Ancient news roundup

Africa (Olduvai Gorge):

Research suggests that early man (c. 2 million years ago) was able to manage in a changing environment for 200,000 years. 

https://www.shh.mpg.de/1935810/petraglia-oldupai-gorge 

'The findings uncovered at Oldupai Gorge and across eastern Africa indicate that early human movements across and out of Africa were possible by 2 million years ago, as hominins possessed the behavioural ability to expand into novel ecosystems.' 

Part of this may be due to the use of stone tools, technology which (it is speculated) may have been employed by other hominin species such as australopithecines:

'... we know that the genus Paranthropus was present in Oldupai Gorge at this time.'

Tibet:

DNA from the hominin species knows as Denisovans has been found in sediment in Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan plateau - the first such find outside Siberia. The specimens date from c. 100,000 years ago, again from 60,000 years ago, and possibly also 50k-30k ya; in the latter case that may have overlapped with the arrival of modern humans and interbreeding there or elsewhere could explain why 'present-day Tibetans carry a gene variant that aids high-altitude survival'.

• https://www.sciencenews.org/article/first-denisovan-dna-outside-siberia-found-tibetan-plateau-cave
• https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/dna-tracks-mysterious-denisovans-chinese-cave-just-modern-humans-arrived-nearby
• https://theconversation.com/how-midnight-digs-at-a-holy-tibetan-cave-opened-a-window-to-prehistoric-humans-living-on-the-roof-of-the-world-148927
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baishiya_Karst_Cave

https://www.google.com/maps/place/35%C2%B026'53.0%22N+102%C2%B034'17.0%22E/@32.0753123,90.6411118,4.75z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d35.448056!4d102.571389?hl=en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denisovan#/media/File:Early_migrations_mercator.svg

Conflict between Homo Sapiens and the Neanderthals

An academic at Bath University suggests there was a 100,000-year war between the two species that pitched modern humans against the Neanderthals that had preceded them out of Africa and were already thriving in Europe and Asia:

• https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1355432/archaeology-news-human-history-neanderthals-earth-evg
• https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201102-did-neanderthals-go-to-war-with-our-ancestors
• https://theconversation.com/when-did-humans-first-go-to-war-149637
• a revised view of Neanderthals: https://time.com/5904203/neanderthals-myths/

South Africa

Article on early man in southern South Africa 200,000 years ago, when sea levels were lower - the hunting grounds since partially inundated following the end of the Ice Age:

• https://eos.org/features/a-lost-haven-for-early-modern-humans
• https://www.heritagedaily.com/2020/05/drowned-paleo-agulhas-plain-was-an-eden-for-early-humans/129190

Peru

It seems prehistoric women could be hunters, as well as gatherers:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/11/prehistoric-female-hunter-discovery-upends-gender-role-assumptions/

Dogs and humans

Parallel DNA research into human and canine genomes is sketching an 11,000-year-long (or more) history of their relationship. The five separate dog genomes have expanded to 32:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/how-dogs-tracked-their-humans-across-ancient-world

Dingoes, on the other hand, seem to have arrived in western Australia some 3,500 years ago - far later than humans - and although some were recorded living with aboriginals in 1788 they don't feature much in ancient rock art; perhaps for roving hunter-gatherers dingoes were an unaffordable luxury?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingo

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.

CHINA: Overfishing the world

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.

* https://news.mongabay.com/2020/07/study-chinese-dark-fleets-illegally-defying-sanctions-by-fishing-in-north-korean-waters/ -
- referencing Science Magazine's article here:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/30/eabb1197

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":

https://www.instagram.com/p/B_k-Dm0DoRw/?igshid=20yb86pv34st

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.
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*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/

NEWS: Okay, okay, be evil - Google embarks on information suppression in China

Google is not only tailoring a biased version of its search engine for Communist China, but blocking its own employees' access to the relevant documents:

https://theintercept.com/2018/08/03/google-search-engine-china-censorship-backlash/

But that's OK, because it's no longer committed to fighting evil:

https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393

NEWS: China extending its influence in Australia and the West

British website The Conservative Woman reviews a new book by Canberra academic Clive Hamilton: "Silent Invasion: China's influence in Australia."

Apparently, last year Chinese parties nearly defenestrated an Australian MP in a key Sidney constituency, which could have wiped out the wafer-thin Parliamentary majority of the current Liberal government.

Elsewhere, Chinese individuals abroad may still be kept under close surveillance:

"Stalking of expat dissidents is facilitated by digital technology. Activity on Facebook (a website blocked in China) is monitored, but it doesn’t stop there. Western governments have shown unbelievable lack of caution in giving contracts to Chinese firms for sensitive work such as surveillance systems. Advanced internet-linked CCTV cameras with face-tracking capacity in use on the London Underground and Gatwick Airport are supplied by Hangzhou Hikvision, a company under Chinese state control. Potentially the data may be sent to Chinese servers, allowing agents to track people wherever they go, recording them visiting church or holding a copy of Epoch Times."

MAP: Historic expansion of Austronesian speakers

As China vies with the USA for control of the Pacific*, Japan Forward offers this map of the spread of Austronesian languages:

* "In 2008 Admiral Keating of the United States Pacific Command (PACOM) gave a warning that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is interested in dividing the Pacific Ocean between China and the U.S.":

- http://japan-forward.com/8th-pacific-islands-leaders-meeting-what-should-be-on-the-agenda/

NEWS: China rising

Two recent articles looking at the bigger picture of China's growing world-power ambitions:

- Mark Almond, director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford, writing in the UK's Daily Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5014375/Why-West-tremble-crowning-new-Mao.html

- and distinguished documentary film-maker and financial/political writer David Malone:

http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2017/10/chinas-rise-americas-fall/

NEWS: Will there be war in the Pacific, again?

One interpretation of North Korea's seemingly irrational belligerence is that Russia and China are behind it and the prize is control of the Pacific:

"To allow DPRK to get away with this provocation means we lose the Pacific and China will see this as a green light to run amok and seize whatever they want and intimidate the rest."

Read more here:

http://japan-forward.com/war-on-the-horizon-is-the-us-ready-to-meet-its-commitments/

The author, Michael Yon, has previously suggested that the renewed interest in abuse of women during the Japanese occupation of China in WWII is propaganda intended to mould public sentiment in advance of aggressive action by the Middle Kingdom:

https://japan-forward.com/the-hate-farm-china-is-planting-a-bitter-harvest/

NEWS: Two Pacific news items

1. China is focusing on Japanese war crimes to stir up sentiment in preparation for more direct actions, says Michael Yon. Writing in online magazine Japan Forward, he looks at the WW2 crimes and claims to find much exaggeration and false accusation.

"China is leading a deadly information war. The first target is Japan. The ultimate target is the United States. For more than two years, our research team and I have been warning that a Chinese radicalization program will lead to terrorism against Japanese. These predictions are proving true..."

https://japan-forward.com/the-hate-farm-china-is-planting-a-bitter-harvest/

2. An article on Zero Hedge looks at the effect of low interest rates on the Australian banking sector and warns of multiple bankruptcies:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-08/are-australia%E2%80%99s-banks-going-bust-loud-boom-all-signs-point-way

NEWS: Pacific weather weirding and geopolitical manoeuvering

Papua continues to suffer from the worst drought since the late 1990s; so do Micronesia and the Marshall Islands; a number of Pacific nations have declared a state of emergency.

As the United Nations' OCHA explains, this is related to an El Niño event in the eastern Pacific - warming of surface ocean waters leading to changes in weather patterns across the world. While some areas become drier, others will experience higher rainfall leading to flooding and higher sea levels, the latter especially trying for low-lying islands.

But is it proof of "global warming"?

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has historic data of ocean temperature variations in the El Niño-prone region going back to 1950 (1). The 3-month period from last December to February 2016 saw the highest positive variation from mean, ever (2.2 degrees C).

However, sceptics could say (a) there are always difficulties with methodology in measurements like these and (b) 65 years is not long in geological terms.

It also depends on how you sample and present the information. Typically, the highest average surface ocean temperatures are found in the September-November period:

The pattern is similar to that in the first graph, but what happens if we start looking at years, rather than rolling quarter-years?

This year still looks exceptionally warm. Yet take 5-year averages and the picture changes significantly:

On that basis the current El Niño is merely returning us to the average point. And look at the pattern for rolling 10-year averages:

Taken as a whole, the last decade has actually been cooler! In fact, since the decade 1992-2001 the rolling 10-yearly averages have all been on or below the mean. If reversion to the mean is to be expected, we should be anticipating some more years of above-average temperatures as a correction.

This doesn't at all help the nations now in crisis; but help is coming, and as ever it has political implications. In a Radio New Zealand interview on Friday, Mark Adams of the International Organization for Migration stressed the logistical difficulties of assistance from the Philippines and the USA's west coast; yet a couple of weeks ago the Federated States of Micronesia issued a press release reporting a visit by the Chinese Ambassador, who announced a "10 million RMB worth of equipment specifically to address and mitigate the effects of the drought."

It has been said that the Chinese ideogram for "crisis" is a combination of elements representing "danger" and "opportunity". Even if its meaning is more correctly explained as "critical point," the notion may have relevance for Western geopolitical analysts looking at the Pacific region.
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(1) http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml