TEXTO

In the Amazon rainforest, an indigenous tribe fights for survival

  09 August 2022

    Deep in the Amazon rainforest, an indigenous tribe that has remained relatively isolated from the outside world is waging a battle for its survival.

    For centuries, the Yanomami have inhabited a vast area of pristine forest and large, meandering rivers on the border between Brazil and Venezuela, living off fishing, hunting and fruit gathering.

    Today, the Yanomami – who number about 29,000 – say they are at serious risk of losing their lands, culture and traditional way of life. The lust for gold and other valuable minerals that lay beneath their ancestral territory has in recent years attracted a wave of illegal prospectors who have cut down forests, poisoned rivers and brought deadly diseases to the tribe.

    “Our land is again being invaded. Our rivers are again being polluted by mercury,” said Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami leader who has dedicated his life to protecting Yanomami rights and lands in the Amazon.

(…)     

    “The Brazilian government must fulfil its protective role, where every Brazilian citizen, not just the Yanomami, feels protected. It is not a favour, but a constitutional obligation. It is necessary to curb the mining projects on indigenous lands because they are illegal under Brazilian law,” said Dario Kopenawa, vicepresident of the Hutukara Yanomami Association.

    Despite the tribe’s predicament, leaders say they are determined to preserve their communities and ancestral land’s rich biodiversity. In a message to mark International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples on 9 August, Wapichana called on governments to uphold the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a comprehensive international instrument on the rights of indigenous peoples adopted by the General Assembly in 2007.

Adapted from https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2022/08/amazonrainforest-indigenous-tribe-fights-survival

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Texto II
CITIES DRIVE ANIMALS AND PLANTS TO EVOLVE
Species are adapting to urban pollution, traffic and shrinking habitats through changes in their genes
By Sharon Oosthoek - Apr 6, 2017

    Ever seen a raccoon open a trash can in search of leftovers? Or walk across power lines to get from one rooftop to another? If so, you've witnessed an animal adapting its behavior to city life. That's been going on since people started building cities thousands of years ago. Now, biologists are seeing signs that animals and plants are also adapting in a more basic way to survive in cities. Their genes are changing.

    Genes are segments of DNA that influence how an organism looks and functions. An animal or plant’s DNA is like an instruction book for how it develops and grows. Some instructions guide its reproductive habits. Others influence the way it moves. Still others might let it withstand poison. Urban pollution, traffic and shrinking wild spaces have been causing changes in these genetic instructions. And scientists have been tracking more and more signs of these genetic changes.

    When genes change in response to their environment, it’s called evolution. Some of those changes may leave animals and plants better suited to their homes. It may offer new traits that increase the odds of surviving long enough to reproduce. This means the individuals will pass on these new traits to their offspring. Eventually, traits that had once been rare can now become common throughout a population.
Fonte: <https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/cities-drive-animals-and-plants-evolve> Acesso: 06/06/2017.

Lucy’s Big Brother Reveals New Facets of her Species

  First came Lucy. Then came Lucy’s baby, an infant of her species. Now comes Lucy’s “big brother”: the partial skeleton of a large male of Australopithecus afarensis, unveiled this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The roughly 40% complete skeleton has been nicknamed Kadanuumuu, which means “big man” in the Afar language of the Afar Depression of Ethiopia, where it was found. “It was huge – a big man, with long legs”, says lead author Yohannes Haile-Selassie, a palaeoanthropologist at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Ohio.

  Dated to 3.6 million years ago, the new skeleton is almost half a million years older than Lucy and the second oldest skeleton found of a possible human ancestor. It had long legs and a torso and a pelvis more like those of a modern human than an African ape, showing that fully upright walking was in place at this early date, Haile-Selassie says. Although headless, the skeleton also preserves parts not found before in Lucy’s species. “It is important because it provides the ribs and scapula”, says palaeoanthropologist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, Columbia.

  In 2005, a sharp-eyed member of Haile-Selassie’s team, Alemayehu Asfaw, spotted a fragment of lower arm bone on the ground at Woranso-Mille, about 48 kilometers north of Lucy’s grave at Hadar. Over the next 4 years, the team unearthed the shoulder blade, collarbone, ribs, and neck vertebra, the first time those bones were found together in an A. afarensis adult. The team also found a pelvis, an arm, and leg bones. Although they never found the skull or teeth, which are typically used to assign species, the skeleton’s age and similarity to Lucy suggest that it belongs to her species, says co-author Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University in Ohio.

  The robust male stood between 1.5 and 1.7 meters tall, about 30% larger than Lucy. Isolated bones of other individuals suggest that some males were even larger, so the new skeleton doesn’t settle a long-standing debate over just how much sexual dimorphism there was in A. afarensis, Lovejoy says. The shoulder blade looks more like that of a gorilla and a modern human than that of a chimpanzee. The curvature of the second rib suggests a wide rib cage at the top and a barrel shape overall, similar to that of modern humans and distinct from the more funnel-shaped rib cage of a chimpanzee, the authors say.

(Science Magazine, 25 June 2010.)