Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Largest Known Elephant Tusks from East Africa, London Natural History Museum
Both were a few inches longer than ten feet or 3.1 meters. A Portuguese missionary in 1663
described a single ship being loaded with 28,000 tusks, many of them over 128 pounds on an
island off the coast of Benin. About 100 to 200 tons of ivory reached the European and Asian
markets during the 16 and 17 centuries. In 1885 480 tons of ivory from the West Coast of
Africa was exported to Europe. By 1902, the Congo alone was exporting 214 tons to Antwerp.
By 1914 before the First World War, some 800 tons were on the market. The price of ivory
stayed stable at about $50 per kilogram until it increased in 1988 to $200 because ivory
sources started drying up and the elephant population became increasingly threatened by
extinction. The result was the 1989 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species
(CITES) ban on ivory trading.
So, I have packed my bags again for another short walk in Africa's thorny Bushveld, among
the well spring of hunter-gatherers that were driven by life's imperatives to stream across the
earth to form societies only influenced in the last two thousand years by European mores for
both good and bad. For this trip to a remote south-eastern part of Zimbabwe my packing is
more limited but includes everything from an emergency kit to perform surgery for injuries,
even chest surgery, to the trappings of modern western gadgets: US passport with computer
chip, cameras, video equipment, digital Dictaphone, a small laptop computer, USB backup
sticks, backup drives, telephones, Zeiss 15X binoculars with doublers, GPS, spare lenses,
batteries, spare flash lights, spare sun glasses and regular wearing glasses, head flash light,
malaria medications, three types of antibiotics, essential supplies, cleaning equipment, and
then, of course, all these irritating battery chargers - I probably have probably more than ten of
them, each for a separate item like the video cameras, telephones, cameras and computers.
These have to function in an area with no external electricity feeds. This is has always been an
Achilles' heel of man in comparison to other animals: our need for energy. And, perhaps even
more so now with the electric grid and water supplies controlled by the Internet and computers
that are vulnerable to computer hacking by our enemies. Initially hunter-gatherers and
pastoralists created energy in the form of fire while modern man uses sources such as oil,
diesel, coal or natural gas fired power plants, nuclear power, hydroelectric, hydrothermal,
Search WWH ::




Custom Search