NEWS: EARTHQUAKE WARNING - WESTERN PACIFIC REGION

A large earthquake deep below the Earth's surface will result in a cluster of quakes in the Pacific region, warns 'Dutchinse' (Michael Janitch) - see video below.

This may possibly be related to a recent solar storm, which some theorise interacts with the Earth's magnetic field to deliver a jolt to the iron core of the planet and translates into movements in the crust.
https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2020/07/do-solar-storms-cause-earthquakes.html

MADAGASCAR: Ancient site threatened by climate change

The Conversation reports the threat to African heritage sites posed by climate change:
https://theconversation.com/these-african-world-heritage-sites-are-under-threat-from-climate-change-144140

'Villages and towns associated with the historic Swahili Indian Ocean trading networks are all forecast to suffer significant loss from sea-level rise and coastal erosion in the coming decades...

'A host of unique heritage locations are built on coral, sand or mud – all at elevations less than 10 metres above sea level.'

Among these sites is Mahilaka, the first major urban center and trading port in Madagascar, which was settled by Austronesians in the first millennium CE. Mahilaka is on the northwest coast. Archaelogical evidence is in the form of human artefacts, but also crop species not native to Africa, and maybe even linguistic traces in the Bantu language. There are indications that the neighbouring Comoros islands may have shared some of this Pacific (among others) immigration history.
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/24/6635

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Overview-of-the-inferred-history-of-Madagascar-Descriptions-and-dates-are-given-in-A-D_fig6_318500759

AUSTRALIA: Ancient aboriginal land management

Civilised people (i.e. from the culture of towns and cities) came to Australia, America etc and saw wilderness. They didn't see a managed environment; but it was there.

One aspect of aboriginal land management was and is 'cool burning' - the periodic deliberate starting of grass fires to clear away flammable debris and so prevent the kind of mega-blazes we saw recently in Australia, which killed perhaps 3 billion animals.



This has also been an ancient practice among Native Americans:



Similarly, in both countries there are sacred areas, some of which would seem to the ignorant eye to be simply wild places, missing the point that they are carefully kept that way:

https://theculturetrip.com/pacific/australia/articles/the-11-most-sacred-places-in-indigenous-australian-folklore/

https://www.indian-affairs.org/sacred-sites.html

There is the archaeology of relics, but there is also the archaeology of the human mind and its cultures. How old, for example, are the stories of the Dream Time?

As Yeats said:

'I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.'

Having said that, an archaeological dig in the Torres Strait has recently found concrete evidence of cultivation of bananas 2,000 years ago:

'Lead researcher Robert Williams said... the Torres Strait had been historically viewed as a "separating line" between Indigenous groups in New Guinea - now part of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea - who practiced agriculture, and those in Australia who were labelled "hunter gatherers".

'But the findings show that the strait was "more of a bridge or a filter" for horticultural practices across both regions.'

ORIGINS: Another unknown ancestor in the human bloodline?

New human genetic research has found traces of a mystery hominin that mated with homo sapiens in Africa a million years ago, long before the first wave of our species left for Europe.
https://www.livescience.com/mystery-ancestor-mated-with-humans.html

It's also thought that our ancestors mated with Neanderthals before that first wave of emigrants, which then either died out or returned to Africa; then some of the second wave (c. 50,000 years ago) also mingled with Neanderthals; and later, in Southeast Asia, also mated with 'Denisovans' and another unknown species, possibly more.

'History is made in bed,' as they say.

See also:

https://www.voanews.com/science-health/new-study-shows-human-ancestors-had-complicated-love-life

JAPAN: Remembering Hiroshima

A version of the post below is also published today on The Conservative Woman:
https://conservativewoman.co.uk/8-14am-august-16-1945-the-bomb-that-changed-the-world/
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Father John A. Simes was starting his day at Hiroshima when it happened, at about quarter past eight on 6 August 1945 http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Hiroshima/Hiroshima_Siemes.shtml . He was up in the hills with the Jesuit Mission that had relocated there after the gigantic fire-bombing of Tokyo in March by hundreds of American planes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo#Operation_Meetinghouse . This time, incredibly, to inflict similar damage only needed a single bomb, a weapon so different that it took Father Simes some time to piece together what had happened. Conventional air raids in World War Two – yet how is napalming civilians conventional? – claimed perhaps twice as many lives in Japan as Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s victims combined; but ever since that day 75 years ago, warfare’s potential has been on a new, even ghastlier level.

The British people’s reaction to the radio news, first relayed on the Home Service at 6 p.m., was not unmixed rejoicing, according to sources quoted by David Kynaston in his ‘Austerity Britain’ (pp. 82-86). https://www.amazon.co.uk/Austerity-Britain-1945-1951-Tales-Jerusalem/dp/0747599238 The nine o’clock edition gave more details of the Bomb and its effects – still hard to discern through the ‘pall of smoke and dust’ - on what had been a Japanese ‘army base’ at six but three hours later was ‘a city of once over 300,000 inhabitants.’ There was ‘elation’ at the prospect of peace, but ‘terror’ at the scale of destruction; the novelist Ursula Bloom and her husband were speechless with horror; the Dean of Oriel College abandoned any belief in a Just War; J R R Tolkien wrote to his son deploring ‘the utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes; calmly plotting the destruction of the world’, especially while mankind’s ‘moral and intellectual status is declining.’ A London schoolteacher noted the hypocrisy of cheering the ‘Atomic bomb’ yet hating the Germans for their air raids on us; a housewife in Cumbria worried whether Japan had the Bomb, too, and was merely biding its time; a Scots engineer wrote in his diary, ‘There is no hope in man… The end is near – perhaps some years only.’

Out East, the morale of the ‘Forgotten Army’ had been low: they had learned of Victory in Europe, but had been expecting perhaps another ten years of fighting the Japanese to the last ditch. Instead, to their great relief, the conflict was to end in a few days. What, however, did they make of the Bomb?

There are three books that taken together serve as a trilogy describing the war in Burma at first hand and at every level. The first, ‘Defeat Into Victory’ (1956) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Defeat-into-Victory-William-Slim/dp/0330509977 , is by the Fourteenth Army’s commander, Lieutenant General (later Field Marshal and Viscount) William ‘Bill’ Slim. In the final chapter ‘Afterthoughts’ he saw that future armies, facing enemies in possession of battlefield nuclear weapons that could wipe out whole units at a stroke, would have to fight in a dispersed, semi-autonomous fashion in order to complete their campaigns.

The second, John Masters’ ‘The Road Past Mandalay’ (1961) https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-road-past-mandalay/author/masters-john/ , is by one of Slim’s military planners who for a time took command of a Gurkha Brigade dropped behind the Japanese lines, initiating a ferocious battle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masters#Life and ultimately forced to retreat. When he returned to HQ he resumed the heavy burden of intricate planning and towards the conclusion of the Burmese campaign became so exhausted that he was in danger of making fatal errors. Granted leave, he set off to walk the Himalayas with his new wife. Near the end, they came to the Rest House in Joshimath where the resident priest remarked that he was glad the fighting was over. This made no sense until His Holiness showed him a newspaper over two weeks old, with the splash headline ‘ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN.’ The couple had started on their mountain journey, cut off from communication with the outside world, on the morning of 6 August.

‘I believed with instant conviction that there could be no more war. No more tactics, no more strategy, only total destruction – or peace. The training and experience of a lifetime had vanished into the thin Himalayan air, and I was happy.

‘I took my wife in my arms and kissed her. His Holiness said, in Hindi, ‘May God bless you, in peace.’

1992 saw the appearance of ‘Quartered Safe Out Here’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quartered-Safe-George-MacDonald-Fraser/dp/0007105932 , George MacDonald Fraser’s celebrated vivid account of his part in the Burma Campaign, serving as a private in Cumbria’s Border Regiment. Many years after the war, he argued with a man who was denouncing the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as obscene, monstrous and barbarous. Fraser reflected on what other and how many more lives would have been lost had the war continued; possibly his own, in which case his three children and six grandchildren would never have been born:

‘And that, I’m afraid, is where all discussion of pros and cons evaporates and becomes meaningless, because for those nine lives I would pull the plug on the whole Japanese nation and never even blink. And so, I dare suggest, would you. And if you wouldn’t, you may be nearer to the divine than I am but you sure as hell aren’t fit to be parents or grandparents.’

Here we are now, with these horrors sitting in their silos and launch tubes, plus chemical weapons and vile diseases carefully crafted by laboratory white-coats. Which of the above witnesses are right? Among the military, the tactician, the idealist, the balance-of-terror-ist? For the civilians, the elated, the horrified, the triumphant, the bleak pessimist?

How can we get rid of such dark toys? For surely, we’re not fit to play with them.

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Suggested further reading:

John Pilger on the risks of another nuclear war:
http://johnpilger.com/articles/another-hiroshima-is-coming-unless-we-stop-it-now

Professor Francis Boyle argues that atomic weapons are illegal:
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/04/atomic-bombings-at-75-the-illegality-of-nuclear-weapons/

TAIWAN, bridge to the Pacific islands; and the multiple impacts of climate change

Aside from archaeological finds, there are several other threads connecting prehistoric Taiwan with the spread of humans through the Pacific island chains.

One is the paper mulberry tree, native to Taiwan and Japan, which the Austronesian migrants took with them because they used its fibrous bark to make their cloth. A 2015 study of its genes supports the hypothesis that the species in Oceania are descended from those in Asia.
  https://raskisimani.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/broussonetia-paper-mulberry.pdf
  https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?post=26541&unit=20%2C29%2C35&unitname=Taiwan-Review&postname=Austronesian-Roots&fbclid=IwAR0rEsePB0aR71MtPstwKguoqx-ZFsHNlw9r5JM0N0h1PbGW1kfIk849PF4

Another is linguistics. Professor Robert Blust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Blust sorts the many languages of Taiwan into ten groups, only one of which (Malayo-Polynesian) developed into the Austronesian family of tongues.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austronesian_languages#Blust_(1999)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayo-Polynesian_languages#Major_languages

A third is the study of human genes. A 2014 study of mitochondrial DNA from a c. 8,000-year-old skeleton unearthed on an island off the Chinese mainland links China to Taiwan and Austronesia.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3951936/

Figure 1: The Liangdao Man Skeleton (picture from here)

The same study suggests a prehistoric migration route as illustrated below, from an area where foxtail millet began to be cultivated (around what is now modern Beijing), to the region where rice was domesticated (surrounding modern Shanghai), to what is now Fuzhou on the mainland (1), on to Liangdao island (2), across to Taiwan (3) and then down to the Philippines (4) and beyond:

(Ibid., adapted from Figure 5)

How did these humans cross over from the mainland? At its narrowest, the Taiwan Strait is about 130 kilometres (80 miles) between Fujian and Taiwan.

Things were different in the last Ice Age. The Strait is now some 100 metres deep, but:
'Pleistocene glaciations lowered [the] sea level 140m in the East China Sea 15,000 years ago, forming a land bridge between Taiwan and the mainland, with Palaeolithic artifacts on both sides. In the initial Holocene 10,000 years ago, melting ice raised the East China Sea 100m, quickly forming the Taiwan Strait.' 
- from 'The Neolithic Taiwan Strait', by Kuang-chih Chang (1989)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120418153210/http://http-server.carleton.ca/~bgordon/Rice/papers/App.18ChangKC89.pdf

'Permafrost covered Asia as far south as Beijing,' says Wikipedia, so perhaps early humans were motivated to go further south, and some willing and able to walk over the exposed land between China and Taiwan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum#Asia

The end of the Ice Age saw rising sea levels: 'After the last ice age about 20,000 years ago, sea level initially rose due to the melting of the glaciers. That peaked around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago,' says geologist Chip Fletcher in this 2017 interview:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-seas-rise-tropical-pacific-islands-face-a-perfect-storm

One might think that this flooding was a spur to the development of boats, but although the earliest found by archaeological excavation date back 7,000 - 10,000 years, other evidence suggests that they existed tens of thousands of years earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat#History
Indeed, recent finds in Central America suggest that homo sapiens may have arrived by sea 20,000 - 30,000 years ago and spread north and south from there, rather than coming though the Alaskan/Canadian ice corridor as previously thought:
http://polynesiantimes.blogspot.com/2020/07/origins-americas-first-colonised-in.html

Contrary to what one might assume, the post-glacial flooding was not uniform in all times and places. As the vast weight of ice was lifted from the land the continental plates started to shift about and rise up further from the Earth's mantle, like a ship being emptied of cargo. 'At the same time that Polynesians were undergoing their journeys of exploration and discovery, 1,000 to 3,000 years ago, sea level was falling and exposing coastal plains that then became habitable, where previously the sea was up against clay banks or cliffs,' says Fletcher. 'In the Pacific region [after c. 4,000-5,000 years ago], sea level started to fall until a few centuries ago. And now global warming is causing sea levels to rise again.'
https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-seas-rise-tropical-pacific-islands-face-a-perfect-storm

Although falling sea levels may have made it easier to land boats, 'around AD 1300 there was rapid global cooling, which was followed shortly by rapid sea-level fall – perhaps as much as 50-70 cm within 100 years in the Pacific [...]
   'In almost every island group in the Pacific - from Solomon Islands and Fiji in the west to Rapa and Easter Island in the east – the first signs of collapse appear around AD 1300 with almost all hill forts beginning to be occupied around AD 1400. [...] 
   'Rapid sea-level fall along Pacific island coasts would have lowered coastal water tables, slowed water circulation within lagoons and killed (through exposure) the most productive parts of coral reefs. A food crisis would have resulted for coastal dwellers. Conflict followed. So people fled inland where they stayed, more or less, for several hundred years.'
https://theconversation.com/rise-and-fall-social-collapse-linked-to-sea-level-in-the-pacific-56268

So the interaction between geography, climate and human history is unexpectedly complex.

PALAU: US justice on trial

UPDATE (April 2021): All charges dropped, no retrial. At last, at long, long last:

https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/crime/article250441866.html

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UPDATE: A GoFundMe page has been set up for Ashley Debelbot, who was released on bail from Muskogee County Jail on 2 July. The purpose is to help with Ashley's expenses to restart her life:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/Ashley-Debelbot
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A Palauan man and his wife are to be re-tried more than 10 years after being found guilty of the murder of their newborn child, McKenzy. Their original trial and their first unsuccessful appeal raise questions about the quality of the justice system and its preparedness to address its own possible errors.

Born in hospital on 29 May 2008, the baby was taken home May 31 and died early the morning after. The couple, Albert and Ashley Debelbot, were convicted of malice murder in 2009, but eventually had their appeal heard in 2017, in which they claimed that their respective attorneys had not defended them effectively.

There are concerns about the conduct not only of the original trial but also of the appeal, which was denied. A further appeal to Georgia's Supreme Court succeeded and the convictions were 'vacated' on 28 February 2020 and a new trial ordered.
https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/crime/article240737036.html

'Their conviction was based on a testimony of the State assistant medical examiner whose opinion is based on an autopsy report.  The State gave no evidence tying the couple to their daughter’s death and the couple’s lawyer did not offer any alternative explanation or evidence or witnesses on how the baby died,' reports the Island Times. The defence attorneys at the original trial had offered no alternative explanation of the child's injuries, even though the hospital had recorded the birth as a 'rough, atypical delivery.' 
https://islandtimes.org/palauan-man-imprisoned-unjustly-for-12-years-in-us/

At the 2017 appeal four medical experts giving evidence for the defence 'opined that the trauma of the birthing process caused the additional and more acute fracturing to the left side of McKenzy’s skull, and denied that post-birth trauma caused McKenzy’s injuries' but 'the court concluded in one  sentence that all the Debelbots’witnesses, expert and otherwise, were not credible' and went on further to rule out their evidence as not legally admissible.
https://law.justia.com/cases/georgia/supreme-court/2019/she defence18a1073.html

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the 2009 trial was the way that the Assistant District Attorney chose to define the 'reasonable doubt' in the presumption of innocence that a jury should extend to defendants:

   In explaining the concept of “reasonable doubt,” which in a juror’s mind would justify a vote to acquit, Assistant District Attorney Sadhana Dailey said it “does not mean beyond all doubt,” and added:
   “It does not mean to a mathematical certainty. Which means we don’t have to prove that 90 percent. You don’t have to be 90 percent sure. You don’t have to be 80 percent sure. You don’t have to be 51 percent sure.”
https://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/local/crime/article240737036.html

It seems reasonable to interpret that last sentence as implying that if it's down to tossing a coin, it's okay to find the defendant guilty. As the Supreme Court said, 'We cannot conceive of any good reason that a competent criminal defense attorney could have to fail to object to such an egregious misstatement of the law.'

The Island Times article cited above says '.. the DA for Muscogee County has announced that she will retry the case despite Georgia Supreme Court saying the government evidence is very thin. Debelbot will be represented in the new trial pro bono by the top rated Civil Defense and Criminal Defense New York Attorney Earl Ward.'

If that Ward is the 'Earl S. Ward' described here, the prosecution will have a fight on its hands; and if Ward succeeds, his pro bono work may be followed by a big compensation fight - he 'secured a $6.7 million settlement for the widow of Israel Vasquez, who was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for more than 12 years for a 1995 homicide he did not commit.' Twelve years: the same period Debelbot has spent in jail, so far; twelve of his wife's child-bearing years, of their potential family life together.
https://ecbawm.com/our-people/earl-s-ward/

Let's turn our eyes away from money and consider a legal system that negligently sics a jury onto the defendants with a wildly wrong definition of reasonable doubt, lets them be found guilty of murder on the basis of an autopsy and accompanying assertions of a single expert (that did not directly connect the alleged offence with the defendants), and brushes away expert witnesses for the defence at appeal.

Not everyone would expect to receive such sub-standard service from the justice system. Is money, or the lack of it, a factor? Any other factors?

NEANDERTHALS: Fact sheet, genetic contribution to melanesians

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1315924/archaeology-history-news-ancient-humans-science-news-paleolithic-france-spt

The graphic above is from a recent article in the Daily Express, reporting on Old Stone Age humanoid remains and cave art found in central France:
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1315924/archaeology-history-news-ancient-humans-science-news-paleolithic-france-spt

The illustrated geographical range obviously leaves gaps to be filled in, and there seems to be evidence of interbreeding during the upper Palaeolithic between Neanderthals, homo sapiens and 'Denisovans' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans:

So to some extent the genes of Homo Neanderthalensis' descendants are also represented in the Pacific region:

'Some recent studies suggest that all humans outside of Africa have inherited some genes from Neanderthals, and that Melanesians are the only known modern humans whose prehistoric ancestors interbred with the Denisova hominin, sharing 4%–6% of their genome with this ancient cousin of the Neanderthal,' says Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melanesians.