Tarzan’s talking apes
QUESTION
Tarzan? IN Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books, Tarzan, the fledgling Lord Greystoke, is adopted by a tribe of West African, jungle-dwelling, great apes called the Mangani. Unlike actual apes, they have a spoken language. ‘Tarzan’, for instance, means ‘white skin’, ‘nala’ means ‘up’, ‘tand-nala’ ‘down’ and ‘numa’ means ‘lion’.
They are described in early Tarzan books as ‘gorilla-like apes’. Burroughs wasn’t a naturalist, zoologist or anthropologist and created these fictional apes to help the story.
Despite this, there have been several serious attempts to identify the fictional Mangani with an actual primate species.
According to Burroughs, the Mangani are organised in tribal bands ruled by dominant males, or ‘kings’. Tarzan was adopted by female Mangani Kala of the Kerchak tribe after Kerchak had killed his father John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke.
Mangani tribes are territorial and subsist by foraging for fruit, grubs, insects and sometimes meat. Burroughs portrays the Mangani as susceptible to violent and unpredictable outbursts, a trait he ascribes to several other species in his books.
In The Jungle Tales Of Tarzan, Burroughs mentions ‘ these great manlike apes which the natives of the Gobi speak of in whispers’ who, ‘unlike the chimpanzee and the gorilla . . . walk without the aid of their hands quite as readily as with’.
The ability to walk entirely upright for long periods of time requires that the pelvises and legs of the Mangani must have been more human than ape. Science fiction and fantasy novelist Philip José Farmer, in Tarzan Alive, his biography of Lord Greystoke, says Burroughs ‘was writing novels, and the facts didn’t always have to be adhered to. Indeed . . . he sometimes went out of his way to make sure the reader thought his Tarzan books were entirely fictional.’ Clearly the Mangani were, in the main, an invention. Nevertheless, in that same book Farmer speculated that ‘ the Mangani were hominids akin to Australopithecus robustus’.
Disney’s 1999 animated film Tarzan clearly portrays the apes who raised Tarzan as gorillas, though in the books, gorillas are looked down on by the Mangani as Bolgani.
‘Earth-bound’ apes (the Mangani can swing from tree to tree, like Tarzan) are explicitly a separate species. The fact that the Mangani are meat-eaters further suggests an evolution that is more human than the vegetarian gorilla.
There are only two passing references in the entire 24 Tarzan books to chimpanzees.
Tarzan’s companion Cheetah was an invention for the movies.
Liam Connell, Bangor, Caernarfonshire, Wales. QUESTION When using bathroom scales, why do you weigh more on a hard floor than you do on soft surfaces such as a bathmat? ACTUALLY the reverse is true; a number of studies have shown that scales will register a higher figure on a soft surface.
Most dieters with analogue scales are aware that they should weigh themselves on a hard surface.
In 2002 Jon Pendergast and Dr David Mackay, of Cambridge University, explained why in a detailed paper entitled The Secret Of Weight Management Or Why You Weigh More On Thick Carpet.
They described how, within an analogue set of scales, there are four levers, each pointing inwards from one of the corners, that transmit the weight of the person to a springloaded metal plate at the back of the scales. The movement of the plate is then transferred via a metal rod to turn the graduated dial on the scales to show the weight.
On a hard surface, the weight of the subject causes the base of the scales to bow slightly, shortening the distance between the fulcrum of the levers and the point at which they put pressure on the spring.
On a carpet, the scales sink in, and the base bows less, thus the leverage is applied over a slightly longer distance – and as the force applied at one end of a lever is multiplied by the distance from the fulcrum to the other end, the result is a faulty reading: up to 12 per cent more than the true value. They found digital scales were far less prone to the effect (less than 0.5 per cent) because of a difference in the internal mechanism.
Mrs H Rogers, Liverpool. QUESTION Has the gap between the top 10 per cent of earners and lowest 10 per cent widened since 2008? SINCE the big economic crash in 2008, many but not all of the top 10 per cent of earners in Ireland have become slightly worse off, but the bottom 10 per cent of earners have taken a far bigger hit.
They’ve suffered far more from the barrage of cuts and extra taxes, and Ireland remains an even more deeply unequal society. Back in 2008, the OECD said that the inequality in incomes in Ireland was as bad as it had been in the mid-1980s and that, in 2008, Ireland was the seventh most unequal nation. In the five years since then, the gap between better off and poor has become even more obvious.
By 2011, the Central Statistics Office was saying that 25 per cent of the population was in deprivation and that by 2011, twice as many people who were in work were also in deprivation compared to two years previously. In fact, if it weren’t for social welfare payments more than half the population would be on or below the poverty line.
These days, it’s considered that anyone earning more than €60,000 a year belongs to the top 10 per cent of earners. But that figure has considerable variations, as the top 0.5 per cent of earners earn more than €275,000 a year. At the very top of the earnings and wealth scale are people like Ireland’s wealthiest citizen, an 83-year-old Indian construction tycoon called Pallonji Mistry, who became an Irish citizen a decade ago and who is now worth around €8billion.
RSVP magazine reports that the top 300 wealthiest people in Ireland are worth nearly €66.1billion combined, and have seen their fortunes soar by close on €4billion over the past two years, thanks to surging fortunes in their investments.
They have more than managed to recession-proof themselves. For the top 10 per cent of earners, the past five years saw their disposable incomes rise by about 8 per cent a year. But they too have been hit by increased Government tax takes and extra charges.
People in the ‘top earnings’ bracket have had to pay the same increase in general charges as everyone else, like the local property tax, and the looming water charges, but the size of their incomes and their annual increases in pay mean that the impact of those charges has been far less severe than for lower earning people. During the past five years, income-tax charges for the highest earners have barely changed.
On the other hand, people who are in the bottom 10 per cent of earners still have to pay all the extra charges imposed during the past five years, as well as suffering from the many cuts in social welfare allowances. In 2010, the CSO said that people on the lowest income levels had experienced a decrease in disposable i ncome of j ust over a quarter; according to all the available evidence, that scale of decrease continues.
So people who are dependent on social welfare payments or who are in low-wage jobs have suffered much more during the past five years. The Nevin Economic Research Institute points out the anomalies: a third of households have a gross income of less than €30,000. A total of 1.5million people live on a gross income of between €10,000 and €30,000 a year.
At the other end of the scale, the top 30 per cent of households have gross incomes of more than €70,000 a year. A total of 14 per cent of households bring in a gross income of more than €100,000, while a small number, 2 per cent of households, have a gross income of more than €200,000 a year. Social Justice Ireland backs up these findings by saying that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer, so that the gap between the two segments is wideni ng significantly. Last year, the organisation said that the top 10 per cent of the population were getting almost 14 times as much disposable income as the poorest 10 per cent.
The European Anti- Poverty Network in Ireland backs this up by saying that the wealthiest 2 per cent of the population controls 30 per cent of the country’s wealth. Graham Murphy, Tallaght, Dublin.
QUESTION Why do some Russians blame King George V for the downfall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917? FURTHER to the earlier answer, while George V may have stated that the Empress Alexandra was ‘largely responsible for the present state of chaos that existed in Russia’, he may not have disliked her personally. She was, after all, a close family member.
She was George V’s first cousin, as was her husband Tsar Nicholas II. She was the daughter of Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s daughter and favourite sister of George V’s father Edward VII, and thus George V’s aunt on his father’s side. Alice had married Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, which made Empress Alexandra ‘German-born’.
David Larkin, Sutton, Surrey.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Irish Daily Mail, Embassy House, Herbert Park Lane, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. You can also fax them to 0044 1952 510906 or you can email them to charles.legge@dailymail.ie. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.