Humans could not colonize regions with cold climates until they learned how to sew furs together into warm clothes. Needles could be made from stone, but bone is easier to work into needles, so bones were more commonly used to manufacture needles during pre-historical times. The earliest evidence of humans using needles dates to 40,000 years ago in Europe. Neanderthals lived in Europe earlier than this, and they must have also had this technology. Needles are proxy evidence of humans making clothes from furs sewn together. Ancient evidence of bone needles is rare and fur clothes even rarer because they are organic and unlikely to be preserved. Evidence of needles has been found at the La Pele site in Wyoming dating to 12,900 years ago. Scientists recently analyzed these bone needles and identified which types of animals they came from.
Humans in Wyoming used fox, cat, and hare bones to make bone needles. These are the likely species, but they didn’t actually identify them to the species level. Chart from the below referenced study.
Archaeologists found 32 bone needle fragments from 11 specimens. They were able to determine which types of animals they came from by studying the peptides in the bone needles. Different animals have different combinations of peptides and can be identified. A peptide consists of 2 or more amino acids, and they are shorter than proteins which consist of 50 or more amino acids. The scientists who participated in this study identified 3 red fox, 4 hares, and 1 cat. They couldn’t identify the others. The hare was either a snowshoe hare or a jack rabbit. The cat might have been bobcat, Canadian lynx, cougar, or the extinct pseudo-cheetah. The canid was probably a red fox. People likely trapped these animals. Although they may have been eaten, the primary use of these animals was for their fur. Their bones were also used to manufacture needles. These animals have tightly spaced hairs that trap warm air next to skin and are exceptionally good for making warm clothes. The Folsom Culture, a people whose lives revolved around hunting bison during the early Holocene, utilized hare almost as much as bison.
Reference:
Pelton, S. et. al.
“Early Paleoindian Use of Canids, Felids, and Hares for Bone Needle Production at the La Pele Site, Wyoming, USA”
For years I joked I was going to learn how to play the xylophone, so I could attract groupies with big boobs. Imagine the ludicrous site of an elderly man (I’m 63) capturing a following of voluptuous women by mastering an instrument that went out of fashion 80 years ago. I really do love the way the xylophone sounds though, and when my wife requested a keyboard for Christmas, I decided I would use it to learn how to read music, then really learn how to play the xylophone. I purchased a glockenspiel instead because it was cheaper, and now I’m learning easy songs and riffs to play on it. I became curious about these types of instruments and researched the origins of them. Striking different keys to get different sounds is an ancient concept, likely pre-historic.
Xylophones may have been invented separately in Africa and Southeast Asia, though I hypothesize an early form of xylophone may have been brought out of Africa when the first Homo sapiens left the continent 50,000 years ago. The earliest known xylophone existed in Southeast Asia 1200 years ago. It’s similar to the harmonium, an instrument known to have existed in China 4000 years ago. A harmonium is simply a xylophone with vertical keys instead of horizontal keys. Xylophone is a Latin word meaning wood sound. The earliest mention of a xylophone in Europe dates to 1511. Folk musicians in Central Europe played xylophones 200 years earlier than this, and they likely adopted the instrument following the Mongol invasions by the Khan dynasty. The Mongols massacred many Europeans, but eventually opened up a cultural exchange, bringing Chinese trade, after they were done killing and pillaging.
This is a primitive type of marimba with fire-cured wooden keysand gourds used as resonators.
A panharmonicon with vertical keys instead of horizontal.
African slaves brought knowledge of how to build marimbas to Guatemala and southern Mexico about 500 years ago.
The vibraphone was invented in 1921 and is simply a marimba with metal keys instead of wooden.
An early form of glockenspiel. A glockenspiel is a xylophone with metal keys instead of wooden. They are also called bells. Bells can be used instead of metal keys.
A marimba is a xylophone with resonator pipes below the keys. The earliest known occurrence of the marimba is from southern Mexico and Guatemala in 1545. The technology to build a marimba came from African slaves who played the instrument. Africans fire-roasted wooden boards and placed them over gourds. Today, marimbas use metal pipes instead of gourds. The length of the boards determines which key they sound like.
Herman Winterhoff invented the vibraphone in 1921, and this instrument surpassed the popularity of the xylophone and marimba among jazz musicians during the big band era. A vibraphone is simply a marimba with metal keys instead of wooden keys, and they also have resonator pipes below the keys. Lionel Hampton popularized the vibraphone during the big band jazz era of the time, and he was a popular member of the Benny Goodman Orchestra.
I figured out how to play the riff used when Benny and Lionel alternate solos. I think I’m going to have to learn Hampton’s solos by watching old videos of him playing because I don’t think his parts are written down.
Augusta Martiel invented the modern glockenspiel during 1886, but it is based on an ancient Chinese use of bells to produce melodies. Some musicians simply refer to a glockenspiel as bells. A glockenspiel is a xylophone with metal instead of wooden keys.
I’ve been learning to play songs on the glockenspiel for about a month now. Glockenspiels cost about half as much as a vibraphone, but once I improve and can play 500 songs, I might spring for one. I think they sound nicer. I’ve learned to play “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “God Bless America,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Hall of the Mountain King,” “Werewolves of London,” and “Something” and “Ob La Di Ob La Da” by the Beatles. I can play several cool rhythm and blues riffs, and the basic bass line for most 1950’s rock songs. I figured out how to play a Lionel Hampton riff from Benny Goodman’s “Stealing Apples. My goal is to someday play as well as him. I’ve struggled figuring out how to play “Under my Thumb.” I think I have the notes correct, but the Rolling Stones used a marimba, and the song just doesn’t sound right on a glockenspiel.
The Yearling is a novel written by Marjorie Rawlings who had it published in 1938. She won the Pulitzer Prize for literature the following year, and this novel was adapted into a 1946 movie, starring Gregory Peck. The story was also adapted for television in 1994. I just finished reading this novel for the first time, and I agree with the critical praise Rawlings received for writing such a classic. She lived on a 72-acre orange orchard in north Florida when she was writing the book. She was not a native southerner, but she befriended her Florida cracker neighbors and took copious notes of their speech patterns and personal histories. The characters in The Yearling were based on people she met in real life, and accordingly they seem very real. Rawlings had an excellent ear for dialogue, and the dialect her characters speak is exactly like the way people used to speak in this region. The story takes place in north Florida during 1870 when the region was still a wilderness. Rawlings also took notes of the flora and fauna of this region, and she spiced her novel with accurate descriptions of the natural beauty of the region. Her descriptions of the natural history are the focus of this essay.
This is the house Marjorie Rawlings lived in at Cross Creek, Florida. It is now part of a state historical park.
The area where the story takes place is today part of Ocala National Forest. A variety of landscapes occur here today and were described in her novel. These include sandy scrub pine, longleaf pine savannah, cypress swamp, hardwood hammock, lakes, and springs. The family in the story lived on Baxter Island, named after the family. It was not an island surrounded by water. Instead, it was a hardwood hammock with more fertile soil than the surrounding sandy scrub pine wilderness. The family was too poor to have a well dug, so they got their water from a nearby seepage spring, and the mother used rainwater to wash clothes. They grew corn, black-eyed peas, sorghum (for syrup and chicken feed), corn, and sunflowers (for chickens), sweet potatoes, tobacco, collards, and onions. For fruit they had wild oranges, pomegranate, mulberries, blackberries, peaches, plums, and scuppernongs. Their livestock consisted of a work horse, a milk cow, some pigs and chickens, and hunting dogs. They depended upon wild game to supplement their larder, and they frequently ate bear, deer, squirrel, rabbit, and turtle. There was one scene when they went fishing for bass. The area was near the St. John’s River which flows into the ocean. Unusually high tides sometimes brought saltwater mullet and blue crabs into nearby lakes.
Birds are often mentioned in The Yearling. Rawlings was confused about the ivory-billed woodpecker. This extinct species was known as the “Lord God bird,” but Rawlings writing suggests she wasn’t aware the ivory-billed woodpecker and the “Lord God bird” were one and the same species. There is a scene in the book when the father and son admire the beauty of a whooping crane mating dance. Rawlings also mentions the scrub jay, a bird endemic to the region. Other birds mentioned in the novel include red birds (cardinals), mockingbirds, owls, buzzards, and bitterns. She refers to grackles as jackdaws.
Predators troubled the family, and the father set traps and tried to prevent their depredations upon their livestock. A black bear known as “Ole Slewfoot” killed one of their hogs and their calf, causing the father to go on a non-stop bear hunt. They hunted foxes that were ravaging their corn field, and a trap caught an albino raccoon. They made the albino raccoon skin into a purse. The father used panther oil to treat his arthritis. Alligator meat was used as dog food. And of course, there were several accounts of deer-hunting. The boy adopted a deer fawn after his father killed the mother deer to use its liver in an emergency effort to draw rattlesnake venom from his bloodstream.
A variety of environments occur in the Ocala National Forest, site of the events depicted in The Yearling. Ridges hold dry sandy scrub forests, uplands were open pine savannahs, valleys were cypress swamps with hardwood hammocks.
Swamp in Ocala National Forest.
Spring in Ocala National Forest.
Pine flatwoods in Ocala National Forest. This site needs a fire pruning.
Scene from The Yearling when the father and son celebrated the killing of Old Slewfoot.
The lonely boy living in a wilderness with few friends adopted a deer fawn for companionship.
Some of the scenes in the book are not realistic. A diamond-backed rattlesnake bit the father in the arm. He immediately found and killed a deer (a convenient coincidence that one was available), removed its liver, and placed it on the snake bite to draw out the venom. There is no way this would work. To detoxify the venom, a blood vessel would have to carry the venom to the liver. The scene was likely based on an old wives tale. The characters supposedly ate bear’s liver. Rawlings was unaware that bear’s liver contains toxic levels of Vitamin A. She is not the only fiction writer who has made this mistake. T.C. Boyle also wrote a story that depicted people eating bear’s liver.
Another unrealistic occurrence in the story is a plague known as the black tongue that devastated the local wildlife after a prolonged rainy spell. I can find no reference to a disease known as black tongue that wipes out many different species of animals. The plague results in a hungry pack of 36 wolves that invade the Baxter homestead because they can’t find any natural prey to eat. The wolves that lived in Florida never ran in packs even half this size. Eventually, the man and his neighbors kill all the wolves in the area–something that did happen. Florida black wolves were extinct by 1917.
The story revolves around a lonely boy and the pet fawn he adopts. It’s a real tear-jerker. His only friend, a disabled boy, dies in the middle of the story. Then, in the end, the boy is told to destroy his pet because it was eating the family’s corn, a crop they depended upon to put bread on the table. It’s a great novel but sad.
Breaking news: The Trump Administration filed a lawsuit against the number 34 because the fake news media reported Trump has been convicted of 34 felonies, and therefore the number 34 has a liberal bias.
The previous paragraph might be similar to a headline one might find in The Onion satirical magazine, but the truth is scarcely less bizarre. The Trump Justice Department sent intimidating letters to dozens of medical and science journals, accusing them of having a liberal bias (as if that was some kind of crime) and threatening their tax-exempt status. The accusation baffles the American Medical Association, publishers of the well-known Journal of the American Medical Association, also known as JAMA. Most doctors are upper middle class political conservatives and are not known for having a liberal bias. Moreover, the letters give no specific examples…just vague references to “woke ideology” and gender pronouns. About a third of leading medical journals are non-profit and wouldn’t be taxed anyway. Other leading journals do make money from advertising, subscriptions, and access to articles for a fee. PLOS One is a vanity publication that makes its money from authors paying to have their studies published. It’s likely the operating margins for these publications is not large.
The goal of these letters is unclear. It seems like a strange way to force academia into fully agreeing with anything the Trump administration chooses to say or decide. Trump demands that science and fact support whatever crazy nonsense he believes, no matter how unscientific or dishonest. The letters clearly infringe on scientists’ 1st amendment rights. However, Trump is taking the fascist approach, insisting a fact isn’t a fact, unless the fascist dictator says it is a fact.
Trump 2.0 is unchained, and he can now do anything without being encumbered by checks and balances, since the Supreme Court ruled the President is above the law. He can order the assassination of anyone he doesn’t like, then pardon the assassin. Trump has usurped the role of Congress and is ignoring judicial rulings. Members of his own party fear his retribution, if they oppose him, so they let him do anything. Trump is threatening to deport legal citizens to a foreign gulag, and some of his officials say people who criticize Trump should be imprisoned for aiding terrorists. His administration is now arresting judges in a brazen attempt to intimidate the already intimidated judicial branch. Judges should have thrown Trump in jail a long time ago.
Trump may not be Hitler, but he is Hitleresque. Many of his actions and words sound similar to Hitler’s. He’s clearly a fascist with a cult following. His own party fears him.
Trump attempted the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and he said he was going to terminate the constitution. He’s well on his way to destroying the U.S. constitution. When asked point blank whether he was obligated to defend the constitution, he said, “I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer.” Half of America doesn’t care that we have become a fascist country.
I foresaw this happening because I realized Trump was going to win a couple of months before the election. Trump already ATTEMPTED THE VIOLENT OVERTHROW OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. He said he was going to terminate the constitution. He is the biggest criminal in U.S. history and wants to be President to stay out of jail and to enrich himself. As soon as he was elected, he started a new bitcoin, inviting foreign countries and crooks to pay him bribes by investing in his cryptocurrency–an instantly impeachable offense. Nevertheless, half the country voted for him because they mistakenly think he would be good for the economy. Americans suffer from a psychotic type of amnesia because Trump presided over the biggest economic downturn in U.S. history during his first term. Now, people are beginning to have 2nd thoughts. Americans are standing on the edge of economic collapse and are just now realizing it. The economic fear index is high. Trump’s tariffs are about to take effect, and they will bring ruin to many small businesses and crush working class people’s personal finances. This will not surprise the rational people who recognized Trump as an insane buffoon, but half the country consists of stupid uneducated pigs who don’t understand the consequences of electing a crazy dummy as President. In a trade war between the U.S. and the world, the U.S. is going to lose.
NPR is the only major media outlet that has so far reported Trump’s attempt to intimidate medical and science journals. It’s not a coincidence that Trump wants to get rid of NPR and PBS and end their government funding. NPR and PBS get 90% of their funding from private donations, and this withdrawal of funds will mainly hurt the small rural stations that serve mostly Trump voters. Conservatives often accuse NPR and PBS of having a liberal bias, but they wouldn’t know because they never listen to anything that might educate them.
The famous Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806 seems like it would’ve inspired numerous movies and television series. Though plenty of documentaries have been produced about this great adventure, Hollywood has produced just 1 movie about it, and it is filled with laughable inaccuracies. The movie was entitled The Far Horizons. It was released in 1955 and featured a famous cast, including some of the biggest stars of the time. Charlton Heston played William Clark, Fred MacMurray (of My Three Sons) played Meriweather Lewis, and Donna Reed played Sacagawea. Modern critics lambaste the film for casting a Caucasian actress as a Native-American, but this is just a minor flaw compared to the other fictional inventions that dog this movie. There were not many Native-American actresses in 1955, and Hollywood casting directors couldn’t be expected to scour Indian reservations, then foot the bill for an actor’s drama class. However, some of the other inaccuracies are indefensible.
Movie Trailer for The Far Horizons
This movie is fair but highly inaccurate.They spray tanned Donna Reed, but she still doesn’t look like an Indian.
The movie portrays Sacajawea as desperately begging Lewis and Clark to let her join the expedition, so she could be reunited with her people. (She was being held prisoner by another tribe.) In truth Lewis and Clark needed Sacajawea because she was the only one in the expedition who spoke Shoshone, and she was indispensable as a translator when they traded for horses with the Shoshone.
Even more outrageous, the screenwriter invents out of whole cloth, a romantic relationship between Clark and Sacajawea. She was married to a French trapper, Charbonneau, who came along on the expedition and served as a cook. Charbonneau impregnated Sacajawea during the journey, and she gave birth and nursed her baby while still on the expedition. The movie depicts Clark in a knife fight with Charbonneau over Sacajawea, and Lewis intervenes and sends Charbonneau packing. The portrayal of Charbonneau demonstrates anti-French bigotry–in old westerns French trappers are often portrayed as dangerous, wicked, knife-fighting characters. Charbonneau was never forced to leave the expedition, and there was no conflict between him and Clark.
The screenwriter also invented a conflict between Lewis and Clark, supposedly because Lewis didn’t approve of the way Clark was leading Sacajawea on. Earlier, the movie portrayed Clark getting engaged to a woman Lewis loved. The resentment boils over, and they get in a fist fight. There is no evidence there was any conflict between the 2 whatsoever.
The movie shows the expedition constantly warring against the Indians. In truth the expedition got along well with the Indians most of the time with 1 exception when they had a skirmish with some Blackfeet after a sentry let an Indian steal his gun. In the movie Charbonneau riles up an Indian chief against the expedition. This never happened. Lewis and Clark liked the Indians they met, and the indigenous people didn’t yet view white men as a threat to their way of life.
The movie depicts an accident, resulting in the deaths of several men due to the supposed conflict between Lewis and Clark. This never happened either. Only 1 man out of 45 died during the expedition, and historians believe he succumbed to a burst appendix about the time the expedition started. There was no cure for a burst appendix in 1804.
The movie showed very few, if any, scenes depicting wildlife.
The real Lewis and Clark expedition saw abundant wildlife.
Lewis and Clark got along well with the Indians, and they liked them. In the movie the expedition was constantly at war or on the verge of war with the Indians.
The movie suffers as well from a stunning lack of scenes depicting the abundant wildlife encountered by the expedition. They often caught giant catfish and salmon, and they saw vast mixed herds of bison, elk, pronghorn, and mustang followed by packs of wolves. Grizzly bears on occasion attacked members of the expedition. Explorers battling giant bears holds great potential as a dramatic move scene, but the movie fails with this possibility as well. For all its shortcomings the movie rates a C+ as entertainment value. Movie buffs just need to know how inaccurate it is.
GeorgiaBeforePeople 