Thursday, July 17, 2014


News Clips For The Day


Congress nears an impasse on immigration crisis
By REBECCA KAPLAN CBS NEWS July 16, 2014

With House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., shooting down a bipartisan bill to address the crisis of unaccompanied children crossing the southern border Wednesday, it looks increasingly likely Congress might wind up at an impasse just before their five-week summer recess.

Until now, Pelosi had said that potential changes to a 2008 law that prevents speedy deportations of unaccompanied children from countries other than Mexico and Canada was not a "deal breaker" for Democrats. That's what two Texas lawmakers, Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, are aiming to do with their bill that would mandate the same treatment for all unaccompanied children apprehended at the border: a quick return to their home countries without going through the immigration system, or a speedy trip through U.S. immigration courts that would take less than two weeks to decide whether they have a valid claim to remain in the U.S.

"I do think the bill that was introduced is exactly the wrong way to go," Pelosi told the New York Times Wednesday. "Is the only immigration bill we're going to have one that hurts children?"

Her spokesman, Drew Hamill, later added that the only acceptable change to the 2008 law would be to handle Mexican children the way Central American children are processed now, requiring that they have the chance to appear before an immigration judge before they can be put into deportation proceedings.

Reid similarly dismissed the Cornyn-Cuellar bill as "too broad" Tuesday. On Wednesday - when the administration will brief senators on President Obama's$3.7 billion funding request to deal with the border crisis - Reid promised that Democrats will come up with legislation "that we feel should move forward quickly." Senate Democrats oppose the major policy changes in the Cornyn-Cuellar proposal that would be attached to any emergency supplemental funding.

Meanwhile, Republicans are expected to offer Mr. Obama less than what he has requested to expand detention and prosecution and repatriation of the children, care for the ones who remain in the U.S., and send more immigration judges to the border.

Divided by whether or not there should be changes to the 2008 anti-trafficking law - Democrats say absolutely no, Republicans say absolutely yes - it is unclear how the two parties will reconcile their differences and respond to the crisis.

Mr. Obama is also in the tricky situation of trying to marshal necessary Republican support for the additional funds the executive branch needs to respond to the crisis without alienating Democrats. He met with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Wednesday afternoon, most of whom adamantly oppose any move that would speed deportations of the children arriving at the border.

Other Democrats have suggested the administration has failed a responsibility to treat the children, many of whom are fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries, as refugees. Gov. Martin O'Malley, D-Md., told reporters last week that the government would "summarily send children to death" by deporting them, prompting an angry call from White House Domestic Policy Director Cecilia Muñoz, according to the Washington Post. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest declined to discuss the call.

Pressed on whether the children are refugees, Earnest said, "In the view of this White House, an immigration judge should make the determination about whether someone qualifies for refugee status."




“That's what two Texas lawmakers, Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, are aiming to do with their bill that would mandate the same treatment for all unaccompanied children apprehended at the border: a quick return to their home countries without going through the immigration system, or a speedy trip through U.S. immigration courts that would take less than two weeks to decide whether they have a valid claim to remain in the U.S.... Meanwhile, Republicans are expected to offer Mr. Obama less than what he has requested to expand detention and prosecution and repatriation of the children, care for the ones who remain in the U.S., and send more immigration judges to the border.... whether or not there should be changes to the 2008 anti-trafficking law - Democrats say absolutely no, Republicans say absolutely yes -.... Mr. Obama is also in the tricky situation of trying to marshal necessary Republican support for the additional funds the executive branch needs to respond to the crisis without alienating Democrats.

The Cornyn/Cuellar bill which is being considered would allow the US to put a stop to the flow of children without our having to find a large number of communities within the US in which to find temporary housing for them for an extended period of time. I am usually liberal in my thinking, but this huge number of children is too great a burden on the resources of the US. We have, for years, had too many illegal immigrants of all ages crossing the border, which has been quietly condoned by American businesses wishing to hire very cheap labor. That practice cuts down on the number of jobs for Americans, and keeps the minimum wage much too low.

I think the US should keep the border secure for a number or reasons, including homeland security, but offer a certain modest number of legal temporary visas and work permits, instead of allowing businesses to illegally hire such workers. With a higher minimum wage mandated for all workers, – including restaurants, industrial farms, the construction industry, domestic service and meat processing plants – many of those jobs that “Americans won't take” would be gobbled up by Americans who have been unable to find other work. Rather than incarcerating such illegal immigrants, which is hardly fair since they haven't committed any real crime in most cases, they should simply be sent back to their home countries if they can't qualify as refugees or apply for a work visa.






U.S. Sanctions Major Russian Banks And Energy Companies – NPR
by ALAN GREENBLATT
July 16, 2014

President Obama outlined a new package of sanctions against Russian firms and individuals on Wednesday.

"These sanctions are significant but also targeted," Obama said. "Russia will see that its actions in Ukraine have consequences."

The administration targeted large banks, as well as energy and defense firms. The sanctions stopped short of covering entire sectors of the Russian economy.

Obama said they were designed to inflict pain on Russia without harming U.S. companies or the nation's allies.

He said Russia had failed to heed calls that it stop weapons from flowing into Ukraine.

"So far, Russia has failed to take any of the steps that I have mentioned," Obama said. "In fact, Russia's support for the separatists and violations of Ukraine's sovereignty has continued."

The new sanctions bar American individuals and companies from trading in equities with those firms or extending them credit for periods longer than 90 days.

Among the firms targeted were Rosneft, the largest Russian oil producer; Novatek, a natural gas producer; Gazprombank, the financial arm of natural gas company Gazprom (though not Gazprom itself); and Vnesheconombank, or VEB, an economic development lender.

The administration also targeted eight state-owned defense firms and four Russian government officials, including an aide to President Vladimir Putin, the head of its Federal Security Service and the minister for Crimean affairs, as well as rump groups in breakaway areas within Ukraine.

The new sanctions go beyond earlier ones, which imposed travel restrictions on individuals and froze their assets.

"These are serious sanctions. They target major Russian energy companies and financial institutions," Steven Pifer, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told The Associated Press.

The Russian firms singled out by the administration will now be blocked from U.S. capital markets for financing medium and long-term debt. They will also have to look elsewhere to find dollars, which are an important financing tool.

"This is a significant step," a senior administration official said in a conference call with reporters. "Today's steps will only further exacerbate Russia's economic problems."

Administration officials emphasized that the Treasury Department, using authority granted by a series of executive orders signed by the president, could extend further sanctions.

European Union leaders, meeting Wednesday in Brussels,imposed fresh sanctions on Russia that did not match the scope of the latest moves by the Obama administration.

"There has been a little bit of a yin-yang where sometimes we're catching up with them and sometimes they're catching up with us," said another senior administration official.




“The new sanctions go beyond earlier ones, which imposed travel restrictions on individuals and froze their assets. 'These are serious sanctions. They target major Russian energy companies and financial institutions,' Steven Pifer, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told The Associated Press. The Russian firms singled out by the administration will now be blocked from U.S. capital markets for financing medium and long-term debt. They will also have to look elsewhere to find dollars, which are an important financing tool. 'This is a significant step,' a senior administration official said in a conference call with reporters. 'Today's steps will only further exacerbate Russia's economic problems.'"

These sanctions will hopefully cause Russia some real distress, as it has been reported that their economy is already not doing very well. We should probably also give Ukraine more weapons of all kinds, as we have so far only helped with non-lethal support. The pro-Russian rebels are still holding a fair amount of land in the Eastern part of Ukraine, and need to be unseated by Kiev, and the flow of Russian arms across the border from Crimea keeps the rebels supplied. If the economic constraints will stop Russia from funneling in weapons and possibly fighters, that could result in a fair fight in Ukraine and eventually a peace plan, with possible modifications to the Ukrainian constitutions to see the Russian speakers are not the subject of discrimination.





http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/17/the-curious-case-of-the-massive-crater-that-just-appeared-at-the-end-of-the-earth/?tid=hp_mm

The curious case of the massive crater that just appeared at ‘the end of the Earth’

The Washington Post
By Terrence McCoy 
July 17, 2014

Under no circumstance is the Russian peninsula of Yamal considered hospitable. Extending 435 miles into the Gulf of Ob, its subsoil is permanently frozen, chilled by temperatures that can plunge to 122 degrees below zero. The sun rarely shows in winter, and to locals called the Nenets, the name of the place translates to “the ends of the Earth.”

As uninviting as all that sounds, it just got even less enticing. For reasons no one has yet figured out, a massive, 300-foot-wide crater has just appeared. Seemingly out of nowhere.

According to video originally shot by a TV station run by the Russian Ministry of Defense — video which The Washington Post was unable to verify — the crater appeared about 20 miles from Yamal’s biggest gas field, igniting an international intrigue.

But beyond the fact that the hole is there, and huge, and that everyone’s intrigued by it, there’s not that much concrete information to go on.

What caused it? It’s unclear. But the Siberian Times, for its part, is hot on the story. It reported “experts are confident” there’s a “scientific explanation.”

Yamal authorities are planning to dispatch experts from the Center for the Study of the Arctic and the Cryosphere Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences to investigate. The researchers plan to analyze and take samples of soil, water and even air around the giant crater.

One thing’s certain, a spokesman of the Yamal Emergencies Ministry said. “We can definitely say that it is not a meteorite,” the spokesman told the Siberian Times. “No details yet.”

Anna Kurchatova of the Sub-Arctic Scientific Research Center contended an explosion caused it. But not a manmade one. No underground Russian missile silo did this. Rather it was global warming. Kurchatova said warming temperatures have caused an “alarming” permafrost melt in Arctic zones. According to this theory, the melting permafrost spewed gas until — pow! — pressure caused on explosion.

Others don’t blame gas emitted through global warming, but the gas that drives the Russian economy. “The Siberian area the crater was found in — the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region, which lies approximately 20 miles from the Bovanenkovo gas field — is one of the most geologically young places on Earth,” according to the science Web site From Quarks to Quasars. “It also happens to be extremely rich in gas. In fact, it contains the largest natural gas reservoir in all of Russia (it might even be the largest gas reserve on the planet).”

The article concluded that explosions in such terrain are not uncommon — especially in areas of substantial subsoil melt.

The crater may also have been caused by something called a “pingo.” That’s a block of underground ice that can push through the Earth to reach the surface, where it melts and leaves a hole behind. The region’s permafrost can be hundreds of feet thick, a width that may engender such an glacial push, Chris Fogwill, a polar scientist at the University of New South Wales,told the Sydney Morning Herald.

“It’s just a remarkable land form,” he said. “This is obviously a very extreme version of that, and if there’s been any interaction with the gas in the area, that is a question that could only be answered by going there.”




“One thing’s certain, a spokesman of the Yamal Emergencies Ministry said. 'We can definitely say that it is not a meteorite,' the spokesman told the Siberian Times. 'No details yet.'” Theories are global warming – causing “gas” to be spewed out in area of permafrost melt, or something called a “pingo,” a large block of ice that pushed its way up to the surface and then melts to leave a hole in the ground. No one has mentioned an ordinary sinkhole. Florida has a sinkhole almost that large called the Devil's Millhopper, a must see for tourists who like going out into nature to explore. Yamal authorities are sending in scientists to test soil, water and air to gather clues to what happened. I look forward to whatever is discovered.





With A Series Of Small Bans, Cities Turn Homelessness Into A Crime – NPR
by PAM FESSLER
July 16, 2014

Laws that criminalize homelessness are on the rise across the country, according to a new report by an advocacy group. The laws prohibit everything from sleeping in public to loitering and begging. Advocates for the homeless say the laws are making the problem worse.

Susan St. Amour is among those who could be affected by the new restrictions. Twice a week, she stands on a median strip at an intersection in downtown Portland, Maine, asking passersby for cash. She says she needs the money to get by.

"[If] for some reason I don't get a bed at the shelter and I have nowhere to stay, it means I can't eat that night unless I have a few dollars in my pocket," she says. "Or it may be because I need to take the bus to the other side of town. I might have a doctor's appointment."

Last year, though, the city passed a law that banned loitering on median strips. A federal judge has since declared the law unconstitutional, but the city plans to appeal. Council member Ed Suslovic says the goal of the legislation was not to hurt the homeless — just the opposite, in fact.

"This was a public safety threat, mainly to the folks in the median strip, but also to motorists going by as well," Suslovic says.

To Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, such measures are counterproductive — as well-meaning as they might be. Especially if they subject individuals to jail time or fines they can't afford to pay.
"It's really hard to get a job when you're homeless anyway, or to get housing," Foscarinis says. "You have no place to bathe, no place to dress, no money for transportation. But then, if you also have an arrest record, it's even more challenging."

Still, her group says such laws are on the rise. The National Law Center found that local bans on sleeping in vehicles have increased almost 120 percent over the past three years. Citywide bans on camping have grown 60 percent, and laws against begging have increased 25 percent. This all comes at a time when the U.S. government estimates that more than 610,000 people are homeless on any given night.

"It would be nice if you could solve the problem of homelessness simply by outlawing it," Foscarinis says. "But in reality, it takes resources to really end homelessness."

Resources are often difficult for cities to come by, even though numerous studies show that housing the homeless is more cost-effective in the long run: Ultimately, less money is needed for emergency services, like hospitals and police.

Still, many cities are trying to help the homeless, even as they pass laws making it more difficult to live outside. Back in Portland, Suslovic says his city is working aggressively to house homeless residents. And the National Law Center applauds other efforts, such as a homeless outreach team at the Houston Police Department.

Sgt. Steve Wick runs the Houston program, which aims to get people off the street. As part of the program, officers and a caseworker guide the city's homeless residents through an often confusing bureaucracy to get them the services they need. He says many have mental health and substance abuse problems.

"You can't tell a person that's been living on the street for a long time, 'You need to do this, this, this and this in order to get off the street' — because they can't do it," he says. He adds, "If you don't kind of help them through the whole process, they're just kind of stuck. They're stuck on the streets."

Wick says officers still need to enforce laws against things like urinating in public, but he says programs like his offer an alternative, more permanent solution.




“Laws that criminalize homelessness are on the rise across the country, according to a new report by an advocacy group. The laws prohibit everything from sleeping in public to loitering and begging..... 'such measures are counterproductive — as well-meaning as they might be. Especially if they subject individuals to jail time or fines they can't afford to pay.'.... 'It would be nice if you could solve the problem of homelessness simply by outlawing it,' Foscarinis says. 'But in reality, it takes resources to really end homelessness.'"

The city of Portland, ME and the Houston Police Department have made active efforts to aid the homeless, providing housing and other benefits. I'm glad to see a Police Department doing this, because they are the “boots on the ground” in bringing people into shelter, drug intervention and mental health care in many cases. In the bad old days, such people have merely been arrested instead of helped. Good police officers can be very helpful in a community rather than being caught abusing prisoners as too often used to happen. They are first on the scene when there is a major problem, and can either take the suspect to Detox or to jail, and then have a role in getting them into a mental health program if need be, and a great many homeless people have drug, alcohol or mental health issues.






This Dirty Little Weed May Have Cleaned Up Ancient Teeth – NPR
by RAE ELLEN BICHELL
July 16, 2014

The menus of millennia past can be tough to crack, especially when it comes to fruits and vegetables. For archaeologists studying a prehistoric site in Sudan, dental plaque provided a hint.

"When you eat, you get this kind of film of dental plaque over your teeth," says Karen Hardy, an archaeologist with the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.

"If you don't clean it off, it mixes up with bits of food and it gets stuck in this area below the gum," she says. "It can calcify within about two weeks, and once it's calcified it's very hard."

That plaque is so hard that it lasts thousands of years. And since prehistoric folk were not known for their flossing habits, the plaque that survived them can serve as a kind of scrapbook for what they ate and breathed.

Hardy and her colleagues were studying skeletons from Al Khiday in Central Sudan, a burial site that was used between around 2,000 and 9,000 years ago, since before the advent of farming in the area.

Using a few isotope and chemical analysis techniques, Hardy says they found "all sorts of different things" in the teeth of 19 individuals, things like sand, dirt, pollen, plant fibers — even evidence of carbon, from breathing smoke from a fire.

Most surprisingly, in seven of the 19 individuals, they found cracked starch granules, evidence that people were roasting and eating a plant called purple nutsedge, orCyperus rotundus. It looks like grass, but has a network of roots like little potatoes.

"Tastes a lot like dirt," says Ted Webster, a weed scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He wrote his Ph.D. on nutsedges, and as part of his defense, he had to eat one raw. He doesn't recommend it.

But for a hunter-gatherer, it was probably great: a starchy pack of energy that grew everywhere. And it contains lysine, an amino acid we need to survive.

As Hardy and her colleagues write in the journal PLOS ONE,even when farming developed in the area 7,000 years later, people were still munching on nutsedge. But at some point, the root it lost its charm. By the 1970s, botanists branded purple nutsedge as "the world's worst weed" in a book of the same name.

"They listed it as being a problem in 92 countries and 52 different crops," says Webster. The only way to get rid of the plant is to uproot it by hand.

But a weed is just a plant growing in the wrong place. Hardy says it wasn't just the prehistoric Sudanese who valued it. Ancient Egyptians used it to make perfume. It was a staple for some Aboriginal populations.

And it may even have prevented tooth decay. Turns out, the nutsedge produces antibacterial chemicals that inhibitStreptococcus mutans, an acid-producing bacterium that breaks down tooth enamel and causes cavities.

"That's why this study was very exciting," Hardy says. "We identified a plant that had been forgotten about but has all these wonderful qualities."

In one group of skeletons, Hardy's group found fewer cavities than would have been expected for the time period.

"There is a potential possibility that it might be linked to the consumption of Cyperus rotundus, but we can't be sure of that," says Hardy.

They can be sure that people were munching on purple nutsedge for millennia. It might have provided snacks for civilizations plodding along the route to development. At the very least, it helped them avoid totally horrible teeth.




“Hardy says it wasn't just the prehistoric Sudanese who valued it. Ancient Egyptians used it to make perfume. It was a staple for some Aboriginal populations.... And it may even have prevented tooth decay. Turns out, the nutsedge produces antibacterial chemicals that inhibitStreptococcus mutans, an acid-producing bacterium that breaks down tooth enamel and causes cavities.”

There are really lots of edible wild plants if you know them well enough. Unfortunately many plants are toxic if eaten, so the experimental process by which humans learned what to pick and eat must have involved a good deal of danger. That's what your tribal elders are for – they have seen many things and remember them, so the whole tribe can benefit, from foods and medicines to the locations of water sources.

There have been so many prehistoric peoples down through the last two million years or so that they must have had considerable cleverness and success, given the fact that they must have been eating whatever walked, crawled, swam and flew supplemented by berries, seeds and green leaves. The difference is now that we consume a smaller variety of foods, but our present foods have higher nutritional levels and taste better due to selective breeding.





Not So Offal: Why Bone Soup, A 'Perfect Food,' Tastes So Meaty – NPR
by KONSTANTIN KAKAES
July 16, 2014

Sup tulang, as this dish is called in Singapore, is Malay for "bone soup." The fattiness of the marrow rounds out the chili, tomato, fennel, cumin and ginger.

I ate the best meat I've ever eaten through a straw.

When the Singaporean food stall proprietor who'd just served me a plate of bones first offered the straw, I refused. I didn't want to take any shortcuts as I worked the tastiest bits of marrow out from the skeletal hollows.

But a couple of minutes into my repast, my face smeared with the viscous broth the bones had come in, I couldn't face the thought of leaving some of this food unexploited. So I took the proffered straw, inserted it down into a bone cavity and inhaled.

It tasted like the first bite of an excellent steak, only more so. Unlike biting into a rib-eye, when that initial sensation gives way to something less exultant and chewier, the marrow lingered on the tongue. I felt as if I was mainlining glutamate, the substance responsible for umami.

These bones had been cooked for hours in a fluorescent red amalgam of tomato and chili. Sup tulang, as this dish is called in Singapore, is Malay for "bone soup." I ate it at Deen Tulang Specialist, one of a handful of stalls specializing in the dish in the Golden Mile Food Centre, one of many food courts, known as hawker centers, in Singapore.

Even as I eagerly gobbled at the bones in front of me, I turned a question over in my head: Just what was it that made the bones so good?

Humans have been eating marrow for as long as we've been around. Indeed, some paleoanthropologists argue that eating marrow is part of what made us become human.

This school of thought is based largely on bones and stone tools from about 2 million years ago found in the Olduvai gorge, in present-day Tanzania. Fossils found there suggest that early humans scavenged carcasses already picked apart by other carnivores, and, using tools, broke open the bones and sucked out the marrow. Because marrow is very fatty, it is calorically dense, so the effort required to break open the bones was worth it.

In the West, marrow somehow evolved into an aristocratic food. In Offal: A Global History, Nina Edwards mentions a recipe used at Henry V's court "involving a beef marrow-stuffed steak rolled up like a pancake and sweetened with honey." Queen Victoria, she says, ate roasted bone marrow on a daily basis. In more recent times, Fergus Henderson, a chef in London who was in the forefront of "nose-to-tail" eating, popularized a recipeof roast beef bone marrow with parsley, served with toast.

These sorts of preparations are delicious, but they treat marrow as a delicate, rare thing, like caviar or foie gras. Yet marrow, today as it was in prehistoric times, is plentiful.

The sup tulang vendors in Singapore sell it by the bone — it works out to just over a U.S. dollar for each one. It's not a pricey food by Singaporean standards, though it is a delicacy.

A similar soup by the same name can be found in Malaysia, but the preparation I had at Deen's is uniquely Singaporean. It is a specialty of the mamak, or Indian Muslim, community in Singapore, who make up a small percentage of the population. Aside from the hawker center where I had it, there are a handful of other food stalls and restaurants in the city-state that serve it.

Compared with the marrow I'd eaten before, which was lightly spiced, the marrow in the tulang soup tasted more intense — the fattiness of the marrow rounded out the chili, tomato, fennel, cumin and ginger.

Marrow, because it is less widely consumed than flesh these days, hasn't been thoroughly studied by flavor scientists. There is one guy, however, who has his Ph.D. in bone marrow: Belayet Choudhury. His 2008 dissertation, "Volatile and non-volatile components of beef marrow bone stocks," is great reading.

Part of marrow's flavor, Choudhury explains, comes from the Maillard reaction in which sugars react with amino acids (this is the same thing that causes a nice crust to develop on steaks cooked over high heat).

Bone marrow, he writes, is almost 80 percent fat and only about 2.6 percent protein, with the rest being moisture. There are at least 12 different fatty acids present and about 20 amino acids.

When bone marrow is cooked, the large number of acids create even larger numbers of volatile compounds through a series of chemical reactions (the Maillard reaction and oxidation being the most important ones). The newly created volatile compounds interact with the nonvolatiles to bring about the marrow's rich taste.

Choudhury set out to find what compounds endow marrow not just with its pronounced umami but also with its "mouthfulness and taste continuity." He performed a series of experiments to single out exactly what was in the stock, finding a number of volatile compounds that hadn't previously been identified that, he wrote, provide "characteristic aroma and overall flavor."

Guy Crosby, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard and the science editor of America's Test Kitchen, says that the many nucleotides present in bone marrow amplify the umami taste of glutamate by as much as 20 to 30 times.

Crosby reminded me that the function of bone marrow is to produce red blood cells. Because it is, in effect, a factory for the creation of cells, Crosby says, bone marrow is like an egg: "a perfect food. It's got everything in it needed to create and sustain life."

And it's true: Marrow tastes wholesome, in a way that other similarly rich foods, like butter, don't. It has some of everything you need. Just as cold, pure water from a mountain spring quenches thirst, this soup, the marrow tempered with spice and made resilient by tomato, seems to me as close as any substance can be to the tangible opposite of hunger.

I liked grappling with the bones, not immune to imagined kinship with cavemen who hunted beasts and gnawed on their prey. But my variety of carnivorous experience is distant from theirs. The fact is, once I gave in and sucked at the marrow through a straw, the implement children use to drink, I got at more of it. It was a reminder that I'm not that much less powerless than a toddler.

Konstantin Kakaes is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., and the author of the e-book The Pioneer Detectives.




“Humans have been eating marrow for as long as we've been around. Indeed, some paleoanthropologists argue that eating marrow is part of what made us become human. This school of thought is based largely on bones and stone tools from about 2 million years ago found in the Olduvai gorge, in present-day Tanzania. Fossils found there suggest that early humans scavenged carcasses already picked apart by other carnivores, and, using tools, broke open the bones and sucked out the marrow. Because marrow is very fatty, it is calorically dense, so the effort required to break open the bones was worth it.” I saw in another article on this subject that they also cracked open the skull and ate the brain. People to this day eat brain, so don't say “yuck!”

Chicken and beef bones are still being used to make broths in the US, and brains are available in some grocery stores, or were within the last 20 years. When I was growing up, Mother would sometimes fry scrambled eggs up with a small can of cooked brains. I really liked it, though I haven't had any in years. I do like organ meats, though, both liver and kidney. The organ meats are richer in nutriments than the muscle, and farmers in the old South used to eat them regularly when they killed an animal.