How Aboriginal People Survived The Last Ice Age

Found on Sovereign Union's Facebook Page here: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1083452677155134&set=a.642304697936603

A 2013 published study revealed how First Nations people coped with the last Ice Age, roughly 20,000 years ago.

"Population numbers plummeted due to harsh conditions at the peak of the last Ice Age", says the study.

Researchers say that when the climate cooled dramatically, Aboriginal groups sought refuge in well-watered areas, such as along rivers, and populations were condensed into small habitable areas.

Professor Sean Ulm, lead author of the research at James Cook University in Townsville, says the vast majority of Australia was simply uninhabitable at this time. "Forests disappeared, animals went extinct; major areas of Australia would have been deprived of surface water."

To understand how Aboriginal people responded to the conditions, a team of experts from Australia, England, and Canada used the radiocarbon dates of thousands of archaeological sites to study the distribution of people across the landscape over time.

The findings, published recently in The Journal of Archaeological Science[1], suggest that about 21,000 years ago, almost all people in modern-day Australia migrated into smaller areas, abandoning as much as 80 per cent of the continent.

"In Lawn Hill Gorge in northwestern Queensland, at the coldest point of the last glacial period, all of the stone, raw materials and food remains are exclusively from the Gorge area," says Sean. "This indicated very limited or no use of the surrounding broader landscape."

This massive consolidation had drastic effects on the population as well. "There was likely a birth rate decline of over 60 per cent," says Alan Williams, a PhD student at the Australian Nation University who worked on the study. "It would have been very ugly."

Can humans cope with climate change?

Sean says the next step would ideally be to study the resulting cultural shifts, however, this may prove to be difficult given that close to one third of what was Australia at the time of the Ice Age is now underwater. "By 10,000 years ago, sea levels were visibly rising, sometimes on a daily basis," says Sean.

Extreme changes in the environment continued for thousands of years, and Aboriginal life readjusted in the process. Sean says this makes it unlikely that researchers will ever know the full societal ramifications of the Ice Age.

What the study does reveal, however, is that humans have withstood massive climate change on this continent in the past, and this might prove vital for preparing for future events.

"A lot of the current climate reports that we read about in Australia...their records only go back a couple of hundred years," says Sean. "That's a very short time span to base our model for future climate change on."

Sean adds that, thanks to studies like this, archaeologists may soon have the potential to extend these data sets.

- Article - Reasearch Paper review by Wes Judd 'Australian Geographic' 27 September 2013

[1] RESEARCH PAPER: 'Human refugia in Australia during the Last Glacial Maximum and Terminal Pleistocene: a geospatial analysis of the 25–12 ka Australian archaeological record'

- By ALAN N.WILLIAMS James Cook University,
- ANDREW R.COOK University of New South Wales;
- MICHELLE C. LANGLEY University of Oxford, UK;
- MARK COLLARDE Human Evolutionary Studies Program and Department of Archaeology, British Columbia, Canada:

[ Academic Paper: https://bit.ly/34Atr6L ]

IMAGES:
Top: Southeast Asia and Australia during the last Ice Age.
Bottom: Estimations the areas in which Aboriginal groups congregated during the last Ice Age. (Source of both images - the above academic article)

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/

ORIGINS: Walking protohumans started in Europe?

According to research published in Nature, the first bipedal ancestor of modern humans may have come from southern Europe. Dubbed Danuvius Guggenmosi, the remains were found in Bavaria and date from c. 11.5 million years ago.

Only a few weeks before this discovery, another research team speculated that a 10-million-year-old pelvis belonging to another species called Rudapithecus Hungaricus may have enabled it to walk upright, too.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03418-2

Before now, says the Daily Mail's report, the earliest evidence of two-legged hominids came from Kenya - the 6 million-year-old remains of Orrorin Tugenensis -  and some fossilised footprints on the island of Crete.

"The discovery of Danuvius may shatter the prevailing notion of how bipedalism evolved: that perhaps 6 million years ago in East Africa a chimpanzee-like ancestor started to walk on two legs after environmental changes created open landscapes and savannahs where forests once dominated."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-7658067/Prehistoric-ape-Germany-pioneer-two-legged-walking.html

So rather than coming from Africa, it's possible that some of humanity's ancestors may have gone there before re-migrating northwards.

AUSTRALIA / SCIENCE: A salute - and solution - to the Australian bush fly

Demonstrating the Aussie wave, aka Australian salute: http://i.imgbox.com/achP9bim.gif

Reporting on the experimental use of a virus to control burgeoning numbers of European carp Down Under, the Wall Street Journal lists "five animals that have gone wild in Australia". Four species are also European imports, but the fifth - flies, of the "bush" type that pesters everyone outdoors  - certainly isn't:

"... it's likely the fly got to Australia in an Aboriginal boat, the same way the dingo got here. In that case, the bush fly might have arrived in Australia as long as 45,000 years ago," says Jim Heath in his Seuss-like-titled 1989 book "The Fly In Your Eye"*

Heath explains that the bush fly needs protein to develop its eggs and is quite happy to find it in human tear ducts, noses, saliva and sweat, not to mention blood and raw meat; hence the plague of them at barbecues. As beef farming grew so did the fly population, feeding and breeding on the droppings of Australia's 28 million cattle. At up to 12 cowpats daily per animal, times up to 2,000 larvae per pat, the herds are potentially fostering quadrillions of flies.

Not just bush flies. Initial efforts to control flies focused on agricultural pests such as the blood-sucking buffalo fly and involved chemicals, to which the insects are increasingly becoming immune. 

So attention turned to biological controls, and this is where the dung-beetle comes in. Dr. George Bornemissza of the Australian CSIRO looked at native beetles and determined that they couldn't cope, so in April 1967 he began a project to import other species:

http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/131790650?searchTerm=Bornemissza&searchLimits=l-category=Article

The first foreign beetles were from Hawaii, released in Queensland on 30 January 1968. The dung-beetles disrupt fly-larval development by shredding and burying manure - which also improves soil quality and helps reduce contamination of run-off water, say the Kiwis, who are using the same strategy.

Because of Australia's diverse climate it was originally estimated that 160 different species would be required; in practice, "a total of 53 species were introduced and of these 23 have established," says CSIRO.

Unfortunately these species tend to cease their activity in early spring before the new season's flies begin to arrive, so two more kinds that are active at that time were introduced in 2012 from France and Spain to southern Australia by Dr Bernard Doube. The entomologist has been calling for a $50 million program to introduce 25 additional species, money which he says will multiply into several billions-worth of extra pastural productivity.

The real salute, then is reserved for the dung-beetle:

http://2bgreener.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Dung-Beetle.jpg

* Full text and illustrations on-line at: http://www.viacorp.com/flybook/fulltext.html

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

AUSTRALIA / ISSUES: Who owns Australia's Great Barrier Reef?

Image: NASA (from  UNESCO page: http://www.environment.com.au/?p=229)

The Australian Government's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority lists 45 tribes and groups that assert an interest in the world's greatest living natural formation:

http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-partners/traditional-owners/traditional-owners-of-the-great-barrier-reef