The relationship between pastoralists, their livestock, wildlife and the rangelands of East Africa is multi-directional, complex and long-standing. The tumultuous events of the past century, however, have rewritten the nature of this relationship, reshaping the landscapes that were created, and relied upon, by both pastoralists and wildlife. Presently, much of the interaction between wildlife a...

This article explores the implications for human health of local interactions between disease, ecosystems and livelihoods. Five interdisciplinary case studies addressed zoonotic diseases in African settings: Rift Valley fever (RVF) in Kenya, human African trypanosomiasis in Zambia and Zimbabwe, Lassa fever in Sierra Leone and henipaviruses in Ghana. Each explored how ecological changes and huma...

The paper deals with the issue of responsible and sustainable tourism starting from a series Italian (and only partially French) cases ecomuseums pastoralism transhumance as potential drivers for development territorial regeneration, well promotion experiential low environmental impact, capable triggering participatory processes inclusion social innovation. Through analysis two regions (Piedmon...

Temporal and geographic variability in adult body size can be a useful indicator of a population's adaptation. The southern African Cape supported foraging populations exclusively until some pastoralism is seen, ca. 2000 BP. This paper describes and interprets body-size patterns among foragers, as deduced from maximum femoral lengths and femoral head diameters, using 127 individually dated adul...

BACKGROUND Genetic variation at NAT2 has been long recognized as the cause of differential ability to metabolize a wide variety of drugs of therapeutic use. Here, we explore the pattern of genetic variation in 12 human populations that significantly extend the geographic range and resolution of previous surveys, to test the hypothesis that different dietary regimens and lifestyles may explain i...

Understanding spatio-temporal resource preferences is paramount in the design of policies for sustainable development. Unfortunately, resource preferences are often unknown to policy-makers and have to be inferred from data. In this paper we consider the problem of inferring agents’ preferences from observed movement trajectories, and formulate it as an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) prob...

The nomadism/pastoralism debate has always been closely connected to discourses about modernization theories whenever development issues were at stake. While the mainstream debates have changed since stage models apparently became outdated, it is surprising that the Chinese development model seems to adhere to classical modernization theory. Consequently, it appears worthwhile to consider prese...