Tongue and Language The tongue is an important organ in our body, not only as part of the digestive system, it’s also indispensable in the production of speech, the feature that distinguishes human beings from other animals.  This is why tongue is called "lingua" in Latin.  Without the tongue, there are no languages. The ability to speak is absent in animals other than humans. Even the most intelligent primate, chimpanzee, cannot speak and can only learn the sign language. Some birds like parrots and myna can produce short phrases of human speech, but just through mimicry. It can be seen that speaking is a unique ability found in humans only. The speaking apparatus includes the tongue, the mouth, and the vocal cord. The control and coordination of these organs to speak is through regions in our brain called “the language centre”.  Recent studies have found a special gene “FOXP2” in our DNA which determines the development of the language centre in the brain...

Austronesian Tapa Cloth The main difference of Homo sapiens from other animals is the lack of dense hairs on their skin.  So they are also called by another name, “the naked ape”.  Then how do Homo sapiens resist the extreme weather?  In order to have something with which to cover their naked bodies, they took the skins of other animals in the ancient times, and in modern time, cotton cloth is widely used. But before cotton was found, what did our ancestors use to serve this purpose? Tapa cloth is one of the answers. Compared to cotton, tapa doesn’t require weaving, so it is a material much easier and requiring less technique for making cloth. Tapa is the bark stripped mainly from Paper Mulberry ( Broussonetia papyrifera ).  Then through a complicated and time-consuming process, the bark was put in water to soften and then beaten, until only sheets of fibres remain, then the fibre sheets are placed together and glued together layer by layer to make tap...