Philobiblon

With typical sensitivity and intellectual rigour, The Sunday Times today reports Cavegirls were first blondes to have fun. There is, however, an apparently peer-reviewed science story behind it:

According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.
The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.
Lighter hair colours, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St Andrews.

I think, however, there are more than few unanswered questions here. Do we know that only the men hunted? No. Do we have any indication that such societies practiced monogamy? No.

And quite what the quote on the end from Jilly Cooper about getting her bottom pinched has to do with paleoloithic hunters, I’m not quite sure.

The “cavewomen” might anyway have been better off on their own, judging from this study:

Marriage helps husbands to an extra 1.7 years, but it knocks 1.4 years off the average wife’s lifespan, according to the study of more than 100,000 people across Europe.

For more intelligent, but highly entertaining reading, I’d recommend an account of hominid fossil-hunting in Ethiopia.
(Hat-tip to John Hawks.)

In the British Library, a chance discovery, on the back of An Account of the Proceedings at the Guild-hall of the City of London on Saturday, September 12 1678 with the substance of Sir Thomas Plater’s Speech and the Lord Mayor’s Answer Thereunto.

At the centre of the large format pamphet is the claim of “the Duke of York being a PAPIST” – so we are of course in the “exclusion crisis”.

But what I liked was that the entire back page of the four-page pamphlet is taken up by:

Postscript
It cannot reasonably be expected the the Speech of this Worthy and Deserving Knight, nor the Lord Mayor’s generous Reply thereunto, should be published exactly, since in so great a Concourse it was hardly possible to be taken; however least so considerable Transaction should be altogether buried in silence, we have endeavoured to give as full an Account thereof, as could be done by strength of memory, which we hope will therefore be kindly accepted instead of a more Correct Copy.

You might call it an early “collections and clairifications column”, or rather a pre-emptive one. Some newspapers might want to try it today.

Mathew Parris in The Times this morning laments the creation of human deserts, wild spaces where there are no humans.

In the beginning, man is expelled from the Garden of Eden. In the end, perhaps, we shall leave it of our own accord, closing the gate behind us.

Disconnection from the wild and “the natural” is indeed a problem, but there is, I’d suggest, an equally powerful argument for leaving parts of the Earth alone. The human species has managed to invade, to change, and often to damage, every aspect of the world. Giving nature, some rest, some space, allowing for biological diversity by the exclusion of us, will help to ensure the differing ecosystems that might just save life on earth.

(I’ve always thought there’s something powerful about the line in one of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books that has a planet expel all of its “telephone sanitisers”, advertising executives and similar “useless” individuals. And then the humans are wiped out by a disease spread through dirty telephones … In a world full of telephones (as a “human” world must be today) that disease is a hideous danger.)
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But good on the “bedroom blogger”, as the media has inevitably dubbed the 16-year-old who has organised a protest in Oxford in favour of animal experimentation. Having done some animal experiments in my agricultural science days (although luckily in ours the goat kids had a very pleasant life), I’ve seen some animal experiments that should never have been allowed. (A lively, intelligent, interested goat kid, in a metabolism cage 24 hours a day, like a battery hen, is not a pleasant sight.)

But there are some experiments that have to be done on animals – that can save large numbers of human lives (and often other animal lives too). Provided experiments are tightly supervised, the best possible welfare conditions are maintained, and the tests have a clear objective, they have to go on. And those who terrorise anyone associated with them – down to the cleaners and builders – have to be stopped.

Olga Ivanovna is animated, clever, pretty, passionate and trapped in a small town, in a country that views another state, and another language, as holding the key to all elements of high culture. What is she to do? She twirls, she glows, she leaps around, collecting every visiting “star”, every scrap of local talent, shining desperately as the life of every party.

You might remember the actress Amy Stratton from Brookside and Coronation Street (as Jenny Gibson and Davina Dawes respectively, so I’m told), but at the Union Theatre in Southwark now she is Olga, a spectacular, sparkling, but oh-so-fragile Olga.

And she’s the undoubted shining light of an ambitious production, The Little Dressmaker, which Linnie Redman has adapted from Chekhov’s short story “The Grasshopper”. This is commonly presented as a morality tale about the dangers of thoughtless following of emotion, but, taking a feminist slant on the story, my sympathies are with Olga.

Perhaps the men in the town have few opportunities, certainly there are few for her friend “the Musician”, played here in a technically virtuoso performance by David Laughton (on piano, violin, squeeze-box and balalaika). Despite his skills, he is reduced to camp posturing and disappointed flouncing, but how much fewer are the chances for women?READ MORE

Of course the Guardian has not been able to resist making it into a joke, but it makes perfect sense: San Francisco is planning to use dog faeces to generate energy. The city already recycles 60 per cent of its waste, but plans to further reduce the total by 75 per cent by 2010. Four per cent of the residential waste now is dog faeces, so this is obviously a problem to address.

Sunset Scavenger will place biodegradable bags and what are tastefully called dog-waste carts in a popular San Francisco dog park. The dog poo will then be put into a methane digester, where bacteria will eat away at it for two weeks before it turns into methane gas. The gas can then be used to power appliances such as cookers and heaters that currently run on natural gas. It can also be used to generate electricity.

Of course it is a gift to cartoonists, but it also sounds perfectly sensible to me, particularly having just been down to Regent’s Park, where I noticed what someone was complaining about in the local paper – dog-owners who “scoop the poop”, then dump the plastic bag on the spot. Of course you couldn’t collect all dog faeces, but I’d bet the daily quantity across Regent’s Park would be quite significant. And a lot of it already goes into specially designated bins.
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There seems to be some confusion about when it started – according to Green Party sources it is today – but anyway, finally London is getting some (reasonably) green buses, which arehybrids that run a lot of the time on battery power. When running on diesel, they are charging the battery and braking also helps to charge it.

Get a pension, they say. Invest for the future. We’re making it simple, they say.

Ha, I say.

The Independent was in the process of changing pensions schemes when I left. I went with the new one, because there was supposed to be extra back-pay paid into it. Whether or not I got that money who knows; it all got so complicated I gave up worrying about it.

So I’m with the new scheme, and I continue that as a stakeholder pension, contributing a modest amount myself each month.

But the money from the old scheme was not – for reasons I’ve given up trying to obtain – paid into the new one. So I’ve already got one scheme, my ex-Times one sitting around (which I haven’t heard from for a couple of years – must chase that down), and I think I might as well amalgamate these two newest ones, to make it easier to keep track of them, and hopefully ensure I’m not paying too much in fees.

Current tally of phone calls: eight; current tally of letters: six. Have I managed to transfer the money yet? No.

Got to write another letter.

Grrrrrr!