Commemorating Carl Walker's Birthday. The National Day of Silence.

Approximately one week ago I blogged about how children bullying other children can mutilate a child's spirit which can lead to bullicide (suicide by bully), as it did in Carl Walker's case. Sexual orientation is cited as the second most common reason given for bullying after appearance.

Yesterday, April 17, which would have been Carl Walker's 12th birthday, had he not taken his own life, also marked the National Day of Silence. This day is supposed to "bring attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment in schools. Each year the event has grown, now with hundreds of thousands of students coming together to encourage schools and classmates to address the problem of anti-LGBT behavior."

Essence Magazine interviewed Carl's mother who provided more details of her son's tragic death. Although Carl, only 11-years old, had not declared his sexuality, he was teased for what the other children perceived to be his sexuality.

"He told me that he was being called names and the kids were saying, "You're gay; you act like a girl."

It can't be emphasized enough that 30% of GLBT youth successfully take their own lives, and all of those deaths can be attributed to the acceptance of homophobia throughout all areas of our society. Unfortunately, this includes the child's own family, and friends. Unlike other minorities, who can seek comfort or support within the family, church, or many times, their community, children who are either gay, or perceived to be gay - sometimes before they even know that they are - have no support system whatsoever.

Is it any wonder that the suicide rate is so high within this group of young people?

Homophobia is Killing Our Youth

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Gendered Division of Labor Gave Modern Humans Advantage Over Neanderthals

Diversified social roles for men, women, and children may have given Homo sapiens an advantage over Neanderthals, says a new study in the December 2006 issue of Current Anthropology. The study argues that division of economic labor by sex and age emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history and facilitated the spread of modern humans throughout Eurasia.

"The competitive advantage enjoyed by modern humans came not just from new weapons and devices but from the ways in which their economic lives were organized around the advantages of cooperation and complementary subsistence roles for men, women, and children," write Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner (University of Arizona).

Kuhn and Stiner note that the rich archaeological record for Neanderthal diets provides little direct evidence for a reliance on subsistence foods, such as milling stones to grind nuts and seeds. Instead, Neanderthals depended on large game, a high-stakes resource, to fuel their massive body mass and high caloric intake. This lack of food diversity and the presence of healed fractures on Neanderthal skeletons--attesting to a rough-and-tumble lifestyle--suggest that female and juvenile Neanderthals participated actively in the hunt by serving as game drivers, beating bushes or cutting off escape routes.

The Middle Paleolithic Neanderthal record also lacks the artifacts commonly used to make weather-resistant clothing or artificial shelters, such as bone needles. Thus, it was the emergence of "female" roles -- subsistence and skill-intensive craft -- that allowed H. sapiens in ecologically diverse tropical and sub-tropical regions to take advantage of other foods and live at higher population densities.

"Earlier hominins pursued more narrowly focused economies, with women's activities more closely aligned with those of men with respect to schedule and ranging patterns," write the authors. "It is impossible to argue that [Neanderthal] females and juveniles were fulfilling the same roles--or even an equally diverse suite of economic roles--as females and juveniles in recent hunter-gatherer groups," they add.

While some degree of niche specialization between adult male and females is documented for many large-mammal species, recent humans are remarkable for cooperative economies that combine pervasive sharing and complementary roles for individuals of different ages and sexes.

Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics.

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