National Geographic July-December 1991. [antikvár]

IM BRANDENBURG, MINDEN PICTURES Mystery of the Shrinking Red Deer Hundred-thousand-year-old bones found on the island of Jersey in the English Chan-nel may help solve an old mystery. Scientists have long known that dur-ing the Pleistocene epoch, when seas rose and feli, large mammal species caught in areas that became islands often grew smaller over time. But no one knew how rapidly this dwarfing occurred. Zoologist Adrián Lister of the University of Cambridge may have an answer. At one site on Jersey, dating back 238,000 years to when the island was attached to the main-land, he found the remains of normal-size red deer (National Geographic, October 1986), which weighed about 450 pounds. At a sec-ond site, dating back 119,000 to 123,000 years, he found bones half the normál length. This dwarf proba-bly weighed only 75 pounds. Knowing that the island was iso-lated by rising sea levels about 125,000 years ago, Lister calculates that the dwarfing process took 6,000 years or less. He believes the dwarf-ism resulted from Jersey's limited food resources: Amid scarcity, smaller animals had the best chance for survival. But when sea levels dropped again, the island was tem-porarily reunited with the mainland, and the animals vanished. Perhaps, Lister says, they bred with mainland deer, couldn't compete for food, or became prey for the influx of mainland predators. Finding—Maybe Losing— an Unknown People A lmost a century ago a traveler's /\ report vaguely mentioned a A tribe called the Birale living near a river in Gamo Gofa Province in southwest Ethiopia (Geographic, May 1983). But nothing was heard of the tribe again until the mid-1980s, when an English linguist met a Birale woman at a river crossing. He recorded about 60 words of her language. Other linguists were excited: The language seemed to bear little relationship to the tongues in the region. Last year Harold Fleming of Boston University, an anthropologist and expert on African languages, led an expedition to seek out the Birale. The scientists found that the tribe had just 89 remaining mem-bers. Only 19 elders still speak the tribal language, Ongota. The Birale live in grass huts, fish in the river, and hunt gazelle and antelope on a nearby savanna using bows and arrows—they fear guns. The men tend to marry outside the group and raise children who, though they see themselves as Birale, speak the outsiders' language. Thus the language, and perhaps the tribe itself, may be doomed. Fleming believes Ongota is an ancient branch of the Afro-Asiatic linguistic family, which includes Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, and Amharic—the official language of Ethiopia. Data Hitch a Ride on a Meteorite Trail Every day, hundreds of millions of meteorites, most no bigger than a grain of sand, hurtle into the earth's atmosphere, usually burning up before they hit the ground (Geographic, September 1986). Though the ionized trails left by meteorites last only seconds, they can be used, much like satellites, to relay data. Since 1977 the U. S. Soil Conservation Service has pioneered use of this process, called meteor-burst communications, to help PAINTING BY PETER A. SAWVER