Ielts Mock Test

The world's oldest mattress
A study published in Science by Lyn Wadley of the University of Witwatersrand

and her colleagues throws new light on the behaviour of early man in South Africa.
The focus of the research is a cave in a natural rock shelter called Sibudu, situated
in a sandstone cliff, 40 kilometres north of Durban. Dr Wadley has found evidence
for at least 15 separate occasions when it acted as a home, with periods in between
when it was abandoned, as is often the case with such shelters. Each occupation left
debris behind, though, and as this accumulated, the cave floor gradually rose. All
told, these layers reveal occupation over a period of about 40,000 years.
Among the things Dr Wadley's team found in the floor of the cave was evidence of
mat making throughout the period of habitation. The oldest stratum, dating from
77,000 years ago, predate other known instances of plant matting by approximately
50,000 years. They consisted of compacted stems and leaves of plants stacked in
layers within a chunk of sediment three metres thick.
The inhabitants would have collected the plant matter from along the river, located
directly below the site, and laid the plants on the floor of the shelter,' said Wadley.
The lower part of these layers, compressed to a thickness of about a centimetre,
consists of sedges, rushes and grasses. The upper part, just under a millimetre thick,
is made of leaves from Cryptocarya woodii, a tree whose foliage contains chemicals
that kill biting insects. Dr Wadley thus thinks that what she has found are mattresses
on which the inhabitants slept, although they may also have walked and worked on
them.
The upshot is another piece of evidence of how, around this period, humans were
creating a range of hitherto unknown artefacts. Adhesives, arrows, needles, ochre-
decorated pictograms and necklaces made from shells are all contemporary with Dr
Wadley's finds, and stone tools became more delicate and sophisticated during this
period.
Indeed, given the age of the mats and other artefacts at the site, it's clear that Homo
sapiens was the hominid who slept in the cave. The earliest hominids had very
different sleeping accommodations. Even though they had evolved an efficient way
to walk on the ground, hominids such as Australopithecus were still small, not much
bigger than a chimpanzee. They probably settled in trees at night, for if they slept on
the ground, they would have been vulnerable to nocturnal predators looking for a
midnight meal. The fossils of early hominids indicate this was possible; they still
retained features useful for climbing, such as curved fingers and long arms. Once in
the trees, they probably built nests of branches, twigs and leaves, just as chimpanzees
do today.
The first hominid to try the ground as a bed might have been Homo erectus, starting
almost two million years ago. Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at
Harvard University, suggests that once hominids learned how to control fire they
discovered they could sleep on the ground while the flames kept predators away. It
was also useful for cooking and processing foods, allowing Homo erectus to expand
its diet. Adaptations for arboreal life were eventually lost, and Homo erectus became
bigger and taller, the first hominid with a more modern body plan. Although there's
no evidence in the paleontological record that hints at what type of bedding Homo
erectus used, modern humans were certainly not the only hominids to construct
'mattresses'. Neanderthals were also building grass beds, based on evidence from a
cave site in Spain dating to between 53,000 and 39,000 years ago
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BUG CITY
In the heart of Africa's savannah, there is a city built entirely from natural,
biodegradable materials, and it's a model of sustainable development. Its curved
walls, graceful arches and towers are rather beautiful too. It's no human city, of
course. It's a termite mound.
Unlike termites and other nest-building insects, humans pay little attention to
making buildings fit for their environments. As we wake up to climate change and
resource depletion, though, interest in how insects manage their built environments
is growing, and we have a lot to learn. 'The building mechanisms and the design
principles that make the properties of insect nests possible aren't well understood,'
says Guy Theraulaz of the Research Centre on Animal Cognition in France. That's
not for want of trying. Research into termite mounds kicked off in the 1960s, when
Swiss entomologist Martin Liischer made groundbreaking studies of nests created
by termites of the genus Macrotermes on the plains of southern Africa.
It was Liischer who suggested the chaotic-looking mounds were in fact exquisitely
engineered eco-constructions. Specifically, he proposed an intimate connection
between how the mounds are built and what the termites eat. Macrotermes species
live on cellulose, a constituent of plant matter that humans can't digest. In fact,
neither can termites. They get round this by cultivating gardens for fungi, which can
turn it into digestible nutrients. These areas must be well ventilated, their
temperature and humidity closely controlled - no mean feat in the tropical climates
in which termites live. In Liischer's theory, heat from the fungi's metabolism and the
termites' bodies causes stagnant air, laden with carbon dioxide, to rise up a central
chimney. From there it fans out through the porous walls of the mound, while new
air is sucked in at the base.
This simple and appealing idea spawned at least one artificial imitation: the Eastgate
Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, designed by architect Mick Pearce, which boasts a
termite-inspired ventilation and cooling system. It turns out, however, that few if
any termite mounds work this way.
Scott Turner, a termite expert at The State University of New York, and Rupert Soar
of Freeform Engineering in Nottingham, UK, looked into the design principles
of Macrotermes mounds in Namibia. They found that the mounds' walls are warmer
than the central nest, which rules out the kind of buoyant outward flow of CO2-rich
air proposed by Liischer. Indeed, injecting a tracer gas into the mound showed little
evidence of steady, convective air circulation.
Turner and Soar believe that termite mounds instead tap turbulence in the gusts of
wind that hit them. A single breath of wind contains small eddies and currents that
vary in speed and direction with different frequencies. The outer walls of the mounds
are built to allow only eddies changing with low frequencies to penetrate deep within
them. As the range of frequencies in the wind changes from gust to gust, the
boundary between the stale air in the nest and the fresh air from outside moves about
within the mounds' walls, allowing the two bodies of air to be exchanged. In essence,
the mound functions as a giant lung.
This is very different to the way ventilation works in modern human buildings,
where fresh air is blown in through vents to flush stale air out. Turner thinks there's
something to be gleaned from the termites' approach. 'We could turn the whole idea
of the wall on its head,' he says. 'We shouldn't think of walls as barriers to stop the
outside getting in, but rather design them as adaptive, porous interfaces that regulate
the exchange of heat and air between the inside and outside. Instead of opening a
window to let fresh air in, it would be the wall that does it, but carefully filtered and
managed the way termite mounds do it.'
Turner's ideas were among many discussed at a workshop on insect architecture

organised by Theraulaz in Venice, Italy, last year. It aimed to pool understanding
from a range of disciplines, from experts in insect behaviour to practising architects.
'Some real points of contact began to emerge/ says Turner. 'There was a prevailing
idea among the biologists that architects could learn much from us. I think the
opposite is also true.' One theme was just how proficient termites are at adapting
their buildings to local conditions. Termites in very hot climates, for example, embed
their mounds deep in the soil - a hugely effective way of regulating temperature. 'As
we come to understand more, it opens up a vast universe of new bio-inspired design
principles,' says Turner. Such approaches are the opposite of modern human ideas
of design and control, in which a central blueprint is laid down in advance by an
architect and rigidly stuck to. But Turner thinks we could find ourselves adopting a
more insect-like approach as technological advances make it feasible.

Ielts Mock Test

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ielts Mock Test

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ielts Mock Test

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The world's oldest mattress

A study published in Science by Lyn Wadley of the University of Witwatersrand

Turner's ideas were among many discussed at a workshop on insect architecture

You might also like