Prehistoric civilisations - wiped out in the Younger Dryas?

An intriguing video on the evidence for much older civilisations that may have been wiped out in a global cataclysm some 12,900 years ago.

Video: human global migration throughout history

DNA shows rapid Aboriginal colonisation of E/W Australia

'Historic hair samples collected from Aboriginal people show that following an initial migration 50,000 years ago, populations spread rapidly around the east and west coasts of Australia.'

https://theconversation.com/dna-reveals-aboriginal-people-had-a-long-and-settled-connection-to-country-73958

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/

Ancient Aboriginal trade routes of Australia

 

https://www.odysseytraveller.com/articles/ancient-aboriginal-trade-routes-of-australia/

'As far back as 1939, archaeologists could show that Australia was criss-crossed by Aboriginal trade routes (see map, above, for more detail on these routes). For Isabel McBryde – ‘the mother of Australian archaeology’ – these Aboriginal trade networks were ‘among the world’s most extensive systems of human communication recorded in hunter-gatherer societies’...

'The extent of cultural exchange between Aboriginal groups is indicated by the widespread Panaramitee rock art style – also known as ‘track and circle’ – which is found across mainland Australia and Tasmania'...

'In 1974, the archaeologist Lesley Maynard studied engravings in Laura in Queensland, Mount Cameron West in Tasmania, and Ingaladdi in the Northern Territory, each of which she believed to be part of the Panaramitee style. The Tasmanian find was particularly important, indicating that the style developed before the creation of the Bass Strait by rising seas at the end of the Ice Age.

'This led her to develop a chronology of Australian rock art. The first was ancient ‘deep cave art’, produced in the last Ice Age; then the homogenous and widely distributed forms of the Panaramitee, also dating to the Pleistocene (Ice Age); and finally the regionally diverse styles of the Holocene (post-Ice Age), both ‘simple figurative styles’, and ‘complex figurative styles’, including the striking Wandjina of the Kimberley, and the intricate X-ray art found in Arnhem Land and Kakadu.'

Indonesian trade with northern Australian aborigines

 

article: https://www.australiaforeveryone.com.au/files/maritime-muslims.html

'Makassar people from the region of Sulawesi in Indonesia began visiting the coast of northern Australia sometime around the middle of the 18th century, first in the Kimberley region, and some decades later in Arnhem Land. They were men who collected and processed trepang (also known as sea cucumber), a marine invertebrate prized for its culinary value generally and for its supposed medicinal properties in Chinese markets. The term Makassan (or Macassan) is generally used to apply to all the trepangers who came to Australia.'
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makassan_contact_with_Australia

Aboriginal Trading Routes

Found on Facebook, Sovereign Union page (https://www.facebook.com/SovereignUnion1/)

https://www.facebook.com/SovereignUnion1/photos/a.586516584802059/5368263563293980/

 

Since the early 20th century archaeologists could show that Australia was criss-crossed by Aboriginal trade routes. For Isabel McBryde – ‘the mother of Australian archaeology’ – these Aboriginal trade networks were ‘among the world’s most extensive systems of human communication recorded in 'hunter-gatherer'* societies’.

Goods and people travelled vast distances: the Dieri people, east of Lake Eyre, South Australia, visited places at least 800 kilometres apart; while shell from Papua New Guinea reached western New South Wales (Gammage, 149).

Every individual was touched by trade: as archaeologist John Mulvaney has written,

‘it was possible for a man who had bought pituri from the Mulligan River and ochre from Parachilna to own a Cloncurry axe, a Boulia boomerang and wear shell pendants from Carpentaria and Kimberley‘ (Griffiths, 47-48).

Trade had a cultural and social importance, as Mowaljarlai and Malnic (1993) write:

‘The lines are the way the history stories travelled along the trade routes. They are all interconnected. It’s the pattern of the sharing system.’ - [See Map Link Below]

Some goods had a social value that meant they were traded particularly widely. Pearl shells from the Kimberley coast have been believed to have travelled at least 800 kilometres away from their point of origin; with some claiming that they reached as far as the mallee, in western Victoria and eastern South Australia. Some pearl shells were as wide as a small plate, engraved with patterns and worn as a pendant by powerful men.

Stone axes also spread over vast distances. At Calingorady Creek (Moore Creek), near Tamworth, New South Wales, an outcrop of greywacke running along the crest of a saddleback ridge was mined prolifically for over 100 metres. In the 1960s, McBryde used petrological analysis – which had previously been used to show that the bluestone used in building England’s Stonehenge had come from Pembrokeshire, Wales – to examine 517 stone axes that had been scattered across New South Wales. They found that rock from the quarry near Tamworth had been carried as far as Cobar, Bourke, Wilcannia and other parts of western New South Wales – a journey equal to that between Belgium and the south of Spain (Blainey, 191-192).

Ochre was another commodity which was traded widely. Red ochre was particularly important to First Nations peoples across Australia: it was used to adorn the body during ceremonies, decorate wooden implements, and in rock art. The ochre trade is particularly ancient: Mungo Man, the 40, 000 year old ritual burial found in the Willandra Lakes area of Western New South Wales, the traditional meeting place of the Muthi Muthi, Nyiampaar and Barkinji Aboriginal tribes, was covered in over two kilograms of red ochre. The ochre had been brought over 200 kilometres to the burial site (Griffiths, 131).

The first material to be mined in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia, was not copper or gold but red ochre. Ochre from a quarry east of Parachilna township, known as Bookatoo, was celebrated among the Dieri people of central Australia. It was regarded as being of an exceptionally high quality, and held a spiritual importance, believed to be the blood of a sacred emu. The Dieri would send armed bands of 70-80 men 500 kilometres to the south to barter with the traditional owners of the mine, the Adnyamathanha people – even though there were plenty of more accessible ochre mines, such as the Ochre Cliffs near Lyndhurst on the Strzelecki Track.

It is also likely that the Dieri people used their access to the prized ochre to trade for pituri, a psychoactive drug made from the leaves of duboisia hopwoodii, used as both a painkiller and stimulant. The most prized variety of pituri comes from near Bedourie in western Queensland, which was traded north to the Gulf of Carpentaria and south as far as Kurdnatta (Port Augusta South Australia). It is said that pituri provided the one solace for Burke and Wills, slowly dying in remote Central Australia in 1861 (Flood, 202).

The act of trade had a cultural importance; taking on ritual and ceremonial aspects. It shaped the way that landscapes were understood. Particular localities became associated with particular manufactured goods, as different groups made objects with skill that was admired elsewhere. This specialisation was the basis of trade. So, for instance, groups living near Mparntwe (Alice Springs region) were particularly admired for skill in making wooden bowls used for liquids. Specialisation was a source of identity, often expressed through local mythologies (Blainey, 194).

The extensive travel that trade required meant that Aboriginal people had a vast knowledge of the world in which they lived, far beyond their direct locality. They used knowledge of the stars to guide them on long journeys; and had understandings of places that they did not have direct experience of. Early West Australian settler George Moore observed that ‘the natives are all aware that [Australia] is an island’. In 1840, men near Fowler’s Bay, South Australia, correctly assured Edward John Eyre that there was no inland sea; while Sturt recalled that Toonda, his guide in 1844, was able to accurately draw a plan of the Murray-Darling river system.

Aboriginal people studied the world that surrounded them, exchanging long-distance visits to learn of far-away lands and skills. Songs and ceremonies, holding practical knowledge needed for survival and navigation of the land, travelled thousands of kilometres in a short period along what is known as Songlines.

Anthropologists were astounded, for example, when Aboriginal women in Kurdnatta (Port Augusta), South Australia, accurately provided details of places in a song series describing Mparntwe (Alice Springs region), 1200km away. They were able to trace the trading of the ceremony, songs, stories, dances and art back to Mparntwe via the outback South Australian town of Utnadata (Oodnadatta).

This trading of songs can be thought of as a trading of intellectual property to assist travelling. Aboriginal people travelled a lot. They renewed and created relationships and socialised at small ceremonies and huge gatherings. They travelled for seasonal harvests on land, in rivers or at sea, either seeking or avoiding dominant weather events. If you knew the songs, you held knowledge of the land to aid navigation as well as find water and food resources.

Trade also necessitated linguistic dexterity, as Walter Roth, the ‘Aboriginal protector’ of Northern Queensland, recalls:

Picked men may be sent to a distant tribe just for the sake of learning [a dance] … It may thus come to pass, and almost invariably does, that a tribe will learn and sing by rote whole corrobborees [sic] in a language absolutely remote from its own.

Though there was no common language across the continent, there was extensive contact between different language groups. Children frequently had parents who spoke different languages. People spoke up to three or four languages, and some could understand several more; making Aboriginal Australians among the world’s most multilingual people. Such multilingualism is still common today, with people in Arnhem Land frequently speaking English as a third (or thirteenth!) language.

Dialect chains enabled long-distance communication. For example, Group A was able to understand Group B, who understood Group C, but Group A might not have been able to understand Group C (Flood, 173). In Central Queensland and the Western Desert, these chains extended over 3000 kilometres.

THE PANARAMITEE ROCK ART TRADITION: MARKINGS IN THE LAND

The extent of cultural exchange between Aboriginal groups is indicated by the widespread Panaramitee rock art style – also known as ‘track and circle’ – which is found across mainland Australia and Tasmania.

The style was 'discovered' by Bob Edwards, an amateur field photographer on a survey of north-east South Australia with his mentor, Charles Mountford. One of their starting points was the series of engravings found at Panaramitee Station.

Moving from station to station, they found over a thousand similar pieces of art, depicting animal tracks and circles, and less frequently crescents, human footprints, radiating lines, and other nonfigurative designs. These same motifs appeared in a number of sites.

Early European explorers had believed the engravings to be fossil footprints, or the result of algae and lichens eating into rock. But it was clear that they were human markings, formed by pecking with a stone hammer into the rock, which were then covered by ‘desert varnish’, a shiny, rust-coloured accretion that builds up over a long period of time. Mountford believed that the varnish was evidence that the carvings were extremely old, confirmed by his interviews with Aboriginal elders, who claimed that the engravings ‘had always been there.’

As Edwards and Mountford ended their survey, the rains hit, filling rockholes and causing creeks to flow. This stroke of good luck revealed to them another continuity of the engravings: each was next to a waterhole, or other form of supply.

Over the following three years, Edwards collected instances of this style across South Australia and the arid centre of Australia, virtually all associated with water sources and arid camp sites. He had uncovered what archaeologists call a ‘stylistic unit’, the artistic signature of an ancient, widespread cultural tradition. The consistency of the drawings led him to believe that these motifs predated ‘the time when tribal boundaries became rigid and separate cultural entities developed.’

In 1966, as part of a team of researchers led by John Mulvaney, Edwards uncovered tracks and grooves resembling the Panaramitee engravings, at a site west of Katherine, in the Northern Territory. They were able to date the engravings at 5000-7000 years old, the first such dating of rock art in Australian history, proving Edwards’ argument that the style was ancient.

In 1974, the archaeologist Lesley Maynard studied engravings in Laura in Queensland, Mount Cameron West in Tasmania, and Ingaladdi in the Northern Territory, each of which she believed to be part of the Panaramitee style. The Tasmanian find was particularly important, indicating that the style developed before the creation of the Bass Strait by rising seas at the end of the Ice Age.

This led her to develop a chronology of Australian rock art. The first was ancient ‘deep cave art’, produced in the last Ice Age; then the homogenous and widely distributed forms of the Panaramitee, also dating to the Pleistocene (Ice Age); and finally the regionally diverse styles of the Holocene (post-Ice Age), both ‘simple figurative styles’, and ‘complex figurative styles’, including the striking Wandjina of the Kimberley, and the intricate X-ray art found in Arnhem Land and Kakadu.

Maynard’s chronology has since been challenged by other archaeologists, including Andrée Rosenfeld, who has argued for greater cultural difference between North Queensland styles and those found in the ‘red centre’. Others have challenged the antiquity of Panaramitee style, suggesting that many of the tracks do not actually date back to the Pleistocene. Many of the artworks found in the central deserts of Australia are of much more recent origin, indicating a continuation of the style into recent years across a large part of Australia (Griffiths, 174-199).

TRADE IN SOUTH-EAST AUSTRALIA:

The trade of Aboriginal peoples in south-east Australia (southern New South Wales and Victoria) has been extensively studied by Isabel McBryde.

In particular, greenstone axes produced at the Mount William Stone Hatchet Quarry (known as Wil-im-ee Moor-ring), on the outskirts of Melbourne, were revealed by McBryde to have travelled over 1000 kilometres across southern Australia. The quarry today, listed as a National Heritage Place, bears the scars of thousands of years of mining by the traditional owners, the Wurundjeri. Deep pits were dug to reach unweathered stone; and the surface of boulders were heated to break away pieces of rock. The heads were then shaped using a large boulder as an anvil, which were then shaped further by their new owners.

Though the whole tribe had an interest in the place, it was under the special custodianship of one man (in the 19th century, a man named Billibellary), who had inherited this from his father, and traded stone for weapons, rugs and ornaments. In one instance, a visitor exchanged a possum-skin rug for three pieces of the stone (McBryde, 148). It seems to have supported a sedentary population: one settler described thirteen ‘warm and well constructed huts’ near Mount William (Gammage, 300).

Stone from the quarry reached the numerous groups of the Murray River, as far away as Yelta (near Mildura). Early settler Isaac Batey was told in 1862 by an Aboriginal stockman from the Lachlan River, New South Wales, that stone for hatchet heads came ‘from a hill down in the Melbourne country’ (McBryde, 133), while the stone also reached Guichen Bay, near Mount Gambier, South Australia.

In turn, the people of the Murray produced goods from the roots of kumpung river grass. Twine was made by twisting fibre, which was used for fishing line; bags, belts and headbands; for binding axe heads; and for ritual purposes. It was also knotted into nets, used to fish and catch emu, ducks, and small animals. Each group needed around thirty-five kilometres of raw twine to have a set of nets, which meant that twelve kilometres of twine had to be manufactured each year. In total, the process of creating a net took around a year of 35-hour weeks. The work of preparing twine and smaller nets was done primarily by women, while men worked on the larger nets. Much like in pre-industrial England, work was cooperative and social, as people sat around, gossiped, and told stories while producing objects.

Great trading meetings were held on the Murray River. These festivities were often tied to particular food harvests, such as the collection of taarp (lerp), a carbohydrate secreted on eucalypt leaves by plant-eating insects, prized for its sugary taste.

The eel harvest of the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape – a sophisticated aquaculture system that is believed to have supported a sedentary population – was another major festivity, which attracted people from as far away as New South Wales and South Australia to feast on smoked eels caught in the traps. The Brewarrina Fish Traps of northern New South Wales were also host to one of Eastern Australia’s great festivities, with huge numbers of people coming to partake of the harvest, with fish complimented by flour-based breads.

PATTERNS OF EXCHANGE IN ARNHEM LAND:

At the other end of Australia, the trading and exchange patterns of the people of Arnhem Land have also been extensively studied. Thanks to challenging tropical conditions and the fierce resistance of the local Yolngu people, Arnhem Land was never conquered or systematically settled by British colonisation. For the British, its history is a series of failed military, pastoral and mining settlements. As a result, traditional Yolngu life patterns have remained strong to this day.

In the 1930s, the anthropologist Donald Thompson studied the trading patterns of the Yolngu people extensively. Thompson found that every individual in Arnhem Land was a part of a ‘great ceremonial exchange cycle’. A man on the Lower Glyde River, for example, would have received black pounding stones from the east; possum fur, dillybags and spearheads from the south-east; boomerangs, hooked spears and ceremonial belts from the southwest; heavy fighting-clubs from the north-west; and foreign goods (traded by Macassan sailors) from the coastal north-east, calico, blankets, tobacco, knives and glass, much of which he traded away in further exchanges.

FISHING

This exchange cycle was at the heart of Arnhem Land culture: each individual was under a social obligation to send gifts to partners in remote areas. The act of giving gave esteem, while slowness and a lack of generosity in giving earned disapproval, even social ostracism.

Unlike trade elsewhere in pre-settlement Australia (with the exception of the trade between Cape York, the Torres Strait Islands, and Papua New Guinea), Arnhem Land formed part of a truly international network of exchange. For centuries fishermen and voyagers from Makassar, a city on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, searched the shores of Arnhem Land in search of trepang, a sea cucumber prized as a delicacy in China.

Anthropologist Campbell Macknight suggested that the trade began between 1650 and 1750, while later scholars such as Darrell Lewis and Anne Clarke have argued that the Macassans started visiting much earlier, around 1000 years ago. The trade only came to an end in 1907, outlawed by the brand-new Australian government.

While on the shores of Arnhem Land, the Macassans grew rice, built stone hearths, and traded with the local Yolngu community, exchanging tobacco, pipes, beads, belts, cloth, iron knives and axeheads and strong dugout canoes, known as lippa-lippa, for the right to fish on Australian waters and employ local labour. They introduced new technologies, such as the dug-out canoe, and inspired a shift in diet to one including more seafood. Macassan words entered the local languages, and some Yolngu people even spent time in the city of Makassar.

The Makassars were integrated into the global trade network, passing goods on to China and using Dutch coins (thanks to Dutch colonisation in Indonesia). The extent of global connection to Arnhem Land is displayed by the mystery of a 12th century African coin found by a serviceman during World War Two.

Macassan goods travelled widely in Australia, even down to the ‘red centre’: botanist Christopher Giles found in a rainmaker’s bag by the Finke River, in central Australia, ‘a curious examples of extremes meeting’, pearl shells obtained from ‘the Malays’ and a boy’s marble from Adelaide.

THE BODY OF AUSTRALIA: A CONNECTED CONTINENT:

Evidence of the trade routes in Aboriginal Australia indicates that Australia was a network of peoples ‘economically integrated’ by the Dreaming. Ngarinyin lawnan David Mowaljarlai, the late elder of the Kimberley, Western Australia, detailed the interconnectedness of Aboriginal people in his map Bandaiyan, Corpus Australis (The Body of Australia) - [See Map Link below].

On his map the whole continent and its islands are joined in a single grid system of social and spiritual connections. The diamonds within the pattern are communities of Aboriginals and the lines connecting them the ancient trade routes and Dreaming pathways that Mowaljarlai calls ‘landstories’. At the nodes connecting the lines is concentrated knowledge – sites of significance or ‘story places’ in which knowledge is embedded. Corpus Australis represents the country as connected through these nodes in the sharing of resources and technology over millennia.

The map of Australia is remapped by Mowaljarlai as a map of the human body, with the line from the Gulf of Caprentariria to the Great Australian Bight the spinal column on which the body is constructed. Cape York and Anhrem Lands constitutes the lungs, Uluru the bellybutton, the Great Australian Bight the public sections, and the southern offshore islands the feet.

For Aboriginal people, society, the environment, and the individual person are not separate from each other. Rather they are united in what the author Mudrooroo describes as “the unity of the people with natural and all living creatures and life forms”. Life and land are intimately connected in a vast network interwoven across vast landscapes.

Many of the most successful exploits of settlers and explorers was thanks to their making use of older Aboriginal trade routes. John McDouall Stuart, the first European to cross the Australian continent, followed an Aboriginal route that led traders from spring to spring in the harsh South Australian outback, linking Cape York and the Kimberley to the southern coast. This route was used in the 1870s to establish the Australian Overland Telegraph Line, connecting Port Augusta to Darwin, with the help of camels and camelmen from the Middle East and Asia.

The route was later used by camel trains led by ‘Afghan’ cameleers to haul goods into central Australia and formed the base of the Great Northern Railway, known as the Ghan, which closed in 1980.

Similarly, the cattle thief and bushman, Harry Reardon, was able to successfully transport 1200 head of stolen cattle from Bowen Downs Station, 130 kilometres north of Longreach, 1000 kilometres south to Hill Hill Station, South Australia, thanks to his communication with Aboriginal people, which allowed him to navigate the desert successfully. The route he established from Lyndhurst to Innamincka was one long traversed by Aboriginal traders, who transported red ochre from the Ochre Cliffs near Lyndhurst north to the Gulf of Carpentaria and south to the Southern Ocean, today known as the Strzelecki Track.

The town of Halls Creek, Western Australia, was an important place of exchange for the traditional owners, the Jaru and Kija people, thanks to its location on the trading routes stretching from the centre of Australia to the Kimberley coast. Even in the cities, many of today’s major landmark have long been ceremonial gathering places for Aboriginal people, including the Melbourne Cricket Ground and King’s Park, Perth.

- Nic Peterson, Odyssey Traveller https://bit.ly/3erMQs6

- - - - - -

REFERENCE MAPS:

Map of trade routes and storylines linking Aboriginal nations across Australia named 'Bandaya', by David Mowaljarlai (1928 - 1997), senior lawman of the Ngarinyin people in the West Kimberley Western Australia: https://bit.ly/3HjAwXh

Map showing the extent of Map showing the extent of Panaramitee style carvings. Image by Ellen Tiley. Image by Ellen Tiley. https://bit.ly/3FCHMxa

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

What happened on Easter Island (Rapa Nui); a lesson for global overpopulation

'The demographic declines of the Rapa Nui are linked to the long-term effects of climate change on the island's capacity for the production of food... 

'We did not find traces of an idyllic equilibrium with nature, and we did not find traces of a huge collapse. Instead, we found traces of interactions between three factors: Climate change, human population size, and changes in the ecosystem. The climate change manifests itself as a long-term pattern of changes in rainfall over some 400 years. The population grew during this same period, and the islanders also increased and changed their use of natural resources and agricultural methods...

'The islanders were not only aware of the changes, but they were also able to change the way the lived on the island. They gradually changed from the quite complex society that raised the marvelous moai statues, to a later and simpler agrarian society with reduced family sizes and a new way of producing food in stone gardens...

'These three factors affected the population on Rapa Nui, and they are also important on a global scale. We studied Rapa Nui and its history because we are trying to understand what is happening with the planet. Everybody talks about climate change and the resulting problems, but very few people are talking about the rising global population and the problems it causes.'

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-growth-decline-rapa-nui-population.html

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.

RAPA NUI: Tattooed torsos of the ancient 'heads'

In Rapa Nui aka Easter Island, archaeologists have uncovered the buried torsos of the ancient stone 'moai', revealing carvings (petroglyphs) representing Polynesian canoes:

Source: Daily Express
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1314641/archaeology-news-easter-island-head-statues-bodies-found-moai-rano-raraku-spt

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.

Story: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1314641/archaeology-news-easter-island-head-statues-bodies-found-moai-rano-raraku-spt

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/