Anthropological Field Research on the Giant Lemurs and Associated Fauna of Madagascar

近年来，科学家们的兴趣激增，他们试图了解人类与植物和动物物种之间相互作用的长期影响，这些物种最近才在马达加斯加灭绝。 这涉及到记录随着时间的推移那里的环境变化。 这种变化也反映在岛上不同时间和地点的灵长类动物群落结构的变化上。 随着人类与岛上的动物群和植物群的冲突日益加剧，有关灭绝原因、适当管理生物资源以及保护濒危生命形式的见解的学术研究已经变得突出。 对灭绝过程的研究来自于对过去的分析。 具体来说，人类与动物/植物相互作用的知识的进步可以通过收集过去各种动物出现时间的新日期来实现，通过发现这些消失的动物，特别是巨型狐猴的新的和更有信息的骨骼部分。 这项研究阐明了它们的生活方式，并可能为人类和巨型狐猴之间的当代性提供更好的证据。 这些发现记录了人类对消失的狐猴的捕食。 应该对巨型狐猴灭绝的时间和原因有更多的了解。 通过这个奖项，研究团队希望扩展以前的收藏并制作新的出版物。 马达加斯加灵长类动物灭绝的时间将通过特定地点的植物和动物化石的放射性碳年代来进一步记录。 关于马达加斯加巨型狐猴灭绝的主要原因存在争议：是疾病，环境变化还是人类的手。 该项目建议发现新的日期，以确定马达加斯加的迁徙浪潮的时间长度，并更好地记录环境变化。 马达加斯加岛上已经灭绝的巨大狐猴包括了地球上曾经存在过的人类的大多数真正奇怪的亲戚。 对这些动物的更好的解剖学知识将大大有助于了解我们自己的哺乳动物秩序内潜在的适应范围的极端。 这些化石中有许多是在马达加斯加极其偏远的地区几乎无法进入的洞穴中发现的，这使得该项目对现场设备的需求很大，并需要使用训练有素的洞穴专家。 该项目是塔那那利佛大学新生代研究小组和杜克大学灵长类中心长期研究合作的延续。

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest among scientists attempting to understand the long term effects of interaction between humans and plant and animal species which have only recently become extinct in Madagascar. This involves documenting environmental change there through time. Such change is also reflected by variations in primate community structure in different times and places on that island. As humans and the fauna and flora of this island increasingly come into conflict, scholarship relating to the causes of extinction, the proper husbanding of biological resources, and insights about the protection of endangered life forms have gained prominence. Research on extinction processes comes from analyzing the past. Specifically, advances in knowledge of the human-animal/plant interaction can come about by gathering new dates for times of occurence of various animals in the past by finding new and more informative skeletal parts of these vanished animals, especially giant lemurs. This research elucidates their lifestyles and potentially will provide better dated evidence of contemporaneity between humans and giant lemurs. These findings document human predation on the vanished lemurs. Much light should be shed on the timing and causes of giant lemur extinction. Through this award, the team of researchers expects to extend previous collections and produce new publications. The timing of primate extinctions in Madagascar will be further documented by radiocarbon dates for plant and animal fossils from particular sites. A controversy exists as to the primary cause for giant lemur extinction in Madagascar: whether by disease, environmental change, or human hands. The project proposes to discover new dates that should establish the temporal length of the wave of extinctions in Madagascar and better document environmental change. The giant extinct lemurs of Madagascar include most of the kinds of really bizarre relatives of humans ever to have existed on earth. Better anatomical knowledge of these animals will contribute significantly to understanding the extremes of potential adaptive range within our own Order of mammals. Many of these fossils are found in extremely remote parts of Madagascar in nearly inaccessible caves causing the project to make heavy demands on field equipment and to make use of trained caving experts. The project is a continuation of a long time research cooperation between the Cenozoic Research Group of the University of Antananarivo and the Duke University Primate Center.