No description available.

East Africa is central to many aspects of human evolution and diversification. At the same time, diet is a key aspect of the ecology of any population. Therefore, one is often interested in the diets of past populations. To assess human diet in the past, stable isotope ratio and dental microwear analyses are often perceived as the only semi-quantitative and objective techniques. However, there are still many unknowns on how isotopic and microwear signals change in response to dietary variation, because few controlled studies have been carried out in modern populations. To investigate this issue, this study targeted living humans from African ethnic groups (El Molo, Turkana, Luhya, and Luo, from Kenya, and Baka, from Cameroon) that practise a wide range of traditional subsistence strategies (pastoralism, fishing, and agriculture), with the objective of building a framework in which to consider past diet in an East African context. This study analysed human hair (n = 143), nail (n = 83), and breath (n = 186) for δ$^{13}$C and δ$^{15}$N from the six different communities, and dental moulds (n = 150) from five of those communities (no moulds were collected from the Baka), and related the findings to dietary information. Dental microwear analyses had a low success rate because microwear features were obscured by the biofilm produced by mouth bacteria. Nevertheless, a visual analysis of the results suggested that the El Molo have the hardest and the toughest diet among all the groups studied, possibly through the inclusion of abrasives in the diet during food processing. In turn, the isotopic analyses revealed the ways in which agriculturalists and hunter gatherers differ from pastoralists and fishers in their isotopic values, although the variation in δ$^{13}$C and δ$^{15}$N did not distinguish between pastoralists and fishers. The results emphasise recent changes in the diet of these groups, the importance of local factors in isotope values, and the variable sensitivity of isotopes to dietary practices. In conclusion, although each technique could provide complementary data that would contribute to a more inclusive view of diet, dental microwear analyses are not easily applied to modern human groups, due to the difficulty in acquiring comparative in vivo data, and in distinguishing between patterns caused by food items, or food processing techniques.

No description available.

in English Mt. Cameroon is a hotspot of diversity and endemism in Africa. Recent research of avian bird communities along the elevational gradient on Mt. Cameroon based on point counts has shown low-elevation plateau of species richness. At the same time, range-restricted montane populations of birds on Mt. Cameroon are unusually abundant if compared to lowland species. I analysed data on community composition, species richness and abundance of birds using an alternative quantitative method - 200 m of understory mist nets erected for three consecutive days across seven elevational plots along the forested gradient of the Mt. Cameroon. First, I looked at the technical limits of this method and confirmed the general opinion that they are better at detecting small birds below 33 g, and that they mostly detected fewer individuals after the first day and always detected fewer new species after the first day of mist-netting. Mist nets detected high proportions of ground-feeding and understory birds and low proportions of birds foraging in higher strata in the lowland forest, which has a scarce understory and a dense canopy. Mist nets recorded similar proportions of birds foraging in all forest strata in the vastly open mid-elevation forest, which has a dense herbaceous understory. They detected higher...

Les espaces ruraux d’Afrique noire sont utilisés par la géographie scolaire pour démontrer la misère et le malheur ou encore pour illustrer la diversité des paysages ruraux dans le monde et la dichotomie Nord-Sud. Notre réflexion s’inscrit dans une perspective postcoloniale puisqu’il s’agit de traquer les représentations encore ancrées dans la mythologie coloniale et de comprendre leur mécanisme d’inertie. L’étude des manuels scolaires de géographie doit permettre de faire ressurgir les représentations exotico-coloniales des espaces ruraux d’Afrique noire et de les analyser, parce qu’ils sont les témoins d’une mémoire collective et des représentations partagées. Leur impact sur les élèves et les enseignants est non négligeable. Ces trois acteurs, qui composent la classe, forment une communauté représentationnelle et discursive. Les mécanismes de construction du savoir, l’importance des représentations dans les processus didactiques nous permettent de comprendre comment se construisent le regard et le discours sur un territoire, même lointain, comme celui de l’Afrique noire. Ce regard et ce discours participent alors à l’élaboration de l’espace symbolique. Ce concept peut être défini comme une superstructure à travers laquelle les individus et les sociétés élaborent leur rapport au monde soit leur géographicité et produisent du territoire, de l’identité et de l’altérité. Il permet à partir des représentations, d’observer leurs impacts sur les territoires donc d’étudier les dimensions idéelles et matérielles, in fine d’appréhender l’Afrique noire dans la complexité et le mouvement. / The rural areas of Tropical Africa are used by the geography applied at school to show misery and misfortune or to illustrate the diversity of the rural landscapes in the world and the dichotomy between North and South. Our thought falls under a postcolonial approach since it is a question of tracking the representations still anchored in colonial mythology and understanding their mechanism of inertia. The study of the school geography textbooks will enable us to enlighten the presence of exotico-colonial representations of the rural areas of Tropical Africa so that we can analyze them. The geography textbooks are the witnesses of a collective memory and shared representations. Their impact on the pupils and the teachers is considerable. These three actors, who make the class, form a representational and discursive community. The way knowledge is built, together with the importance of representations in the didactic process, will lead us to establish how the vision and the way one talks about a territory - even as far from us as Tropical Africa - are shaped. This vision and the way one talks about a territory is part of the development of space symbolic system. This concept can be defined like a superstructure through which the individuals and the societies develop their connections to the world, that is to say their geographicity, thus creating their own notions of territory, identity and otherness. Starting from representations, this concept allows us to observe the impact on the territories and to study their phenomenological and material dimensions, in fine to apprehend the Tropical Africa, its complexity and its movement.

Angola is a tropical country with many biogeographical units and, therefore, has a high floristic diversity. Although an increasing number of floristic studies has been carried out in Angola in recent years, the country is still considered to be underinvestigated as many species being collected were previously unknown there. Several scientific groups working in different parts of Angola contributed to this paper their data from biodiversity assessments. With this we can add 67 species newly recorded for Angola, including two new generic records and five alien species, to the almost 7,300 vascular plant taxa known so far for Angola. Most of the new records for Angola are also present in different neighbouring countries, but they are little known, and their IUCN threat status has not been assessed yet. However, ongoing fieldwork and exploration are needed to complete the floristic knowledge of the understudied country.