Epilogue: Homegrown in PNG — Rural Responses to HIV and AIDS

ABSTRACT A three‐years‐long, multi‐sited, multi‐method study conducted throughout Papua New Guinea by the Institute of Medical Research revealed a staggering prevalence of sexually transmitted disease (STD) that threatens an already fragile political‐economy and health services delivery system. Logistics, methodological complexities, and political and especially religious sensitivities hampered conduct of such research. Extremely little HIV social research has been allowed to inform interventions or serosurveillance protocols. Well‐ intended but ill‐conceived international initiatives have promoted a normative AIDS paradigm that misconstrues HIV transmission risk, incites greater fear, increases stigma, and promotes anti‐condom rhetoric. This collection ‘HIV/AIDS in Rural Papua New Guinea’ presents a sustained series of ethnographically based accounts of rural responses. In this epilogue I situate the importance of those responses in a discussion of the great divide between the lived realities of HIV infection and AIDS related suffering on the one hand, and the discursive practices and policies of media, public health, international donors and NGOs on the other.     

Mass spectrometric U-series dating of Laibin hominid site in Guangxi, southern China

The Laibin hominid represents one of the rare finds of modern Homo sapiens in China, rare for its relative completeness and well-established stratigaphic provenance. This paper presents the results of mass spectrometric U-series dating of intercalated calcite samples from the Laibin site. The capping flowstone and the calcite vein, which sandwich the hominid fossil-containing deposits, date to 38.5 ± 1.0 and 44.0 ± 0.8 ka, setting respectively the minimum and maximum ages to the fossils. The second flowstone layer is 112.0 ± 1.4 ka old, indicating that the cultural sequence may possibly extend to somewhere between 44 and 112 ka. Securely dated Laibin finds should be of importance in reconstructing human physical and cultural evolution in the region.