Category The World Around us

One of the great mysteries of the world is the identity of the people who inhabited Easter Island in the South Pacific. The island is famous for the mysterious stone statues found there. It is believed that they were carved by tribes of people who lived there during Neolithic times (more than 1000 years ago). Very little is known about these people, but they are thought to be the ancestors of the people of the islands of Polynesia.

The island’s local Polynesian name is Rapa Nui. The name “Easter Island” came from Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who was the island’s first European visitor on Easter Sunday in 1722.

Today, Easter Island is believed to be the most remote inhabited island in the world. It’s a special territory of Chile that is famous for its 887 huge statues — called moai — that were created by the early Rapanui people between 1100 and 1680.

Easter Island is a UNESCO World Heritge Site. Much of the island and the moai statues are protected within Rapa Nui National Park. The huge stone moai statues are sometimes referred to as “Easter Island heads.” This nickname is a bit misleading, though, since most of the statues have bodies. Scientists are still unearthing many moai statues that have large portions buried beneath the ground.

Almost all of the statues were carved out of solidified volcanic ash from an extinct volcano called Rano Raraku. The Rapanui carvers used only stone hand chisels to create the magnificent statues. A single moai statue could have taken a team of six men about one year to finish. Experts believe each statue might represent the deceased leader of a particular native family.

Although many statues remain in the quarry at Rano Raraku, many others were transported to other areas of Easter Island. This fact has fascinated explorers for years, because some of the statues weigh over 80 tons. How did the native Rapanui transport these statues up to 11 miles away without wheels or animals?

Experts have come up with many different theories over the years about how the native peoples might have transported these huge statues hundreds of years ago. To date, though, no one knows for sure how many of the statues got to their current locations around the island.

The natural environment is very important to Australian Aborigines. This is because they traditionally believe that the world was created by human, animal and plant ancestors in something called the Dreamtime. The Dreamtime is celebrated and communicated through art, songs, dancing and story-telling.

The Dreamtime is a commonly used term for describing important features of Aboriginal spiritual beliefs and existence. It is not generally well understood by non-indigenous people.

Aboriginals believe that the Dreamtime was way back, at the very beginning. The land and the people were created by the Spirits. They made the rivers, streams, water holes the land, hills, rocks, plants and animals. It is believed that the Spirits gave them their hunting tools and each tribe its land, their totems and their Dreaming.

The Aboriginals believed that the entire world was made by their Ancestors way back in the very beginning of time, the Dreamtime. The Ancestors made everything. The Ancestors made particular sites to show the Aboriginal people which places were to be sacred. The Aboriginals performed ritual ceremonies and customary songs near the sacred sites to please the Ancestral spirits and to keep themselves alive.

Distinct tribes had different philosophies and beliefs about the Ancestors who made the world. Some believed that the Ancestors were animal-spirits.

Others in parts of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory believed the Ancestors were huge snakes. In other places the spirit who created the world were believed to be the Wanadjina.

Dreamtime is the foundation of Aboriginal religion and culture. It dates back some 65,000 years. It is the story of events that have happened, how the universe came to be, how human beings were created and how their Creator intended for humans to function within the world as they knew it.

Aboriginal people understood the Dreamtime as a beginning that never ended. They held the belief that the Dreamtime is a period on a continuum of past, present and future. The Aborigines learned about their beginnings through their Dreamtime creation folklores that told of the momentous actions of the creators. The myths were the foundation of Aboriginal society and provided certainty about existence. The Australian aborigines believed that the land they occupied was once not in existence like it is today. It was free from form or life, vacuous – empty.

They unquestionably believed that this was the way things once were because the ancestors had said so and they would never doubt their word. It was during what has become known as the Dreamtime, the land, mountains, hills, rivers, plants, life forms both animal and human and sky above were formed by the actions of mysterious and supernatural spirits.

During the Dreamtime the creators made men women and animals, declared the laws of the land and how people were to behave to one another, the customs of food supply and distribution, the rituals of initiation, the ceremonies of death which are required to be performed so that the spirit of the dead travels peacefully to his or her spirit-place, and the laws of marriage. Some Dreaming’s told of the mythical creators disappearing. They believed that the creators disappeared from the sight of mere mortals, but continued to live in secret places.

Some lived in the tribe’s territory in rock crevices, trees and water holes. Others went up into the sky above as heavenly bodies. Others changed into (or perhaps became) natural forces such as wind, rain, thunder and lightning. It is believed that many of the creators continued to live on the land or in the sky above watching over them. These supernatural enigmatic creators were often referred to as men and women who had the ability to change shape into animals and other creatures such as the Rainbow Serpent.

There are also stories of heroes and heroines and Father and Mother figures.

The Dreamtime may be difficult for many of us to understand fully but it is part of which the Aboriginal people are the very essence and reason for being here. It is all encompassing and will forever be at the centre of their existence as a people.

The first people to live in Australia arrived there about 40,000 years ago from Southeast Asia. These people were named “Aborigines” (people who have lived there since early times) by the European settlers who arrived in Australia during the 18th century. Life has been difficult for many Aboriginal Australians, forced to adapt to the settlers’ ways of life. Today, youngsters are being taught about their own rich heritage.

Australia holds some of the earliest archaeological evidence for the presence of modern humans outside Africa, with the earliest sites dated to at least 45,000 years ago, making Australian aboriginals one of the oldest continuous populations outside Africa. It is commonly assumed that following the initial dispersal of people into Sahul (joint Australia-New Guinea landmass) and until the arrival of the Europeans late in the 18th Century, there was no contact between Australia and the rest of the world.

Researcher Irina Pugach and colleagues now analysed genetic variation from across the genome from aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, island Southeast Asians, and Indians. Their findings suggest substantial gene flow from India to Australia 4,230 years ago, i.e. during the Holocene and well before European contact. “Interestingly,” says Pugach, “this date also coincides with many changes in the archaeological record of Australia, which include a sudden change in plant processing and stone tool technologies, with microliths appearing for the first time, and the first appearance of the dingo in the fossil record. Since we detect inflow of genes from India into Australia at around the same time, it is likely that these changes were related to this migration.”

Their analyses also reveal a common origin for populations from Australia, New Guinea and the Mamanwa – a Negrito group from the Philippines – and they estimated that these groups split from each other about 36,000 years ago. Mark Stoneking says: “This finding supports the view that these populations represent the descendants of an early ‘southern route’ migration out of Africa, while other populations in the region arrived later by a separate dispersal.” This also indicates that Australians and New Guineans diverged early in the history of Sahul, and not when the lands were separated by rising sea waters around 8,000 years ago.

The incredibly harsh environment of the Arctic is home to a group of people who settled there around 4000 years ago. They inhabit parts of Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Those who live in North America are known as Inuit, which literally means “real men”. Many Inuit continue their traditional lifestyle — hunting for food and furs to sell but being part of both modern and traditional worlds can be hard, especially for young people.

The Inuit people live in the far northern areas of Alaska, Canada, Siberia, and Greenland. They originally made their home along the Alaskan coast, but migrated to other areas. Everything about the lives of the Inuit is influenced by the cold tundra climate in which they live.

The typical materials for making homes such as wood and mud are hard to find in the frozen tundra of the Arctic. The Inuit learned to make warm homes out of snow and ice for the winter. During the summer they would make homes from animal skin stretched over a frame made from driftwood or whalebones. The Inuit word for home is “igloo”.

The Inuit needed thick and warm clothing to survive the cold weather. They used animal skins and furs to stay warm. They made shirts, pants, boots, hats, and big jackets called anoraks from caribou and seal skin. They would line their clothes with furs from animals like polar bears, rabbits, and foxes.

The Inuit people were unable to farm and grow their own food in the harsh desert of the tundra. They mostly lived off of meat from hunting animals. They used harpoons to hunt seals, walruses, and the bowhead whale. They also ate fish and foraged for wild berries. A high percentage of their food was fatty, which gave them energy in the cold weather.

In order to hunt larger prey like walruses and whales, the Inuit hunters would gather in a large group. To hunt a whale, typically at least 20 hunters would gather on a large boat armed with a number of harpoons. They would attach a number of seal-skin balloons filled with air to the harpoons. This way the whale could not dive deep into the water when it was first speared. Each time that the whale would come to the surface for air, the hunters would harpoon it again. Once the whale died, they would tie it to the boat and tow it back to shore.

It would sometimes take a number of men a long time to catch and kill a whale, but it was well worth it. The Inuit used all parts of the whale including the meat, blubber, skin, oil, and bones. A large whale could feed a small community for a year.

Despite the harsh landscape of the Arctic, the Inuit still found ways to travel long distances. On land and ice they used dogsleds called qamutik. They bred strong sled dogs from wolves and dogs to pull the sleds which were made from whale bones and wood. These dogs became the husky dog breed.

On the water, the Inuit used different kinds of boats for different activities. For hunting they used small single-passenger boats called kayaks. They also built larger, faster boats called umiaqs that were used for transporting people, dogs, and goods.

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Around 20,000 years ago, the first settlers of North America arrived from Asia. They were able to travel over land, because at the time, the two continents were joined together. These early settlers gradually formed different tribes and spread them-selves throughout the whole country. When the first Europeans arrived during the 15th century, they thought they had landed in Asia, and called the Native Americans “Indians”. The relationship between the Indians and the new settlers was difficult, and many battles were fought.

Many thousands of years before Christopher Columbus’ ships landed in the Bahamas, a different group of people discovered America: the nomadic ancestors of modern Native Americans who hiked over a “land bridge” from Asia to what is now Alaska more than 12,000 years ago. In fact, by the time European adventurers arrived in the 15th century A.D., scholars estimate that more than 50 million people were already living in the Americas. Of these, some 10 million lived in the area that would become the United States. As time passed, these migrants and their descendants pushed south and east, adapting as they went. In order to keep track of these diverse groups, anthropologists and geographers have divided them into “culture areas,” or rough groupings of contiguous peoples who shared similar habitats and characteristics. Most scholars break North America—excluding present-day Mexico—into 10 separate culture areas: the Arctic, the Subarctic, the Northeast, the Southeast, the Plains, the Southwest, the Great Basin, California, the Northwest Coast and the Plateau.

The Arctic culture area, a cold, flat, treeless region (actually a frozen desert) near the Arctic Circle in present-day Alaska, Canada and Greenland, was home to the Inuit and the Aleut. Both groups spoke, and continue to speak, dialects descended from what scholars call the Eskimo-Aleut language family. Because it is such an inhospitable landscape, the Arctic’s population was comparatively small and scattered. Some of its peoples, especially the Inuit in the northern part of the region, were nomads, following seals, polar bears and other game as they migrated across the tundra. In the southern part of the region, the Aleut were a bit more settled, living in small fishing villages along the shore.

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The human race is made up of many different nationalities and groups of people. Indigenous people are those who are native to a certain area. The term is often used to describe the original inhabitants of areas that are now populated by people from other parts of the world.

Indigenous peoples are inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment. They have retained social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live. Despite their cultural differences, indigenous peoples from around the world share common problems related to the protection of their rights as distinct peoples.

Indigenous peoples have sought recognition of their identities, way of life and their right to traditional lands, territories and natural resources for years, yet throughout history; their rights have always been violated. Indigenous peoples today, are arguably among the most disadvantaged and vulnerable groups of people in the world. The international community now recognizes that special measures are required to protect their rights and maintain their distinct cultures and way of life. Find below a short history of the indigenous struggle in the international stage.

While making up less than five percent of the world’s population, indigenous people account for 15 percent of the poorest. They’re more likely to suffer from malnutrition, and often lack adequate social protection and economic resources. The international community recognizes that special measures are required to protect their rights and maintain their distinct cultures.

The life expectancy of indigenous people is as much as 20 years lower than that of their non-indigenous counterparts. Often lacking adequate healthcare and information, they are more likely to get diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, HIV and AIDS.

More than one in three indigenous women are sexually assaulted during their lifetime, and they also have higher rates of maternal mortality, teen pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases. The Declaration on the Right of Indigenous People draws attention to the needs and rights of indigenous women and calls for action to protect them from violence. Indigenous peoples are inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of living.?Nearly 70 million indigenous women and men depend on forests for their livelihoods, and many more are farmers, hunter gatherers or pastoralists.

These communities thrive by living in harmony with their surroundings. Research shows that where indigenous groups have control of the land, forests and biodiversity flourishes. Indigenous communities’ contribution to fighting climate change are far greater than previously thought. Their forestlands store at least one quarter of all above-ground tropical forest carbon – about 55 trillion metric tonnes. This is?equivalent to four times the total global carbon emissions in 2014. Given that data isn’t available for all the lands native communities manage around the world, the actual impact is far greater.

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