City to declare hotspots a disaster area

WASHINGTON: Two-million-yearold fossils including the three tiny bones of the middle ear are helping scientists figure out the auditory abilities of early human ancestors at a time when they were beginning to hear more like a person and less like a chimpanzee.

A study published on Friday involving two species from South Africa, Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus, showed they boasted better hearing than either chimps or people in a frequency range that may have facilitated vocal communication in a savanna habitat.

Both species featured a mixture of ape-like and human-like anatomical traits and inhabited grassland ecosystems with widely spaced trees and shrubs, as opposed to the forests of earlier members of human lineage.

In both species, maximum hearing sensitivity was shifted toward slightly higher frequencies compared to chimpanzees, and both had better hearing than chimps or humans in the range from about 1.0-3.0 kilohertz, paleoanthropologist Rolf Quam of Binghamton University in New York said.

Sounds in that range include vowels and some consonants, Quam said.

“It turns out that this auditory pattern may have been particularly THE CITY of Cape Town is investigating whether it can declare violent crime hotspots in the metro a disaster area, the city said yesterday.

The request for legal opinion was officially signed off by mayor Patricia de Lille last week, mayoral committee member for safety and security JP Smith said.

“This move comes after the quarterly meeting of the disaster management advisory forum, during which a discussion took place about the crime situation in some parts of the city meeting all the criteria for being declared a disaster. The exact areas will be chosen after the soon-to-be-released official crime statistics are considered.”

A disaster is defined as a progressive or sudden widespread or localised natural or human-caused occurrence which causes or threatens to cause death, injury, or disease; damage to favourable for living on the savanna. In more open environments, sound waves don’t travel as far as in the rainforest canopy, so short-range communication is favoured on the savanna,” Quam said.

The human lineage split from chimps roughly 5 to 7 million years ago, Quam said, and our ancestors’ hearing abilities began to adapt to lifestyle changes.

To assess the two species’ hearing abilities, the researchers studied fossils including tiny middle-ear bones called the ossicles (the malleus, incus and stapes) and created virtual computer reconstructions of the ear’s internal anatomy.

Our species, Homo sapiens, which arose about 200 000 years ago, is distinct from most other primates in having better hearing across a wider range of frequencies, generally from 1.0 to 6.0 kilohertz. This range encompasses many sounds emitted during spoken language.

“We are not arguing that these early humans had language, which implies a symbolic content,” he said. “Certainly they could communicate vocally. All primates do. But human language emerged during our evolutionary history at some time after the existence of these early humans.” – Reuters property, infrastructure, or the environment; or disruptions of the life of a community; and is of a magnitude that exceeds the ability of those affected by the disaster to cope with its effects using only their own resources.

The city did not control the criminal justice system as all parts of the system were controlled by national government, Smith said.

“In the context of the ongoing failure of policing at the hands of national government, the legal opinion will seek to treat identified crime hotspots as it would any other disaster areas by making available additional policing and other resources to prevent crime and stabilise such communities.”

The legal opinion would also explore whether the city could claim additional resources from national government in lieu of failure of the national police to secure certain communities. – ANA