Howler Monkey Facts (Alouatta)

Howler Monkey Facts (Alouatta) Howler monkeys (genus Alouatta) are the largest New World monkeys. They are the loudest land animal, producing howls that can be heard up to three miles away. Fifteen species and seven subspecies of howler monkey are currently recognized. Fast Facts: Howler Monkey Scientific Name: AlouattaCommon Names: Howler monkey, New World baboonBasic Animal Group: MammalSize: Head and body: 22-36 inches; tail: 23-36 inchesWeight: 15-22 poundsLifespan: 15-20 yearsDiet: OmnivoreHabitat: Central and South American forestsPopulation: DecreasingConservation Status: Least Concern to Endangered Description Like other New World monkeys, howler monkeys have wide side-set nostrils and furred prehensile tails with naked tips that help the primates grip tree branches. Howler monkeys have beards and long, thick hair in shades of black, brown, or red, depending on sex and species. The monkeys are sexually dimorphic, with males 3 to 5 pounds heavier than females. In some species, such as the black howler monkey, mature males and females have different coat colors. Howler monkeys are the largest New World monkeys, with head and body length averaging 22 to 36 inches. One characteristic of the species is its extremely long, thick tail. The average tail length is 23 to 36 inches, but there are howler monkeys with tails five times their body length. Adults weigh between 15 and 22 pounds. Like humans, but unlike other New World monkeys, howlers have trichromatic vision. Both male and female howler monkeys have an enlarged hyoid bone (Adams apple) that helps them make extremely loud calls. Males and females are different colors in some howler monkey species. Tier Und Naturfotografie J und C Sohns / Getty Images Habitat and Distribution Howler monkeys live in the tropical forests of Central and South America. They spend their lives in the tree canopy, only rarely descending to the ground. Howler monkey distribution. Miguelrangeljr IUCN / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License Diet The monkeys primarily forage tree leaves from the upper canopy, but also eat fruit, flowers, nuts, and buds. They sometimes supplement their diet with eggs. Like other mammals, howler monkeys cannot digest cellulose from leaves. Bacteria in the large intestine ferment cellulose and produce nutrient-rich gases which the animals use as an energy source. Behavior Obtaining energy from leaves is an inefficient process, so howler monkeys are generally slow-moving and live within relatively small home ranges (77 acres for 15 to 20 animals). Males vocalize at dawn and dusk to identify their position and communicate with other troops. This minimizes conflict over feeding and sleeping grounds. Troop ranges overlap, so howling lessens the need for males to patrol territories or fight. Each troop consists of six to 15 animals, usually containing one to three adult males. Mantled howler monkey troops are larger and contain more males. Howler monkeys rest in the trees about half of the day. Reproduction and Offspring Howler monkeys reach sexual maturity around 18 months of age and display sexual readiness by tongue-flicking. Mating and birth may occur at any time of the year. Mature females give birth every two years. Gestation is 180 days for the black howler monkey and results in a single offspring. At birth, both male and female black howler monkeys are blond, but males turn black at two and a half years of age. In other species the color of the young and adults is the same for both sexes. Adolescent males and females leave their parents troop to join unrelated troops. The average life expectancy of a howler monkey is 15 to 20 years. Conservation Status Howler monkey IUCN conservation status varies according to species, ranging from least concern to endangered. The population trend is unknown for some species and decreasing for all others. Howler monkeys are protected in parts of their range. Threats The species faces multiple threats. Like other New World monkeys, howlers are hunted for food. They face habitat loss and degradation from deforestation and land development for residential, commercial, and agricultural use. Howler monkeys also face competition from other species, such as spider monkeys and woolly monkeys. Howler Monkeys and Humans Howler monkeys are not aggressive toward humans and are sometimes kept as pets despite their loud vocalizations. Some Mayan tribes worshiped howler monkeys as gods. Sources Boubli, J., Di Fiore, A., Rylands, A.B. Mittermeier, R.A. Alouatta nigerrima. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2018: e.T136332A17925825. doi:10.2305/IUCN.UK.2018-2.RLTS.T136332A17925825.enGroves, C.P. Order Primates. In: D.E. Wilson and D.M. Reeder (eds), Mammal Species of the World, pp. 111-184. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 2005.Neville, M. K., Glander, K. E., Braza, F. and Rylands, A. B. The howling monkeys, genus Alouatta. In: R. A. Mittermeier, A. B. Rylands, A. F. Coimbra-Filho an G. A. B. da Fonseca (ed.), The Ecology and Behavior of Neotropical Primates, Vol. 2, pp. 349–453, 1988. World Wildlife Fund, Washington, DC, USA.Sussman, R. Primate Ecology and Social Structure, Vol. 2: New World Monkeys, Revised First Edition. Pearson Prentice Hall. pp. 142–145. July, 2003. ISBN 978-0-536-74364-0.

Ancient Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro

Ancient Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro is what generations of besotted archaeologists have named a 10.8 centimeter (4.25 inch) tall copper-bronze statuette found in the ruins of Mohenjo Daro. That city is one of the most important sites of the Indus Civilization, or more accurately, the Harappan Civilization (2600-1900 BC) of Pakistan and northwestern India. The Dancing Girl figurine was sculpted using the lost wax (cire perdue) process, which involves making a mold and pouring molten metal into it. Made about 2500 BC, the statuette was found in the remains of a small house in the southwestern quarter of Mohenjo Daro by Indian archaeologist D. R. Sahni [1879-1939] during his 1926-1927 field season at the site. The Dancing Girl Figurine The figurine is a naturalistic free-standing sculpture of a nude woman, with small breasts, narrow hips, long legs and arms, and a short torso; her genitals are explicit. She wears a stack of 25 bangles on her left arm. She has very long legs and arms compared to her torso; her head is tilted slightly backward and her left leg is bent at the knee. On her right arm are four bangles, two at the wrist, two above the elbow; that arm is bent at the elbow, with her hand on her hip. She wears a necklace with three large pendants, and her hair is in a loose bun, twisted in a spiral fashion and pinned in place at the back of her head. Some scholars suggest that the Dancing Girl statuette is a portrait of a real woman. Individuality of the Dancing Girl Although there have been literally thousands of figurines recovered from Harappan sites, including over 2,500 at Harappa alone, the vast majority of figurines are terracotta, made from fired clay. Only a handful of Harappan figurines are carved from stone (such as the famous priest-king figure) or, like the dancing lady, of lost-wax copper bronze. Figurines are an elaborate class of representational artifact found in many ancient and modern human societies. Human and animal figurines can give insight into concepts of sex, gender, sexuality and other aspects of social identity. That insight is important for us today because many ancient societies left no decipherable written language. Although the Harappans had a written language, no modern scholar has been able to decipher the Indus Script to date. Metallurgy and the Indus Civilization A recent survey of the use of copper-based metals used in Indus civilization sites (Hoffman and Miller 2014) found that most of the classic Harappan aged objects made of copper-bronze are vessels (jars, pots, bowls, dishes, pans, scale pans) formed from sheet copper; tools (blades from sheet copper; chisels, pointed tools, axes and adzes) manufactured by casting; and ornaments (bangles, rings, beads, and decorative-headed pins) by casting. Hoffman and Miller found that copper mirrors, figurines, tablets, and tokens are relatively rare compared to these other artifact types. There are many more stone and ceramic tablets than those made of copper-based bronze. The Harappans made their bronze artifacts using a variety of blends, alloys of copper with tin and arsenic, and varying lesser amounts of zinc, lead, sulfur, iron, and nickel. Adding zinc to copper makes an object brass rather than bronze, and some of the earliest brasses on our planet were created by the Harappans. Researchers Park and Shinde (2014) suggest that the variety of blends used in different products was the result of fabrication requirements and the fact that pre-alloyed and pure copper was traded into the Harappan cities rather than produced there. The lost wax method used by Harappan metallurgists involved first carving the object out of wax, then covering it in wet clay. Once the clay was dried, holes were bored into the mold and the mold was heated, melting the wax. The empty mold was then filled with a melted mixture of copper and tin. After that cooled, the mold was broken, revealing the copper-bronze object. Sex and the Dancing Girl Most of the images of women from Harappan-period sites are from hand-modeled terracotta, and they are primarily curvaceous mother goddesses. Many of them have explicit sexual organs and navels, heavy breasts and broad hips; most wear a fan-shaped headdress. Male figurines appear later than the female ones, with early male motifs represented by male animals- bulls, elephants, unicorns- with explicit genitals. The dancing girl is unusual in that although her genitals are explicit she isnt particularly voluptuous- and she is not hand-modeled, she was created using a mold. American archaeologist Sharri Clark suggests that the process of making hand-modeled terracotta images was ritually or symbolically meaningful to the maker, that the manufacturing of the figurines was as important or perhaps more important than the figurine itself. It is possible, then, that the manufacturing technique chosen by the maker of the Dancing Girl had some specific meaning that we dont have access to. Possible African Origins The ethnicity of the woman depicted in the figure has been a somewhat controversial subject over the years since the figurine was discovered. Several scholars such as ECL During Casper have suggested that the lady looks African. Recent evidence for Bronze Age trade contact with Africa has been found at Chanhu-Dara, another Harappan Bronze Age site, in the form of pearl millet, which was domesticated in Africa about 5,000 years ago. There is also at least one burial of an African woman at Chanhu-Dara, and it is not impossible that the Dancing Girl was a portrait of a woman from Africa. However, the figurines hairdressing is a style worn by Indian women today and in the past, and her armful of bangles is similar to a style worn by contemporary Kutchi Rabari tribal women. British Archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, one of many scholars besotted by the statuette, recognized her as a woman from the Baluchi region. Sources Clark SR. 2003. Representing the Indus Body: Sex, Gender, Sexuality, and the Anthropomorphic Terracotta Figurines from Harappa. Asian Perspectives 42(2):304-328. Clark SR. 2009. Material Matters: Representation and Materiality of the Harappan Body. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 16:231–261. Craddock PT. 2015. The metal casting traditions of South Asia: Continuity and innovation. Indian Journal of History of Science 50(1):55-82. During Caspers ECL. 1987. Was the dancing girl from Mohenjo-daro a Nubian? Annali, Instituto Oriental di Napoli 47(1):99-105. Hoffman BC, and Miller HM-L. 2014. Production and Consumption of Copper-Base Metals in the Indus Civilization. In: Roberts BW, and Thornton CP, editors. Archaeometallurgy in Global Perspective: Methods and Syntheses. New York, NY: Springer New York. p 697-727. Kennedy KAR, and Possehl GL. 2012. Were There Commercial Communications between Prehistoric Harappans and African Populations? Advances in Anthropology 2(4):169-180. Park J-S, and Shinde V. 2014. Characterization and comparison of the copper-base metallurgy of the Harappan sites at Farmana in Haryana and Kuntasi in Gujarat, India. Journal of Archaeological Science 50:126-138. Possehl GL. 2002. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective. Walnut Creek, California: Altamira Press. Sharma M, Gupta I, and Jha PN. 2016. From Caves to Miniatures: Portrayal of Woman in Early Indian Paintings. Chitrolekha International Magazine on Art and Design 6(1):22-42. Shinde V, and Willis RJ. 2014. A New Type of Inscribed Copper Plate from Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilisation. Ancient Asia 5(1):1-10. Sinopoli CM. 2006. Gender and archaeology in south and southwest Asia. In: Milledge Nelson S, editor. Handbook of Gender in Archaeology. Lanham, Maryland: Altamira Press. p 667-690. Srinivasan S. 2016. Metallurgy of zinc, high-tin bronze and gold in Indian antiquity: Methodological aspects. Indian Journal of History of Science 51(1):22-32.