Islands,the Anthropocene,and Decolonisation

The Anthropocene is deployed as incontrovertible fact, yet its foundations merit strong critique to challenge how particular voices and locations are absented, silenced, or enrolled in the fallacies that attend this epochal framework. Other placed, grounded, and scale-sensitive explanations exist for present and future state scenarios, including on islands—often the focus of apocalyptic thinking. Dealing with historical and contemporary struggles to decolonise is more powerful than engaging with a reified framework that is part of ongoing colonial-imperial excesses, uneven development, and racial capitalism. This work considers how four of us, as instigating authors, worked with five others, as collaborating authors, to understand academic works, activism, and artistic expressions of island life and concerns. Our aim was to learn about how and why their efforts to prioritise decolonisation is at the heart of what is needed to shore up island peoples’ futures.     

The fourth molar in a mandible found in a Jomon skeleton in Japan

A fourth molar in a mandible occurs very rarely, even in clinical surveys involving a large number of modern people. Having encountered a case with the fourth mandibular molar in a prehistoric skull in Japan, we would like to report on the macroscopic morphology of the case using X-rays, and to discuss the case with reference to literature concerning supernumerary teeth in the molar region.