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).

Was Toba really so bad?

There's an interesting article at New Scientist about what is possibly the most crucial issue of human prehistory: the Toba supervolcano explosion, which happened some 74,000 years ago.

There are two parallel debates: how catastrophic was Toba and were humans (H. sapiens) already in southern Asia then. They converge at the point on how could they survive the consequences of the supervolcano.

The debate seems to be quite hot and multifaceted: for some the catastrophe was really bad while for others only half that bad, for some humans were already in South Asia as evidenced by the toolkits so similar to African ones while others guided by the dubious molecular clock approaches prefer to consider a post-Toba out of Africa migration and yet others would push the dates of the migration back to c. 125,000 years ago, right at the Abbassia Pluvial, when there's abundant evidence also of H. sapiens in North Africa and Palestine.

A lot of information and synthesis of the various viewpoints can be found in the abstracts of the Oxford conference titled "The Toba Super-Eruption: A critical moment in human evolution?", which are freely downloadable as PDF.

More Paleolithic rock art found in Central India

From Stone Pages - Archaeo News:

A group of naturalists from Amravati districts (India) has discovered a set of 17 unique cave paintings in the Satpura range of Madhya Pradesh - which opens up new avenues of research as this art form are believed to be of Paleolithic period. The group has been working since the last six years on this project and include scientist Dr V.T. Ingole, wildlife writer P.S. Hirurkar, Padmakar Lad, Shirishkumar Patil, Dnyaneswar Damahe and Manohar Khode.

The first cave with a rock painting was spotted in January 2007. "It is really unique and must be preserved," says Ingol. "We have so far found and surveyed 65 rock shelters and we found 17 cave paintings," Hirurkar said. "We expect that there could be more such paintings in the 20-km range of our current discovery," he said, adding: "We expect this to be 15,000 to 20,000 years old." All these are located in the Tapti valley. Talking about his discovery, Hirurkar draws parallel with the Bhimbetka rock shelters, which is a World Heritage Site. "In these paintings one can see images of different animals," said Ingole.

The first cave which was visited is facing the north is in good condition and has more than 50 rock paintings comprising mainly of animal figures such as a herd of spotted deer, a herd of Samber, Rhinos, a group of wild dogs, bison, blue bull, tiger, and so on. The stags are painted very prominently with long antlers.

Many of the paintings are in red colour, perhaps made of red iron oxide. There are other paintings which are coloured in white mainly depicting human figures on horse with sword and other gears. Two smooth deep holes (mortar like) 10 cm diameter and 15 cm deep were also found near the cave. These holes might have been used to powder minerals used for paint.

Original link to Sankar News (Nov-30-2009) is broken but I trust Diego and Paula enough to understand it's a problem of the newspaper and nothing else.

The perpetuation of poverty: analyzing Bangla Desh

Now and then seems wise to recall why poverty exists and is perpetuated in spite of the overproduction we have, including many countries that pay farmers to produce less, not more.

Vicenç Navarro picks one of the poorest countries in the world, Bangla Desh, as case study. Why is Bangla Desh poor? Does it not produce enough food? It does and even exports it because their inhabitants don't have enough money to pay for it. The crucial problem, like elsewhere, is that wealth is concentrated in very few hands: 16% of rural Bangladeshis own 75% of the land and this olygarchy rules the country (75% of parliament members own huge land swaths). These have absolutely no interest in redistributing even a fraction of that wealthin order to increase the internal demand: they are just interested in perpetuating their power and wealth.

So constitutionally land redistribution, what is just a self-evident need in order to create a "middle class" that can drive demand and serve as backbone of the country's sociology, is just illegal. No matter who wins in the polls (the usual clone-party pseudo-democratic regime, with the occasional military intervention), nothing can change. Only a violent revolution can in fact change things in such a country but the odds are against it and keeping people semi-illiterate and ignorant, and stranded in religious false promises, helps the olygarchy to perpetuate the status quo.

This is of course not just the case of Bangla Desh but of so many other countries through the world, in dire need of a revolution with some blood and specially some good wealth redistribution. And this applies, in my opinion, also to supposedly wealthy countries like the USA, that are in dire need of some wealth redistribution too. By the moment, all they got is further taxes to pay the bankers who suck their blood. Why not put them in jail, as they deserve?
.

India: two ancestral populations and many founder effects

There's a new seemingly important paper around but it is behind a paywall so I can only make a shallow comment: David Reich, Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Nick Patterson, Alkes L. Price & Lalji Singh, Reconstructing Indian population history. Nature, 2009.

A divulgative review can be read at Science Daily.

Apparently the research has found or confirmed two important elements in the Indian genetic background:

1. That there were two ancestral populations in the subcontinent: a northern one (ANI), not very different from Western Eurasians and a southern one (ASI) totally unique to India and whose only pure remainder are the Andamanese. Otherwise both distinct ancestral populations are nowadays found mixed at various apportions.

2. That tribes and castes are really not that different, with castes seemingly being formed out of recycled ancient tribes. This means that there are many tribal/caste founder effects that make each of these groups rather unique and inbred, with likely relevant health consequences like those found among other similarly isolated populations, such as Jews or Finns.

Nothing too new, because I do have the feeling that this was vaguely known but never really established in such categorical terms. For example, in some previous global studies South Asians have often appeared as a mixture of two components: one the same as West Eurasians and another unique of them. Even the anthropometrists of old used to talk of "Caucasoid" and "Australoid" (or sometimes "Veddoid") Indians, even if we know now that the use of the term "Australoid" in the past was all but clarifying, mostly meaning anything Eurasian that is not specifically Western or Eastern.

For me, this confirmation of the existence of two distinct ancestral populations, suggests that they formed in the early period of Eurasian spread of humankind, before what we conventionally call now "races" formed. As West Eurasia was colonized since c. 50,000 BP, that provides a most recent time limit for such population divergence, because it must have happened before, probably quite a bit of time before, some of the ANI peoples migrated to West Asia, North Africa and Europe. The "Indian remix" must then have happened after this westward migration.
.

The Ceylon death camps

280,000 Tamils (men, women, children...) are still imprisoned in the so-called "refugee camps" of Sri Lanka. The situation has been these days denounced as awful, death threatening and secretive. Humanitarian organizations working in the camps are forbidden to speak of what happens there but the facts are anyhow getting to be known in those so-called "refugee camps" that are in fact mass open air prisons.

It is not just that the people can't freely return to their homes after many months that the war is over, or that the nutritional needs of children are not been met at all, but the fact that most of such camps are plainly flooded and children and adults alike are forced to live in water and side by side to their own excrements. People are dying right now on contagious diseases that they would probably never catch outside.

While the Sinhalese government has promised to liberate the refugees after "screening", in all these months only a handful of elderly or incapacitated have been in fact liberated, while instead some 10,000 have been sent to secret prisons. And it would seem that unless a clamor rises against this fascist and racist treatment of the people, the Sinhalese government won't do anything but just let those many thousand Tamils die.

I'd suggest not buying tea from Ceylon to begin with, as that is their main export.

On a side note, the UN has declined to provide the total figure of deaths in the war in order "to avoid a diplomatic conflict", what is unprecedented, but it is known that some 20,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed by government forces in the last month of the war, 10,000 of them in a single day: May 17th.

Source: Gara.
.

South Asian microliths, second round

Thanks a lot to Ibra (and Manjunat, who is the original source, it seems) for sending me a copy of Petraglia's last paper, that otherwise should be publicly available in six months.

The research actually has two parts that somehow Petraglia wants to fuse: genetics and archaeology. I forewarn that I do not agree, on first read, with the genetic interpretation and that petraglia himself is an archaeologist, not a geneticist. There are important geneticists in the team though, like Toomas Kivisild and Mait Metspalu.


Genetics

In any case, I fail to see how from the referenced genetic papers, the most recent one being Sun 2005, they conclude that South Asian M sublineages expanded so late. This must be inspired by a recent paper that did suggest a late expansion for SA M sublineages in comparison to the East, paper that I did not pay really any attention because it was behind a paywall. I can't even recall the authors (though guess it's from the Estonian team, considering its influence on this one).

I must note here that these estimates are contradictory with the model proposed by Atkinson 2007, that suggests that South Asia was already experiencing high and continuous demic expansion rates already since 55-50,000 BP.


Archaeology

The really important part, the one that takes most of the space and really provides important data, is the archaeological section, including a very interesting reconstruction of the climate and vegetation of South Asia some 30,000 years ago.

But the real substance is in the lithic sequences of the Jurreru Valley (Jwalapuram, Andra Pradesh, Southern India), where we can witness the following:

1. There is apparent human presence since c. 74,000 BP (also before, from Petraglia's older work in the same area). These people already used stone blades, characteristic of the UP cultures in West Eurasia (and in some East Asian cases too).

2. The existence of microblades (microliths) can be dated safely to at least 38,000 BP, though they do not become the dominant type of tool until c. 34.000 BP, when the presence of microblade cores is clear indication that they were made intentionally and not just by accident.

Other sites researched are:

Patna (Maharashtra Pradesh), where an ostrich egg-shell gave a radiocarbon date of c. 30,000 BP. Here flake blades are found since the early (>30 kya) stages, though the technology is described as being Middle Paleolithic. A trend towards microlithism is also detected since c. 30,000 BP.

A series of sites in Western Sri Lanka (Sabaragamuva province), dated from 38-36,000 BP to 28.500 BP, that have also yielded some microblade technology. These caves also provided the earliest known Homo sapiens remains of South Asia.

Southern Sri Lankan sites, Bundala and Patirajevala, show an early MP technlogy TL-dated since 70-64,400 BP, showing a gradual reduction of size of the artifacts. In the upper layer (dated to c. 28.500 BP) there is a clear change towards geometric microlithism.

Hence it seems reasonably clear that microlithic technology seems to have expanded from southern India and maybe Western Sri Lanka, where it may have begun as early as c. 38,000 BP (uncalibrated, should be before 40 kya after calibration), with strong signs of quotidiain usage c. 35,000 BP, and is found at Patna (a reference for possible expansion into other West and Central Eurasian regions), c. 30,000 BP (uncalibrated too).
.

Did South Asians invent microliths some 38,000 years ago?

Also found at Anthroforum, thanks to Ayepod, and sourced to Scientific American.

It seems that Michael Petraglia, who already surprised us some years ago with his discovery of pre- and post-Toba continuity at Jawalpuram, has now come to find that microliths are found in the subcontinent dating to c. 38,000 years ago.

South Asian microliths (below) compared with older tools (above). Each segment of the scale is 1 cm.

This may be one of the oldest worldwide dates for this curious technological phenomenon of blade reduction on Earth and may help to explain, maybe, the spread of Y-DNA macrohaplogroup P and its derived lineages R and Q, whose origins seem to be in the subcontinent.


Update: I have located the original paper and another divulgative article on it. Apparently Petraglia argues for 35-30,000 years ago (though these may be uncalibrated BP - unsure).

M. petraglia et al. Population increase and environmental deterioration correspond with microlithic innovations in South Asia ca. 35,000 years ago. PNAS 2009 (behind paywall by the moment).

And also check this article at New Scientist.
.

Tamil Tigers lay down arms "to stop the slaughter".

The struggle has reached its bitter end. Against all odds we have contained the Sinhalese army without any help, except the endless support of our people. It is our people who is dying under the bombs and missiles, of starvation and illnesses. We have only one option left to remove the last weak pretext of our enemy to exterminate our people. We have decided to silence our weapons. We only lament the loss of lives, that we cannot sustain for longer. We won't bear anymore watching how the blood of our people is spilled.

We need to do everything on our hands to stop this slaughter. If this implies laying down our arms and get into a peace process, that is something we already said were willing to do. We are living in an unprecedented historical moment that requires unprecedented prudent historical decisions. If that saves the lives of thousands, it must be done.

This is the excerpt published by Gara of the communication of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, signed by Selvarasa Pathmanathan.

An interview with this leader of the Tamil guerrilla can be watched at Channel 4 as well. He denies surrender but insists in using the expression "laying down arms" instead. He also rejects they have used civilians as human shields claiming instead that the people went with them because they distrust the Sinhalese army.
.

On macro-haplogroup N

I recently posted on Eurasian mtDNA. But I had to rethink my notes and conclusions on super-haplogroup N, largely on review of the somewhat complex (and badly named) strucure of this clade (see Ian Logan's mtDNA site) and the realization that haplogroup W is at least as South Asian as West Eurasian (see Metspalu 2004), and has its highest concentration in Northern Pakistan.

So, after due rethinking, I get the following haplogroup N map:


In other words, the true structure of haplogroup N has 6 subclades:

1. macro-R: including huge and widespread haplogroup R (South Asian by origin without any serious doubt), some Indian N* and East Asian N9 (that includes Y)
2. macro-W: including South & West Eurasian W, as well as Australian N* lineages. W as such is most frequent in Pakistan and hence I have depicted it there. In West Eurasia is most directly linked with West Asia.
   
3. macro-X: including West Eurasian X and N1, as well as some of the Indian N*. X is also found occasionally in North Asia and notably, in the distinct X2a subclade, among the Natives of North America (apparently arrived there associated with Clovis culture). Nevertheless the highest diversity of X by far is in West Asia/North Africa, so it must be considered a West Eurasian clade. N1 includes several subclades, among which is haplogroup I of apparent ancient presence in Europe (always in small ammounts).
   
4. S: Australian specific
5. A: East Asian and American, with a long sequence of SNPs at the root
   
6. Ket N*, with an even longer sequence of SNPs at the root

While haplogroups A and Ket N* appear to have gone through long periods of small population size, all the other four clades are defined by only one SNP at their respective roots, suggesting that they diversified rapidly after splitting from the N node. The most extreme case would, of course, be R.

Origins and spread:

I would think that macro-R and macro-W appear to have originated in South Asia, maybe in NW and/or Western coastal South Asia, if we are to follow their modern distribution patterns. From there they would have migrated to the East, maybe with M and other N-derived clades (A, S), seeding N9 in East Asia, as well as W-related N* in Australia. The handful of R-derived clades in Eastern Asia and Sahul may have gone with them or soon after (broadly in the same process anyhow).

Macro-X instead appears to be most diverse in Western Eurasia, maybe indicating an older migration in this direction than the one starred by R subclades (U, R0 and JT) in the same direction. I am not sure in relation with which one would M1 (and possibly other M subclades such as M48) migrated in westward direction. It is possible then that X/N1-related Indian N* represents a backflow from West Eurasia (but hard to say with certainty).

Overall I'd say that N is most diverse in South Asia (if anywhere) and that, contrary to my previous post, it must have coalesced along with M in the subcontinent. Nevertheless it does seem to have a more western center of gravity than M, possibly indicating that the N-M split (from L3) happened in relation to events and geography of South Asia. It is possible that (broadly) M represents those that advetured further into the subcontinent, while N those that remained closer to the Indus river and Arabian sea area. Nevertheless the ability of N carriers to reach out to East Asia and Australia, among other remote places, along with a majority of M carriers, indicates that these geographic boundaries were by no means strict or rigid and that the different early Eurasian populations were admixing all the time within this process.

Important note/caveat: defining N as South or West Eurasian is largely a matter of where did macro-W coalesce. I have here suggested that W could be South Asian by origin but the philogeny of the haplogroup is complex and by no means clear (see Ian Logan's notes on W) . The presence of related macro-W "N*" in Australia would suggest a migration via South and SE Asia (no other explanation is possible) and the presence of W in Thailand also would suggest a South Asian center of gravity. But the matter is not fully clear and, if macro-W would be of West Asian origin after all, my previous model, with N (but not R) coalescing in West Asia, could stand.
.

Aterian and the coastal migration model

It seems that Aterian, the North African paleolithic culture (attributable to Homo sapiens), occupies the whole range of dates between c. 85,000 BP to the Epipaleolithic, when new waves (Iberomaurusian, Capsian) may have arrived from Spain and Sudan.

Recently these findings have been confirmed by archaeological research at Taforalt, Morocco, that have yielded some of the oldest known ornaments, competing for that title with Skuhl cave (Palestine) and Oued Djebanna (Algeria).

Aterian tools

Fine so far. But there is a problem: the deepest genetic layer in North Africa seems to be mtDNA haplogroup U6, that is related with other U clades of West, Central and South Eurasia. This clade is believed to have arrived to North Africa with the earliest human colonists, much like its "sisters" U5 and U8a seem to have arrived to Europe too. But, while European early sapiens colonization may date to 48-40,000 BP, not being in contradiction with the mainstream model of colonization of Eurasia from a single out of Africa migration c. 75-60,000 BP, the Aterian very old C14 dates do.

And there is nothing between Aterian and the Epipaleolithic that can explain that.

So I am starting to question the coastal migration model too, or at least the dates attributed to it.

No hardcore conclussions yet but what if... the OOA event happened much earlier, maybe c. 120,000 BP, and had a westward branch via the Levant that ended up in North Africa? There are certainly H. sapiens remains in the Levant that are date c. 100,000 BP (though they are believed to have been replaced by Neanderthals, that are dated to c. 60,000 BP).

In South Asia (key area for Eurasian prehistory) archaeology can hardly differentiate between pre-sapiens and sapiens technologies. The divide between Middle and Upper UP is placed, somewhat arbitrarily, at c. 30,000 BP (much later than in Central and West Eurasia) and human or hominin remains are very scarce anyhow. But, like in West Asia, disconinued blade tools (preluding UP somewhat) are occasionally found with much older dates. In West Asia this was (more or less consistently) attributed to Neanderthals but it is very unlikely that the findings of India can be attributed to them too.

Check for instance Petraglia et al., 2007: Middle Paleolithic Assemblages from the Indian Subcontinent Before and After the Toba Super-Eruption:

We provide here firm chronological evidence that hominins were present in the Jurreru River valley, south India, immediately before and after the YTT eruption. Analyses of the archaeological industries recovered from the site indicate a strong element of technological continuity between the pre- and post-Toba assemblages. Together with the presence of faceted unidirectional and bidirectional bladelike core technology, these pre- and post-Toba industries suggest closer affinities to African Middle Stone Age traditions (such as Howieson's Poort) than to contemporaneous Eurasian Middle Paleolithic ones that are typically based on discoidal and Levallois techniques (Fig. 3). The coincidence of (i) evidence of hominins flexible enough to exhibit continuity through a major eruptive event, (ii) technology more similar to the Middle Stone Age than the Middle Paleolithic, and (iii) overlap of the Jwalapuram artifact ages with the earlier end of the most commonly cited genetic coalescence dates (21–23) may suggest the presence of modern humans in India at the time of the YTT event. This interpretation would be consistent with a southern route of dispersal of modern humans from the Horn of Africa (24); the latter, however, will remain speculative until other Middle Paleolithic sites in the Indian subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula (25) are excavated and dated.

Jwalapuram tools

And also:
- Modern Human Origins and the Evolution of Behavior in the Later Pleistocene Record of South Asia, by Hanna V.A. James and Michael D. Petraglia, 2005 (no link found).
- J.B. Harrod, Synopsis of the Paleolithic of India (PDF).

From this last paper (a list of Indian Paleolithic sites with brief descriptions), I specially noticed two sites from before the Toba event that show blade creation. One (Hokra 1-a and Gurha, Thar Desert, Rajasthan) is not dated but the other (Patpara, Middle Son Valley) has a C14 date of at least 100,000 BP. Blade based tools are also found after the Toba event in several sites that may be dated since c. 45,000 BP.

But even if the earlier blade industries are not really consolidated UP (like happens with Levantine Jabroudian, where stone blades were made long before UP apparently by Neanderthals without continuity), presence of anatomically modern humans does not need to be related to them anyhow (in fact that is the case in may other parts of the World). And the technoligical continuity in India an the very early dates of Sapiens-made Aterian in North Africa, strongly suggest an out-of-Africa event much earlier than Toba eruption. Maybe c. 100,000 BP. There was a warm peak (a more favorable climate probably) c. 105,000 BP that could account for such migration maybe.