Some archeological news

Stone pages' Archaeo News bulletin is back to normality and I think these items are worth mentioning:

• England: discovered cairn complex at Otley, Yorkshire. More at The Northern Antiquarian.
• Australia: ongoing research at Kimberley hopes to find clues of earliest inhabitants. More at The Australian.
• USA: underwater black chert source at North Carolina suggest coastal migration of Paleo-Indians. More at Star News.
  
• Oman: a 5000 years old cemetery. More at Gulf Times.
• Bahrain: Dilmun culture's burial mounds will be researched before massive development destroys them. More at Gulf Daily.
• India: stone circles' complex largely destroyed in development at Thiruporur, Tamil Nadu. More at the Megalithic Portal (another reference site).

One of the surviving stone circles of Thiruporur (from the Megalithic Portal)

You can discuss these news and much more at Stone Pages' forums.

New paper on Y-DNA haplogroup C

Natsuya points me to this new paper on the distribution and likely spread of Y-DNA haplogroup C, with special focus on East Asia and subhaplogroup C3.

Hua Zhong et al. Global distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroup C reveals the prehistoric migration routes of African exodus and early settlement in East Asia. Journal of Human Genetics 2010. Pay per view (but you can read it freely at ZohoViewer).

CONCLUSIONS
We demonstrated the phylogeographic distribution of one of the most ancient non-African Y-chromosome lineages, from which we inferred the prehistoric migration and expansion of the Hg C lineage. We propose that Hg C was derived from the African exodus and gradually colonized South Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania and East Asia by a single Paleolithic migration from Africa to Asia and Oceania, which occurred more than 40KYA. The prehistoric northward migration of Hg C in mainland East Asia likely followed the coastline and is consistent with the northward migration of other East Asian Y-chromosome haplogroups.

Nothing too new as you can see, however the the data detail and the neighbor-joining trees of haplotypes for C3 and C5 are of some interest, suggesting that C3 probably coalesced a Mid-East Asia (China and surroundings) rather than SE or NE Asia.

C6 was not located anywhere, suggesting that it's just a very minor clade. In contrast South Asian specific C5 was detected among 2.5% of Indians and 1.5% of Southern Pakistanis, reminiscent of a back-migration from SE Asia by the same "coastal route" that was used to reach SE Asia at an earlier moment.

It's interesting also the still rather high amount of undefined C* found in various areas: 4.6% in Philippines, 5.6% in East Indonesia, 5.9% in Micronesia, 5.6% in Australian Aborigines, 9.1% among the Mulau of Guangxi, 6.9 among the Shui of Guizhou, 7.6 among the Yao of Guangxi, 7.7 among the Tujia of Hubei, 8.2 among the Hui of Ningxia and 6.7 among the Hezhe of Heilojiang. It is also potentially interesting the 0.5% in India because it might have greater densities in some of its very diverse populations (but it's treated as a single homogenous sample in this paper).

Paleolithic Europeans did not burn the vegetation as in SE Asia or Australia

While it seems that in SE Asia and Australia newly arrived H. sapiens extensively used fire to transform the landscape since 60-50,000 years ago, this was not the case in Europe, neither by Neanderthals nor our species.

Anne-Laure Daniau et al., Testing the Hypothesis of Fire Use for Ecosystem Management by Neanderthal and Upper Palaeolithic Modern Human Populations. PLoS ONE, 2010. Open access.

Conclusion

Extensive use of fire for ecosystem management was probably a component of the technical package of Modern Humans during their colonisation of Southeast Asia. Our study shows that fire regimes in Western Europe between 70 ka and 10 ka were mainly driven by the D-O millennial-scale climatic variability and its impacts on fuel load. At a macro level at least, the colonisation of Western Europe by Anatomically Modern Humans did not have a detectable impact on fire regimes. This, however, does not mean that Neanderthals and/or Modern Humans did not use fire for ecosystem management but rather that, if this were indeed the case, the impact on the environment of fire use is not detectable in our records, and was certainly not as pronounced as it was in the biomass burning history of Southeast Asia.

Australia to follow the steps of China: will filter Internet

On the pretext of fight against crime, Australia will now implement a guvernamental filter. Obviously, human rights watchdogs are very concerned, as they strongly suspect it will serve to much more than block illegal sites, but to implement censorship on the Internet.

Read more at BBC.

I mentioned recently how the EU is also implementing such institutional filters, in this case with the even more pathetic pretext of enforcing corporative copyrights.

Tasmanian megafauna extinction: man-made

That is what a team of researchers has concluded after re-dating the last known large animal remains of the Australian island: it happened after humans had arrived (c. 43,000 BP) and in a context of climatic stability. Giant kangaroos and marsupial lions were among the exterminated species.

Source: BBC: Extinction 'by man, not climate'.

Another, maybe better, article can be found in Science Daily: Humans Implicated In Prehistoric Animal Extinctions With New Evidence.

Australia about to collapse

Economy?, nuclear war?, class struggle?, ethnic tensions?

Nope. Mere and simple imminent ecological disaster caused, probably, by global warming.

Timeline? A century or two ahead?, several decades?, an undefined future?

Nope. By October this year.

While the USA and China are succumbing to brutal massive floods, Australia is facing the worst of the worst drought ever. It's been nicknamed the Big Dry and it's been going on for many years now, since 2003, sending many farmers into bankrupticy and becoming one of the factors behind increased food prices worldwide (as Australia used to be one of the main food exporters of the World).

Drought affected croplands

Now an expert panel has warned that the most important river system of Australia, the Murray-Darling basin, the Australian breadbasket, will be beyond the point of recovery unless it gets enough water by October. In practical terms it means that the whole ecology of the single most important agricultural and economical region of Australia will take at least a decade to recover or will not recover at all in any foreseable future.

The Murray-Darling basin

The reaction of the government? Wait until November. Incredible but true. The report has been leaked to the press anyhow sparkling great concern and political scandal in the island-continent.