The Little Prince Only Had Three
September 24, 2015 4:34 PM Subscribe
Baobab Trees I was not aware that baobab trees grew anyplace but Africa, so it blew my mind to find out that they also live in India and Australia.
They were likly introduced by Africans in both cases.
My understanding is that the Baobabs in Australia (called Boabs locally) arrived in the form of waterborne seeds some time ago.
There's even been some mapping of Boab genetics with language groups, and the hypothesis is that the boabs were spread by the local Aboriginal people in North West Australia.
posted by claudius at 4:51 PM on September 24, 2015 [5 favorites]
There's even been some mapping of Boab genetics with language groups, and the hypothesis is that the boabs were spread by the local Aboriginal people in North West Australia.
posted by claudius at 4:51 PM on September 24, 2015 [5 favorites]
Yep, neither of the two articles suggest any contact between Australia and Africa.
posted by wilful at 4:59 PM on September 24, 2015
posted by wilful at 4:59 PM on September 24, 2015
and in Florida.
posted by shockingbluamp at 5:19 PM on September 24, 2015
posted by shockingbluamp at 5:19 PM on September 24, 2015
There are some boab/baobab trees near me, and I often see their pods on the ground nearby. They're about half the size of my fist and seem to be open by the time they fall. How do you eat them? Is there any point trying?
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:21 PM on September 24, 2015
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:21 PM on September 24, 2015
I always though they were introduced too. But that was probably just me misremembering the story of the ones in Brisbane's Anzac Square (which were planted to commemorate the Qld Light Horse's participation in the Boer War).
Learn something new every day…
posted by Pinback at 5:21 PM on September 24, 2015
Learn something new every day…
posted by Pinback at 5:21 PM on September 24, 2015
I was going to make a comment about B-612, but then I saw the title of this post. Well played.
posted by Ruki at 5:25 PM on September 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Ruki at 5:25 PM on September 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
Apparently it's the white powder in the seed pod that is food? Going by wikipedia.
posted by geek anachronism at 6:14 PM on September 24, 2015
posted by geek anachronism at 6:14 PM on September 24, 2015
Certainly introduced, but also growing: the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus has one.
posted by deadbilly at 6:38 PM on September 24, 2015
posted by deadbilly at 6:38 PM on September 24, 2015
The excellent Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze seems to have themed each of its "worlds" around a real-world continent or region (At least Europe, Africa, Austral-Oceania and Antartica are referenced, and I assume Asia, North and South America are just harder to definitively pin down here) but the first level in the Africa world is all about Baobabs, and is awesome, and now that's what I think about with Baobabs.
posted by Navelgazer at 6:45 PM on September 24, 2015
posted by Navelgazer at 6:45 PM on September 24, 2015
"Yep, neither of the two articles suggest any contact between Australia and Africa."
Would not all places inhabited by humans have some contact with Africa in the past?
posted by flaterik at 9:00 PM on September 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
Would not all places inhabited by humans have some contact with Africa in the past?
posted by flaterik at 9:00 PM on September 24, 2015 [3 favorites]
I think it's stretching the meaning of the word "Africans" a bit far to use it to refer to all humans ever.
posted by claudius at 9:50 PM on September 24, 2015
posted by claudius at 9:50 PM on September 24, 2015
All of the 'modern' humans originally came from Africa. That includes everyone. Baobabs need a certain climate. They do poorly outside their 'comfort zone'
The powdery stuff inside the pod,and he seeds are both edible.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 9:50 PM on September 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
The powdery stuff inside the pod,and he seeds are both edible.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 9:50 PM on September 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
This confirmed our hunch that the baobabs had not been in the Indian subcontinent long enough for the populations to diversify, and that their dispersal by ocean currents was less likely than introduction by humans.
It seems more likely that it was the humans who were dispersed by ocean currents.
It would be quite impossible from a practical standpoint for any African people to introduce the trees.
Modern stories of shipwrecked sailors traveling thousands of miles are not uncommon. Isn't the safe bet that some Africans went fishing in the morning, the weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed, and eventually the ship set ground on the shore of some uncharted desert isle?
Of course the seeds could have washed ashore later, but that was not until season 3.
posted by three blind mice at 12:19 AM on September 25, 2015
It seems more likely that it was the humans who were dispersed by ocean currents.
It would be quite impossible from a practical standpoint for any African people to introduce the trees.
Modern stories of shipwrecked sailors traveling thousands of miles are not uncommon. Isn't the safe bet that some Africans went fishing in the morning, the weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed, and eventually the ship set ground on the shore of some uncharted desert isle?
Of course the seeds could have washed ashore later, but that was not until season 3.
posted by three blind mice at 12:19 AM on September 25, 2015
One of my relatives carved his name into a boab tree in Western Australia when he was gadding about in the Kimberley in the 1890's wearing nothing but a gun belt. The inscription on the tree and some low walls are all that remains of his attempts to build a sheep station at the mouth of the Regent river with a view of Mount Trafalgar. If he had had his way the Prince Regent River National Park would be a bustling city, rather than a (virtually) untouched area of wilderness.
The project didn't work out, not least because sheep don't thrive in tropical areas where the grass is 7 feet tall, and he moved to Melbourne at the other end of the country where he worked as a librarian. While he was there he wrote up his adventures in the north for a newspaper as a series of 24 articles entitled 'Pioneering in Northern Australia'. His writing conveys the experience pretty well, including the depredations suffered by a red haired Scotsman due to the heat, sunshine and insects of the tropical north. He also mentions the hostile relationship between the local Wororra warriors and the settlers, which was fairly controversial at the time.
The articles have recently been compiled in a book entitled 'Under a Regent Moon' which is well worth a look. Ironically, his literary contribution to Australian culture was completely eclipsed by his wife's, whom he met while working in the library in Prahran. She was clearly enamored of his tales of the north and they swiftly relocated to the Northern Territory where he had accepted a position as a manager of a cattle station. Within 18 months he was dead from malarial dysentery and Jeannie Gunn returned to Melbourne where she wrote of her experiences at Mataranka in the books 'Little Black Princess: a True Tale of life in the Never-Never Land' and 'We of the Never Never'.
posted by asok at 3:39 AM on September 25, 2015 [5 favorites]
The project didn't work out, not least because sheep don't thrive in tropical areas where the grass is 7 feet tall, and he moved to Melbourne at the other end of the country where he worked as a librarian. While he was there he wrote up his adventures in the north for a newspaper as a series of 24 articles entitled 'Pioneering in Northern Australia'. His writing conveys the experience pretty well, including the depredations suffered by a red haired Scotsman due to the heat, sunshine and insects of the tropical north. He also mentions the hostile relationship between the local Wororra warriors and the settlers, which was fairly controversial at the time.
The articles have recently been compiled in a book entitled 'Under a Regent Moon' which is well worth a look. Ironically, his literary contribution to Australian culture was completely eclipsed by his wife's, whom he met while working in the library in Prahran. She was clearly enamored of his tales of the north and they swiftly relocated to the Northern Territory where he had accepted a position as a manager of a cattle station. Within 18 months he was dead from malarial dysentery and Jeannie Gunn returned to Melbourne where she wrote of her experiences at Mataranka in the books 'Little Black Princess: a True Tale of life in the Never-Never Land' and 'We of the Never Never'.
posted by asok at 3:39 AM on September 25, 2015 [5 favorites]
A bit more on Under a Regent Moon from The Australian:
...Aeneas Gunn, a young man “of the best class of bohemian”, plunged deep in literature, restless and wide-eyed. The cruise from Cape Londonderry past “huge scowling cliffs and bluffs of sandstone, faces scarred, gashed and wrinkled by the eternal onslaught of the elements”, had made a strong impact on him, but it was nothing compared with what he found at the settlement, on a promontory Bradshaw had christened with a version of his wife’s maiden name, Marigui. The country became the raw material for a minor masterpiece.
Gunn is the baroque prose fabulist of the Austral tropics, a love-child of some ungodly union between William Beckford and Edgar Allan Poe. His recollections of his Kimberley sojourn, first printed in the Prahran Telegraph, are now collected in a slender volume, Under a Regent Moon. The stories build into a sustained flight of prose poetry, both precise and exorbitant, both cold-eyed and hysterical. There are passages on Wagner’s music, on near-nervous breakdowns in the mangroves, on the temptations of idleness, on the bush, above all, and Marigui’s wilderness surrounds.
The coast from north-east to north-west was like a ragged edge to the silky skirt of the mobile sea. Promontories and peninsulas tore it with great gashes, and rounded headlands were scalloped out of its smooth folds. Hundreds of islands lay like dark holes in it. Away out towards the horizon, behind which ships sink down and continents lie hidden, grey curtains of rain draped it with a fringe.
This is the writing of a man who has experienced a build-up season in the north Kimberley: that landscape marked Gunn for the remainder of his brief life.
posted by asok at 4:43 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
...Aeneas Gunn, a young man “of the best class of bohemian”, plunged deep in literature, restless and wide-eyed. The cruise from Cape Londonderry past “huge scowling cliffs and bluffs of sandstone, faces scarred, gashed and wrinkled by the eternal onslaught of the elements”, had made a strong impact on him, but it was nothing compared with what he found at the settlement, on a promontory Bradshaw had christened with a version of his wife’s maiden name, Marigui. The country became the raw material for a minor masterpiece.
Gunn is the baroque prose fabulist of the Austral tropics, a love-child of some ungodly union between William Beckford and Edgar Allan Poe. His recollections of his Kimberley sojourn, first printed in the Prahran Telegraph, are now collected in a slender volume, Under a Regent Moon. The stories build into a sustained flight of prose poetry, both precise and exorbitant, both cold-eyed and hysterical. There are passages on Wagner’s music, on near-nervous breakdowns in the mangroves, on the temptations of idleness, on the bush, above all, and Marigui’s wilderness surrounds.
The coast from north-east to north-west was like a ragged edge to the silky skirt of the mobile sea. Promontories and peninsulas tore it with great gashes, and rounded headlands were scalloped out of its smooth folds. Hundreds of islands lay like dark holes in it. Away out towards the horizon, behind which ships sink down and continents lie hidden, grey curtains of rain draped it with a fringe.
This is the writing of a man who has experienced a build-up season in the north Kimberley: that landscape marked Gunn for the remainder of his brief life.
posted by asok at 4:43 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
Actually the Boab trees in Australia predate any settlement from anyone but the native aboriginal people. It would be quite impossible from a practical standpoint for any African people to introduce the trees.
The people who settled Madagascar in the vicinity of two thousand years ago were an Austronesian people. As in, the same group of people who also went east and settled Polynesia, including Hawaii and Easter Island, and south to Aotearoa/New Zealand.
So whether it's true or not that baobabs were brought to Australia by humans, it's far from a practical impossibility that people who were born and lived in Africa brought them.
posted by XMLicious at 5:14 AM on September 25, 2015
Baobabs of Mumbai is a surprisingly busy Facebook group dedicated to... well... talking about baobabs in India.
posted by whitewall at 5:16 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by whitewall at 5:16 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
« Older A is for Autumn. | Ten million viewers were glued to it: Andrew... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Actually the Boab trees in Australia predate any settlement from anyone but the native aboriginal people. It would be quite impossible from a practical standpoint for any African people to introduce the trees.
posted by Talez at 4:50 PM on September 24, 2015 [1 favorite]