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Remains from CU's Medical School still in Boulder

Anonymous — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 20:20:38 +0000

Remains from CU's Medical School still in Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/25/2024 - 14:20

Silvia Pettem

Cadavers used in anatomy classes were buried in unmarked lots in Columbia Cemetery

The University of Colorado Department of Medicine and Surgery opened in Boulder in 1883 with two students. By 1890, the medical school included more than a dozen students, two of them women. In order to graduate, each student was required to dissect an entire human body.

Records of these cadavers reveal a little-known cross section of life and death in Boulder County. The body parts were interred in unmarked lots, where they remain today, in Boulder's Columbia Cemetery.

Prior to the school's opening, Dr. Lumen M. Giffin moved to Boulder from New York to become professor of anatomy and physiology. In the early days, tuition for the three-year program was a one-time fee of $5 for in-state students and $10 for those from out of state. The courses included lectures, chemical laboratories and dissections.

CU Boulder alum Silvia Pettem is an acclaimed local historian and author of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon.

One of the bodies donated to Giffin's class was that of miner Frederick Nelson. He had sought refuge from a forest fire and suffocated in the shaft of the Bald Mountain Mine near the town of Sunset. His relatives were unknown, and no one claimed his remains.

Many of the deceased met similarly unusual or violent deaths. According to coroners' records, in 1909 Herman Schmidt's skull was crushed by a falling rock while he worked as a laborer on the construction of Barker Dam, below Nederland. Schmidt was a recent immigrant with no known family or friends.

No one knew anything about Michael Clifford at the time of his death except his name. He was murdered in a drunken brawl in the town of Marshall. The university also welcomed his body.

Few, if any, of the cadavers used in the classroom dissections were female until 1914, when Cyrus Deardoff donated the body of his 70-year-old wife, Ellen, who had been declared insane and starved herself.

Cyrus had, at one time, been a prominent gold miner in Ward. However, he died destitute a few months after Ellen's death. He saved the expense of a funeral and the stigma of being consigned to a pauper’s grave by agreeing in advance to give the university his body, as well.

The year was a busy one for the medical students. By then, CU had purchased its second cemetery lot, and bought a third one a couple years later.

Additional bodies came from people who died by suicide or from influenza or other infectious diseases. Some, like Thomas McCormick, died from an overdose of morphine in the county jail.

Then there was William Ryan, a farmer, who had suffered from chronic alcoholism and was found dead in bed. He had no family, but he did have a watch and chain and a horse and buggy. CU got those items, too.

In 1924, citing a lack of appropriate medical facilities, CU's medical school moved to Denver. In 2008, the school transformed itself again with a move to the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.

A year before the school left Boulder, Giffin died of a stroke at age 72. At the time, he was the oldest physician in Boulder. He, too, was buried in Columbia Cemetery—intact and in his own grave with family members. But while Giffin is resting is peace, the other bodies in Columbia Cemetery are resting in pieces.

Top image: Luman M. Giffin (center) and his class in the CU Medical School during the late 1890s. (Photo: courtesy Carnegie Library for Local History, Boulder)

Silvia Pettem is a CU Boulder alum (1969) and is the author of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon. This column originally appeared in the Daily Camera. She can be reached at silviapettem.com.

Cadavers used in anatomy classes were buried in unmarked lots in Columbia Cemetery.

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Remembering the player behind ‘Fernandomania’

Anonymous — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 18:44:00 +0000

Remembering the player behind ‘Fernandomania’ Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/24/2024 - 12:44

Jared Bahir Browsh

Fernando Valenzuela, who died Tuesday, was more than just the first Mexican superstar in Major League Baseball; he helped soothe longstanding resentments in a displaced community

The Los Angeles Dodgers announced Wednesday that Fernando Valenzuela passed away late Tuesday night at the age of 63. The legendary pitcher debuted late in the 1980 season as a 19-year-old, but it would not be until his first full season when the rookie would initiate “Fernandomania,” fascinating not only Dodgers and baseball fans, but people throughout the United States and Latin America.

Valenzuela helped the Dodgers beat the Yankees to win the World Series in 1981, the last time the two teams met. At a time when the Dodgers struggled to soothe their relationship with Mexican American fans, Valenzuela was not only the balm, but also initiated a wave of players from Mexico that continues today.

The Dodgers’ relationship with the large Chicanx community in Los Angeles had long been fraught after the building of Dodger Stadium. Following passage of the Federal Housing Act in 1949, then-Mayor Norris Poulson chose Chavez Ravine, a shallow canyon in Los Angeles, as the location to build 10,000 housing units, promising the Mexican American community living there that they would have their first choice of housing.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Yet after most of the neighborhood was razed, the project was delayed, and when the Dodgers decided to move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, the area was chosen to build the new Dodger Stadium. The broken promises led to decades of resentment between the team and the Mexican American community in the city, as the remaining residents were forced out of the neighborhood.

Selling out stadiums

Valenzuela was scouted by several teams, but when legendary Cuban-American scout Mike Brito went to evaluate him in Silao, Mexico, he convinced the Dodgers to buy out Valenzuela’s contract in the summer of 1979, just beating out the Yankees. He worked his way up from the minor leagues, debuting with the Dodgers in September 1980 after learning what became his signature pitch, the screwball, which breaks the opposite direction of a curveball or slider.

He spent the final month of the season as a reliever, helping the team contend for the West Division before they lost to the Houston Astros in a one-game playoff.

The following season, the 20-year-old Valenzuela was tapped to be the Dodgers’ opening-day starter after pitcher Jerry Reuss was injured the day before the game. This set off Fernandomania, as he went 8-0 with five shutouts and an earned run average of 0.50. The 1981 season was cut short due to a strike in June, but when the season resumed in August, Valenzuela helped the team win the World Series, becoming the first pitcher to win both the National League Rookie of the Year and Cy Young awards in the same season.

Valenzuela sold out stadiums both at home and away, becoming a phenomenon only a few years after first signing to the Mexican league from his small, rural hometown in Sonora. An international Horatio Alger story, Valenzuela’s rise is one of the most unbelievable in modern sports history.

Valenzuela spoke very little English and struggled to communicate with many of his teammates; however, team manager Tommy Lasorda spent time in the Caribbean winter leagues and helped Valenzuela’s transition to the major leagues, while Mike Scioscia learned enough Spanish to become the young pitcher’s personal catcher. Valenzuela would go on to make six straight All-Star games before shoulder issues related to overuse and the strain of throwing the screwball derailed his career. He ultimately played 17 seasons and threw a no-hitter for the Dodgers in 1990, but his legacy goes far beyond his phenomenal rise.

The first Mexican superstar

Walter O’Malley had owned at least a minority stake in the Dodgers since 1944, accumulating a larger stake in the team and eventually becoming its president in 1950. He was part of the ownership group that signed Jackie Robinson and led the move to Los Angeles in 1958. O’Malley was tired of the Brooklyn Dodgers living in the Yankees’ shadow—their Ebbets Field had less than half the capacity of Yankee Stadium (32,000 vs. 67,000) and the Dodgers lost six of the seven World Series matchups with the Yankees in the 1940s and 1950s. O’Malley saw a business opportunity in moving to the West Coast and building his own stadium in spite of the displacement of the Mexican American community there.

Fernando Valenzuela, known for his signature 'screwball' pitch, winds up during the Dodgers' April 8, 1986, home opener. (Photo: Tony Barnard/Los Angeles Times)

Much like Robinson brought Black fans to the Dodgers, and baseball more generally, O’Malley sought a Mexican player to draw Latine fans who refused to watch the Dodgers not only because of resentment over the displacement, but also because the Dodgers were seen as a team for the white community in Los Angeles. Walter O’Malley died a month after the organization signed Valenzuela, so he never saw the impact of the first Mexican superstar in baseball.

Though famous, Valenzuela still faced many of the same issues other Mexican immigrants faced coming to America. The language barrier led to isolation early in his career, and after his historic rookie season, he was threatened with deportation as he held out for a new contract in 1982, since he was in the United States on a work visa. It was said that Ronald Reagan pushed for immigration reform partly due to meeting Valenzuela in 1981.

Despite the disappointment of being cut by the Dodgers during 1991 spring training, Valenzuela maintained his legendary status with the team, becoming their color commentator in 2003 and having his number, 34, retired in 2023.

His jersey is still one of the most popular, with Valenzuela jerseys seen throughout Dodgers stadium 34 years after he threw his last pitch for the team. In spite of his status as the greatest player from Mexico to play in the Major Leagues, he has not been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, although many artifacts from Fernandomania sit in the museum in Cooperstown.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Top image: Fernando Valenzuela pitches a two-hit, 4-0 victory over the Montreal Expos at Dodger Stadium May 21, 1986. (Photo: Marsha Traeger/Los Angeles Times)

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Fernando Valenzuela, who died Tuesday, was more than just the first Mexican superstar in Major League Baseball; he helped soothe longstanding resentments in a displaced community.

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Balancing opportunity and exploitation as the NBA forges new ground in Africa

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 18:19:39 +0000

Balancing opportunity and exploitation as the NBA forges new ground in Africa Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/22/2024 - 12:19

Jared Bahir Browsh

The recent death of Dikembe Mutombo and the start of the NBA regular season today highlight the fraught realities of building a talent pipeline between lower-income countries and the NBA

On Sept. 30, Basketball Hall of Famer Dikembe Mutombo passed away after a two-year battle with brain cancer. As a young NBA fan, I looked at Mutombo as someone both figuratively and literally larger than life.

Even as a fan of the Philadelphia 76ers, one of my favorite basketball memories was when Mutombo helped lead the Denver Nuggets to an upset of the No. 1-seed Seattle Supersonics, which featured an iconic highlight of Mutombo holding the final rebound as he celebrated on the ground. I later had the joy of watching him as a Sixer when the team made a run to the NBA Finals in 2001.

Mutombo’s legend went beyond his size, with an incredible backstory that might seem too unbelievable for a Hollywood script. He enrolled in Georgetown University on a USAID academic scholarship at 21, originally intending to pursue a career in medicine. But after being recruited to play basketball, and knowing very little English, he majored in linguistics and diplomacy, earning internships with U.S. Rep. Robert Matsui and the World Bank.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

My sister attended Georgetown, and Mutombo stories were common—with his intelligence, gregarious nature and success on the court making him a legend at the university. He was drafted by the Nuggets on the day after his 25th birthday and played 18 years with several teams, including the Houston Rockets, where he was a mentor to another international player, Yao Ming.

During his playing career, Mutombo began participating in humanitarian work, started his own foundation to support his native Congo and served as the first youth emissary for the United Nations Development Program. He also began working with Basketball without Borders, a program started by the NBA to encourage friendship and tolerance through basketball camps run globally.

The program was first introduced in 2001 in the Balkan states after the Yugoslav Wars, before entering Africa in 2003. It has become a pipeline for future all-stars like Pascal Siakam and Joel Embiid to earn college scholarships and be drafted into the NBA.

In 2023, the NBA had a record 125 international players on team rosters, with 19 of those players from African nations. The last six MVP awards have been won by three international players, two of whom, Embiid (Cameroon) and Giannis Antetokounmpo (born in Greece to Nigerian parents) have deep ties to Africa. Mutombo followed Hakeem Olajuwon (drafted from Nigeria in 1984) and Manute Bol (drafted from Sudan in 1985) as a part of the first wave of African players to enter the NBA. There was a dramatic increase of international players entering the NBA that began with the fall of the Soviet Union and accelerated after the success of the 1992 Olympic Dream Team.

Still-rare success

The success of players like Olajuwon, Mutombo and Embiid is still fairly rare in spite of the internationalization of basketball. Of the 125 international players on rosters last year, 72% were from Canada or Europe, representative of the strong basketball pipeline within the Global North and evidence of the developmental resources maintained by these Western nations with strong youth programs and professional leagues.

Players who emerge from outside of these pipelines are often exceptional in skills and physical attributes, overcoming a lack of developmental support. Recent evidence of the wide gap in resources was the relative success of the South Sudan men’s national team at the Paris Olympics, which challenged top teams in spite of there being no indoor basketball courts in the nation. South Sudan’s basketball federation president is Luol Deng, whose family escaped the war-torn country and settled in Great Britain before Deng enrolled at Duke for a year, becoming a two-time All-Star during his 15-year NBA career.

For every Deng, Antetokounmpo or Mutombo who make it to the NBA or other professional leagues around the world, like the English Premier League, there are thousands of others who don’t. It is a lottery that creates competition domestically among lower-income groups, including members of the African diaspora in the United States, where social mobility only seems accessible through sports and entertainment.

The now-iconic image of then-Denver Nugget Dikembe Mutombo celebrating an overtime win against the Seattle Supersonics May 7, 1994. (Photo: Bill Chan/Associated Press)

The desire to leverage sports to achieve social mobility is not new, but it has become increasingly international as domestic sports leagues continue to globalize, driven by access through digital media and growing their fan and revenue bases.

Earlier efforts to globalize were focused on wealthier nations in Europe and Asia, with the NBA and NFL holding exhibitions in countries like Germany and Japan and leveraging the rivalry with the USSR. Since the 1970s, the NFL has attempted to expand beyond the United States, eventually creating the World League of American Football that would evolve into NFL Europe, which officially launched in 1991. After NFL Europe folded in 2007, the league looked toward expanding beyond U.S. borders—self-tasked with expanding not only the NFL brand but American football in general.

The NBA, on the other hand, has focused on expanding as the top basketball league in the world, leveraging the international popularity of the sport. This growth was supported by the fall of the Iron Curtain and growth of professional basketball globally, driven both by television and the popularity of players like Michael Jordan. The NBA’s agreement with the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) to allow their professionals into the Olympics led to the 1992 Dream Team, which only accelerated this growth.

Big in China

Understanding of how international players can expand the game, and brand, was further evidenced by the success of Yao Ming in popularizing the NBA in China. Yao’s success also shows the geopolitical complications that can arise, considering the Chinese government’s requirement that Yao hand over half his earnings to the government, and later conflicts ignited when Daryl Morey made comments related to repression in Hong Kong.

The growth of basketball in Europe and wealthier nations like Israel has opened opportunities for American players to continue their professional basketball careers outside the United States and for top European athletes to play in the NBA. The stability of this pipeline, and the success of players like Olajuwon and Mutombo, led to Basketball without Borders. The NFL has run several international development and scouting programs since 2007, leading to the current International Player Pathway Program. Dozens of international NFL players have entered the NFL through this program, creating a strong pipeline in countries like Nigeria, and supported by Osi Umenyiora, a Nigerian-British former NFL All-Pro.

However, the high cost of entry and potential for injury has limited this growth, leading the NFL to strongly support the growth of flag football, which will make its Olympic debut in the Summer 2028 Games in Los Angeles. NFL officials have mentioned hopes that it will have the same impact as the Dream Team had for NBA basketball. In a similar vein, FIBA has also been working to leverage 3x3 basketball to expand participation and success to other nations.

Several NBA players participated in the 2017 NBA Africa Game, including then-Dallas Maverick Dirk Nowitzki, center. (Photo: U.S. Embassy South Africa)

This growth is not without complications. Along with walking a fine line between free speech, politics and growth—as evidenced by the conflict between the NBA and China during the 2019-2020 season over Daryl Morey’s tweet in support of Hong Kong protesters, as well as 2024 exhibition games between the Denver Nuggets and Boston Celtics in the United Arab Emirates—there are also claims of cultural and economic imperialism as leagues and their sponsorship partners leverage the sport and operate in other nations.

One of the clearest examples of this imperialism and cultural disconnect is represented in the Basketball Africa League (BAL), which is overseen by NBA Africa and FIBA. Early investors included Mutombo, with Barack Obama and Grant Hill, and corporations like Pepsi and Nike, becoming the primary investors. These corporations are looking to leverage the league to expand their brand recognition, which furthers criticism regarding exploitation of labor and resources, including water privatization by beverage companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

There is clearly a disconnect between expectations and realities on the African continent, with fans unable to afford tickets, a lack of facilities and the talent drain to the NBA and European leagues. Unsurprisingly, the BAL and NBA Africa are headquartered in South Africa, in the shadow of apartheid and colonialism.

Ethically fraught global expansion

In spite of these issues, NBA Africa is reportedly valued at over $1 billion, and similar to NBA China, much of the value, and investment, is based on access to potential consumers on the continent, whose population is nearing 1.4 billion. Also, similar to NBA China, there have been issues with the relationships formed to create these subsidiaries. Leaders in nations like Rwanda, Russia and Saudi Arabia have been accused of investing in sport to distract from human rights violations and improve their reputation on the world stage.

The NBA and NFL are far from the only corporations engaging in ethically fraught global expansion; however, the long Western history of exploiting of groups of color, particularly African Americans, only exacerbates concerns regarding globalization of North American sports leagues. Programs like Basketball without Borders present themselves as philanthropic but are actually investments to help expand corporate footprints and open pipelines to talent that removes players from their communities—mirroring similar pipelines between lower-income communities in the United States and major college athletics programs.

Mutombo’s passing reminds us of the positive and negative potential of global sports: the opportunity for social mobility, philanthropy and community, and the risk of widespread exploitation.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Top image: Men play basketball in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (Photo: Rohan Reddy/Unsplash)

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The recent death of Dikembe Mutombo and the start of the NBA regular season today highlight the fraught realities of building a talent pipeline between lower-income countries and the NBA.

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Uncovering the surprising similarities between sports and politics

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 10:31:43 +0000

Uncovering the surprising similarities between sports and politics Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/10/2024 - 04:31

Jared Bahir Browsh

In just a few decades, Fox went from being ‘the fourth network’ airing The Simpsons and baseball to being a leading voice in U.S. politics

Every four years, Americans oscillate between sports and coverage of the presidential election, and outside of trash talk between competitors, many overlook the commonalities between the two.

The media corporations responsible for covering both sports and politics are the same, and as we experience increasing polarization, it’s important to highlight the direct link between the partisan media and sports media rights—which has existed for 30 years, since Fox first aired NFL football after outbidding CBS for the broadcast rights. That winning bid helped legitimize the nascent broadcast network and establish the partisan cable news environment we are familiar with today.

Fox owner Rupert Murdoch is now known for overseeing one of the largest media empires in the world, but through the early 1980s he was known as a publisher of newspapers, specifically tabloids. He inherited a news publication after his father’s death in 1952, The News in Adelaide.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

He expanded his news empire to New Zealand and the United Kingdom through the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although he became known for his ownership of tabloids, his corporation also oversaw more traditional broadsheet newspapers, including Australia’s first national newspaper, The Australian.

By the 1980s, Murdoch had set his eyes on electronic media, particularly television. He struggled to break into the British broadcast market, so he focused his energy on pay TV, buying a controlling stake in Satellite Television Limited, later renamed Sky. After being excluded from the consortium overseeing British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), he launched his own satellite-based service, circumventing British ownership laws by using the Astra satellite operating in Luxembourg.

Sky launched in 1989, 13 months before BSB’s launch in March 1990. The two competed for the rights to the FA Premier League, with Sky’s bid, nearly double that of any competitor, seen as overpaying. However, Murdoch saw sports as a “battering ram” for pay television, helping to attract viewers who might otherwise balk at spending money for scripted shows and news.

During this time, Murdoch and News Corporation set their sights on the United States, purchasing Marc Rich’s stake in 20th Century Fox after Rich became a fugitive for tax evasion and selling oil to Iran during the hostage crisis. He bought the stake from oil magnate and investor Marvin Davis, and 20th Century Fox was considering buying Metromedia, which owned broadcast stations. Davis opposed the purchase while Murdoch and executive Barry Diller pushed to expand the media reach of the troubled studio. Davis sold his stake in 20th Century Fox in 1985, incorporating Davis Petroleum in Denver the next year. Murdoch gained American citizenship, since legally he could not own a broadcast network as a foreign citizen, and in fall of 1986 the Fox Broadcasting Company launched with Diller as chairman and CEO.

The six original stations purchased from Metromedia were in major markets including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Fox Broadcasting Company, or FBC, was renamed Fox to leverage the media legacy of 20th Century Fox, and it officially launched on April 5, 1987.

The fourth network

Fox was considered the fourth network, if people had access to its programming at all. Network programmers purposely scheduled just below the minimum number of hours required for network status to avoid federal regulatory restrictions, including Financial Interest and Syndication Rules.

As it built its affiliate base, Fox took lessons from ABC to boost its visibility, building a young audience through its Fox Kids programming, prime-time teenage and young adult soaps like Beverly Hills 90210 and MelrosePlace and reality television, most notably COPS. However, following the precedent of BSkyB leveraging sports to accelerate growth, Fox made a bid for Monday Night Football in 1987, after ABC hesitated in renewing its contract with the NFL. Fox met the NFL’s asking price, but ABC came back and matched, due to ABC’s more extensive reach. The NFL renewed with ABC.

In November 1995, Fox obtained a partial contract for Major League Baseball. (Photo: Ryosuke Yagi/Wikimedia Commons)

At the end of the 1993 season, however, both the NFC and AFC contracts were up for renegotiation, and Fox ultimately outbid CBS for the NFC rights. As a result, Fox executives made a major push to gain affiliates with stronger broadcast signals in major markets, since the network was still using lower-quality UHF frequencies in many markets. This led to a major realignment of affiliations, with stations in markets like Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Detroit and Cleveland switching from CBS to Fox.

In November 1995, Fox obtained a partial contract for Major League Baseball, airing 16 Saturday games as well as the 1996 World Series. By the end of the decade, Fox would also agree to air the Cotton Bowl and NASCAR.

Taking risks

Sports and risk-taking in its entertainment programming boosted Fox’s profile, and the network entered the cable market with FX (stylized fX at launch) in 1994 as an interactive network embracing the then-emerging Internet. FX rebranded in 1997 as the network dedicated to Fox’s largest demographic, men 18-49, while also serving as a platform for its expanding sport portfolio and a place to rerun popular Fox series.

Throughout Fox’s early years, several other segments of the media were also quickly expanding. CNN had launched as the first 24-hour news network in 1980, but coverage of the Gulf War in 1990-1991 helped Fox grow into a major news source on par with other national outlets. In 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was officially repealed, leading to an explosion of conservative radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Lastly, the continued deregulation of the media—which was further formalized through the Telecommunications Act of 1996—consolidated the radio market, allowing for more nationally syndicated shows like Limbaugh’s and motivating the major media corporations to further expand, including into cable.

In 1994, NBC spun the news network America’s Talking off from CNBC; it was created by former Republican strategist Roger Ailes, who was president of the financial network at the time. Ailes left America’s Talking under controversy, after allegedly making antisemitic comments to NBC executive David Zaslav, who is now the CEO and president of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Fox News launched Oct. 7, 1996, and has become a significant voice in U.S. politics. (Photo: Steve Bott/Wikimedia Commons)

Ailes was hired by News Corp as founding CEO of Fox News, which launched on Oct. 7, 1996. Three months earlier, NBC had replaced America’s Talking with MSNBC, a collaboration between NBC and technology company Microsoft. MSNBC sought its approach through programming with several conservative commentators, including Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson. MSNBC would not find its identity until after Microsoft divested, becoming the left-leaning alternative to Fox News and abandoning the balance it previously tried to find along the political spectrum.

Unsurprisingly, Murdoch and News Corporation took a more heavy-handed approach, paying cable companies to carry the network. Three days after Fox News launched, Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting, which owned CNN. Because of an antitrust consent decree (in which the government sues a company and the defendant agrees to stop alleged illegal conduct), Time Warner Cable was forced to carry a second news station and selected MSNBC, with News Corp claiming that this broke an agreement to carry Fox News.

Citing the fact that its U.S. headquarters were in New York, and leveraging connections, News Corp convinced Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral administration to pressure Time Warner to carry Fox News. Although Time Warner ultimately won the initial battle, Fox News won the war when Time Warner began carrying Fox News. The ordeal displayed Murdoch’s willingness to leverage his close relationships with the Republican Party to support his media empire.

This relationship is at the core of the seemingly real-life Succession episode currently playing out in Nevada, as Murdoch attempts to rewrite his trust to ensure his more conservative son Lochlan takes over Fox Corporation upon his death and maintains the network’s current place on the political spectrum. Even as the media giant sold off some of its assets in the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney in 2019, Murdoch retained Fox’s national sports and news entities—including Fox News, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, along with its cable and broadcast networks—as he continues to leverage sports as a battering ram to protect his international media empire.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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In just a few decades, Fox went from being ‘the fourth network’ airing The Simpsons and baseball to being a leading voice in U.S. politics.

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Pursuing long-awaited justice for victims of Nepal's 'People's War'

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 17:59:39 +0000

Pursuing long-awaited justice for victims of Nepal's 'People's War' Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/20/2024 - 11:59

Tracy Fehr

Nepal’s revamped truth commissions will need to go beyond ‘ritualism’ to deliver justice to civil war victims

Nepal’s attempt to deliver justice and accountability following the country’s decade-long civil war froze more than two years ago with little progress—but a recent development has raised hopes that it could soon be revived and revamped.

In August 2024, the country’s parliament passed a long-awaited bill that sets the stage for appointing a third —and hopefully final—round of truth commissions to carry out investigations into the more than 66,000 conflict victim cases that have been collecting dust since the last commissions ended in July 2022.

The two main bodies involved—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons—were created by Nepal’s government in 2015 to deal with crimes that were committed during Nepal’s conflict, commonly known as “The People’s War.”

Tracy Fehr (right, with a woman living in Gorkha, Nepal) is a PhD student in the CU Boulder Department of Sociology who researches Nepal's transitional justice process. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

In 1996, Maoist rebels began an insurgency against the Nepali government in western Nepal that escalated into a 10-year civil war across the country. According to United Nations estimates, the conflict resulted in the deaths of 13,000, with 1,300 people still missing and an unknown number of torture and conflict-related sexual violence victims.

The People’s War ended with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord that, among other obligations, required the Nepal government to create a high-level truth commission.

To date, the commissions have completed two rounds. The first, which collected the majority of the victim cases, began with a two-year mandate in 2015 that the government extended by an additional year three times. The second round, mandated from 2020 to 2022, was shut down for months due to COVID-19.

The commissions were tasked with three main objectives: to reveal the truth about gross human rights violations; to create an environment of peace, trust and reconciliation; and to make legal recommendations for victim reparations and perpetrators from the conflict.

However, despite seven years of work, little progress toward any of these objectives has been made. No case investigations have been completed, no perpetrators have been held accountable, and no victim reparations have been distributed. Reconciliation in a country that still bears the scars of conflict remains a distant thought.

From 2022 to 2023, I conducted research in Nepal about the country’s transitional justice process. During my research, I heard people refer to Nepal’s prolonged process as “a judicial merry-go-round,” “Groundhog Day” and “transitional injustice.”

Many Nepali people I spoke to believe that the government has strategically prolonged the transitional justice process to avoid accountability, hoping that people will eventually tire of the process and forget. Indeed, a heavy cloud of hopelessness and frustration had settled over the commissions as legal and resource limitations and political biases plagued the first two rounds, severely slowing progress and impairing the commissions’ functionality and local trust.

Justice ‘adjourned’

In 2022, I interviewed a conflict victim in the rolling hills of Rolpa, in the country’s west, where the conflict began. She had submitted her case to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission seven years before but had heard nothing since. “In a way, our complaints are in adjournment,” she said. “They have not ended, yet they are not being forwarded either.”

She was one of approximately 300 women who officially submitted a case of conflict-related sexual violence to the TRC.

A woman looks over the village of Thabang, Rolpa, Nepal. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

However, a former truth commissioner told me that this number may be as high as 1,000 because some victims of sexual violence submitted their case as “torture” to distance themselves from the stigma and shame often associated with sexual violence in Nepal.

I also met leaders at several women’s organizations who have documented thousands of cases of conflict-related sexual violence in Nepal, but they have not yet submitted these cases to the TRC due to ongoing concerns of confidentiality and trust.

The lack of progress by Nepal’s truth commissions suggests that they are being used to carry out what I refer to as “transitional justice ritualism”—the act of a state creating hollow institutions designed without the support to produce actual consequences.

As part of this transitional justice ritualism, I believe that Nepal’s post-conflict coalition government has, up to this point, been using the truth commissions as a political tool to show the international community that it is upholding its obligations under the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Accord and to avoid universal jurisdiction—that is, the international legal principal that allows other nations to prosecute individuals for serious human rights violations regardless of where the crimes took place.

The threat of universal jurisdiction has been a particular concern for alleged perpetrators in Nepal since 2013 when Colonel Kumar Lama, a former Royal Nepal Army commander during Nepal’s conflict, was apprehended in the United Kingdom on charges of torture and war crimes. While Lama was acquitted there due to a lack of evidence, the threat of universal jurisdiction for war crimes perpetrators in Nepal still looms for those in positions of power during the civil war.

A contested step forward

But a recent change in the political leadership of Nepal and the passing of the new law, which amended the Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act, mark an opportunity for the government to move beyond transitional justice lip service.

Under the amended law, a third round of appointed commissioners will operate for a period of four years – hopefully enough time to complete their unaccomplished mandates. A government committee is working to appoint new truth commissioners before the country’s major holiday Dashain in October 2024. The amended act also provides for creating specialized subunits within the TRC—concerning truth-seeking and investigations, reparations, sexual violence and rape, and victims coordination—that could potentially improve the streamlining of resources and move some of these stalled parts of the commissions forward.

Maoist victims protest in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2023. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

Nonetheless, hope has been tempered by apprehension and uncertainty. Some victim groups support the legislation, while others protest provisions they argue could undermine justice, especially by protecting perpetrators with decreased sentencing.

International human rights groups have recognized positive and long-awaited amendments to the existing law, but also warn of serious accountability gaps that could undermine the transitional justice process.

U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk said the revised law was “an important step forward” but added: “It is imperative that the legislation is interpreted and implemented in a manner that upholds victims’ rights, including to truth, justice and reparations, and that guarantees accountability in full compliance with international human rights standards.”

Potential for international support

Although it seems the transitional justice process will still be Nepali-led, doors may be opening for international support in the form of financial or technical assistance—marking a significant shift in the process.

The amended act provides for a “fund” to finance the investigations process and victim reparations that will be supported by the Nepali government and is open to contributions from other national and international organizations.

Sushil Pyakurel, a former member of Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission, is among a group of human rights defenders, lawyers and victims establishing a civil monitoring committee to serve as a watchdog for the revived process. Pyakurel stressed the need for Nepali civil society, alongside the international community, to pressure the government to fulfill its promises of a victim-centric implementation.

“You can make whatever law you want, but it is how you implement it that really matters,” Pyakurel told me. “Although the law is different, if the mentality remains the same, then nothing will change.”

The revival of Nepal’s truth commissions provides the government a chance to demonstrate a commitment to a transparent and legitimate process. But I believe it must move beyond the transitional justice ritualism of the previous two commissions to actually provide justice and acknowledgment for the country’s civil war victims.

Top image: A Nepali man looks at photographs of people 'disappeared' during Nepal's civil war in Kathmandu Aug. 30, 2017. (Photo: Niranjan Shrestha/AP Photo)

Tracy Fehr is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Nepal’s revamped truth commissions will need to go beyond ‘ritualism’ to deliver justice to civil war victims.

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Amid growing war fatigue, some Ukrainians more willing to cede land

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 15:36:49 +0000

Amid growing war fatigue, some Ukrainians more willing to cede land Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/19/2024 - 09:36

Growing number of war-weary Ukrainians would reluctantly give up territory to save lives, suggests recent survey

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is trying his best to shake up the dynamics of the Russia-Ukraine war. He recently undertook a major cabinet reshuffle in which he replaced no fewer than nine ministers, including his foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba. Announcing the changes, Zelensky said he wanted his government to be “more active” in pressing for aid from its western allies.

These cabinet changes came as Ukraine pressed ahead with its offensive in the Kursk oblast in Russia. Zelensky has said that holding some Russian territory will give Kyiv leverage for future territorial exchange negotiations with Russia.

And, while criticism of Zelensky’s gamble has increased as Ukraine’s position in the Donbas in the east of the country has deteriorated, seeing Ukrainian soldiers turn the table on Russia has undeniably given Ukrainians a morale boost.

John O'Loughlin, a CU Boulder professor of geography, is a political geographer especially interested in the spatial and territorial aspects of conflict. He and co-researchers Kristin M. Bakke and Gerard recently conducted telephone surveys of 2,200 adults in government-controlled areas of Ukraine.

Ukrainians needed this. As the war has endured and its costs mounted, morale and public health have suffered.

We have tracked Ukrainian sentiment for years. In June and July 2024, in cooperation with the Kyiv International Institute for Sociology (KIIS), we conducted a telephone public opinion survey of 2,200 respondents representative of the adult population of government-controlled areas of Ukraine. This was to follow up on a survey from Oct. 2022.

We should treat wartime polls with caution. But our survey findings suggest people are worried about war weariness among their fellow Ukrainians. It also suggests that there is growing, if reluctant, support for negotiations and territorial concessions.

Open to compromise

Attitudes among Ukrainians toward territorial concessions have also started to shift—but only slightly. Most people have opposed giving up land since 2014, but KIIS’s own regular omnibus survey provides evidence of growing recognition, now shared by one-third of Ukrainians, that territorial concessions may be necessary.

In June-July 2024 we repeated a question we asked in Oct. 2022 on territorial concessions, shown in the figure below. “All choices about what to do during this current Russian aggression have significant, but different, costs. Knowing this, which of the following four choices should the Ukraine government take at this time?”

The biggest change was this: in 2022, 71% of respondents supported the proposition to “continue opposing Russian aggression until all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, is liberated," but in 2024 the support for that option had dropped to 51%.

In 2022, just 11% agreed with “trying to reach an immediate ceasefire by both sides with conditions and starting intensive negotiations." In 2024, that share had increased to 31%.

But there are differences in how people look at these choices. Much depends on whether they have been displaced (though whether they lost family members or friends does not seem to make a difference), whether they worry about war fatigue among their fellow Ukrainians, and whether they are optimistic or pessimistic about western support.

There is more at stake in this war than territory—not least, saving lives, ensuring Ukraine’s sovereignty, and protecting the country’s future security. KIIS’s own recent research has shown that in a hypothetical negotiation scenario, people’s views on the importance of preserving territorial integrity might depend on how any possible deal might safeguard other things they care about.

For two and a half years, the brutal war has affected everyday lives of Ukrainians, and many (43%) believe that the war will last at least another year. Most of the respondents in our survey had not been physically injured in Russian violence (12% had), but about half had witnessed Russian violence, and most had lost a close family member or friend (62%). About one-third had been displaced from their homes.

Consistent with an increasing number of reports, the survey shows growing recognition of war fatigue. Rather than asking directly about whether respondents felt this themselves, we asked whether they worried about it among fellow Ukrainians. The results were revealing: 58% worry “a lot” and 28% worry “a little," whereas only 10% report that they do not worry about war fatigue.

People in Ukraine mark the second anniversary of the beginning of the war in February. (Photo: Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo)

While there are signs of war weariness among Ukraine’s western allies, our surveys show that Ukrainians are still broadly optimistic about continued western support, though less so than in October 2022. About 19% believe western support will grow (down from 29% in 2022), while 35% believe it will stay the same (41% in 2022). Almost a quarter (24%) believe it will continue but at a lower level than now (up from 16% in 2022), and 13% believe it is unlikely to continue (up from 3% in 2022).

Life or death

Research from early on in the war showed that Ukrainians strongly preferred strategies that preserved the country’s political autonomy and restored the entirety of its territory. This would hold, “even if making concessions would reduce projected civilian and military deaths, or the risk of a nuclear strike over the next three months."

As the authors of the study pointed out: “Russian control of the government in Kyiv or of territories in the east would put the lives of many Ukrainians at risk, as it is well documented that Russia has committed widespread human rights violations in temporarily occupied territories.”

Given the war’s accumulating death toll, in our 2024 survey we designed a simple framing experiment that can give us an indication of whether considerations about loss of life may shape people’s views on negotiations. We asked half of the respondents, randomly selected, if they would accept that “Ukraine concede some of its territories to end the war”. About 24% said yes.

For the other half, we asked if they would accept that “Ukraine concede some of its territories to save lives and end the war." In that case, 34% said yes. So, if—rightly or wrongly—territorial concessions are associated with saving lives, it increases support for them.

But when asked directly in the 2024 survey if they agreed with the statement “Russia should be allowed to control the territory it has occupied since 2022," 90% disagreed. So, while there is still majority—if diminished—support for fighting to restore full territorial integrity, there is growing support for negotiations.

What we also know from our surveys is that there is very little evidence that Russia’s territorial annexations will ever have any legitimacy among Ukrainians.

John O'Loughlin is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. His co-authors are Kristin M Bakke, a professor of political science and international relations at University College London, and Gerard Toal, a professor of government and international affairs at Virginia Tech.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Growing number of war-weary Ukrainians would reluctantly give up territory to save lives, suggests recent survey.

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Professor Mary Rippon led a secret, separate life

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 21:31:39 +0000

Professor Mary Rippon led a secret, separate life Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/17/2024 - 15:31

Silvia Pettem

In book, CU Boulder alumnus Silvia Pettem details a little-known chapter of the trailblazing faculty member's story

As a student at the University of Colorado, I often passed through the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater on the way to my classes. I had assumed Rippon was a woman associated with the theater department, but that was not so. I later learned that she had arrived in Boulder in 1878 and became the university's first female professor. After her death in 1935, then-President George Norlin named the theater (then under construction) in her memory.

Publicly, "Miss Rippon" was highly respected by students and faculty. However, unknown to Norlin and the others, she had a secret private life that would have been considered scandalous, had she not hidden her husband and daughter behind a Victorian veil of secrecy.

The long-concealed truth was revealed in 1986 when an elderly man donated Rippon's diaries, account books, and journals to the university's archives. He was Rippon's grandson and revealed that she had had a romantic relationship with one of her students, became pregnant in 1888, secretly married, and took a year's sabbatical in Germany to give birth.

CU Boulder alumnus and historian Silvia Pettem (left) wrote Separate Lives about a little-known chapter in the life of influential CU Boulder Professor Mary Rippon, namesake of the campus theater.

At the time, there was no rule concerning teacher-student relationships, as it never occurred to anyone to implement one. Rippon was 37, and her husband, Will Housel, was 25. When the baby, Miriam, was born, Housel was still at CU in his senior year.

After graduation, Housel joined his wife and daughter in Europe before Rippon returned to Boulder and continued to teach as if nothing in her life had changed. Housel and Miriam remained in Europe, where he attended graduate school. Initially, Miriam was placed in a series of orphanages. At the age of 4, she was taken to Rippon's extended family in Illinois.

At the time, Victorian-era society expected women with children to be supported by their husbands. If a professional woman married, she would have been accused of taking a job away from a man with a family to support. Rippon had to completely separate her public and private lives in order to keep her job. She continued to teach for 20 more years.

As a revered pioneer woman educator, Rippon appears to have valued career over family, but she may have, instead, realized that she needed to work to financially provide for her daughter's care.

Eventually, Rippon and Housel divorced. Housel remarried when Miriam was 8 years old and provided his daughter a home, but he lacked an adequate income. On a salary less than her male colleagues, Rippon continued to support her daughter, as well as her divorced husband, his second wife, and, eventually, their four children!

Meanwhile, Rippon was a role model for her female students, a full professor, and even chair of the Department of German language and literature. Except for confiding in two close friends, she took her secret to her grave in Boulder's Columbia Cemetery.

For decades, the only tangible evidence on the CU campus of Rippon's secret life was ivy that Housel had planted outside of Old Main, where Rippon held her classes. His sentiment was obvious in a poem he penned his senior year that read in part, "But the ivy is for friendship and it seemeth best of all; 'tis the rose of love and petals that will never fade or fall."

Silvia Pettem’s In Retrospect column appears once a month in the Daily Camera, where this first appeared. She can be reached at silviapettem@gmail.com. She will be signing copies of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon (Lyons Press, 2024) at the Boulder Bookstore on Oct. 22.

In book, CU Boulder alumnus Silvia Pettem details a little-known chapter of the trailblazing faculty member's story.

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Studying complex networks of plants and pollinators

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 18:42:15 +0000

Studying complex networks of plants and pollinators Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/11/2024 - 12:42

Julian Resasco

I’ve visited the same Rocky Mountain subalpine meadow weekly for a decade of summers looking at plant-pollinator interactions—here’s what I learned

Imagine a bee crawling into a bright yellow flower.

This simple interaction is something you may have witnessed many times. It is also a crucial sign of the health of our environment—and one I’ve devoted hundreds of hours of field work observing.

Interactions between plants and pollinators help plants reproduce, support pollinator species like bees, butterflies and flies, and benefit both agricultural and natural ecosystems.

Julian Resasco is an assistant professor in the CU Boulder Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

These one-on-one interactions occur within complex networks of plants and pollinators.

In my lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, we’re interested in how these networks change over time and how they respond to stressors like climate change. My team emphasizes long-term data collection in hopes of revealing trends that would otherwise be unnoticed.

Working at Elk Meadow

Ten years ago, I began working in Elk Meadow, which is located at 9,500 feet (or 2,900 meters) elevation at the University of Colorado’s Mountain Research Station.

I wanted a local field site that allowed for frequent observations to study the dynamics of plant-pollinator networks. This beautiful subalpine meadow, bursting with wildflowers and just 40 minutes from campus, fit the bill perfectly.

Since 2015, often joined by members of my lab, I have made weekly hikes to Elk Meadow. We visit from the first flower in May to the last in October. We observe pollinators visiting flowers at plots scattered throughout the meadow, walking the periphery to minimize trampling. The morning is the best time to visit because pollinator activity is high and thunderstorms often roll in at midday during the summer in the Rocky Mountains.

Observing the network

Elk Meadow is rich in biodiversity. Over the years, we have observed 7,612 interactions among over 1,038 unique pairs of species. These pairings were made by 310 species of pollinators and 45 species of plants.

Pollinators include not only a wide variety of bees, but also flies, butterflies, beetles and the occasional hummingbird. Expert entomologists help us identify some of the insects.

Plants include species that are widespread, like the common dandelion, and some that are only found in the Rocky Mountains, like the Colorado columbine.

Common but vital

Collecting data in Elk Meadow is fun, but it is also serious science. Our data is useful for understanding the dynamics of plant and pollinator interactions within and across seasons.

For example, we learned which interactions between plants and pollinators are stable and which change over time and space. We consistently observed interactions between generalist species and their many partners over time and in different plots across the meadow.

Generalist species can tolerate a range of environmental conditions, meaning they are more frequently available to interact.

In other words, generalist species are more likely to be alive, active and foraging in the case of pollinators—or flowering in the case of plants—compared with species that can only survive if environmental conditions like temperature, sunlight and rainfall are just right to support them.

Generalist species are vital in networks, but they often don’t receive the same conservation attention as rare species. Even these common species can decline due to environmental changes destabilizing entire ecosystems. Protecting these species is important for maintaining biodiversity.

Julian Resasco at Elk Meadows at CU Boulder's Mountain Research Station. (Photo: Julian Resasco)

In it for the long term

As we gather more years of data, our study is becoming increasingly useful for understanding how networks and pollinator populations are changing—especially with signs of climate change increasingly emerging. Most ecological studies are only designed or funded for one or a few years, making our 10-year dataset one of only a few for plant-pollinator networks.

It is only with long-term ecological data that we can detect trends in responses to climate change, particularly because of high year-to-year variability in weather and populations.

The National Science Foundation supports a network of long-term ecological research stations across the U.S., including the Niwot Ridge Long-term Ecological Research Program near Elk Meadow, which is dedicated to the study of high-mountain species and ecosystems.

Colorado’s climate, like much of the world, is experiencing significant changes, such as rising temperatures, earlier snow melt and more late-winter and spring rain instead of snow. These changes lead to earlier water runoff from mountains, drier soils and more severe droughts. These shifts can have important consequences for plants and pollinators, including changes in where species are found, how many there are, and when they flower or forage.

High-elevation plant and pollinator communities may be especially vulnerable to climate change impacts since these areas are experiencing greater temperature increases compared with lower elevations.

We have seen warmer and drier conditions at Elk Meadow. Overlaid in this trend, we have observed annual variation in temperature and drought conditions that can help us understand and predict how different species will fare in a hotter and drier future.

Climate change is a driver of pollinator declines and is predicted to become increasingly important in the coming decades. Immediate threats also include pesticide use, light pollution and the destruction of wild habitats for farming and development.

The state of Colorado recently commissioned a study to gauge the health of Colorado’s native pollinators and make recommendations on how to protect them.

Appreciating the current pollinator landscape

Working at Elk Meadow has provided opportunities for my students to conduct independent research and receive valuable training and mentoring.

Seeing the beauty of the living things in the meadow and observing their cycles inspires my students and me.

Elk Meadow is a place to clear my mind and come up with new research ideas. It is also a place to observe and record how one tiny patch of our planet is changing in reaction to bigger changes happening around it.

Julian Resasco is an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I’ve visited the same Rocky Mountain subalpine meadow weekly for a decade of summers looking at plant-pollinator interactions—here’s what I learned

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Rewriting the story of horse domestication

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 21:41:20 +0000

Rewriting the story of horse domestication Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/03/2024 - 15:41

William Taylor

Domesticating horses had a huge impact on human society—new science rewrites where and when it first happened

Across human history, no single animal has had a deeper impact on human societies than the horse. But when and how people domesticated horses has been an ongoing scientific mystery.

Half a million years ago or more, early human ancestors hunted horses with wooden spears, the very first weapons, and used their bones for early tools. During the late Paleolithic era, as far back as 30,000 years ago or more, ancient artists chose wild horses as their muse: Horses are the most commonly depicted animal in Eurasian cave art.

Following their first domestication, horses became the foundation of herding life in the grasslands of Inner Asia, and key leaps forward in technology such as the chariot, saddle and stirrup helped make horses the primary means of locomotion for travel, communication, agriculture and warfare across much of the ancient world. With the aid of ocean voyages, these animals eventually reached the shores of every major landmass—even Antarctica, briefly.

In his new book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, William Taylor, a CU Boulder assistant professor of anthropology, draws together new archaeological evidence revising what scientists think about when, how and why horses became domesticated.

As they spread, horses reshaped ecology, social structures and economies at a never-before-seen scale. Ultimately, only industrial mechanization supplanted their near-universal role in society.

Because of their tremendous impact in shaping our collective human story, figuring out when, why and how horses became domesticated is a key step toward understanding the world we live in now.

Doing so has proven to be surprisingly challenging. In my new book, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History, I draw together new archaeological evidence that is revising what scientists like me thought we knew about this story.

A horse domestication hypothesis

Over the years, almost every time and place on Earth has been suggested as a possible origin point for horse domestication, from Europe tens of thousands of years ago to places such as Saudi Arabia, Anatolia, China or even the Americas.

By far the most dominant model for horse domestication, though, has been the Indo-European hypothesis, also known as the “Kurgan hypothesis.” It argues that, sometime in the fourth millennium BCE or before, residents of the steppes of western Asia and the Black Sea known as the Yamnaya, who built large burial mounds called kurgans, hopped astride horses. The newfound mobility of these early riders, the story goes, helped catalyze huge migrations across the continent, distributing ancestral Indo-European languages and cultures across Eurasia.

But what’s the actual evidence supporting the Kurgan hypothesis for the first horse domestication? Many of the most important clues come from the bones and teeth of ancient animals, via a discipline known as archaeozoology. Over the past 20 years, archaeozoological data seemed to converge on the idea that horses were first domesticated in sites of the Botai culture in Kazakhstan, where scientists found large quantities of horse bones at sites dating to the fourth millennium BCE.

Other kinds of compelling circumstantial evidence started to pile up. Archaeologists discovered evidence of what looked like fence post holes that could have been part of ancient corrals. They also found ceramic fragments with fatty horse residues that, based on isotope measurements, seem to have been deposited in the summer months, a time when milk could be collected from domestic horses.

The scientific smoking gun for early horse domestication, though, was a set of changes found on some Botai horse teeth and jawbones. Like the teeth of many modern and ancient ridden horses, the Botai horse teeth appeared to have been worn down by a bridle mouthpiece, or bit.

A Kazakh man on horseback with a golden eagle in an image made between 1911 and 1914. (Photo: public domain)

Together, the data pointed strongly to the idea of horse domestication in northern Kazakhstan around 3500 BCE—not quite the Yamnaya homeland, but close enough geographically to keep the basic Kurgan hypothesis intact.

There were some aspects of the Botai story, though, that never quite lined up. From the outset, several studies showed that the mix of horse remains found at Botai were unlike those found in most later pastoral cultures: Botai is evenly split between male and female horses, mostly of a healthy reproductive age. Killing off healthy, breeding-age animals like this on a regular basis would devastate a breeding herd. But this demographic blend is common among animals that have been hunted. Some Botai horses even have projectile points embedded in their ribs, showing that they died through hunting rather than a controlled slaughter.

These unresolved loose ends loomed over a basic consensus linking the Botai culture to horse domestication.

New scientific tools raise more questions

In recent years, as archaeological and scientific tools have rapidly improved, key assumptions about the cultures of Botai, Yamnaya and the early chapters of the human-horse story have been overturned.

First, improved biomolecular tools show that whatever happened at Botai, it had little to do with the domestication of the horses that live today. In 2018, nuclear genomic sequencing revealed that Botai horses were not the ancestors of domestic horses but of Przewalski’s horse, a wild relative and denizen of the steppe that has never been domesticated, at least in recorded history.

Next, when my colleagues and I reconsidered skeletal features linked to horse riding at Botai, we saw that similar issues are also visible in ice age wild horses from North America, which had certainly never been ridden. Even though horse riding can cause recognizable changes to the teeth and bones of the jaw, we argued that the small issues seen on Botai horses can reasonably be linked to natural variation or life history.

This finding reopened the question: Was there horse transport at Botai at all?

Leaving the Kurgan hypothesis in the past

Over the past few years, trying to make sense of the archaeological record around horse domestication has become an ever more contradictory affair.

A re-enactment of Botai hunter-herders (Photo: Niobe Thompson)

For example, in 2023, archaeologists noted that human hip and leg skeletal problems found in Yamnaya and early eastern European burials looked a lot like problems found in mounted riders, consistent with the Kurgan hypothesis. But problems like these can be caused by other kinds of animal transport, including the cattle carts found in Yamnaya-era sites.

So how should archaeologists make sense of these conflicting signals?

A clearer picture may be closer than we think. A detailed genomic study of early Eurasian horses, published in June 2024 in the journal Nature, shows that Yamnaya horses were not ancestors of the first domestic horses, known as the DOM2 lineage. And Yamnaya horses showed no genetic evidence of close control over reproduction, such as changes linked with inbreeding.

Instead, the first DOM2 horses appear just before 2000 BCE, long after the Yamnaya migrations and just before the first burials of horses and chariots also show up in the archaeological record.

For now, all lines of evidence seem to converge on the idea that horse domestication probably did take place in the Black Sea steppes, but much later than the Kurgan hypothesis requires. Instead, human control of horses took off just prior to the explosive spread of horses and chariots across Eurasia during the early second millennium BCE.

There’s still more to be settled, of course. In the latest study, the authors point to some funny patterns in the Botai data, especially fluctuations in genetic estimates for generation time – essentially, how long it takes on average for a population of animals to produce offspring. Might these suggest that Botai people still raised those wild Przewalski’s horses in captivity, but only for meat, without a role in transportation? Perhaps. Future research will let us know for sure.

Either way, out of these conflicting signals, one consideration has become clear: The earliest chapters of the human-horse story are ready for a retelling.

William Taylor is an assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Domesticating horses had a huge impact on human society—new science rewrites where and when it first happened.

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Sphinx moth caterpillars wield an eruptive defense

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 18:21:43 +0000

Sphinx moth caterpillars wield an eruptive defense Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/29/2024 - 12:21

Jeff Mitton

Sphinx months have an array of identifiers, one being an unusual defense mechanism

Cindy Burkhardt Maynard had been watching a sphinx moth caterpillar in her garden for several days, but then, it disappeared. Soon after, she saw another trundling across a dirt road on Rabbit Mountain. These were Hyles lineata white-lined sphinx moths which are the most common in this area. As caterpillars progress through 5 developmental stages or instars, their colors and patterns change. In addition, their background colors change from dark green in eastern states to light green in the mountains west to yellow in California. Due to this variability, it can be difficult to identify sphinx moth species from the caterpillar stage alone.

Color patterns of white-lined sphinx moth caterpillars vary with age and geography. Photos by Cindy Burkhardt Maynard.

A caterpillar transforms into a colorful moth with a heavy body about 3 inches long and a wingspan of about 4 inches. Against a brown background, the wings and body have stripes and zones of black, white and salmon or pink.

You may have seen hawkmoths but mistaken them for hummingbirds. Hummingbirds and hawkmoths are about the same size, both are active at dusk and both hover while taking nectar from flowers. Sphinx moths can fly up to 30 mph and while hovering they beat their wings 41 cycles per second (up and down), so fast that they make a buzzing sound.

If I am not thinking critically, the plight of a sphinx caterpillar evokes my sympathy. Imagine—a very large, soft caterpillar that does not bite or sting, devoid of poisonous spines and urticating (barbed) hairs, unable to fly or run away. Admittedly, the colors and patterns of some sphinx moths provide camouflage, but if they cross a road or path or patch of sand, the camouflage fails them. The sphinx caterpillars are also called hornworms due to an ominous, threatening horn projecting upwards from their posterior end, but it is all bluff--the horn is harmless.

Caterpillars of many butterfly species consume plants that have toxic defensive chemicals, which they sequester to specific tissues, such as fat tissues. Predators quickly learn that these caterpillars are toxic and thus inedible. However, the sphinx moths do not either transport or sequester plant molecular defenses. They utilize plant molecular defenses but with another technique.

Endoparasite pupae spill from a sphinx moth puparium.

If a predator approaches a sphinx caterpillar, the caterpillar rears its head in an unmistakably threatening way. If the predator persists and approaches closer, the caterpillar engages in projectile vomiting, spewing a fetid slop of semi-digested food laced with the toxic compounds synthesized by the plants it was eating. The predator, now drenched with a stinking and stinging slime and probably suffering impaired vision and sense of smell, would likely lose its concentration and break off its attack.

Even if all predators can be dissuaded, the caterpillar faces more challenges. A large number of wasps and flies are endoparasitic, meaning that the adult female injects an egg beneath the skin of a caterpillar. If you have ever been stung by a wasp, you know that the wasp can sting while swooping by, without landing. Endoparasitic species may insert one or many eggs, dooming the caterpillar. Endoparasites remind me of "Alien" a horror sci-fi movie that appeared in 1979.

A neighbor was removing a lilac bush when he found a sphinx pupa. After completing all of its instars, it had burrowed into the roots of the lilac and transformed into a pupa. My neighbor showed me the pupa, and we agreed that I would give it loving care so that we could identify the species when the moth emerged as an adult. Neither of us was aware of the load of endosymbiont eggs that were embedded in the pupa. In late summer, too much time had passed, and I knew something was wrong. I cracked open the puparium and endosymbiont pupae spilled out. They had completely consumed all the moths, leaving the sphinx puparium fully packed with endosymbiont pupae.

To identify the species of endosymbiont, I took the capsules to the laboratory of Deane Bowers, a CU entomologist whose lab could rear the endosymbionts. But the endosymbionts were dead and thus unidentified, so I am unable to end this story as I had hoped.

I mentioned that I had sympathy for sphinx moths for they had few defenses against a horde of enemies and thus each had a low probability of surviving to reproduce. An adult female sphinx moth can lay up to 1,000 eggs, but if her population is neither shrinking nor expanding, the average number of eggs that survive to reproduce is two, one for herself and one for her mate. Sphinx moths run a gauntlet to complete their life cycle, but this is the way it is for all species.

Top photo: A sphinx moth hovers while choosing its next nectar source.

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Sphinx months have an array of identifiers, one being an unusual defense mechanism.

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