Polygamy as a social reform

I recommend this article as a view into how another culture proposed working out problems.

"Caroline Humphrey, Sigrid Rausing professor of collaborative anthropology at Cambridge University, says central Asia and Russia have much to teach us."In the 1990s, Russia and central Asia experienced huge economic change: what a bank was, how your career was going, what you could expect from life, everything changed overnight..."

Improbably, for both groups [Islamic men and rural women], this is polygamy as a solution to contemporary social ills – and, according to Humphrey, is appearing outside Islamic regions. In rural areas the "man shortage", exacerbated by war, alcoholism and mass economic migration, is even more serious."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/oct/27/polygamy-study-russia-central-asia

Cro-Magnon needles

Charles Wm. Dimmick writes:

> Amazingly enough, some anthropologists believe that
> the rapid spread of Cro-Magnon culture into Europe
> is related both to the development of complex speech
> patterns and the invention of the sewing needle, both
> occurring about 40,000 years ago.

That's a very interesting speculation.

At that time, I would guess we are talking about needles made out of bone. But Charles adds more:

> Or antler. An important Cro-Magnon invention was the
> ability to groove and split antler to make long straight
> splinters that could then be shaped into spear points
> [especially barbed harpoon-like points] and sewing
> needles.

and Peter Boulding continues today's lesson on Cro-Magnon man:

It's pretty amazing what Mr C M M managed to use antlers for. I've seen a trench eighteen inches wide and four feet deep cut into solid chalk, running in a 100-foot diameter circle round the top of one of those dome-shaped Dorset hills, that was dug entirely with pieces of antler; no sign of flint tools. The trench was the foundation of a wooden henge: at three-foot intervals there were foot-deep round holes in the base of the trench for the telegraph pole-sized wooden uprights. The henge, whose purpose is unknown, took two generations to build; four generations later the entire structure was very deliberately burned down: again, we have no idea why, but it's not that simple to turn that many telegraph poles into charcoal, not when they're buried five feet deep in tightly-packed chalk infill.

Although Peter needed to clarify, in response to this objection:
> I didn't know that any of the henges, wood or stone, were CMM. Are
> you sure?

No, you're right: I was using "CMM" to indicate what archaeologists and anthropologists nowadays call simply "modern man"--i.e. CMM and everyone descended from him; we used to refer to ourselves as CMM to merely to distinguish ourselves from the Neanderthals we supplanted. AFAIK no known henges are anything like 10,000+ years old; the one I referred to was onlyabout a third of that age.

So ends today's Anthopology lesson.