Artificial Rhinos?

Michael - Thursday

For the last few years, several start up biotechnology companies have been looking into the viability of making artificial rhino horn.  In recent years a company named Pembient has been making the running.  Its CEO, Matthew Marcus, has impressive credentials and the drive to make things happen.  Both their technology and their business model have evolved over the last couple of years.

What’s the point?  Matthew says the company is committed to saving the rhino by replacing the demand for real rhino horn – all taken from poached rhinos since there’s no legal market – with the artificial substitute.  His plan is to sell the product at around one eighth of the black market price in consumer countries – mainly Vietnam and China – thereby driving the price down to levels where poaching is no longer sufficiently lucrative to be viable against the conservation resources arrayed against it.  At the same time he hopes to make money for the company and possibly expand into other ‘replacement’ wildlife products such as ivory.

Two chunks of artificial horn

Here’s how it works.  Rhino horn is basically keratin as is hair and wool.  Their initial process used sheep’s wool to grow a look-alike horn material, which is indistinguishable from the real thing at a microscopic and even DNA level.  The latest technology uses yeasts coded with rhino DNA and keratin itself to provide an “ink” that a 3D printer can then convert into an actual horn in shape and color.  Not only is this the most valuable type of horn for medicinal products - because the consumer can actually see that it’s the real thing, but it can also be used for carvings and bracelets which are becoming popular with a well-heeled set in the east.  In December National Geographic reported on it.

The horn from wool process

I’ve worked on some of the dynamics describing what is happening to the white rhino population in South Africa and it’s not a happy story.  The Kruger National Park – the largest resource of rhinos left in the world - loses upwards of three rhinos per day, and surrounding private game reserves contribute to that also despite their smaller and more controllable area and generally better resources.  Poachers can sell a single horn for around US$15,000 and that's a huge amount of money in South Africa, about ten times what people living in these areas can make in a year.  That leaves a lot of money to buy information and accomplices and still have a very fat wallet.  With those sorts of stakes, the poaching will go on and as poachers are arrested or shot, others will take their places.  Some pessimistic predictions suggest that this year we may lose enough rhinos to cause the total population to start declining.  At that point the white rhino is heading for extinction.

The real thing for sale

So one would imagine that conservationists are delighted with the Pembient initiative.  Not so fast.  I said their business models had been changing and there’s a reason for that.  Some of the earlier ones seemed designed to actually increase the market.  One was a joint venture with a Chinese brewer to add artificial rhino horn to a line of beer.  (The horn is supposed to help with hangovers.)  Although it was going to be specified on the bottle that the horn was artificial, the concern is that it would reinforce the belief in the medicinal properties.  There was to be a similar face cream.  None of this went down well with the international NGOs working to save the rhino!

A summary of their arguments against the sale of artificial rhino horn is:

·         There is no evidence that the artificial horn will replace the real thing and it may just expand the market by making it affordable to a wider group of consumers;

·         It may reinforce the myths of the efficacy of the material;

·         Marketers will demand a premium for real wild horn, just as De Beers does for real diamonds over the synthetics;

·         How will law enforcement officers distinguish between them?

In February a petition was presented to the US Fish and Wildlife Service requesting the ban of the sale of artificial horn.  As far as I can discover, there hasn’t been a response to that as yet.

Pembient has reacted to all these arguments, and has moved its business model to the sale of complete horns from their 3D printer for carving purposes.  Of course, once the artificial horns are delivered, they can be used for anything.

It’s a complex issue and I don’t know the answer.  I can say that I think the present anti-poaching effort isn’t going to stem the tide.  Apparently the publicity campaigns in China have reduced the percentage of people who believe in the value of rhino horn as a medicine to below 50%.  Changing anyone’s mind about anything is pretty hard, so that’s a big achievement.  But 50% of China is still a lot of people...

A New Man – The mystery of Homo naledi

Artists reconstruction of Homo naledi from the skeletons found

Last week, University of the Witwatersrand anthropologist Lee Berger announced the discovery of a new species of hominid – Homo naledi.  It followed his remarkable discovery of Australopithecus sediba some years before, but this discovery is widely regarded as still more significant and surprising.

A selection of the remains

Naledi – a star in the Sesotho language – is an extraordinary creature, somehow mixing features of Australopithecus and Homo.  The skull is really small—the brain was about the size of an orange—yet adult individuals were comparatively large at around 5 feet and 100 pounds. The hands share many of the features of our own, yet the fingers curl and the shoulders slope which is more characteristic of the Australopithecines who were probably tree climbers.  The feet are quite similar to ours and the legs are long, suggesting that naledi walked and ran in a similar way to us, and spent much time on the ground.  If you would like to read a much more in depth account, Homo naledi makes the cover of National Geographic next month and you can preview the article HERE.

So then is naledi claimed as the so-called ‘missing link’ between Australopithecus and Homo?  Is South Africa—indeed Johannesburg!—truly the ‘cradle of humankind’?  The answer is no, or at least not yet.  The missing piece of information is age.  So far no one has been able to determine the age of the fossils from the Cave of Stars.  And the age options for naledi are truly fascinating.

Researchers at the Dinaledi cave

If nadeli is more than 3 million years old, then Australopithecus was just a side bar; Homo had evolved from something else already. Naledi would probably be our ancestor. Yet the similarities of certain features to each genus suggest rather an age of between two and two and a half million years and then naledi could indeed be the link between the two genera. And if naledi is younger still—less than a million years, say—then there were at least two very different species of Homo living in Africa at the same time.

The discovery of the fossils was made about two years ago almost by accident at a cave near the Cradle of Humankind some 30 miles north west of Johannesburg.  Two amateur speleologists were exploring a popular cave system and one came upon a hidden tunnel dropping steeply downward. The two of them were looking for something new and exciting, and decided to take on this chimney.  At the bottom they found a treasure trove of fossil hominid remains.

Lee Berger and his new friend

I said the discovery was almost by accident, but Professor Berger had gone to a lot of trouble to get the word out to keep an eye open for interesting fossils in the area, and that made the link.  The two cavers brought him their news and pictures, sparking off the discovery of the largest collection of hominid fossils ever found in Africa. Realizing he had to act quickly, Berger assembled a team of volunteers who were brave enough and slender enough to get into the chamber.  He called them his cave astronauts and all of them are women. Already more than 1500 individual fossils have been collected and come from at least fifteen different individuals of various ages.  Also amazing is that the fossils are almost exclusively human, apart from a few birds and rodent-like creatures.  This is not a cave full of victims of some predator; the bones are unmarked by teeth. And there is no sign of a river washing the fossils into the cave as then there would be an appropriate mix of other materials.  No, these creatures are alone in the dark.  How did that happen?

Watch Lee Burger giving a fascinating summary HERE.

The Dinaledi 'astronauts'

For all the excitement about a new man, the most fascinating part of the whole story is that naledi apparently disposed of its dead; indeed the Dinaledi cave seems to be a graveyard.  Until now there has been no suggestion that any species other than Homo sapiens took pains to remove the bodies of the dead from the natural environment, certainly not by following a difficult route into a hidden chamber to leave them there.  But the scientists have considered every other reasonable possibility and rejected it by careful argument.

“When you have eliminated the impossible,” Sherlock Holmes once observed to Watson, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”  Professor Berger rather charmingly misquoted this at the press announcement as “When you have eliminated all the probable, you are left with the impossible.”  Various people have vehemently agreed with that judgement!  On the one hand, some scientists have rejected his conclusions and insisted that there must be other explanations, while at the other extreme the whole scenario is rejected by creationists with one even describing the discovery as a white racist plot designed to keep black people at a subhuman status. (How this argument could possibly be made is beyond me; indeed the Wits Vice Chancellor, Professor Habib, pointed out at the press announcement that the implications of all humans arising from a common ancestor emphasises our similarities not our differences.)

But in the scientific community there seems to be no disagreement that we have just met an ancient member of our genus, never before even suspected.  And the mystery of when they walked the earth remains.

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.

Michael - Thursday