Paleogenetics is helping to solve the great mystery of prehistory: How did humans spread out over the earth?

Jacob Mikanowski writes: Most of human history is prehistory. Of the 200,000 or more years that humans have spent on Earth, only a tiny fraction have been recorded in writing. Even in our own little sliver of geologic time, the 12,000 years of the Holocene, whose warm weather and relatively stable climate incubated the birth of agriculture, cities, states, and most of the other hallmarks of civilisation, writing has been more the exception than the rule.

Professional historians can’t help but pity their colleagues on the prehistoric side of the fence. Historians are accustomed to drawing on vast archives, but archaeologists must assemble and interpret stories from scant material remains. In the annals of prehistory, cultures are designated according to modes of burial such as ‘Single Grave’, or after styles of arrowhead, such as ‘Western Stemmed Point’. Whole peoples are reduced to styles of pottery, such as Pitted Ware, Corded Ware or Funnel Beaker, all of them spread across the map in confusing, amoeba-like blobs.

In recent years, archaeologists have become reluctant to infer too much from assemblages of ceramics, weapons and grave goods. For at least a generation, they have been drilled on the mantra that ‘pots are not people’. Material culture is not a proxy for identity. Artefacts recovered from a dig can provide a wealth of information about a people’s mode of subsistence, funeral rites and trade contacts, but they are not a reliable guide to their language or ethnicity – or their patterns of migration.

Before the Second World War, prehistory was seen as a series of invasions, with proto-Celts and Indo-Aryans swooping down on unsuspecting swaths of Europe and Asia like so many Vikings, while megalith builders wandered between continents in indecisive meanders. After the Second World War, this view was replaced by the processual school, which attributed cultural changes to internal adaptations. Ideas and technologies might travel, but people by and large stayed put. Today, however, migration is making a comeback.

Much of this shift has to do with the introduction of powerful new techniques for studying ancient DNA. The past five years have seen a revolution in the availability and scope of genetic testing that can be performed on prehistoric human and animal remains. Ancient DNA is tricky to work with. Usually it’s degraded, chemically altered and cut into millions of short fragments. But recent advances in sequencing technology have made it possible to sequence whole genomes from samples reaching back thousands, and tens of thousands, of years. Whole-genome sequencing yields orders of magnitude more data than organelle-based testing, and allows geneticists to make detailed comparisons between individuals and populations. Those comparisons are now illuminating new branches of the human family tree. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Europe and U.S. pay cost of inaction against Syria’s Assad

Yaroslav Trofimov reports: The Syrian refugee crisis overwhelming Europe has shattered the illusion, often used to justify inaction, that in the modern world there is such a thing as a distant war in a faraway land.

Over the past four years, 250,000 Syrians have died, most of them killed by the Assad regime against which the West has refused to intervene. More than half of the population has been forced to flee their homes, with four million refugees pouring first into neighboring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan — and now many of them to Europe.

As Europe’s frontiers have collapsed, millions more are likely to follow suit, overland or by sea. This has already turned Syria from a thorny foreign-policy issue into a full-blown domestic emergency that threatens the cohesion and social peace of the European Union and lays bare the costs of the West’s policy of nonintervention against the regime.

“The Syria conflict is a lot closer to Europe than the U.S. — and the interest in solving it should have been regarded as a vital one at least here in Europe,” said Guido Steinberg, an expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and the German federal government’s former adviser on international terrorism.

“But the Europeans really have no clue how to deal with a major regional crisis in the Middle East. We needed the U.S. — but the U.S. wasn’t there.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Thousands of Russians fighting for ISIS, says security service

Newsweek reports: Russia’s federal security services (FSB) estimate that around 2,500 Russian nationals have joined the ranks of Islamist terror organisation ISIS, state TV channel Perviy Kanal reported on Friday.

Speaking to reporters at a summit attended by Russian anti-terrorism officials and officials from other member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, FSB Deputy Chief Sergey Smirnov said some of Russia’s neighbours also face urgent problems in terms of jihadist recruitment.

He said that according to FSB data, 3,000 would-be jihadis from across the central Asian region had joined ISIS. Smirnov did not clarify what role these recruits play, and it did not specify if they were actively involved in fighting alongside ISIS. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. and Russia in talks on how to fight in Syria without fighting each other

Reuters reports: U.S. and Russian defense chiefs spoke for the first time in over a year on Friday, breaking their silence to discuss the crisis in Syria as Moscow’s increasing military buildup there raised the prospect of coordination between the former Cold War foes.

The Pentagon said the call lasted about 50 minutes and included an agreement for further U.S.-Russian talks about ways to keep their respective militaries out of each other’s way, something known as “deconfliction” in military parlance.

The United States fiercely opposes Russia’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Pentagon last year cut off high-level military talks with Moscow after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine.

But Russia’s buildup at Syria’s Latakia airbase raises the possibility of simultaneous U.S. and Russian air combat missions in Syrian airspace.

Heavy Russian equipment such as tanks and helicopters, as well as naval infantry forces, have recently been moved to Latakia, an Assad stronghold, U.S. officials say. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

‘We want a massacre’: Turkish-Kurdish tensions escalate as election looms

Der Spiegel reports: Cemile just wanted to get some fresh air and escape the feeling of confinement that the curfew in Cizre had brought with it. It was shortly after 8 p.m. on Sept. 4. Darkness had fallen over the city in southeastern Turkey. In the distance, Cemile could see the fire in the mountains. The soldiers were burning down the forests to destroy the Kurdish fighters’ hiding spots. “But don’t go on the street!” Ramazan Cagirga, her father, called out.

Outside, as is so often the case these days, shots could be heard. Suddenly a loud noise could be heard nearby. Cemile — 12 years old, long hair, brown eyes, with pearl earrings — collapsed on the spot. A gunshot had traveled through the wooden gate to the front yard and killed the girl. Eyewitnesses report it coming from an armored vehicle.

“We hoped Cemile would survive,” her father says. “We carried her into the house, but there was nothing we could do.” He then tried to organize an ambulance to pick up the body. But nobody came, because of the gunshots and the curfew. During the day, temperatures reached over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), so they cleared out the freezer, wrapped the body in cellophane and froze it. The girl’s body spent three days there before a car finally came to take her to the hospital in the neighboring city of Sirnak. Cemile’s family buried her on Friday.

The family had already lost relatives in an attack by Turkish security forces once before. In 1992, a grandfather, sister, aunts and uncles of Ramazan Cagirga died — seven people in total. The house — the same home where Cemile died this month — had been shot at.

It’s not just the deaths in the Cagirgas household that seem to be repeating themselves. Between 1984 and 2013, 40,000 people, mostly Kurds, died in Turkey’s bloody civil war. Now both sides are ramping things up once again, with attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), assaults by the Turkish army, a state of emergency, restrictions on news coverage and a general climate of fear and violence. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

If Obama thought rebel training was bound to fail, why did he support it?

The New York Times reports: By any measure, President Obama’s effort to train a Syrian opposition army to fight the Islamic State on the ground has been an abysmal failure. The military acknowledged this week that just four or five American-trained fighters are actually fighting.

But the White House says it is not to blame. The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place — a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At briefings this week after the disclosure of the paltry results, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, repeatedly noted that Mr. Obama always had been a skeptic of training Syrian rebels. The military was correct in concluding that “this was a more difficult endeavor than we assumed and that we need to make some changes to that program,” Mr. Earnest said. “But I think it’s also time for our critics to ‘fess up in this regard as well. They were wrong.”

In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment. The I-told-you-so argument, of course, assumes that the idea of training rebels itself was flawed and not that it was started too late and executed ineffectively, as critics maintain. [Continue reading…]

An I-told-you-so argument is also one typically made by someone who impotently stands on the sidelines — someone deprived of a decision-making role, not someone with the title: commander-in-chief.

The region-wide perception that the U.S. role in Syria has been marked by neglect is underlined in one analyst’s conclusion that “we’ve become like part of the furniture.”

Facebooktwittermail

Meet the obscure company behind America’s Syria fiasco

BuzzFeed reports: At the heart of the high-stakes U.S. program to train and equip Syrian rebels to fight ISIS is a multimillion-dollar arms deal that the Pentagon farmed out to a tiny, little-known private company called Purple Shovel LLC. A BuzzFeed News investigation, based on inside documents and confidential sources familiar with the Syria operation, has found:

▸ Purple Shovel, through the subcontractors it selected and oversaw, tried to sell the U.S. thousands of Russian-style rocket-propelled grenades that were considered unreliable because they were manufactured three decades ago, before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union.

▸ The U.S. government rejected them, and that delayed to the effort to stand up the Syrian rebel force.

▸ An American contractor, 41-year-old Francis Norwillo, was killed in a weapons explosion in Bulgaria while training with such outdated grenades.

▸ The U.S. violated its own policy and gave Purple Shovel approval to acquire millions of dollars’ worth of high-tech missiles for the rebels from Belarus, a dictatorship that is under sanctions by the European Union. Belarus, which has supplied weapons to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and is accused of human rights violations, is normally off-limits to U.S. arms dealers. But the U.S. military and State Department agreed to make an exception, allowing 700 powerful anti-tank missiles to be purchased, with U.S. taxpayer funds, for the rebels. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Abandoning Syria: Few options left for stopping the war

Christoph Reuter reports: Both men were Syrians — a taxi driver and his passenger. They met during an hour-long drive in April from the airport in the southern Turkish city of Adana toward the east. Within a few minutes, they realized that they were from the same place, the northern port city of Latakia, which is controlled by the Syrian regime.

Things got tricky when the two men began to wonder whose side the other had been on.
They avoided direct questions for a while. Before, on the other side of the border, they may have shot at each other. But now they were sitting in the same car. Eventually, the driver began to tell his story. He had been a bank manager and had told jokes about Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. After an informer betrayed him to the government, a man from Syrian intelligence gave him a warning, saying: “Get out now. They’re coming to get you in half an hour.”

Then the second man told his story. He had been an architecture student. “I had nothing against Assad,” he said. But checkpoints had been erected everywhere in recent weeks, where young men were forcibly recruited into the army. “I didn’t want to die,” he explained. The driver chuckled briefly, and then the two men went silent for a while.

“It’s over,” the driver finally said. “Yes,” his passenger replied. They spent the rest of the trip discussing the best routes to Europe. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

EU nations pull welcome mats for migrants, imposing new restrictions

The Washington Post reports: European nations once friendly to refugees abruptly yanked their welcome mats Thursday, as Germany considered slashing its benefits and Croatia announced it was closing most of its road links with Serbia “until further notice.”

The German measures would overhaul asylum codes to stem the massive flow of migrants into Europe, scaling back the generous policies that have made Germany a beacon for desperate war refugees and economic migrants pouring out of the Middle East, Africa and beyond.

In a 128-page draft law produced by the German Interior Ministry and obtained by The Washington Post, the government would speed asylum procedures, cut cash benefits, hasten deportations and punish those with false claims and phony paperwork. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Britain welcomed Huguenots, Jews, Vietnamese. So why not Syrians?

Robert Winder writes: The headlines grow ever more macabre. Tear gas, water cannon and razor wire in Hungary add a horrifying edge to the chaos in Croatia, mayhem in Macedonia or death by asphyxiation in an Austrian layby. Next to these disasters, the odd jostle to climb on to a refrigerated lorry in Calais, which recently was depicted as a hideous national crisis, is a minor issue. The few thousand souls who have made it as far as the French coast are no longer the headline act.

Politicians still squirm as if there are burglars coming up the drive, but concede that it is a humanitarian crisis. Television presents it half as a heart-tugging parable of children in need, and half as a criminal riot. Everyone knows that something must be done. No one knows what. We live in an age that likes simple solutions, but in this case there isn’t one. Is it possible, though, that the suddenness of this convulsion is harming our sense of proportion? There were 26,370 knife crimes in Britain last year, yet a few thousand hungry mouths from war zones (many of them children) are widely held to present the graver threat to our way of life. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Are jihadists hiding among refugees? Unlikely, analysts say

AFP reports: Warnings that jihadists bent on violence may be sneaking into Europe disguised as refugees are growing louder, but analysts say extremists do not need to board rickety rubber dinghies to infiltrate the continent.

Politicians have for weeks been sounding the alarm over the risk of bloodthirsty radicals making their way to Europe undetected in the flood of desperate migrants, and even Pope Francis warned this week of the “risk of infiltration”.

While experts say this scenario is not impossible, they argue that groups such as the Islamic State have far more sophisticated means to reach Europe to carry out attacks. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The unheralded force that helped win the Iran deal and reshape U.S. foreign policy

Ben Wikler writes: At midnight tonight [Thursday], the clock stops. The congressional review period for the Iran nuclear deal expires, and the opponents of the deal officially lose their chance to torpedo the landmark foreign policy achievement of the Obama era. Thanks to 42 Democratic and Independent Senators, the GOP-driven sabotage bill never even reached the president’s desk, and the United States has moved off of the path to war with Iran.

It’s a moment worth marking: the visible sign of a tectonic shift in the politics of American foreign policy.

The Iran deal’s political survival means many things at once. It signals the decline of AIPAC and the Likud lobby, a masterfully executed vote-whipping operation driven by the White House, Dick Durbin and Harry Reid in the Senate, and Leader Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Rep. David Price, and Rep. Lloyd Doggett in the House.

But it also means something more, something largely missed in the many write-ups of how the victory was forged. The success of the Iran nuclear deal marks a crescendo of a politically mature constituency for peace and diplomacy. It’s a milestone in the ascendancy of a grassroots movement stirred to action by the Iraq war that has been building steadily since, a force that will shape the politics of war and peace in 2016 and the years beyond. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Following a final failed attempt by Senate Republicans to kill the Iran nuclear agreement Thursday, the administration moved aggressively toward putting it into effect, naming a new czar to oversee implementation and announcing that President Obama would issue waivers suspending all U.S. nuclear-related sanctions on Oct. 18.

The waivers will not go into effect until what the agreement itself calls “Implementation Day,” when the International Atomic Energy Agency certifies that Iran has complied with all of its obligations — including removal of 98 percent of its enriched uranium stockpile, shutting down its underground enrichment facility and rendering inoperative the core of a plutonium-capable reactor.

Senior administration officials said those processes could take well into 2016 once they begin next month, under the terms of the deal completed in July. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Can Netanyahu change Al Aqsa status quo?

Ben White writes: In 2014, almost 11,000 Jews entered the Al-Aqsa mosque compound. This represented a 28 percent increase from the previous year – and almost double the number of Jewish visitors in 2009. While in 2012, Jewish activists entered the compound on average once every 2 weeks, in 2013 this had become once every 4 days, and in 2014, closer to every 2-3 days.

The UN has described how this week’s confrontations were preceded by “three consecutive weeks of [Israeli forces] preventing all Palestinian women, as well as all men under 50, from entering Al Aqsa Mosque Compound during the morning hours, to secure the entry of settlers and other Israeli groups.” Last week, the Israeli government outlawed two Muslim groups, “informal movements of mostly Arab women and elderly men”, who protest Jewish activists’ visits to the compound. [Continue reading…]

Middle East Eye reports: Dozens of Palestinians were reportedly injured on Friday when Israeli and Palestinian Authority forces suppressed protests across the West Bank amid continuing entry restrictions the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.

At the Qalandiya military checkpoint, three Palestinians were shot with rubber-coated steel bullets as youth threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli forces who responded with stun grenades, tear gas and .22-caliber bullets, Maan News Agency reported.

Clashes were also reported on Friday in Hebron, Nablus, Tulkarem, Qalqiliya and near Bethlehem where PA security forces assaulted demonstrators and, according to Maan, detained 13 young people. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

This is how easy it is to be suspected of being a radical if you’re Muslim

BuzzFeed reports: British Muslims have detailed the innocent, everyday acts that have led to individuals being suspected as radicals, from holding open doors to writing class projects about foreign policy.

Amid international criticism of the arrest of a Texan schoolboy for building a clock his teacher thought was a hoax bomb, a new report highlights growing concern among UK Muslims that they are being unfairly targeted for being suspected extremists.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) submitted the examples to David Anderson QC, the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, who included them in his annual report published on Thursday. In the report, Anderson warned the government’s counter-terrorism legislation risked alienating Muslims and could provoke a backlash in certain communities. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iran released top members of Al Qaeda in a trade

The New York Times reports: The government of Iran released five senior members of Al Qaeda earlier this year, including the man who stepped in to serve as the terrorist group’s interim leader immediately after Osama bin Laden’s death, and who is the subject of a $5 million bounty, according to an American official who had been briefed on the matter.

Iran’s release of the five men was part of a prisoner swap in March with Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, the group holding an Iranian diplomat, Nour Ahmad Nikbakht. Mr. Nikbakht was kidnapped in the Yemeni capital of Sana in July 2013.

The Iranian government, in a statement on Thursday after the release was reported by Sky News earlier this week, denied that the five men had been freed. The American official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the matter, confirmed the release of Saif al-Adl, a senior member of Al Qaeda’s ruling body, known as the Shura Council, who oversaw the organization immediately after bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs in Pakistan in 2011. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Russian journalist Oleg Kashin knows who tried to kill him

The Washington Post reports: On Nov. 6, 2010, two men beat a prominent Russian journalist, Oleg Kashin, within an inch of his life. He was hit 56 times in the head, arms and legs with a steel pipe, left hospitalized in an induced coma with a fractured skull, and had one finger partially amputated. He survived and eventually recovered.

The brutal attack in a downtown Moscow courtyard shocked Russian society. Then-President Dmitry Medvedev vowed the killers would be found, but after nearly five years, the case remained unsolved, similar to attacks against other journalists here. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Climate change is the moonshot of our times

Martin Rees writes: Consider this scenario: Suppose astronomers had tracked an asteroid, and calculated that it would hit the Earth in 2080, 65 years from now — not with certainty, but with, say, 10 percent probability. Would we relax, saying that this is a problem that can be set aside for 50 years, since people will by then be richer, and it may turn out that it misses the Earth anyway? I do not think we would. There would surely be a consensus that we should start straight away and do our damndest to find ways to deflect it, or mitigate its effects.

Why do our governments, in contrast, respond with torpor to the climate threat? It’s because concerns about future generations (and about people in poorer parts of the world) tend to slip down the agenda. And of course because the hardest challenges get parked in the “too-difficult box” rather than reacted to. The task of weaning the world away from dependence on fossil fuels is indeed a daunting one. I’m rather pessimistic about “top-down” attempts to constrain emissions, like the UN conference in Paris this year. It’s far more realistic to push forward with new technologies so that they can compete economically with fossil fuels.

The impediment to “decarbonizing” our economy is that renewable energy is still expensive to generate. Moreover, power from the sun and wind is intermittent so we need cheap ways to store it on a large scale. Fortunately, technology in solar energy and batteries is proceeding apace. Along with a group of colleagues, I have been promoting a campaign to accelerate it further. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail