It Is Always Bulking Season For Lady Meerkats

Not Geography Geography Lesson 2 

Meerkat Social Science 

Anyone who watched Meerkat Manor as a child, will hopefully enjoy this week's topic - the super interesting and unexpected social system of meerkats. It's a random one indeed. So:

Meerkats are the ultimate feminists. 

They live in matriarchal systems, where the whole family is ruled by a dominant female, who normally is responsible for birthing all the pups, and keeps everyone else in check. Dominance is the ruling factor in meerkat society, and the matriarch must keep all the other females submissive by force to remain top-kat. 

The Matriarch has thrown a seven; now what?

This is where the 'bulking' comes in! When the matriarch dies (probably from becoming a tasty little snack), the group needs a new leader ASAP. The role is filled firstly by the eldest remaining female, but because meerkats are born in litters of several pups, there is most likely going to be a few females all the same age. So to decide who will be the matriarch, the same-age females - probably sisters - have to fight for the top spot. And when I say fight, I mean really fight... like meerkat MMA. And so this is why the lady meerkats have to keep as a high a body mass as possible, because at any time their leader may be killed and they will have to fight to be her replacement, and the larger they are the better chance they have of winning. 

The Meerkat idyll is shattered.

Because the same-age females are under such pressure to maintain high body mass, their life spans are cut short *sob*. Just as a human would suffer poor health if they had to constantly worry about taking part in a Gladiator-esque showdown at any moment, the strain on the lady meerkats' bodies is significant. 

Turns out Meerkat Manor was not so much of a nice family show, but is actually more like a Margaret Atwood novel. Still cute though - 12/10. 

A Very Meaty Evolution

Not Geography Geography Lesson 1

Ape + Meat + Fire = Man..?

For the first in my 'Not Geography Geography Lessons', I have chosen to discuss something which I only learnt this week, during one of my new degree modules - Food and Agriculture in the 21st Century (a strange choice admittedly) - which concerns the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens (that's us) from Austrapithicines/ape-like creatures (only a very small percentage of us, mostly racists and bigots). Joking aside, this is actually a really interesting topic that the majority of everyday people don't think about and don't know much about outside of Darwin's Evolution of  Species. So:

There are two early hominid species which are thought to be the descendants of modern-day humans: 

(1.) Austrapithicines (Apes) --> (2.) Habilines (missing link species) --> (3.) Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

Up until quite recently, the idea of something other than Darwin's traditional 'survival of the fittest' being the key driver to this evolution, was largely unheard of. It was established that moving from cultures wherein food sources were mainly vegetarian (nuts, fruits, vegetables, scavenged meat) to knife-wielding hunter-gathers had facilitated this first leap. Hence - Austrapithicines + Meat = Habilines. 

Now things get a bit odd, because scientists then largely ignored the second evolutionary jump, and put it down to hominids generally becoming smarter and changing physiologically. BUT, recent research has revealed that something did change to enable that second jump; and that thing is fire. The average UK resident eats around 84kg of meat per year, and chances are that not once during the consumption of that meat, does the average man stop and think 'the process of me cooking and eating this meat is the very same one that allowed my descendants 0.8 million years ago to evolve into me'. That very thought however, is now the widely accepted theory as to how we made that last jump from the missing links, and the process of that is where it gets really interesting...

Researchers have directly attributed our descendants' ability to create fire, and use that fire to cook their food as the main cause of our physiological and social evolution as humans today. Because:

• Cooked meat is softer and easier to chew and digest than raw meat = changes to our digestive system and smaller jaws (and smaller jaws = more space for a bigger brain!)
• Cooking meat can kill bacteria and disease = fewer deaths from woolly mammoth sushi.
• Cooking for people tends to make them like you = increased sociality and better social systems. 

And so... we can all thank that one habiline in his cave who decided to try something new and BBQ his mammoth, and inadvertently led to the evolution of his species into modern-day man. Let's all have a sausage on him! 

*If you want to read more about it, try Richard Wrangham's book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003F5NSVK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)*

You Are Entering A Strict 'No Colouring In' Zone

An Introduction 

As part of my quest to not disappoint my entire family when I cannot name the capital of Uzbekistan, or give them a comprehensive explanation of every weird looking cloud they send me a picture of, or detail the entire formation history of a random hill we see whilst out somewhere, I have begun this blog. It is definitely not to help me get a job in a years time. 100% not because of that. 

I am currently a third year Geography student studying in Lancaster, and spurred on by instances as described above, have decided to take a stand and write about things which are actually geography. Not the weird map-drawing, pencil-sharpening, country-naming, river-wading monster of peoples' imagination. 

Every week (maybe), I will write a short little review of a subject which is most certainly geography, but not as people know it, with the hope that people will be inspired to see that the subject has infinite topics and hardly any of them have maps involved. A lot of these will be things that I have covered in my degree, and some will be entirely new things that I've stumbled on. So here goes....

*P.S - The capital of Uzbekistan is Tashkent, and I definitely did not Google that. 

*P.P.S - If you would like to offer me a job (a great move for you), I am all ears.