This series looks to be truly inspiring.
Mega-Kudos to you!!

I don’t know about that, Jason… Besides, why would you have to choose between the two? Just wear very loose, white clothes, and stick to the shade. That’ll protect you from the sun, and you’ll hardly feel more hot than if you stripped down.

One more thing about language, though. I’ve read that people who grow up isolated cannot develop language, taht there’s a certain cut off point after which the neurological capacity for it is no longer there. How does this fit in with this understanding of language? I imagine they do produce sounds, and the sounda are probably based off of ambient noise in their environment, but I don’t know. This did seem to give credence to the idea that language is an imposition, rather than something that occurs ‘naturally,’ for lack of a better word. Any ideas?

In all instances of which I am aware (no small few), the capacity for verbal (and non-verbal) communication still exists. However, that does [b]not[/b] mean that the verbal communication used has any kind of resemblance to established human languages. Even [b]more[/b] importantly, children whose development has been seriously retarded (ie spending the first 5 years of their life in a closet with little human contact) generally suffer from poor communication skills, not due to lack of “language”, but lack of mental and emotional experience that allows them to understand the meaning [b]behind[/b] language.

Ha! Start encouraging pale-skinned tourists to strip off like the Aborigines do, and you’re going to end up with some VERY badly sunburned tourists - who’ll possibly develop skin cancer later on as the Australian sun has more intensity than the sun elsewhere.

This is a bad example, because the Aborigines are actually better adapted to this particular environment and thus can strip off but not burn, whereas tourists are generally not.

Someone I met at a doctor’s ofice asked about this, and we began talking, and he gave another example of environmental mimicry: he read about some family bird that produced the sounds of a car alarm. It was a humorous human interest piece, I think, but the point was, the bird relied on its surroundings to guide it as to the sounds it produced.

One more thing about language, though. I’ve read that people who grow up isolated cannot develop language, taht there’s a certain cut off point after which the neurological capacity for it is no longer there. How does this fit in with this understanding of language? I imagine they do produce sounds, and the sounda are probably based off of ambient noise in their environment, but I don’t know. This did seem to give credence to the idea that language is an imposition, rather than something that occurs ‘naturally,’ for lack of a better word. Any ideas?