The Eastern Asturian rock art (e-book)

I just found this little jewel at the always interesting blog Pileta de Prehistoria:

Ofelia Barroso del Río y Federico del Río Berguño. Arte Rupestre. La Prehistoria Ilustrada del Oriente de Asturias (Rock Art. The Illustrated Prehistory of the Asturian East). Direct download here (PDF 3.24 MB).


A graphic and text review of the Paleolithic art, (32-11 thousand years ago) of this distinct district of the Franco-Cantabrian region that looks quite nice. Text in Spanish but many many images that are surely the main attraction of this e-book.

Enjoy.

Spanish budget cuts less than quarterly benefits of just four companies

I'd say this is a very relevant figure: it means that taxing these companies 25% on benefits would allow the government to keep spending. As there are many more companies, the tax could be much lower, of course.

According to the labour union Basque Workers' Solidarity (ELA), just four large Spanish companies, Banco Santander, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), Telefónica and ENDESA, earned in the last quarter more (6.6 billion euros) than the local IMF's puppet, Rodríguez Zapatero, aims to cut in public spending this year (five billion euros).

But instead of taxing them, the government gives them public aid: 61 billion that would have been much better spent in much needed pensions, direct public investment and unemployment aid.

This is an outraging situation not restricted to Spain. In fact it's the generalized abuse in which EU countries, following US lead, have fallen in: tax the poor to give to the rich.

Nothing less than 3.7 trillion euros have been gifted to the banks after squeezing them from the public. And now they say it's time to cut welfare and salaries. Are we dumb or what?!

The public aid to banks reaches the 12% of the European GDP and is going to reach as much as 22%.

Meanhiwle stocks sink anyhow... I wonder if some remnant of common sense in the brains of the vampires is telling them that this rape is just the last untenable bubble and that they are going to even devour the very states and imperial that allow their mere existence. If so, it doesn't matter if you sell or buy because neither kind of paper is going to be worth anymore.

You know I have very bad opinion of Capitalism but something I never really expected it to do was to suicide in this stupid way. I though they'd fight till the last penny but seems that they prefer to destroy all society as long as they can have their dose of benefits today.

Damn junkies! They can never think of tomorrow!

Source: Gara[es].

Interfertile seal species retain different gene pools in spite of hybridation

This is probably a paper of interest for all those surprised or otherwise intrigued by the gene flow now detected between H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens.

Melanie L. Lancaster et al. Two behavioural traits promote fine-scale species segregation and moderate hybridisation in a recovering sympatric fur seal population. BMC Evolutionary Biology 2010. Open access.

The two fur seal species share the same reproductive spot at Macquarie island in New Zealand (and two other sites) and they do engage in fact in rather high interbreeding. However the two species remain neatly separated because of habitat preferences (colder/warmer waters, pebble/boulder beaches) and maybe also proposed fitness costs for the hybrid offspring.

The reality of Capitalism

In these days when the Spanish government bows to Emperor Barack I and his court of EU and IMF bureaucrats, cutting the budget in anything but police and military spending, it's good to know what are these promoting at the expense of the common citizen.

Argentine sociologist, Atilio A. Boron, explains at his blog[es] with facts what is Capitalism. I use his data here with my own comments:

Population: 6.8 billion. Almost 100% live in Capitalist areas (with very few exceptions nowadays). Of which:

• 1 billion (15%) are chronically undernourished
• 2 billion (29%) have no access to medicines
• 884 millions (13%) have no access to edible water
• 924 millions (14%) have no home or live in precarious ones (slums)
• 1.6 billion (24%) have no electricity
• 2.5 billion (37%) have no sanitation
• 774 million adults are illiterate
• 18 millions die (are murdered by the system) every year because of poverty, most of them children under 5.
• 218 million children (5-17 y.o.) work under slavery conditions in dangerous or degrading jobs such as soldiers, prostitutes, servants, agriculture, construction or the textile industry.
• 25% of people have only 0.9% of all wealth, while 10% owns 71%. Data from 2002, when it had worsened in relation to 1998. It's most likely that the gap today is much wider.
• In this 1998-2002 period the wealthiest 10% increased their wealth in 6.7%, fraction that, if distributed, would double the incomes of 70% of people, saving many many lives (and activating the market a lot).
  

He concludes:

After five centuries of existence this is what Capitalism has to offer. What do are we waiting to change the system? If Humankind has a future it will be Socialist. Under Capitalism instead there will be future for nobody, not for the poor and not for the rich. F. Engels' sentence, which is also R. Luxemburg's one: 'Socialism of barbarism' is today more real than ever before. No society can survive when its vital drive is greed and its engine is profit. Sooner or later it causes social disintegration, environmental destruction, political decadence and moral crisis. We are still in time but we cannot wait for too long.

Neanderthal genome confirm very old divergence between both species

This is something that I had oversighted on my first reading of Green-2010:

Assuming an average DNA divergence of 6.5 million years between the human and chimpanzee genomes, this results in a point estimate for the average divergence of Neandertal and modern human autosomal DNA sequences of 825,000 years. We caution that this is only a rough estimate because of the uncertainty about the time of divergence of humans and chimpanzees.

I must say that it is a pretty decent age that correlates well enough with the archaeological record. Acheulean technology, which surely reflects this divergent episode, spread from Africa to Eurasia c. 900,000 years ago or maybe even earlier (1.4 million years in Palestine).

I have mentioned in the past that the actual time of Pan-Homo divergence must be in fact somewhat older, at least 8 million years (ref. Caswell 2008), the difference with the date used by Green is enough to push the Neanderthal-Sapiens divergence to almost 1 million years, right in time to fit with the Acheulean expansion.

I have been advocating for this scenario for some time now and finally it seems that I was right in this. However I still see a lot of people happily talking of a mere 300 Ka, what is simply ridiculous.

This has of course implication for the mtDNA of the Denisova finger, which is doubly old and hence from c. 2 million years ago, from the very spread of H. erectus.

This is important because, against some speculations in the opposite direction, these ages match almost perfectly with the archaeological record: the puzzle fits well and that makes me happy.


The other age estimate is not Green's one

Contradictorily, in a later section they report, using a different method, a divergence age between 270 and 440,000 years. I can only shake my head before this apparent inconsistency. It's worth to read the confusing method they used to reach to this age at the Supporting Online Material (section 14, page 122) because the method produces very strange (and rather very short) age estimates for humans, such as 5000-60,000 for the divergence between Han and Yoruba. I think it's a rather suspicious method that is not better in anything to the point estimate above.

The fact that this procedure was made by co-author Heng Li (from MIT-Harvard, not the main Max Planck Institut team) and that the whole section seems strangely contradictory with the first one (whose SOM article is authored by Green himself - section 10, page 56) makes me think in possible disputes between the authors on which method and result is best, somehow resulting in this patchy double conclusion.

I understand that the estimate of 850 Ka is authored by Green and hence essentially the position of the European team and that the low estimate was introduced in the last minute to satisfy the Americans (after all Science is a US publication and its executive publisher has connections with the MIT).

I wonder which is the ideological or camarilla interest in promoting and even force-feed, as in this case, these low age estimates against all common sense, it is beginning to stink.

Sardinian Neolithic art in danger

I got a special newsletter some weeks ago from Diego Menozzi and Paola Arasio, who lead the excellent site on Megalithic monuments Stone Pages and its affiliated forum, but I did not realize the relevance of what they said on it until now: some tomb in Sardinia with conservation issues, you know: the typical problems of archaeology as governments don't care about culture, much less if it doesn't provide political redits.

But now I have accessed to their colorful press release along with Prof. George Nash (via Pileta de Prehistoria) and the problem suddenly became more striking and pressing:


Clear why, right? How can such a beautiful and well preserved monument from what surely was the all-times Sardinian apogee (the Nuraghe era) be treated as some nuisance the government does not want to spend money in protecting and promoting?

The site is known as the Checkered Tomb or Tomba della Schachiera (also: Sa Pala Larga 7) and is located in Bonorva, NW Sardinia, along with many other tombs and monuments, probably dated to the 3rd millennium BCE. It was excavated recently and merely disposed of afterwards, by covering the entrance with a concrete slab (permeable to water and somewhat corrosive) and destroying much of the context by filling with concrete as well, receiving so little attention that even the mayor of the town was unaware of the findings.

For the authors of the press release, this monument and others in the area is easily comparable to famous Maltese monuments, however would not it be for nearby farmer, Mr. Porcu, who took photos in the latest excavation season, in 2009, we would not have even a picture of them... anywhere, except maybe in some forgotten archive of the Italian cultural bureaucracy.

New analysis of African mtDNA

There is a new paper on 'African' mtDNA L(xM,N) with a focus on trans-Saharan flow:

Nourdin Harich et al., The trans-Saharan slave trade - clues from interpolation analyses and high-resolution characterization of mitochondrial DNA lineages. BMC-Evolutionary Biology 2010. Open access.

The authors conclude that all or most of this mtDNA flow happened in recent times within the trans-Saharan slave trade, mostly in the last few centuries of Arab domination. I think that this position is simply untenable (and I'd dare say falling into 'romantic' Orientalism per many of the reasonings like: some harems could be enormous, reaching even the extravagating number of 14,000 concubines) but there is interest anyhow in the data managed (from many other different studies mostly) and specially in the many nice distribution maps provided.

They do not only fall into pseudo-romantic visions of the slave trade and its importance but also fall in another pool of moving sands: excessive reliance on the molecular clock age estimation methods, when they draw their conclusions.

I really fail to see how MC age estimates of c. 10-15,000 years ago (L3) can justify a recent shared ancestry within the slave trade. They would actually point, if anything, to late Paleolithic or Epipaleolithic migrations (Capsian culture?) There is only one case with a more recent date in all the L3 comparisons but it's not between an Tropical and Mediterranean Africans but between one Jordanian and one North American (Afro-American?) Instead there are many L3 cases with older age estimates: up to 37,000 years ago.

They do not have age estimates for the other haplogroups, specially some L0 and L2 sublineages that also permeate the Sahara-Red Sea barrier.

As I have said before, some of these lineages look very old North of the Sahara (see here) and may have been pouring towards the North and NE since around the out-of-Africa migrational episode, which may be c. 120,000 BP, quite roughly.

They fail to analyze two particular haplogroups that are apparently more common North of the Sahara and East of the Red Sea: L3k and L3i respectively (L3i is plotted on a map but North African specific L3k is totally ignored).

As I said above, the best is the distribution maps, which allow for a quick visual impression of the distribution of the L(xM,N) lineages. Form these I think that:

• L0a shows a clear South-East Africa-West Asia distribution, with some very high concentrations in this last region. I previously mentioned that I think that L0a1b2 and L0a1c (?) are clear candidates for a Middle Paleolithic flow to West Asia related to the OOA migration.
  
• L1b surely had a Middle Sahelian origin but also clearly permeates across the Sahara. Within it, L1b1a2 is typical of the Red Sea area, while L1b1a5 is found in Mauritania and Cyprus (per Behar 2008). I think that its expansion happened some time after the L3 one (29 CR mutations to the root vs the 23 of L3) but may well belong to the late phase of the Abbassia Pluvial.
  
• L2a is so ubiquitous that cannot be analyzed as a whole. The timeline of its expansion is surely the same as that of L1b (again 29 CR mutations to the root) but it's much more impressive in its dimensions. Some of the high level sublineages (L2a1j) are exclusive of the Mediterranean, while some others are shared across the desert and surely deserve specific attention if we want to clarify anything.
  
• L2d. The map concentrates this lineage in West Sahara but (from Behar 2008) it's actually also present in Ethiopia, Algeria and Yemen. It's another candidate for an old lineage beyond the Sahara.
• L3b also looks pretty much North African/West Asian but has also presence in West and East Africa.
• L3d is an even more clear case of a North African/West Asian lineage: rare south of the Sahara and very common north of it.
  
• L3e looks by the map as split in a North African and a Bushman clades, however by Behar's data the situation is much more complex: scattered in many distinct African and West Asian populations, all very suggestive of an old spread within the L3 explosion (OOA related).
  
• L3f looks like spread from Sudan in all directions early on as well.
  
• L3i is shown as the Red Sea-South Arabia lineage it is and is a very strong candidate for OOA migration remnant in Southern Arabia. Can never be attributed to 'slave trade' but it's most probably the "little sister" (niece in fact) of M and N. It is actually closer to the L3 root than M and N by CR mutation count, so it's surely older, just that it did not reach South Asia.
  
• L3x is a very similar case, however it should be slightly more recent than L3i, with an age similar to that of the N and R explosions in further Asia.
• I'm wondering if L3w is just another name for L3k. It does not exist in PhyloTree but the distribution (Algeria, Ethiopia) is reminiscent of the one reported for L3k elsewhere.

There's no mention to L6 and L4b, both of which are also candidates for participation in the OOA flow to South Arabia.

In brief: it seems that the preconceptions of the authors are preventing them to reach to rational conclusions. The paper has some interest but this lays mostly on the illustrations (maps). Hopefully, as it happened with the similarly confused Balaresque paper, someone else (Morelli in this case) will take the bull by the horns and do something better with all that data.

Related posts:

• The early expansion of H. sapiens in Africa (mtDNA)
• Are we overlooking the signature of the Out of Africa?
• Reviewing the mtDNA lineages (notes): L0, L1, L2 and L5, L3'4'6
  

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).

How the working class is taxed and the rich get away with their loot

Based on data from Ciudad Futura[es].

In the Kingdom of Spain:

• Workers declare raw salaries averaging 18.400 euros (14 monthly pays of 1314 euros)
• Company owners declare income averaging 13.525 euros (14 monthly pays of 966 euros)

Naive conclusion: capitalists are poor charitable souls who sacrifice for their workers and the economy, getting a Greek salary for that. They live in slums typically.

Reality: they declare as little as they can, earning many times what the Tax Office is told.

This is confirmed by the following data:

• In Spain only 727 individuals have patrimonies over 10 million euros, according to the Tax Office
• In Spain 5270 individuals have patrimonies over 10 million euros, according to Banif (Banco Santander)

It is hence estimated that the Spanish Tax Office fails to collect 90 billion euros every year, enough to multiply by 28 times the Education budget (anyhow just a way to pay tithes to the Catholic Church) or the Health and Social Policies budget.

Black money circulating in Spain beyond state reaches is estimated in 245 billion euros. The black market level in Spain seems to be 10 times higher to the Eurozone average.

On some details of the Neanderthal genome draft

Still chewing on the Neanderthal genome draft (Green 2010). Only today I have got some time to dwell on some of its details.


Alleles specific to all Homo sapiens (and not to Neanderthals)

It's interesting not just that some of us carry a small apportion of Neanderthal alleles but also the list of alleles that are exclusive of our species. Green et al. dwell on this matter in the section titled A catalog of features unique to the human genome.

There is a list of 78 alleles (table 2) that are fixated in the derived (non-Chimpanzee) form in the species Homo sapiens exclusively and found in their ancestral state among Neanderthals. Many are not really known their role but others seem to accumulate in certain processes such as skin (sweat...), melanin, smell, vision, sperm motility, hormonal and cellular division regulatory processes. This suggests me that there were some marked biological and appearence differences among the two species in spite of the proximity.

Therefore the inter-species barrier was possibly rather high even if still not total.

The authors emphasize specially five alleles in which more than one SNP is different, suggesting greater differences. These are specially related to skin morphology and regulatory substitutions (specificity).

Also the studied certain regions in clear rapid evolutionary change in the line leading to humans called HARs. The vast majority of these HARs had already evolved before the Neanderthal-Sapiens transition but a few (c. 1.7%) had not yet and belong specifically to Homo sapiens.

These human-specific HARs include genes related to mental functions (associated with mental disorders such as Dow syndrome, schizophrenia and autism) as well as a the RUNX2 (CBFA1) gene that would be related to changes in skull, clavicle and ribcage morphology.


Are Chinese slightly 'more Neanderthal' than other Eurasians?

Less definitely, when working with the comparative data at table 4, I find that the Han Chinese sample (n=2) appears very slightly but maybe significantly "more Neanderthal" than the other Eurasians, including the only Japanese. The Chinese individuals differ from the African sample in Neanderthal alleles by an average factor of 5.05 (4.95 and 5.15), while the non-Han Eurasian average is 4.21 (3.93-4.65), that is: almost a point more. Only one European individual (4.65) really approaches the Han Chinese figures, which differ by almost a whole point (0.92) from the rest.


This, of course, can only be a very preliminary indication but it does seem intriguing and potentially meaningful. The fact that the greatest difference is with the, otherwise very close, Japanese could even point to some greater diversity patterns in East Eurasia in regard to Neanderthal genes in us, and, considering the tiny sample sizes, even in much of the rest of Eurasia.

Some experts' opinions on the Neanderthal genome's implications

From Quo magazine (in Spanish). Translated some sentences here:

J.L. Arsuaga, co-Director of Atapuerca archaeological site: These are only some some results and we will have to wait. It is a contribution in some humans of just some 2%, what would not be really relevant.

C. Lalueza Fox, member of the research team of El Sidrón cave: This year we will see published the Thousand Genomes' Project, that aims to sequence a thousand human genomes, and will be interesting to see if the percentage of Neanderthal genes is kept, in which frequency, in which populations.

Jordi Agustí, member of the research team of Dmanisi site: It does not fundamentally invalidates what was believed so far: that they were different or almost different species.

E. Baquedano, member of the research team of Pinilla del Valle site: We will have to admit that Humans and Neanderthals belong to a single species even if they are distinct subspecies.

In the same magazine but a separate interview, anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, defends his theory on admixture in Europe some 40,000 years ago only and is disdainful of the use of aDNA and the comparison of a "pathetic" sample of just 3 Neanderthal individuals with just "five modern humans" (sic, actually it's five modern human populations comprising 12 individuals). He refers us to his 2007 anatomical paper.

Exploring the Neanderthal admixture episode (1)

I mentioned the other day that a small amount of Neanderthal genes have been detected among non-African modern humans in a homogeneous way that strongly suggests it happened only within the process of migration into Eurasia and beyond.

The percentage of Neanderthal "blood" in non-Africans is estimated in 1-4% (average: 2.5%) what means the equivalent to one great-great-great-grandparent (3.13%) or great-great-great-great-grandparent (1.56%). In other words: the equivalent to one of 32-64 ancestors.

The homogeneity of the apportion across people of Eurasian ancestry (includes Oceanian and American natives) tells us that this was the situation in the Migrant Population at the arrival to South Asia, where it expanded very dynamically.

We must understand that, due to various environmental reasons (adaptation to warm climate, arid barriers and Neanderthal pressure) the Migrant Population must have been rather small between Africa and South Asia. At least that's what the genetic signature strongly suggests. However it was not too small or not too homogeneous because several lineages (2-3 at least per gender) arrived to the South Asian secondary cradle (a really small homogeneous population would surely have got its lineages more strictly fixated, i.e. one per gender).

There are many different detailed scenarios that could explain this limited gene flow but the following one is which seems to me as the simplest one on light of the available genetic and archaeological data:



Feel free to discuss, of course, it's very tentative and pretty much open to variants and alternatives.

Why did I get the main migrant population go via South Arabia? Because there are many clues that suggest so but it's again a personal choice: my best hunch.

Why did I place the main admixture event in Palestine? Because there's some archaeological evidence telling of at least contact between both species there c. 130,000 years ago (old stratigraphic date). But could have happened in many other areas of the Middle East, in Iran for instance (in which case, we could consider a single migrating population via South Arabia and consider the Palestinian episode genetically unproductive).

Just trying to figure out...

New genetic research on eye color in Europeans

There is a new paper on the genetics of eye color in Europeans that claims to have achieved the highest ever levels of correlation between genes (and other underlying factors such as age, somewhat relevant) and phenotype, reaching 49-52% of accuracy.

Fan Liu et al., Digital Quantification of Human Eye Color Highlights Genetic Association of Three New Loci. PLoS Genetics 2010. Open access.

The originality of the approach is that they did not just quantify "color" but two parameters: hue and saturation. In both cases (table 3) a SNP (rs12913832A) at the HERC2 gene is most important in eye coloration (44.5 for hue, 48.3 for saturation), followed at a fair distance by age (1.2 for hue, 5.0 for saturation). The rest of the factors (other SNPs, gender) only seem to have minor influence (<0.5%),>

Almost half of the underlying factors of eye color still remain obscure.

Neanderthal gene flow found in humans

Finally an aperitif from the so much expected Neanderthal genome. We will still have to wait for the other specimens from several parts of Europe but the three individuals of Vindija (Croatia) have already been sequenced and provide some interesting information.

Richard E. Green et al., A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome. Science Magazine 2010. Open access.

Abstract

Neandertals, the closest evolutionary relatives of present-day humans, lived in large parts of Europe and western Asia before disappearing 30,000 years ago. We present a draft sequence of the Neandertal genome composed of more than 4 billion nucleotides from three individuals. Comparisons of the Neandertal genome to the genomes of five present-day humans from different parts of the world identify a number of genomic regions that may have been affected by positive selection in ancestral modern humans, including genes involved in metabolism and in cognitive and skeletal development. We show that Neandertals shared more genetic variants with present-day humans in Eurasia than with present-day humans in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that gene flow from Neandertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.

Related materials (all open access) can be found at Special Feature: The Neanderthal Genome, also at Science Magazine.

The authors estimate that this gene flow is quantified in 1-4% of the Eurasian genome and this is the same for West Eurasians, East Asians or Papuans but not for the Yoruba nor the San. This means that, most likely, there was gene flow between the two species soon after the Out of Africa migration.

More later maybe. This is just a quick heads up.

Morong 43: health professionals under the Inquisition in Philippines

There is today an interesting article at La Haine (in Spanish, an English version can be read here), by James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya, on the kind of Colombian-like violence and oligarchic terrorism that dominates the Filipino political landscape, where votes are forced by the means of institutional terror by a handful of feudal lords (and ladies, as President Macapagal).

A particular focus is the inquisitorial forgery of the case against 43 physicians and nurses that were arrested at a professional meeting in the locality of Morong, where they were discussing a plan for intervention in case of epidemic after the disaster caused by typhoon Ketsana.

They were rounded up and brought to a military camp where they were tortured. They are (gratuitously) accused of belonging to the guerrilla New People's Army.

The decane of the College of Physicians of the University of Philippines described the arrests, tortures and accusations as part of a pattern of terrorism against physicians comitted to the rural areas, where the situation is generally awful.

The issue has been covered in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet however the mainstream press has ignored the matter completely, because Gloria Macapagal and her terror regime are a key ally of the Empire in the area.

"Those lazy Greeks!"

The Imperial media is spreading the lie that Greek workers are lazy and overpaid. The reality is, of course, very far from that insulting propaganda:

Greeks work on average 42 hours per week, while the EU average is 40.3 and the Eurozone one is just 40 hours.

Private sector workers are also extremely underpaid in Greece: 803 euros per month, including taxes and social security payments. You get more than that in many EU countries for picking your nose! The lowest wages in the Eurozone are well ahead of those figures, at least 1400 euros in the Netherlands for example.

Pensioners only become such at ages slightly above the EU average, 61.4 vs. 61.1 years, but do so with pensions that, before the current draconian measures, were already insultingly low: 750 euros/month, while in the Netherlands is 3200 euros instead.

At least 30% of Greek workers are totally outside of the social security system anyhow, in a black market area that certainly does damage to the ability of the government to meet its social obligations and can only be harmful to workers themselves. In comparison the EU average is of 5-10%.

Greece public service (22.5% of workforce) is large in comparison with Germany (14%) but rather modest in comparison with other EU countries: 30% in France, 27% in the Netherlands, 20% in the UK.

The 13th and 14th month salaries are not any "extras" but just a method of dividing the yearly salary to stimulate consumerism in the holiday seasons. A similar method is common in Spain. The salary is anyhow defined in yearly terms and the only difference is that it is divided in 14 units instead of 12.

While the wages and working conditions in Greece are extremely low for EU standards, price have not stopped rising. Greek workers have to buy at German prices while having half the salary of Germans. A somewhat similar situation happens in Spain and other low wages Eurozone countries: it is the euro-prices which won't allow ever to lower salaries because after all, you want a salary to pay for your living, so it has to be big enough for that.

In Greece a packet of cereals costs on average 2.86 euros, while the same packet costs 1.89 euros in the UK (51% cheaper than in Greece) and in France 2.25 euros (27% cheaper). Greeks buy a toothbrush for 3.74 euros while in the UK the same toothbrush is sold for 2.46 euros (52% cheaper). A pack of soft drinks that costs 3.1 euros in Greece, costs 2.76 in Belgium, 2.3 in France and 2.68 in UK. The most prominent examples are a cup of coffee or tea: in Greece the average price is between 3 and 3.5 euros, more than twice the average in most European countries.

Greece does not need lower salaries, quite obviously. It needs cheaper prices if anything. You just can't lower salaries under the cost of living.

More at Marxist.com

Greece and Europe can only do one thing: a Revolution

As the pace of the Greek revolution speeds up, with the first casualties in a burned down bank office and the Greek Parliament besieged daily by the angry people, one may wonder why is people so angry. After all, according to the Imperial media, it's all their fault and the government is doing what it must do to save the nation.

The answer is logically that people is not so naive: they have barely, if at all, benefited from the bad practices that have triggered the crisis (rather the opposite) and they have yet to see any of those white collar criminals being brought to court and their properties seized to help pay the national debt.

The answer is that the whole nation is being held for ransom for the corruption of a handful of oligarchs and, what is maybe even more important, their international accomplices.

That's simply not acceptable.

And obviously this means a regime change in Greece: one that can effectively arrest the criminals and issue the appropriate international capture orders for their accomplices in Washington and Brussels.

One that has no problem in nationalizing the product of past years' robbery when possible.

One that dares to declare bankruptcy if need be.



So Greece is set for a revolutionary regime change and that is most unlikely to be prevented because there is no alternative. The only question is the pace and exact extension of this change.

But what about the rest or EU. EU can live without Greece but can it live without half of EU members? Because the speculators' aim is already set to other Eurozone states. It seems by the signals that the Iberian peninsula will be next but Italy, Ireland and the very UK (out of Eurozone but of great importance by its size) are clearly in the agenda.

The European Union today.
Eurozone in blue, comitted to join the Eurozone in green, special statuses in red, non-EU states using the euro in purple.
Stripes signify those states clearly targetted by the Transnational Capital to be ripped off in a "controlled demolition" (Latvia included because it's already suffering the IMF blackmail).
Original map from Wikipedia (modified).

The goal is to recycle these countries into cheap labor zones for the Euro-Global Capital without these vampires losing a cent in the process. The 'problem' is that the plan may go awry and trigger a pan-European revolutionary process.

Maybe the level of popular organization is not yet high enough but, even if the Transnational Capital achieves its goals it can only be a temporary situation as the rage they will leave behind in some of the more privatized and less well-off states of EU, where people do already struggle to make ends meet, cannot really be contained in the mid run.

While the Greek spending spree may have been going on before the advent of the Global Crisis, in the rest of countries public spending has actually been a reaction, a much needed one, to this disintegration of the Capitalist World Order. Claiming that states have to cut spending in the midst of a general crisis is totally absurd: states must increase their spending to put up for the inability of the so-called "market economy" to generate jobs and salaries, which are after all the only ones that will generate demand for the beleaguered private companies, at least for most of them.

Cutting public acquisitive power is not an option, not even for German capitalists: it's a suicide.

If the European Bank must print more euros, so be it. If the euro has to be devaluated, that is not a problem but in fact good news for European companies, which would see their international competitivity improved greatly by such measure.

But EU institutions are not working for the good of the European common citizen (or should I say denizen?), EU institutions are only working for the good of some privileged elites and they don't care at all about the common European, not even about the common European small company. Only huge multinationals matter for them.

This situation obviously demands a regime change at EU level. A regime change that redefines EU as a social federation and not as a capitalist one, a regime change that establishes EU finally as a representative democracy and not a mere bureaucracy at the service of the transnational mafias.

It may take some time but it will be done. The only alternative is for EU to disintegrate completely and its various states (or fragments of states in some cases, as Spain for example is not going to survive this one in a piece, nor will the UK) let to fend off alone in the vast ocean full of sharks. That's not a realistic or at least desirable goal and it's something that goes against the common feeling of nowadays Europeans, for which a European union, this or another better one, is a default.

So the only alternative is pan-European revolution.

Let's do it, do you have a better plan for today, my dear unemployed bored and desperate reader?

_________

Note: you can read the declaration of a colleague of the dead bank workers blaming the deaths on the bank owners at Occupied London (in English) and Indymedia (original in Greek). Triggered by this tragic incident, the Greek bank workers are going to strike tomorrow even if the corporative guild forbids them to do so.

Origin of Aterian

Julien Riel-Salvatore writes today on new research on the Moroccan site of Dar es-Soltan (near Rabat), which has yielded dates of c. 110,000 BP for one of the oldest cultures of our species: Aterian, defined by its characteristically tanged points and the clear evidence of symbolic behavior in form of perforated shells, extended through North Africa.

He mentions that the same Germano-Moroccan team has been working in other sites dated to as early as 175,000 BP, what is really bordering the very origins of our species as such (oldest skulls are dated to 190,000 BP in Ethiopia and 160,000 in both Ethiopia and Morocco).

He also points to a very promising site at Ifri n'Amar (at the Rif) with a depth of 6.3 meters which seems to include also recent layers of this culture. No final dates are given anywhere but the fact that the tanged peculiarity persisted through Upper Paleolithic (Oranian, Capsian) makes me think of some sort of continuity even through change.

Ref. Press release of the Moroccan Ministry of Culture (in French and Arabic).

Greece and Spain like Latvia, Portugal to tax the rich instead.

There's a nice article of economist I. Esnaola at Gara today, illustrating how the "rescue plan" of the IMF-EU tandem is a recipe for disaster. It is exactly the same "medicine" Latvia got in 2008 and things have only got worse for them since then: growing unemployment (even higher than Spain!), "growth" of -18% in a single year, and all without being able to stop public deficit from running wild at all.

That's exactly what they want to impose to Greece, just that the Greek people seem much less sheeply than Latvians and may just send IMF, EU and everything of the like to the trash bin in the process.

Spain does not seem to need an IMF package: it is already applying one: on its own will nearly all state income is reliant on a growing VAT (consume tax, now to be raised to 18%) and from tobbacco, alcohol and gasoline special taxes. Meanwhile the wealthy enjoy the best deals, what makes Spain unable to collect enough money for its expenses.

Instead, the only conservative government of the three South European countries, that of Portugal, has decided to tackle the tax crisis by raising taxes to the wealthy segment, up to 45%. It's clear that they are the only ones who know how to deal with the budget crisis: redistributing and not just loading the scales against the working class even more.

Arizona boycotted for racist law

The new racist law of Arizona (SB1070), as you may know, allows citizens to denounce policemen if they do not stop and identify potential illegal immigrants, that is in practical terms: anyone who looks Hispanic, but holds no provision to guarantee the human rights of these people nor to allow them to denounce police or the state for abuses. It basically makes sure that police will be pressed hard to treat all Hispanic people as potential criminals or otherwise be reported to their bosses by the local nazis.

It has been globally condemned as a racist law and has been denounced that way in pan-American forums such as the OAS and within the USA itself.

In fact, what is happening is that Arizona is becoming the focus of a widespread boycott, what seems to bother the governor of the state, Jan Bewer, and is harming the hostery business, which has reported significant falls in customers since the law was pushed ahead. But really if not being blond with bright blue eyes and speaking broken English with a nasal accent while spitting "chew" on the floor makes your suspicious to the state police, who may even arrest you for no reason... it's clear that it's better not to go to Arizona, just in case.

Hostery industrials have detached themselves from the racist law. Debbie Johnson gremial speaker for the industry in Arizona, said: "I would like to tell to all the people who is angry for the law that we did not support it. Many of our workers are Hispanic and we respect them".

Even the City of Los Angeles is pondering the possibility of boycotting Arizona. Public servants of San Francisco, another major Californian city, already decided to suspend all cooperation with Arizona except in health and police. Both city governments have asked citizens not to consume any product with Arizonan origin.

Signatures are already being gathered in order to get a referendum on the law. Paradoxically, Arizona has some unusual democratic provisions in its constitution allowing the citizens to call for referendums easily.

Source: La Haine[es].