and not have it take forever is really hard. The portability of bread is a plus for technology. And peas can get mushy and if cooked can mold.

There are Lactofermented peas:

https://www.beetsandbones.com/lacto-fermented-green-peas/

But they aren't widely eaten and include things like garlic, which is out. Bay leaves are not from Europe. Garlic is a difficult one since garlic kills so many bacteria, but you can cope with oregano, I suppose, which kills a high amount of bacteria according to a well vetted study since it was published (original study was 1999, but followup studies since then):

Preservation is a huge part of production and an upside of grains.

Also, how are you going to produce alcohol? This makes water safer to drink. You'd have to convert to teas. (Raspberry leaf tea is a thing.) Peas are not high starch enough, as cited to hold together bread. It's not good enough to make alcohol.

But now you're thinking, OK, we got peas as a staple, they just won't make bread out of it.

Peas, a major protein source, you don't need cows, pigs, etc as much. (Though you're still kinda lacking in vitamin B12, but I'll cover that later.) And your people make a new type of pea plant (BTW, legumes is the largest plant family on Earth.)

Might limit you to not be able to carry it around easily and it's hard to rehydrate, but eventually your people get there. (If you're thinking, but lentils, yeah, not Europe. Deal).

Subsequent agriculture

Tanning leather, BTW, you need oak trees with high tannins, but this tech originated from Western Asia (or Southwestern Asia, if you want to call it that)

Oak trees are found on five continents, but it's a bit fuzzy on how they got there. Humans have a habit of picking up seeds and spreading them about. My own great grandfather loved collecting seeds and planting them. You also have Johnny Appleseed.

The processing time to make acorn flour is pretty terrible (You have to boil it a long, long time to remove the tannins, this is why I didn't suggest this as a staple), but at least you have leather.

The major other crops are out:

Potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, hazelnuts, walnuts, corn, wheat, rye, barley, strawberries? (This one is questionable.), pears (China), apples (Central Asia), Pomegranates (Iran), and major fruits you can think of. Think of a major fruit. Look it up and you'll find it doesn't come from Europe, though it might be grown there.

Most of the spices and herbs are out (sage, oregano, rosemary, and thyme stay in.) No, you can't have garlic. Most allium comes from outside of Europe. Animals are also out: pigs, goats, sheep, cows, chickens, llamas, alpacas.

It's debatable about horses. One thread people debated back and forth on horses, so I'll lay that out.

This leaves you likely with dogs, which probably came with early modern humans. Yeah, ummm... there's a question here, and maybe I shouldn't touch it, and the answer is likely no, probably not eating them. Not unless people get desperate. The Cambridge History of Food also questions the archaeology from Western Asia, but the archaeology also says the only time humans ate dogs were in desperation and the layer in question came at the heels of a drought? (I took a picture of the page, pretty easy to look up since it has an excellent index.).

This leaves deer. Not a good animal to domesticate, but let's say Reindeer. (Thinking Evenk here).

I'm adding in carob.

So Round up of what we have?

Staple crop: Legume, likely related to peas.

Secondary crops:

You have brassica (mustard family)

Olives

Rosemary

Thyme

Oregano

sage

horseradish, maybe.

Acorns—makes leather

carob

currants

gooseberries

raspberry

blackberry

turnip, possibly beets

parsnip Stinging nettle Dandelion (European and edible from roots which make a substance said to be similar to coffee to the buds.)

Brassica family, mainly Brussel sprouts, but possibly they would invent others.

BTW, carrots originally weren't orange until William of Orange, who gets his name from a plant native to Southern China-ish.

But other berries—cranberry, is from the Americas. And strawberry, while found in Europe, was originally domesticated in the Americas. This one is a question mark. Because it was found on both continents, but was only domesticated in the Americas.

The majority of the foods you find are domesticated in West Asia, Southern China and the Americas (mostly central Americas and Northern South America.) Welcome to the downside of temperate climates.

Pies? Nope. "What about Shepards Pie" Yeah, where are you getting the potatoes? Also the iron works is in question here. (later)

Short list. You're losing your mind, no pizza? Yep. No pizza. (lol Someone got mad when I pointed this out with links). Tomato is New World, Wheat is West Asia, Cows domestication is West Asia and Northern Africa. Horse milk you can't form into cheese without camel rennet. Camels, you guessed it, not Europe.

Possibly new legumes to maximize it. (They grow tall as trees, make peanuts, etc, so it's possible a culture under pressure would make new ones. BTW, peanuts is new world.)

Domesticated animals: Dogs, deer, maybe horses—horses are debated. European rabbits, yes, though don't make for good domestication since they are really difficult to work with which you'll have to look up. Look up a rabbit care video. But at least breed fast. Low amount of fat for candles, though.

You'd also have seafood. Only one type of seaweed is poisonous in the world and that is in England. But it's highly nutritious. (The native seaweed in India is apparently nasty, but edible).

You don't need as much with the pea family anyway.

European Bison are not easily domesticated, BTW, but would give you tallow-ish stuff if they succeeded or an ethnic group decided to be nomadic pastoralists with them.

For sweet taste, carob. Easy to process, and you don't need sugar beets, which is harder to process and were only invented as a source in the late 19th century. Mediterranean. The seeds are edible so just grind it up. Though it's easier to grind the pods. So it's easier to process and use in other recipes.

The other options are out: Honeybee domestication originated in China, there's a form in Northern Africa, but the frame design was late 1800's, so Victorian. Even if you had it, it would be for rich people.

Sugar cane is tropical.

Carob mildly tastes like chocolate. This is your chocolate substitute. No fermentation required. However, it doesn't have the properties of chocolate melting, etc. The fat content is much lower, but the production is much higher.

Dates, BTW, are from 4000 BCE in West Asia, fertile crescent. It's out. https://foodandnutrition.org/from-the-magazine/dates-an-ancient-fruit-rediscovered/

The problem with horses

This part is really difficult to climb through.

The first part is that horses were likely domesticated outside of Europe. Also, the invention of the saddle, etc was also outside of Europe. You need a good staple crop to have enough time to mes around with it. You would also have a smaller population if it stays in Europe.

This part got heated in the original. So the evidence is this:

Horses were domesticated outside of Europe (It's on the border of Europe, so hotly debated)

Horses were killed off in the Americas by Indigneous people before being reintroduced. https://new.nsf.gov/science-matters/horses-part-indigenous-cultures-longer-western

The technology to domesticate the horse further was outside of Europe (saddle, stirrups, etc)

But horses exist in Europe, wouldn't they want to breed them?

But maybe only for food? (recent scandal at the time)

Would they be burden animals? You need burden animals fro agriculture to advance and higher production.

So yeah... without cows, pigs, goats, sheep, large questions arise about this.

Would the population split into eating and noneating? Would it not?

Yeah, limited foodstuff. Limited calories, but your people are making it, but maybe not turning white yet? Well, in Southern Europe. Introduction of grains and farming was said to be the thing that tipped people over.

Agriculture is really difficult to achieve without a staple crop like grains or starchy tubers.

But for the sake of argument, let's say they get there, and manage to never break the force field, no matter what, because racists win or whatever. No food importation in or out, no new ideas.

What now?

Arches, as an idea, came from outside of Europe. Rafts do predate humans (Homo Erectus again), but boats, was likely Phonecian. And metal working and stone working also came from outside of Europe as ideas. Beaker people, love them.

Metal working came from Northern Africa, BTW, but say they figure it out, and we let them slide.

You get stunted in Maths since ideas of math came from Babylonians. Later Migrations of Minoans don't count anymore. Linear A isn't invented, but OK, OK, there was written language invented in the Americas, so it's possible, if they get through agriculture and get up to what? Trade, they might have language. But wait, you (Nanowrimo person) just said trade is evil, so maybe they don't have a written language? In all instances of language being created it was on the back of what? trade. Maths awas also created on the back of mostly trade. Sumerians created their written language on trade. The oldest tablets we have is a trade dispute.

Look up Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir. In another words, written records were for keeping track of ledgers, one of the oldest types of writing on record.

These people think trade is too complicated and evil to exist in Europe. So OK, no written language for you, though seriously, I don't know how that works. Is Northern Europe a different subsistence system than Southern Europe?

You all are fighting for diminishing resources (considering 1500's Europe and a BBC doc about how trees were fought over and laws about not cutting down trees) each other while the rest of the world is trading back and forth on ideas and not getting imperialized. Fine. Let's play that game.

The amount of technology gets cut down severely when you disconnect Europe from the rest of the world. You don't get the iron age without some knowledge about smelting. And you need those "dirty Africans" or whatever racist thing they were thinking in order to get that smelting. You don't get masonry without PoCs (Most masonry, as an idea came from West Asia, and they would literally import those people to work on castles, see the docs on Guédelon Castle from British TV). Whatcha going to do?

Let's move onto clothes...

Flax (for Linen), silk, ramie, hemp (for clothes which is a different cultivar), coir, Abaca, Angora (rabbit)*, Angora (goat), wool (obviously), bamboo, banana fiber, cashmere (the goat), sisal, camel hair (obviously), kapok, mohair, kenaf, yak, Qiviut, vicuña,Hibiscus cannabinus, Lyocell, Modal (AKA Rayon) *, Piña (pineapple), and Soy protein are out. All of them occur outside of Europe or require an industrial society. Byssus AKA sea silk, Chiengora (dog hair), spider silk*, is in.

However, notice how expensive and difficult it is to make clothes of these things. So only rich can access them.

dog* hair often requires wool to be added to make the hairs stick together. And sheep wool, in particular has really good spinnable fibers.

Spider silk also kinda takes higher technology to produce into clothing. Look it up and some might find it cruel to do it that way.

Byssus also known as Sea silk was produced by the Greeks and Romans, but only for the super rich.

This means for poor people: Leather and stinging nettle fabric is what they have left. You can see a video of that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-usU7-WjUU So your people have clothing. They aren't white except for the nomadic people to the north unless you can advance their agriculture and slide the pea family to replace the major nutrition somehow.

And making clothes is torture for the common populace who have to pick stinging nettles for their clothes.

You're thinking, but Angora Rabbits? Yeah, this is possible, though not likely called that since the rabbits originated from Turkey, which is outside of the scenario, but it would be maybe possible your people come up with something similar given human nature as long as they pause the rabbit breeding long enough and have enough surplus to tinker.

So poor people are running around with stinging nettle fabric, rich are wearing most likely sea silk, and you can see the misery compared to growing something like flax.

I doubt anyone can afford to be vegetarian with limited resources. Pescitarian, maybe closer to the shore.

*Dogs were domesticated outside of Europe, but are often attributed to why humans outpaced Neanderthal and date back far enough in time that early humans likely took them to Europe when they first arrived. Cats, however, were domesticated in Africa and are OUT. (Making the majority of writers cry since there seems to be more cat people than dog people among writers).

Conclusion

You're stuck with the Humours, but does Greek civilization even exist without grains? So much collapses when you don't have the subsistence infrastructure. I mean there is a reason people made bread and carry grains and we don't eat peas as a staple.

So you'd have to build everything from scratch starting around ~45,000 BCE or earlier (when Homo sapiens came to Europe by estimates) and you don't even have those really white people then according to science except the Evenk ancestors who show white about 10K years ago? (No, it's not the Caucuses—in what right mind do you think white people developed in the Caucuses when you know about Vitamin D and darker melanin generally around the equator due to skin cancer, etc issues and so on.)

Umm, the lesson here is that Europe was never cut off and people should stop going into that fantasy. Like how did you get apples, plums, honey, etc without trade? And also, people shouldn't be afraid of trade and keep in mind temperate climates (Middle/Northernish Europe) aren't the only biomes in Europe. No matter how much fantasy wants to focus on Western Europe and ignore the Scandis. Seriously, I'm so bored of people assuming everything is like Germany or a less rainy England in fantasy. (And I do mean England, not Scotland or Wales). Can't we get some variety? You have the Mediterranean, but you also have Scandinavia, and you're doing Europe? Where are they? You also had foragers and Nomads in the history of Europe. The Romani from North Western India, for example. And some say that early Celtic groups could have been partial foragers before the coming of Beaker people.

But even in an alt sci-fi, you have to trim all of those accomplishments of PoC and then argue that your people killed all of the PoCs on the way to the planet, and really, that makes no sense. But I suppose then you can murder Bibimbap into tatertot disgusting mess later on. But really?

But even say, you had an organically grown planet that happened to grow a humanoid species, how are you going to grow it without some level of cooperation? And the majority of the food stuff is going to come from those warmer climates: Southern China, West Asia and Central-ish Americas. They don't have a winter to worry about. So it would be imperative for your people to trade.

While you're at it, I'm really squicked by the idea that people put in 16 year old girls to marry much older guys in fantasy and then call it acceptable. You can change at least those rules.

I don't get why people work so hard to cut out LGBTQIA, disability and PoCs from fantasy? Like people should have maimed legs from all the battles written.

BTW, I am amused by the idea that in Star Trek times they didn't have birth control. lol thousands of years and haven't perfected birth control? That one I can't believe. Picard didn't know how to use a condom. lol.

[o-craven-canto]

Nearly all the megafauna we associate with Africa today is immigrants. For the last 30 million years or so, its dominant mammalian families have been Bovidae (antelopes, gazelles, gnus, buffaloes), Giraffidae (giraffes), Hippopotamidae (hippos), Camelidae (dromedaries), Felidae (lions, leopards), Canidae (jackals, wild dogs), Hyaenidae (hyaenas), Rhinocerotidae (rhinos), Equidae (asses, zebras), Hystricidae (African porcupines)... nearly all came from outside. Mostly Asia; some from America! (The big exception is elephants).

For the first half of the age of Mammals, say 60 to 30 million years ago, Africa was an island-continent, cut off from the rest of the world by the warm currents of the Tethys Sea:

(Map by Chris Scotese; other pics from Wiki unless noted otherwise)

And, much like Australia in later times, it had developed its own unique fauna of endemic mammals, unknown in the rest of the world. It mostly formed a single clade, appropriately called Afrotheria, which had branched off other placentate mammals in the time of the last dinosaurs. And what were these Afrotheria?

Some of the smallest are still among us. Tenrecs and golden moles (order Afrosoricida), elephant shrews (order Macroscelidea), and hyraxes (order Hyracoidea), the African answer to hedgehogs, moles, shrews, and rabbits, respectively. They are not closely related to their Amero-Eurasian analogues, but they live in much the same way, and much in the same way they did when Africa was an island.

But some of them could grow quite large! Alas, Titanohyrax is known only from its jaws. Thankfully, the jaws and teeth of mammals are very distinctive and allow very precise identification.

And as for the true giants? Behold magnificent Arsinoitherium (order Embrithopoda), which was a rhino before there were rhinos. No close relation -- in fact, its horns were hollow cones of bone, whereas those of rhinos are made of solid keratin, like giant fingernails. (Sketch by Mauricio Anton, from this wonderful paper by him and Alan Turner).

Then there were the early Sirenians, the still only semi-aquatic ancestors of dugongs and manatees (and the first who broke containment: the proto-manatees Pezosiren and Prorastomus ended up in Jamaica when Africa was still an island, and they still had legs!)

And of course there were early Proboscideans, the grandparents and granduncles of elephants, like Moeritherium, who roamed Egypt when it was still a tropical swamp...

But no isolation lasts forever. Around 40 million years ago, Africa had drifted close enough to Eurasia for some animals to cross through the Tethys. As the seafloor was crushed between continents, the smoking islands that would become Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Iran were rising in between.

Among the first to cross were Primates, such as Afrotarsius, a sort of midway between tarsiers and true monkeys. They did well in the jungles on both sides of the Tethys, spawning macaques, vervets, langurs, baboons and eventually, in the woodlands around Lake Victoria, the first apes.

Another such groups were Rodents -- specifically the Phiomorpha subgroup, in which we find all sorts of distinctly African species such as Old World porcupines, cane rats, and naked mole rats. This is to say that Primates and Rodents did well for themselves after sneaking in.

But then, 30 million years or so, Africa crashed into Eurasia. All barriers to migration went away (well, they came and went with the sea level, but the point is, Africa was no longer super-Australia anymore). And then what we think of today as "African fauna" rushed in.

Here is what African macrofauna looked like at that point, as ungulates and carnivorans were starting to show up:

(H. B. S. Cooke, 1968)

The usual rule of thumb is that when two landmasses meet, the faunas of the smallest and/or most isolate landmass lose out. The later interchange between North and South America is a more famous example, but this is no exception.

The great Embrithopods vanished forever; other orders were relegated to small, humbler sizes. In came Bovidae, Giraffidae, Hippopotamidae, Rhinocerotidae, Felidae, Canidae, Hyaenidae, all sharpened by competition on a larger scale in the great grasslands of Eurasia. In came Equidae and Camelidae, which had appeared in North American plains alongside pronghorns (where did you think llamas come from?), and had gone all the way through Bering and Asia.

And by later ages, you see it yourselves: elephants and apes actually do quite well, but Eurasian carnivorans and ungulates now rule the land.

To be fair, many groups of pre-invasion African fauna did more than just endure. In the Miocene epoch, soon after the great exchange, apes would be found throughout Eurasia from Spain to China, and perhaps some key part of our own evolution took place there. Elephants were even more widespread, getting as far as South America; manatees invaded warm seawaters all around the Equator. Rock hyraxes and African porcupines had some success in the Near East and southern Europe. But I don't think any of these transformed the Eurasian landscape on the same scale as the African landscape was.

And to be sure, the newcomers were impressive!

The wheel of ages turns and turns, caring little for who thrives and who falls -- but life as a whole, somehow, always falls on its feet.

[todropscience]

LONGEST MIGRATION OF A SOUTHERN RIGHT WHALES RECORDED

Why the the southern right whale cross the Atlantic ocean? because the krill.

Southern right whales (Eubalaena australis) typically migrate between summer, high-latitude offshore foraging grounds and winter calving grounds located in coastal, temperate waters. But now, the satellite tracker for a southern right whale from South Africa, named 221423, which had been silent for months, misteriously appeared in south Argentina. The satellite tracker revealed the first scientifically documented case of a southern right whale crossing the Atlantic.

Whale 221423, swam to coastal Argentina, traveling a total of 15,288 kilometers. This distance far exceeded the findings of a previous tagging study that found the longest distance to be around 7,000 kilometers. Another whale traveled an unexpected 9,000 kilometers to the South Sandwich Islands, a feeding area typically frequented by western right whales. 

Premodern and modern whaling operations nearly extirpated the southern right whale, declining in nearly 100,000 individuals in the early 1800s to a few hundred individuals around the 1920s. However, thanks to current protection of the species, they have been recovering steadily in parts of their historical range, particularly in the coastal wintering and calving areas of Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

Photo above: Left showing 221423 taken in Walker Bay, South Africa, on October 13, 2021, immediately after tagged. Right: Photograph of 221423 taken in the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) on July 9, 2022.

Map indicating the movement patterns of four adult female tagged on the South African coast in October 2021.

Reference (Open Access): Vermeulen et al., 2023. Swimming across the pond: First documented transatlantic crossing of a southern right whale. Marine Mammal Science.

[nicklloydnow]

“Victim-blaming is generally agreed to be unacceptable. But when the crime is a pogrom and the victims are Israelis, many educated people seem to think otherwise. Following the shattering events of October 7th, when Hamas jihadists from Gaza swept into southern Israel and conducted a pitiless campaign of torture and mass murder, many rushed to place responsibility for the mayhem squarely on the shoulders of Israel. Even when the horrors of mutilation, rape, and hostage-taking are acknowledged, we are told that these events must be understood in their proper “historical context.”

The problem with this argument is that the proposed historical context is selectively chosen. The Hamas attack claimed the lives of at least 1,400 Israelis, but its “root cause” was almost immediately attributed to “the occupation,” rather than to the doctrines of its participants. According to this narrative, Hamas is only reacting to life in the pressure-cooker of a besieged Gaza Strip. But placing the pogrom in the historical context of “the occupation” explains nothing unless “the occupation” is also explained in its historical context. Nor is the Israeli response to the pogrom properly contextualised in this explanation. No thought is given to the likely consequences of Israel not striking (or striking inadequately) at Hamas in response to the massacre.

(…)

The problem in 1929 was not “the occupation,” but a refusal to accept any Jewish state in Palestine. This refusal stands in contrast to repeated (if not always full-hearted) Jewish acceptance of a two-state solution, including the Jews’ acceptance of the Peel Commission in 1937 and the UN Partition Plan in 1947. The Arab rejection of partition then and the Hamas rejection of a Jewish state now are both rooted in the same claim that the Jewish state is a settler-colonial enterprise. But this characterization is simply false.

First, Israel is not a colony of any country, nor was it established as one. It is not like the British colonies in America and Australia, nor the Belgian or German colonies in what were the Congo and South West Africa. Jews were not sent by anyone, nor did they migrate from a single country or even a single region. In other words, they had no metropole. Moreover, they have ancestral ties to the land. It is the place from which they came, and from which they were exiled. This is not to deny that Palestinians have ties to the same land, but it is not colonization when those who are driven out of their land return to it. Those Palestinian exiles who deny this, might ask themselves whether their own claims to some part of Palestine will evaporate in time, and if so, when?

Second, a very large proportion of the Jewish Israeli population is descended from refugees. These include not only refugees from pogroms and the Shoah in Europe, but also around 650,000 Jews who fled persecution in Arab countries and Iran. Other Jewish Israelis are migrants who have moved to Israel because, for any number of reasons, that is where they prefer to be. Refugees and migrants are not colonialists. Those who reject this distinction will be forced to acknowledge that there is now a substantial Muslim colonization of Europe, America, and other Western countries. That is not a reasonable characterization, nor is it one that Palestinians’ Western supporters will be eager to defend.

So what about “the occupation” in 2023? The Gaza Strip is not occupied, and hasn’t been since Israel unilaterally withdrew from the territory in 2005. It is true that Israel—along with Egypt—controls Gaza’s borders, but that is not the same as occupation. It is also true that the partial blockade (converted to a full siege following the October 7th massacre) has brought hardship to Gazans, but it is not a gratuitous infliction. The blockade was imposed in an attempt to control the flow of arms into Gaza, which Israelis knew Hamas would then use to attack Israel.

Israel does continue to occupy the West Bank, but responsibility for that conundrum cannot be laid solely at Israel’s door either. It takes two sides to make peace. Anybody who suggests that Israel could resolve the conflict by simply withdrawing from the West Bank should try to understand that the results of the Gaza disengagement demonstrate this to be impossible. That experience has provided a painful lesson in the dangers of vacating disputed land in the absence of (and possibly even with) a peace agreement. Since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, that area has regularly been used as a launching ground for thousands of rockets into Israel (despite the blockade), and now for the worst massacre of Jews since the Nazis.

(…)

But those who lay all (or almost all) of the blame for the ongoing conflict and the consequent statelessness of the Palestinians on Israel display either bad faith or naiveté. Lifting the blockade on Gaza and unilaterally withdrawing from the West Bank would amount to suicide for Israel’s Jews. The same is true of the suggestion that there could be a unified state of Jewish and Arab citizens from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Those who propose such a state need to explain which country in the region this state would most resemble. Not a single state in the Middle East rates even remotely as well as Israel still does in terms of liberal and democratic freedoms. What reason do we have for thinking that a unified Palestine would be any different, especially with antisemitic rejectionists like Hamas in the polity.

When we ask what each side of the Hamas-Israel conflict could do differently, it is much easier to say what Hamas could do. It could stop attacking Israel. If it stopped behaving like the fundamentalist, repressive, terroristic regime that it is, and used its resources for building a nascent Palestinian state, it would bring greater prosperity to its citizens, gradually ease restrictions on its borders, and demonstrate that Palestine could exist peacefully alongside Israel. But that, of course, is not what Hamas wants.”

[realjaysumlin]

Columbus: In His Own Words

The person who is telling this story about our natural history of Christianity and colonization that took place everywhere the colonizers went and continue to do this today. They don't have any remorse or empathy for their crimes and brutality because they truly believe we are not humans according to their Christian Doctrine.

Our Beautiful Black Indigenous People globally migrated out of Africa and populated earth and this is what we get from the people who call themselves white and European.

They lie about everything to hide their horrible history and they make themselves gods of the people who they mutilated, traumatized and abused for their own sick pleasures. They tell us to believe in their Christian god so we can live in peace after our death, because we have been living in hell since these shit people invaded our lands.

From Africa, Asia, America both north and south, Australia and all of the islands in the world, Oceania, The South Pacific we all share the same horrible stories of what was done to all of us. Even this wasn't enough to be humiliated as nothing because these shit people called us savages, niggers, animals, not humans, slaves and even wrote laws to demean us even more.

They divided our human family and tribes and made us kill our own brothers and sisters so we could make room for other white people who treated us the same exact way 😭💔. We were less than animals in their sight.

They invented races making our children believe in their system and religion and making our children want to be white. The dark skin native people were called Africans and enslaved because some of us looked the same, they made us purchase slaves so they could blame us for enslaving the African People but they are the same as us and we didn't abuse each other, we lived in peace as a family, so you can say the same thing about Africans who bought slaves so they could be free.

The trail of tears proves this point and so many occasions where we fought the white people as brothers and sisters together with the help of many tribes. No one has ever told our side of history because we didn't have any news media platforms that represented the abused people of colonization.

So the next time you Black and Indigenous People globally talk about a loving Christian God of creation, please remember what this god and it's people did to our family and if you still believe in this shit religion we say to you, welcome to hell while you have life on earth; because as long as white people live on earth, we will always be living in hell.

[fatehbaz]

Oz Rock bands were big in Brazil in the 1990s. Australian surfers know its breaks. [...] [I]n the past decade [2005-2015] Brazil has had the second fastest rate of migration to Australia [...].

Australia’s connection with Brazil began in 1787 with the First Fleet voyage. This was thanks to the port of Rio’s location in the South Atlantic and a centuries-long British-Portuguese alliance – unique among European powers in the Age of Empires. The First Fleet had three layovers on its relatively cautious eight month voyage from Britain: a week in the Spanish colony of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, a month at Rio in the Portuguese colony of Brazil and a month at the Dutch East India Company’s Cape colony in South Africa. Fleet commander Arthur Phillip had not intended to rest and resupply at Rio but sailing conditions made it prudent to do so. And Phillip’s former service in the Portuguese navy ensured a cordial welcome from Rio’s colonial authorities.  

At this time, as Bruno Carvalho writes in Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (2013), Rio enjoyed rising status within the Portuguese Empire. In 1763 it had been named the new capital of Brazil. In 1808 Portuguese royals fled to Rio to escape Napoleon and remained there at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. As a consequence, Rio could boast of being the only American city to serve as a centre of European power.

One First Fleet official lamented how little the British knew of Rio. This came to be addressed, as Luciana Martins notes in A Bay to be Dreamed Of: British Visions of Rio de Janeiro (2006), as increasing numbers of British visitors ventured there during the 19th century. Visitors included New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie, and later Charles Darwin – along with thousands of convict and free migrants on board ships calling at the port of Rio.

Writing in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (2005), Emma Christopher observed that in Australian history books, travel from Britain to Australia seemed to have been “covered as if in the blink of an eye”.

This inspired her to write of the “watery non-places” of the journey not as voids, but rather as places where much transnational history was lived [...].

[J]ournals by intending Australian colonists such as Macquarie’s wife Elizabeth allow glimpses of colonial Rio through colonial Australian eyes. Elizabeth Macquarie assessed Rio with keen intelligence and, more challengingly – as Jane McDermid has argued in recent research on histories of the British abroad – a callously casual racism.

First Fleet journals tell us that, in 1787, convicts confined to ship at Rio witnessed enslaved West Africans rowing Portuguese fruit sellers around the anchored Fleet transports in decoratively festooned boats.

Convicts overheard and exchanged stories from officials permitted shore leave: stories of the songs of captive West Africans awaiting sale at the port marketplace; of colourful Portuguese Catholic institutions and festivities that were exotic to straight-laced British Protestants. Stories of being forbidden, on pain of death, to venture to hinterland jewel mines. Onshore at Rio, colonial migrants bound for Australia befriended Portuguese colonists, despite the language barrier. They purchased curios. They passed judgement – glowing and harsh – on the people of the Portuguese colony, its natural and built environment, just as Brazilians in turn scrutinised them.

---

Text by: Julie McIntyre. “I Go to Rio: Australia’s forgotten history with Brazil.” The Conversation. 16 September 2015. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[idigitizellp21]

5 Interesting facts about Diwali

Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, is one of the most widely celebrated religious occasions across the world. Here are some of the most surprising facts about Diwali that you probably didn’t know.

1. The day Lakshmi visits her devotees

Goddess Lakshmi visits her devotees and bestows gifts and blessings upon each of them. To welcome the Goddess, devotees clean their houses, decorate them with finery and lights, and prepare sweet treats and delicacies as offerings. Devotees believe the happier Lakshmi is with the visit, the more she blesses the family with health and wealth.

2. Different Diwali stories

Many see Diwali honouring the return of the lord Rama, his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana from exile, as told in the ancient Hindu epic called the Ramayana. To some, Diwali marks the return of Pandavas after 12 years of Vanvas and one year of agyatavas in the other ancient Hindu epic called the Mahabharata. Many other Hindus believe Diwali is linked to the celebration of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity, and wife of deity Vishnu. The five day festival of Diwali begins on the day Lakshmi was born from the churning of cosmic ocean of milk during the tug of war between the forces of good and forces of evil; the night of Diwali is the day Lakshmi chose Vishnu as her husband and then married him. Some Hindus offer pujas to additional or alternate deities such as Kali, Ganesha, Saraswati, and Kubera. Other Hindus believe that Diwali is the day Vishnu came back to Lakshmi and their abode in the Vaikuntha; so those who worship Lakshmi receive the benefit of her good mood, and therefore are blessed with mental, physical and material well-being during the year ahead. But mostly the festival is considered the return of the Lord Rama and Sita after completing fourteen years in exile.

3. On the day of Diwali, Lord Mahavira attained his Moksha

In Jainism, Diwali commemorates the anniversary of Lord Mahavir‘s attainment of moksha, or freedom from the cycle of reincarnation, in 527 B.C.E. Lord Mahavir was the 24th and last Thirtankar of Jainism and revitalized the religion as it is today. First referred to in Jain scriptures as dipalikaya, or light leaving the body, it is said that the earth and the heavens were illuminated with lamps to mark the occasion of Lord Mahavir’s enlightenment.

4. Sikhs commonly called Diwali Bandi Chhor Divas

Diwali, for Sikhs, marks the Bandi Chhor Divas, when Guru Har Gobind Ji freed himself and Hindu Kings, from Fort Gwalior, from the prison of Islamic ruler Jahangir, and arrived at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Ever since then, Sikhs celebrate Bandi Choor Divas, with the annual lighting up of Golden Temple, fireworks and other festivities.

5. It is a national holiday in India, Trinidad & Tobago, Myanmar, Nepal, Mauritius,  Guyana,  Singapore, Suriname, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Fiji. And is an optional holiday in Pakistan.

Diwali is celebrated around the world, particularly in countries with significant populations of Hindu, Jain and Sikh origin. These include Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Mauritius, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, the Netherlands, Canada, the United Kingdom,United Arab Emirates, and the United States. With more understanding of Indian culture and global migration of people of Indian origin, the number of countries where Diwali/Deepavali is celebrated has been gradually increasing. While in some countries it is celebrated mainly by Indian expatriates, in others it is becoming part of the general local culture. In most of these countries Diwali is celebrated on the same lines as described in this article with some minor variations. Some important variations are worth mentioning.

[supremebirdbracket]

Twinsies!

Long-tailed jaegers, also called long-tailed skuas, are highly migratory, breeding in the Arctic and wintering in the south Pacific and Atlantic oceans. They spend most of their time (75%) over the open ocean, and feed primarily on fish pirated from other seabirds. They also eat smaller birds and mammals, food scraps, fruit, and carrion; these alternative food sources are more common during migration. They hunt lemmings and prey on nests during the breeding season. Long-tailed jaegers are known to be fairly fearless of humans.

Parasitic jaegers, or Arctic skuas, are named for their habit of kleptoparasitism, or stealing food from other animals. They acquire most of their food this way, but will also eat eggs, chicks, rodents, and insects during the breeding season. They breed on the tundra and fells of the Arctic (and northern Scotland), and spend the rest of the year off the coasts of Australia, southern Africa, and South America. While considered Least Concern worldwide, they are classified as Endangered in Europe.

[wholesome-sharks]

Four years ago, I drew a picture of a shark-themed nativity scene. Last year I decided to sculpt the shark nativity. Due to extenuating circumstances I was unable to have it finished in time for Christmas. This year, I was able to display the complete shark nativity for the holidays.

Note: yes I did supplement the nativity set with goldfish. Next year I might use swedish fish. 

Here is a breakdown of the different characters:

Angels: portrayed by angel sharks

Angel sharks are flat in shape because they are adapted to hide in the sand and ambush their prey.

Video: Angel Shark attack 

Wise Men: Three Migratory Shark Species

(Left) Scalloped hammerheads once traveled the world’s oceans in schools of hundreds. Many shark species in general are endangered because of overfishing and the shark fin trade, but scalloped hammerheads have been hit particularly hard. One place where these great schools survive is in the eastern Pacific ocean, along the coasts of Central and South America. 

(Center) Blue sharks live in temperate ocean waters globally. They mainly eat squid in the depths of the open ocean, but are often found at the surface feasting on dead whales. Blue sharks tagged off of Rhode Island, USA have been found near Africa on the far side of the Atlantic. 

(Right) Great white shark migration has been the subject of satellite tag studies in recent years. A white shark tagged off of South Africa, named Nicole, traveled across the Indian Ocean to the west coast of Australia and then back to Africa again. White sharks in the north Pacific travel between the west coast of North America and Hawaii, converging in a location between the two places nicknamed ‘the Great White Cafe’. 

Video: A white shark called Katherine

Shepherds: Blacktip Reef Sharks

Many species of sharks corral or ‘herd’ schools of fish into bait balls as a hunting behavior. Blacktip reef sharks, native to the Indo-Pacific, will chase fish swarms into the shallows and even risk beaching themselves. 

Note: for fish I have used Goldfish(TM). In future years I may use other fishy snacks such as Swedish Fish. 

The Holy Family: Zebra Sharks

Zebra sharks in captivity are affectionate and even playful with aquarists. WIld zebra (or leopard) sharks are shy but very placid in temperament. Being the nicest of all nice sharks, zebra sharks were the ideal choice for the Holy Family.

 There have been documented cases of female zebra sharks producing pups without mating, a process scientifically called parthogenesis. In all documented cases, however, the pups never live longer than six months.(This one ofc we know will be different ;))

Zebra sharks get their name from the zebra-like striped skin of the pups, as you can see with baby Jesus in the center. 

Zebra sharks are native to the Indo-Pacific, and they are found as far west in the Indian Ocean as the coasts of the Arabian peninsula

[world-literatures]

project read around the world

40/198

a project in which I attempt to read one book per country in the world. my favourite book from each country (so far) will be recorded here and swapped out as necessary.

africa

equatorial guinea - la bastarda by trifonia melibea obono

nigeria - things fall apart by chinua achebe

somalia - the last nomad by shugri said salh

south africa - black bull, ancestors and me by Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde

sudan - season of migration to the north by tayeb salih

asia

afghanistan - a thousand splendid suns by khaled housseini

china - strange beasts of china by yan ge

india - interpreter of maladies by jhumpa lahiri

indonesia - beauty is a wound by eka kurniawan

iran - darius the great is not okay by adib khorram

iraq - frankenstein in baghdad by ahmed saadawi

japan - idol, burning by rin usami

north korea - princess bari by hwang sok-yong

south korea - love in the big city by sang young park

malaysia - queen of the tiles by hanna alkaf

palestine - mornings in jenin by susan abulhawa

saudi arabia - a girl like that by tanaz bhathena

singapore - crazy rich asians by kevin kwan

taiwan - want by cindy pon

vietnam - we'll meet again in san francisco by duong thuy

europe

denmark - the copenhagen trilogy by tove ditlevsen

france - giovanni's room by james baldwin

greece - the iliad by homer

ireland - normal people by sally rooney

italy - my brilliant friend by elena ferrente

kosovo - bolla by pajtim statovci

poland - once by morris gleitzman

spain - the spanish love deception by elena armas

sweden - beartown by frederik backman

united kingdom - pride and prejudice by jane austen

north america

canada - station elevent by emily st john mandel

dominican republic - clap when you land by elizabeth acevedo

jamaica - wide sargasso sea by jean rhys

mexico - amulet by roberto bolano

united states - the city we became by n.k jemisin

oceania

australia - taboo by kim scott

papua new guinea - a faraway familiar place by michael french smith

south america

argentina - things we lost in the fire by Mariana Enríquez

brazil - the alchemist by paulo coelho

colombia - one hundred years of solitude by gabriel garbia marquez

venezuela - it would be night in caracas by karina sainz borgo

[barry-kent-mackay]

Ring-necked (Common) Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus), Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos), and Canada Goose (Branta canadensis)

These three recent oil paintings, all done smaller than life size, show some of the world’s best known, widely distributed wild bird species, and in all three I was kind of channeling 19th century, Victorian and immediate post-Victorian British-European bird painting techniques in oils, albeit using modern materials, including acrylic underpainting. These are also species that are widely more or less domesticated or kept captive, and that have been “introduced” beyond their natural range to become established on other continents, and which are prone to hybridization.

The Ring-necked Pheasant originated in eastern Europe and much of Asia, but being highly edible, ornamental, and easily hunted they have been widely naturalized in many other regions, including North America. They are hugely variable with many subspecies (about thirty!) and plenty of variations and mutations occurring in nature, as well as a result of domestication. 

This painting is 16 by 20 inches in oils on birch.

The Mallard’s natural distribution includes a large swath of the northern hemisphere, from subarctic to subtropical regions.  They will migrate from areas that freeze over, but spend the winter where food and some open water is available. They have been established in parts of Australia, New Zealand, South America, the Falklands, and South Africa. They are also variable, also given to hybridization with related duck species, and, like the former species, have been domesticated for thousands of years. Most of the domestic ducks you see are Mallards, showing amazing variety in size, shape colour and patterns.  Like many migratory ducks from the higher latitudes, they show considerable sexual dimorphism, and the males have a “female-like” summer plumage called the “eclipse” plumage. I have shown a male from the fall, as it is molting from eclipse plumage to breeding plumage. As I have tried to show molt can make them a little raggedy, but unlike some land birds (like the jays and cardinals in my garden who sometimes go nearly bald in August) they must maintain full body plumage to avoid heat loss in cold weather, and so the molt period in the fall can be quite prolonged, maintaining the body contours without breaks or bald patches.  This is an oil painting on a 12 by 12 inch square of birch.

The Canada Goose was originally endemic to North America, plus the Kamchatka Peninsula of eastern Siberia, and extreme eastern China, but individuals were taken from Canada to Europe as early as the 17th Century and are now well established in much of the UK and Europe, as well as New Zealand. This species can hybridize with related species, but less frequently so than the previous two.  As is true of the Mallard, when not persecuted as a game bird these geese can become very acclimatized to the presence of people. I see (and hear) them daily here in Markham, and I chose to do this little study of a bird, not in the dramatic, wilderness setting, or flying against a dramatic cloudscape as most artists show them.

[is-solarpunk]

Solarpunk Writing Prompts #12

Here you can listen to original podcast

Here is the source of the podcast's transcript you can read below

Solarpunk Prompts - The Expedition

Hello world. I'm Tomasino.

This is Solarpunk Prompts, a series for writers where we discuss Solarpunk, a movement that imagines a world where technology is used for the good of the planet.

In this series we spend each episode exploring a single Solarpunk story prompt adding some commentary, some inspirations, and some considerations.

If this is your first time here, I'd recommend checking out our introduction episode first, where we talk about what Solarpunk is, why you should care, and why this series came into being.

Tonight our prompt is about the Global South on a mission North. It is called: "The Expedition"

A group of doctors and engineers from a Global South country are sent on a mission in the North, helping the specialists there live in the world after The Great Internet Collapse, where the AIs will no longer make suggestions and the Clouds can't calculate the load bearing strength of a pillar.

What is the Global South?

The concept of the Global South and Global North are not strictly geographical. Indeed, a large portion of the Global South is above the equator. Instead the terms refer to a grouping of countries along a socio-economic and political boundaries.

The Global South usually refers to Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The term came about as an alternative to "Third World" which doesn't devalue those it speaks of.

The Global North, then, usually refers to North America, Europe, Australia, and Russia. It's sometimes used in place of "developed countries".

Over the last 30 years the Global South has been on the rise politically, economically, and technologically. Some of that has been due to the migration of manufacturing and production, but there have also been major independent cultural shifts across the globe.

It's very difficult to make broad claims about the state of the Global South despite the term being designed to do just that. The digital divide is a key metric used to separate the two, yet internet use in Asia far exceeds many places in the Global North.

The term "Global South" itself had its origins in the late 60s in the context of Vietnam. "The dominance of the north over the Global South" was the phrase, referring to the long history of colonialism between the regions.

Culturally the south holds the vast majority of indiginous peoples, the dominant religious bases, and the lesser share of money.

Former West-German Chancellor Willy Brandt created a visual line, quite squiggly, across the world dividing it into the wealthy north and the poor south.

In summary: Being categorized as part of the "North" implies development as opposed to belonging to the "South", which implies a lack thereof.

Reliance on technology in the North as a psychological factor

It is exactly that concept that has taught the Global South how to live and work around instability in their infrastructure, whether that be political, economic, or technological.

It is a mentality that simply doesn't exist in the north, as evidence by the runaway march toward total digital economic dependence.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change wrote an article in 2019 on the state of economic infrastructure in the European Economic Area, stating:

Internet infrastructure services are both widespread and critical to businesses’ core functions, with significant volumes of economic activity dependent on them.

It continues:

[...] some infrastructure services, such as payments or cloud storage, can be thought of as critical infrastructure – any significant or prolonged failure of one of these could undermine the business’s ability to carry out its activities to a potentially existential degree, while possibly triggering a domino effect throughout the rest of the economy. It’s also important to note that many infrastructure businesses higher up the stack are themselves dependent on infrastructure businesses lower down the stack.

This is the main problem the Global North faces in our prompt. A rich, developed society run with fundamental infrastructure built online collapsing under the cascade of failures when that internet access disappears.

Picture a world only ten years in our future. Machine learning has advanced, AI has infiltrated many jobs. It may support a surgeon in their work, providing real-time data in the heat of the moment. Or it may be used in mechanical or civil engineering, providing simulation data that tests and retests the safety of bridges, pipes, or waterways. Students entering the field are taught to work with these systems, and learn to rely on them. Perhaps they learned the theory in school, but in practice you work with the standard tools of the trade. What's left is a gap of functionality. Either you have the tools or you regress to the basics, and practice with the in-between is lost.

Who can you turn to? Who would have the skills you need? Who can help?

Why is the Global South better for this?

The experts growing up in the Global South were forced to learn how to fix their own equipment, and to do so without expensive manufacturers' services. They hack, break, hotfix. They do what they need to make things work, whether it's with the technology or around it.

This type of free-form problem solving is a daily practice. There is far more experience with make-it-work attitudes.

Like Jugaad in India, the creative, inexpensive solution is the most effective because it keeps you moving forward despite your barriers.

This isn't to say that the Global South has no access or knowledge of modern technology. On the contrary, they not only need to know how to use those things, but deeply understand their functioning so they can be patched and maintained with parts never meant for the purpose.

That may mean knowing how to strip out DRM, Digital Rights Management, because a system was designed by people that only ever thought of it being used in the United States. They may need to bypass this or that check, or make a system work somewhere it wasn't intended.

Is it any wonder that Solarpunk found its start there?

We're talking about self-sufficiency here, not primitiveness.

Cuban doctors

Lets look at an example.

After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Cuba established a program to send its medical personnel overseas, particularly to Latin America, Africa, and Oceania, and to bring medical students and patients to Cuba for training and treatment respectively.

This program became the backbone of what's been called Cuba's soft-diplomacy or doctor diplomacy. It's so successful, these traveling Cuban doctors have their own wikipedia page. But seriously, in 2015, Cuba had more than 50,000 health personnel in 103 different countries. That's more medical personal than all the G8 countries combined. Their work is focused on long-term, sustainable care in the most underserved populations around the world.

Imagine the life of a doctor from the Global South. This isn't her first time in the field, heading to some place desperate for her help. Her people call her a Salvager, dragging out what healing she can from hard-hit places. She knows she's walking into trouble, too. This will be hard. For every person who will cry for her help, there is another she'll have to convince. "We're just here to help," she'll repeat. Conditions will be terrible. They'll lack everything she needs, but she knows what to do to make do. That's her expertise, her experience.

What does that collapse look like?

So what might collapse look like in your story? Imagine all the "public-facing" internet failing. Yeah, some hackers can still get a local network going, maybe a server for a building, but no Facebook. No Amazon. A lot of doctors will say "No problem, most of our records are still on paper!" and then they'll laugh, until they realize their equipment is iOT, and won't work without a manufacturer's server running. No more cloud. No more Google search.

If that surgeon had become reliant on the AI assistant, well it's back to the basics again. Perhaps that's not so bad now, but in 10 years? In 20, when these practices become as commonplace as Excel in an office. Do you even remember using a green sheet? Manually tallying columns and checking your math again and again? How quickly the knowledge of the old way fades.

Then remember the domino effect. One system may be the basis for several more. Our economies are integrated, mixed things. Small disruptions can have major effects. How much worse would a major internet outtage be? Once it went from days to weeks, how many businesses would still survive? And without those functioning, what about food? What about heating? How far down the line do you really need to look before there is a total collapse?

But the internet couldn't really be disrupted, right? That's an extreme example for fiction. Is it believable?

We already see events today that mimic the same result. Ransomware attacks disable hospitals around the world.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/ransomware-attacks-hospitals-take-toll-patients-rcna54090

https://www.aha.org/center/cybersecurity-and-risk-advisory-services/ransomware-attacks-hospitals-have-changed

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57184977

It's not just their registration systems. These attacks also affect the machines themselves. Thanks to IOT and Global North thinking, MRIs, tomographs, even dialysis machines can all stop working when they can't get online. When an attack like this hits, sometimes patients need to be transferred to another hospital.

Imagine if it happened to all of them.

Writing ideas

How can we approach these situations with fiction? The setting of the collapsing North is dramatic and will give plenty of impetus for action. The team being sent to aid them is clearly our community protagonist. That's the easy part.

How can we level that up?

Let's lean into the misconceptions to illustrate how painfully wrong they are. The Northern leaders, professors, or administrators may be offended at the idea of these vagrants sent to save them. It need not be vicious or mean, either. These could be well-intending people who lack inter-cultural literacy. Now we have extra tension on top of the infrastructure. Hospitals need to operate. The metro needs to go, even if it hasn't been serviced in a month. The conditions are terrible, and the people aren't even greatful for their help.

Can you feel the struggle there? Just imagine waking up into that reality. How strong must your personal sense of ethics be to withstand it, to weather that storm time and time again.

How strong are your ideals?

Until next time, I'm Tomasino. I hope you'll join me for the next Solarpunk Prompt.

Music in this recording is Esoteric Eye by S O A R E R from Global Pattern's compilation Solarpunk: A Brighter Perspective

[harpagornis]

Multituberculate Earth: Gondwanatheria

Gondwanatheria is a mysterious but highly successful clade of allothere mammals. As previously noted it is unclear if these are multituberculates, close relatives or unrelated non-mammalian synapsids; it’s even unclear if they form a natural group, as ferugliotheriids are sometimes considered true multituberculates while other gondwanatheres aren’t. For the sake of simplicity they are treated as a monophyletic group here that may or may not be related to multituberculates (otherwise represented only by cimolodonts). Its worth to not that, unlike virtually all other multituberculates, gondwanatheres have a seperate septomaxilla from the premaxilla, whereas the normal multituberculate condition is just a single bone that may be a premaxilla or an entirely new bone as mentioned in the link above.

In our timeline, gondwanatheres first appear in the Late Cretaceous. They were widespread, with remains found in South America, Antarctica, Africa, Madagascar and India; they crossed the KT boundary in all, but the fate of African, Indian and Malagasy species is unknown. In South America and Antarctica they continued to thrive even as marsupials and placentals took over, but ultimately became rare by the Oligocene. One possible species, Patagonia peregrina, might have endured as recently as the Miocene, though this taxon is controversial and some studies claim it is a polydolopiform instead (the latest on the matter seems to cautiously favor the gondwanathere interpretation).

Thus, in our history gondwanatheres are potentially the last of the multituberculates, or of the non-mammalian synapsids at any rate.

In this timeline, fortune nature kept smiling on this resilient clade, whose plausible deniality is even more effective thanks to their real life success. The Paleocene saw them in all of the southern continents, albeit with some provincialism, with sudamericids, greniodontids and ferugliotheriids in South America, Australia and Antarctica, sudamericids and adalatheriids in India and Madagascar and galulatheriids in Africa. Not long after they aimed for the north; ferugliotheriids, already found in the Late Cretaceous of Mexico, were quick to migrate to North America and soon after to Europe.

The PETM brought about an even greater interchange. India joined with Asia, and with it herds of sudamericids and adalatheriids marched into the continent. More efficient herbivores – unlike most [other] multituberculates, many species have ever-growing cheek and incisor teeth like rodents -, they displaced the local taeniolabidids and nearly all lambdopsalids above 10 kg. Adalatheriids would later colonise North America, but sudamericids would only expand further with the Grand Coupure, taking advantage of the forest collapse to invade Europe and North America. This is less fortunate for local ferugliotheriids, which go extinct.

As of the Oligocene, gondwanatheres are essentially cosmopolitan, found in pretty much every major landmass. In this respect they resemble the hadrosaur dinosaurs of the Cretaceous, another cosmopolitan clade of herbivores with sophisticated teeth. Though they are more diverse, ranging from tiny hamster-sized granivores to massive aquatic herbivores and some of the tallest land mammals of all time.

Ferugliotheriidae

Ferugliotheriids are the most basal of gondwanatheres; as mentioned previously, some authorities don’t even considered them gondwanatheres at all. They lack the refined teeth of their more derived relatives, having brachydont rather than hypsodont cheek teeth and retaining a plagiaulacoid. Consequently, they generally feed on soft plant matter, though the plagiaulacoid allows them to explore some harder food stuffs like seeds and tubers.

Ferugliotheriids have the second widest distribution after sudamericids, ocurring across the Americas, Europe, Antarctica, Australia and the Caribbean islands, though the Grand Coupure killed them off from the northern continents, and even in the southern ones the spread of grasslands is threatening their long term survival, seeing as they can’t process grass as easily as other gondwanatheres. Most remained comparatively small, from hamster to sheep size, but both Australia and the Caribbean saw the rise of large browsing species, using their forelimbs to bring down branches like gorillas or sloths. Several species have taken to an arboreal lifestyle, being more efficient folivores than other tree-climbing mammals like ptilodontoideans or leonardid dryolestoids.

Galulatheriidae

Africa in our timeline bears a singular gondwanathere, Galulatherium jenkinsi. Although sometimes placed in Sudamericidae, sharing similar hypsodont teeth, it differs in other respects, like the absence of enamel and the presence of what appears to be a plagiaulacoid. If Adalatherium – which is pretty similar to sudamericids – can get its own family, I don’t see why Galulatherium can’t.

In this timeline, galulatheriids pretty much evolved in parallel with our world’s paenungulates. They diversified in the isolation of Africa, the only mammals in the Paleocene alongside kogaionids, where they took herbivorous niches while the latter became predators. Being relatively bulky animals, they left plenty of room for the arrival of other groups like the arboreal afroptilodontoideans and cursorial boffiids, diversifying in rather unique ways. Some became mole-rat-like burrowers, while others became chalicothere-like tall browsers. While lacking enamel, their ever-growing hypsodont molars allowed them to consume grass efficiently, though most species remained mixed browsers even into the Oligocene.

Many species became semi-aquatic, even as taeniolabidids took hold over the world’s seas and freshwater habitats. Several have swam across the Tethys to Balkanatolia, where they became established as the largest herbivores while one genus, Termagantus, established itself in southern Europe (though in fairness it could have also arrived there via a brief land bridge). Both European and Balkanatolian species became extinct in the Grand Coupure, but another group had far more sucess: in the Eocene, some galulatheriids crossed the then-thinner Atlantic Ocean into South America. Arriving to a crowded landmass, they currently remain in semi-aquatic niches.

Hvalros tropicalis, an Oligocene form known from European and Caribbean marine sites. It used its tusks to scrape off algae from corals, sometimes even eating corals thanks to its ever-growing molars. By corvarts.

Uniquely among allotheres galulatherids (as well as some greniodontids) have converted their vestigial plagiaulacoid into a tusk (notoptilodontoideans also converted the peg-like relictual plagiaulacoid into a canine-like tooth, but the main one remains blade shaped as usual). Used both for fighting predators and rivals as well as for digging tubers and scrapping tree bark, these tusks allow them some control of their environment, allowing them to uproot undesirable plants. In some regards, it can be said that galulatheriids mimic elephant evolution, though they have not developed trunks.

Adalatheriidae

Adalatherium hui is probably one of the most publicised gondwanatheres, the first to show a significantly complete skeleton. It was rather similar to sudamericids – many of which co-existed with it in the Cretaceous of Madagascar – sharing similar ever-growing hypsodont teeth coated in thick enamel, but it was an unexpectedly gracile animal with erect limbs and lacking some of the latter’s features like facial flanges. As such it was given its own family, which in this timeline has found great success.

Adalatheriids were originally constrained to Indo-Madagascar. But as India collided with Asia in the PETM, they quick spread across Asia, and even into North America through Beringia. They would latter colonise Europe during the Grand Coupure, spanning the entire North Hemisphere plus the island of Madagascar. Still, North America and Madagascar would be the hotspots of their radiation.

In the northern continents, adalatheriids grew increasingly gracile and tall. While its easy to compare these now long-necked herbivores to indricotheres (barring their wider distribution), they in truth more closely resemble elephants and sauropod dinosaurs at least in terms of function, feeding both from tall trees as well as picking grass and small shrubs (well, I guess camels are a good analogue, but it’s not quite as romantic, you know). Like most mammals they have only seven neck vertebrae, so while their neck are not terribly flexible they anchor powerful muscles that allow the skull to pull vegetation powerfully. Their necks are proportionally longer than those of giraffes, allowing them to drink more gracefully. Conversely, some species have short necks and more closely resemble rhinos ecologically, and a few species remained small and gopher-like.

I’m not supposed to reveal this yet, since there is no Oligocene fossil reccord of Madagascar, but there they instead became arboreal, analogous to our giant lemurs.

A notable feature of Adalatherium is the presence of many holes in this skull; this normally correlates to blood vessels supporting a soft tissue structure, like a horn or a wattle. We thus choose to portray adalatheriids in this project with all manner of horns on the snout, some similar to those of rhinos while other more bizarre structures.

Sudamericidae

Sudamericids were the most successful gondwanatheres in both timelines, having spread across South America, Antarctica, India and Madagascar and possibly lasted until the Miocene. In this timeline, they further colonised Australia, and through India first Asia in the Eocene, then North America and Europe in the Oligocene (though they remain less diverse in the former, where adalatheriids are more common instead; see below for the future in the southern continents). Only Afro-Arabia remains free of them… for now…

These are rather robust animals, which can be best thought of as mix between heavy rodents like gophers and herbivorous xenarthrans like sloths and glyptodonts. Like the former they have ever growing hypsodont teeth, a rarity among allotheres, and like the latter they developed massive jugal flanges likely anchoring powerful cheek muscles. They were most certainly capable of processing hard plant matter from cycads to the now increasingly dominant grass, and this has been key to their success.

Many gondwanatheres in this timeline attained massive sizes, with Oligocene Asia species in the upwards of 5 tons. However, a myriad of small taxa as small as a guinea pig still persist, some of which even competing with lambdopsalids in digging niches, and having more successfully produced mole-rat-like forms. When larger species die, these ones are among the first to step in to replace them. Many species have also taken to the tree canopies in Eurasia, acting as the main local sloth-analogues.

Sudamericids may lack the tusks of galulatheriids and the horns of adalatheriids, but their resilience makes the hard to get rid of. But perhaps a new rival has come to challenge them…

Greniodontidae

Greniodon is an enigmatic gondwanathere from our timeline’s Late Eocene of Patagonia. They strong resemble sudamericids, but they differ in having an occlusal surface more similar to that of ferugliotheriids. Thus, they are here interpreted speculatively as a sort of “bridge” between the basal ferugliotheriids and derived galulatheriids, adalatheriids and sudamericids, retaining plagiaulacoids that in some species formed tusks like their galulatheriid cousins. In our world, these bizarre animals was a tenacious survivors, having lasted until the end of the Eocene.

… and so it makes sense that, in this timeline, its relatives too are highly successful, having “the best of both worlds” in terms of derived and primitive molar features, allowing them to feed on a wider variety of vegetation. They for now occur in South America, Australia and Antarctica, and as early as the early Paleocene they have been displacing their sudamericid cousins in the south. For now both clades co-exist, but southern sudamericids are being driven to increasingly specialised niches in the light of these new, more efficient grazers and browsers, and combined with the arrival of African galulatheriids they may be ironically removed from South America altogether.

Greniodontids: our new saviours… or an even greater evil to be unleashed?

[jay28unit2]

The Victorian British Empire

The Victorian British Empire dominated the globe, though its forms of rule and influence were uneven and diverse. the traffic of people and goods between Britain and its colonies was constant, complex, and multidirectional. Britain shaped the the empire, the empire shaped Britain, and colonies shaped one another. British jobs abroad included civil and military service, missionary work, and infrastructure development. People from various imperial locations traveled to, studied in and settled in Britain. Money, too, flowed both ways— the empire was a source of profit, and emigrants sent money home to Britain— as did goods such as jute, calico cotton cloth and tea.

Dramatic expansion of the empire meant such goods came to Britain from all over the world. between 1820 and 1870 the empire grew, shifted its orientation eastward, and increased the number of nonwhite people over whom it exerted control. Much of this expansion involved violence, including the Indian Mutiny (1857-1859), the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865) in Jamaica, the Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1860) in China, and the Taranaki war (1860-1861) in New Zealand. India became central to imperial status and wealth. There was significant migration to the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand and later to Canada and South Africa. from 1870 until 1914 continued aggressive expansion (including Britain's participation in the so called Scramble for Africa) was assisted by new technologies, including railways and telegraphy. Britain took control of larger parts of Africa (including Egypt, Sudan and Kenya), which together were home to about 30 percent of the African population. the same period also saw the start of anticolonial movements that demanded freedom from British domination in India and elsewhere. These would ultimately lead to decolonisation after World war II.