Ancient eastward migration traced in genes

From "Eurasian Bookshelf" on Facebook -  

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1202752154987561&set=a.527495192513264: A Story Written in DNA

The Development of the East Eurasian Phenotype

The East Eurasian phenotype — the set of physical traits common among many East Asian, Siberian, and some Southeast Asian populations — didn’t appear overnight. It developed over tens of thousands of years as ancient human populations adapted to diverse climates, diets, and environments across the vast lands east of the Eurasian Steppe.

Modern genetic studies suggest that many distinctive traits — including epicanthic folds, shovel-shaped incisors, thicker hair shafts, and skin tone variations — evolved as adaptive responses to cold climates, UV radiation, and dietary factors during the Upper Paleolithic (roughly 40,000–10,000 years ago).

These traits are believed to have crystallized among ancient hunter-gatherer populations in northern and eastern Asia, particularly in regions like Siberia, the Yellow River basin, and the Amur River valley. Later migrations spread this phenotype widely — into China, Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia — blending with local groups over millennia.

Genetics also shows fascinating connections between East Eurasians and Native Americans, who migrated across Beringia during the Ice Age, carrying parts of this shared ancestry into the New World.

This story is still unfolding, thanks to ancient DNA research — revealing how migration, climate, and time have shaped the diversity of human appearance across continents.

Ancient trade between Tanzania and northern Australia ?

 

The five ancient coins, believed to have been minted in present-day Tanzania, date back to the 8th to 15th century AD. They were made of copper, silver, and gold and are thought to have been used as trade currency. The discovery of these coins on the remote and isolated Wessel Islands off the coast of Northern Territory in Australia has led to speculation that ancient East African traders may have reached the continent long before the arrival of Europeans.

The Kilwa Kisiwani with its ancient capital city located on the coast of present-day Tanzania in East Africa, was a powerful empire that controlled the trade of gold, ivory and other valuable goods from the African interior to the Indian Ocean.

The exact explanation for the presence of these coins remains a mystery, and further research and studies are needed to confirm their origin.

How did the five coins from distant Kilwa wind up in the isolated Wessel Islands? Was a shipwreck involved? Could it be that the Portuguese, who had looted Kilwa in 1505, reached the Australian shores with coins from East Africa in their possession? Or was it that Kilwan sailors, renowned as expert navigators all across the sea route between China and Africa, reached Australia? Did they trade with the Indigenous population? Or docked and left? Maybe some stayed.

https://www.facebook.com/AfricanAustralian/photos/a.10152788300699725/10160484585694725/

Debelbots: new DA reveals Department illegally suppressed evidence, apologises for unfair trial

https://reason.com/2021/05/06/debelbots-child-murder-shaken-baby-syndrome-free/

Initially, the government planned to retry the Debelbots. But just a few weeks ago, District Attorney Mark Jones, who inherited the case, decided not to do that. He told the Supreme Court that there was "mounting medical evidence that says the child was born this way"—that is, with a fatal brain defect. Then he went a step further and apologized to the Debelbots, on behalf of his office, for "not getting a fair trial."

This seemed to shock Ashley Debelbot almost more than being freed from a life sentence. Asked in a press conference how she felt about the DA's apology, she replied, "I thought I would never hear that word being said to me, ever. Once you've been incarcerated, the word 'sorry' never comes to you at all."

She added, "I do not hold any bitterness toward anybody."

Her husband, Albert Debelbot, seemed a little less mellow. "I joined the Army protecting the same freedom that was taken from me. I lost a buddy in Iraq and [another] buddy lost his leg protecting the freedom we so believe in. We came home and the same system that we went to war to protect would never protect us."

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UPDATE: See also Daily Mail (UK) coverage 21 May 2021:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9596867/Convictions-babys-death-tossed-couple-freed-prison.html

Debelbots freed, finally

 UPDATE (April 2021): All charges against Albert and Ashley Debelbot have been dropped, no retrial. 
At last, at long, long last:

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

- what a travesty.

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See earlier Polynesian Times article from August 2, 2020:

https://polynesiantimes.blogspot.com/2020/08/palau-us-justice-on-trial.html

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?

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/

AUSTRALIA / MAP: Australian indigenous tribes

Original can be enlarged. See: http://www.indigenousinstyle.com.au/australian-aboriginal-map/