In Rapa Nui aka Easter Island, archaeologists have uncovered the buried torsos of the ancient stone 'moai', revealing carvings (petroglyphs) representing Polynesian canoes:
It's theorised that the moai were funerary headstones for members of different tribes on the island, as there are human remains found around these statues.
A study published a few days ago* reports large-scale illegal fishing in North Korean waters by Chinese ships that harvested more than 160,000 tons of Pacific flying squid in 2017 and 2018.
According to the article, squid hauls have dropped since 2003 in South Korea and Japan, and 'unable to compete with the more technologically advanced Chinese vessels, which use powerful lights and other technologies to maximize the size of their catch, some North Koreans have resorted to fishing illegally in faraway Russian waters.' International cooperation in managing fish stocks is breaking down.
This reminds us of comments made on Youtube five months ago by a South African-born businessman and vlogger who has worked and lived in China for years. 'Serpentza' (Winston Sterzel) says (starting 6:56 in the video below):
"China has completely outfished the waters off the coast of China and so their fishing trawlers must seek alternatives and the alternatives are: the rest of the entire world. "Clandestine Chinese fishing has decimated the fish stocks off the coast of South Africa, my country, and most of the African coast, where corrupt leaders are easily bribed to turn a blind eye while local fishermen and communities suffer greatly [...] "There is no catch-and-release or sustainable fishing in the modern Chinese mentality. As a nation who recently experienced devastating famine, it's a 'take now before it's all gone' mentality."
He also talks about Chinese economic activity that damages the environment, wildlife (e.g. by unrestricted hunting in Africa*) and people's health, while Chinese officialdom has great difficulty in enforcing laws that could prevent this.
A couple of months later he was on Instagram, reporting : "Chinese fishing ships off the coast of South Africa are illegally stripping the ocean of fish at an alarming rate yet nothing is being done, many people speculate that the South African government has been paid to turn a blind eye the same as what happened in Namibia":
A report last month on Maritime Executive says that China plans two closed seasons on squid fishing in the Pacific and Atlantic, to help stocks recover:
"The closed seasons cover what are believed to be the main spawning grounds of the Humboldt squid, in waters to the west of Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, from July to September, and of the Argentine shortfin squid, off Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, from September to November."
We shall see whether this is enforceable, and what other measures need to be and will be taken. The magazine also links to a site called 'China Dialogue Ocean', saying 'China Dialogue Ocean (https://chinadialogueocean.net) is dedicated to illuminating, analyzing and helping to resolve our ocean crisis.' We hope this is more than merely PR in these difficult times for international diplomacy.
_______________________________________________________________________________
*Not to mention the involvement of China (among other nations) in the illegal wildlife trade in the Amazon: https://news.mongabay.com/2020/07/brazilian-amazon-drained-of-millions-of-wild-animals-by-criminal-networks-report/
Recent archaeological discoveries in Mexico and Brazil put the arrival of humans there back to 20,000 - 30,000 years ago, when the land corridor through what is now Alaska/Canada was blocked by ice https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02137-3 :
In a book published last year, British writer on ancient mysteries Graham Hancock theorises that the history goes back much further, by around another 100,000 years:
Perhaps Thor Heyerdahl was on the right track when he built Ra and Ra II to show that a papyrus boat could sail from Africa to the Americas - though why not a Polynesian type outrigger?
'New evidence gleaned from the study of a common plant species lends further credence to the theory that Taiwan is the ancestral homeland of the Austronesian-speaking peoples,' says this 2015 article in Taiwan Today reporting on research that links Taiwan to a tree now found across the Pacific, the paper mulberry, used to make tapa cloth.
So on their skilled and dangerous voyages across the ocean, the Austronesian migrants must have taken not just food, tools and domestic animals but seeds and cuttings of the precious tree.
The evidence is the fossilised remains of a butchered rhinoceros, though no humanoid skeleton has yet been found there.
"So who were these ancient people? They couldn’t have been our own species, Homo sapiens, which evolved in Africa hundreds of thousands of years later. The most likely bet is H. erectus, an archaic human species that first evolved nearly 2 million years ago and may have been the first member of our genus to expand out of Africa. [...] "Like most researchers, Antón isn’t convinced that ancient humans were deliberately crossing Southeast Asian seas so long ago. More likely, they were carried to distant islands by tsunami waves, or arrived there via floating islands of land and debris detached during typhoons."
"See the history of Māori arrivals from 1200, European arrivals from 1642 and the signing of He Whakaputanga from 1835 to 1839.
This animation is from the map table at the He Tohu exhibition.
The map table is a 3D canvas that stories are projected onto from above. Find out more at https://natlib.govt.nz/he-tohu
He Tohu is presented by Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga and the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, both of which are part of the Department of Internal Affairs."
This photograph appeared on the Facebook page 'Philippine and world's indigenous tribes news and history' (20 March 2016) and at first glance the hunters celebrating behind the surprised and disappointed head might seem to be fist-bumping; instead it looks as though they are sharing something, or disguising their faces.
The accompanying text reads:
"HEADHUNTERS OF TAIWAN Between 1903 and 1908 there were seventy advancements made to the guard lines by the Japanese, but indigenous men in search of heads often came over or under the barrier at nightfall to lay waiting in ambush for unsuspecting victims. Headhunting, the primary ritual component of the Atayal, Paiwan, Saiset, and other groups, not only served to maintain the prosperity of society by ensuring agricultural and community fertility through the propitiation of the deities and ancestors, it also ensured that a man would meet with success in finding a wife while at the same time guaranteeing his safe passage to the afterlife. Thus, the custom was considered indispensable to life and existence itself. Among the Atayal, success met on the headhunt was deliberately marked upon the chins of warriors with tattoos. And those headhunters who acquired more than five heads using old weapons, like a curved machete-like knife, might also have their chests tattooed or the backs of their hands. Among the Paiwan, it was believed that the spirits of ancestors dwelled in these beheading knives, which were held in the possession of the tribe for several generations. However, the Paiwan were not necessarily tattooed after having taken a head; instead, the successful warrior was also denoted by the wearing of a certain kind of cap which was made by women of the tribe. More generally, tattooing could also be administered to the foreheads of unmarried Atayal boys and girls in their teens. Apart from the tattooed foreheads of women, only those who were skillful in weaving could tattoo their cheeks and other parts of their bodies. Besides the beautiful cloths they wove on the loom, Atayal women also manufactured net bags that headhunting husbands used to carry severed human heads. Next to his beheading knife, these bags were his most treasured possession. It is not surprising, then, that the Atayal believed that only those women who were proficient in weaving (hence tattooed), and those men who were successful headhunters (also tattooed) could pass safely into the afterlife."
- but is taken from a longer - and interesting - post here that does not include the image above:
The eastward migration - taking place around the year 500, it is thought - is a mystery:
'One can only assume that the island of Madagascar played an important role in trade, particularly that of spice trade (especially the cinnamon) and timber between Southeast Asia and Middle East, directly or through the African coast and Madagascar.'
'The German explorer and ethnologist Karl von den Steinen, who visited the isles in 1891, listed over one-hundred and seventy individually named tattooing motifs which is remarkable since the tradition was "banned" by French officials approximately fifty years before that time.'
- http://www.vanishingtattoo.com/tattoo_museum/marquesas_tattoos.html
'After a detailed DNA analysis of the genomes of more than 800 Polynesians and Native Americans, both modern and prehistoric, researchers have found evidence of contact between the two groups as far back as 1200 CE...
"Our analyses suggest strongly that a single contact event occurred in eastern Polynesia, before the settlement of Rapa Nui, between Polynesian individuals and a Native American group most closely related to the indigenous inhabitants of present-day Colombia," the researchers explain in their paper.
