Humans as Agents in the Termination of the African Humid Period
There is great uncertainty over the timing and magnitude of the termination of the African Humid Period (AHP). Spanning from the early to middle Holocene, the AHP was a period of enhanced moisture over most of northern and eastern Africa. However, beginning 8000 years ago the moisture balance shifted due to changing orbital precession and vegetation feedbacks. Some proxy records indicate a rapid transition from wet to dry conditions, while others indicate a more gradual changeover. Heretofore, humans have been viewed as passive agents in the termination of the AHP, responding to changing climatic conditions by adopting animal husbandry and spreading an agricultural lifestyle across the African continent. This paper explores scenarios whereby humans could be viewed as active agents in landscape denudation. During the period when agriculture was adopted in northern Africa, the regions where it was occurring were at the precipice of ecological regime shifts. Pastoralism, in particular, is argued to enhance devegetation and regime shifts in unbalanced ecosystems. Threshold crossing events were documented in the historical records of New Zealand and western North America due to the introduction of livestock. In looking at temporally correlated archeological and paleoenvironmental records of northern Africa, similar landscape dynamics from the historical precedents are observed: reduction in net primary productivity, homogenization of the flora, transformation of the landscape into a shrub-dominated biozone, and increasing xerophylic vegetation overall. Although human agents are not seen as the only forces inducing regime change during the termination of the AHP, their potential role in inducing large-scale landscape change must be properly contextualized against other global occurrences of neolithization.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2017.00004/full
Welcome to the Vegan Theory Club Weekly Megathread!
Question of the week:
What is your favorite bean?
Feel free to talk about anything, whether it’s vegan-related or not. This is a chill space for connecting, sharing ideas, and supporting each other.
Looking forward to hearing what everyone’s up to!
I've sent them an email to ask for clarity and will update with their response.
Having a read of the food labeling standards (https://www.foodstandards.gov.au/food-standards-code/legislation) 1.2.2, 2.4, and schedule 10-2 any edible oil is only required to be identified as follows:
(a) The statement of ingredients must declare:
(i) whether the source is animal or vegetable; and
if the food is a dairy product, including ice cream—the specific source of animal fats or oils.
(b) This generic name must not be used for >diacylglycerol oil.
As such it turns out anything labelled as vegetable oil could contain palm oil, which is relatively likely given it's ~36% of global oil trade and the number 1 producer. https://ourworldindata.org/palm-oil
So I recommend that unless you have specific knowledge, if anything has a thick texture at room temp and claims not to be hydrogenated you should assume it is palm oil. Especially if it's quite low in saturated and polyunsaturated fats which is a bit of a coconut oil tell.
RIP to a delicious one.
- A former sinner
Welcome to the Vegan Theory Club Weekly Megathread!
We’re kicking things off with a space just for vegans! Inspired by our friends over at Hexbear, this thread is the spot to chat about what’s on your mind, what’s happening, and what you’re planning for the week.
Feel free to talk about anything, whether it’s vegan-related or not. This is a chill space for connecting, sharing ideas, and supporting each other.
Looking forward to hearing what everyone’s up to!
Got any ideas?
We’re also taking suggestions for essay topics, recommended readings, or any resources that could help each other out. Feel free to drop in links, ask for advice, or contribute any other materials you think would be useful for the community and we can start adding to the megathread.
Looking forward to hearing what everyone’s up to and what we can explore together!
Check out our communities:
The communities are here to help share links and photos for vegans by vegans.
Vegan Home Cooks is a site for a discord server called Vegan Home Cooks Discord. This is a low-friction post-what-you-cooked community so we can share what we made today and talk about it, no recipes required. We want to provide motivation and encouragement for each other and show off what we made today.
Vegan Recipes is focused on how to cook and links to recipe sites.
Gardening is focused on our gardens, plants, hydroponics and learning how to do it. Some of us are pros and some are just learning and want to post what we're reading and what we're doing.
Vegan is for general vegan news
Vegan Infographics for vegan infographics and agitprop
Art All things art, preferably by vegans but not required.
Book Club Our sort of monthly book club, we finished reading Fanon but never had our final post. We're going to get that going and do fiction for September/October. Also post about whatever you are reading!
DIY Do it yourself! This is a community to fix our shit.
Our communities are federated with various other servers running software called Lemmy. If you have an account on one of those servers you can still subscribe to our communities from your home server and participate. If you create an account with us you can also view other federated communities across multiple Lemmy servers we are linked up with.
Thanks for visiting our site!
Vegan
The Lemmy place to discuss veganism.
Resources:
Rules:
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Keep discussions civil.
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Arguments against veganism will be removed.
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No bigotry is allowed - including speciesism, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, castism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
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Sealioning will not be entertained.
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Please avoid sharing articles about celebrities, plant-based capitalism and artificial intelligence.