They Don't Like Us, They Don't Like Us!

Hey, I thought that electing Obama would change world opinion toward us. We could hold our heads high, be loved and accepted among the community of nations, and all that rot.

Well, sorry to say, it didn't work. Electing Obama has not changed world opinion much at all. We are still widely hated. BBC did a global poll and found that:

Views of the US showed improvements in Canada, Egypt, Ghana, India, Italy and Japan. But far more countries have predominantly negative views of America (12), than predominantly positive views (6). Most Europeans show little change and views of the US in Russia and China have grown more negative.

Read the whole thing here.

So what can we conclude?

First, "world opinion" doesn't exist. Opinions vary from place to place depending upon local and regional conditions.

Second, the opinions of foreigners are not driven by American domestic politics. It doesn't matter much who we elect, foreign opinions are not going to change greatly.

Finally, opinions regarding the United States are driven to some extent by the national interests of the country being polled. China gets frisky, Japan and India draw closer to the United States. The Russian bear begins to growl and its neighbors begin to seek American involvement in their countries.

Savaging Sarah

Yuval Levin has a nice piece in Commentary on the divergent reactions to Sarah Palin's candidacy.

On the left:

The reaction to Palin revealed a deep and intense cultural paranoia on the Left: an inclination to see retrograde reaction around every corner, and to respond to it with vile anger. A confident, happy, and politically effective woman who was also a social conservative was evidently too much to bear. The response of liberal feminists was in this respect particularly telling, and especially unpleasant.

And on the right:

It seemed to matter not a whit that Palin had never taken any action on abortion in her time as governor, and rarely had much to say on the subject. Indeed, even as she campaigned before captivated audiences, drawing tens of thousands of proud conservatives to rallies in a display of rock-star popularity no vice-presidential candidate had ever earned, Palin barely spoke about abortion or social issues.

Palin did not merit her instantaneous conversion into the Joan of Arc of the American Right, just as she did not deserve the opprobrium that was heaped upon her by the Left.

So why the fuss?

Palin’s cultural populism put her at odds with the foe that did her the most serious damage: the nation’s intellectual elite, whose initial suspicion of her deepened into outright loathing as the campaign progressed.

Why the hatred?

Applied to politics, the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

Sarah Palin embodied a very different notion of politics, in which sound instincts and valuable life experiences are considered sources of knowledge at least the equal of book learning. She is the product of an America in which explicit displays of pride in intellect are considered unseemly...

There's much more in this perceptive article. Sarah Palin, more than any other recent political figure tells us a lot about ourselves, and it isn't good. Read the whole thing here.

The Party of Fear

Democrats like to argue that Republicans gain power only by scaring people about non-existent threats [like the Soviet Union, Radical Islam, etc.], but the real Party of Fear is the one that incessantly predicts imminent crisis. From the fear of nuclear armageddon, to the predictions of overpopulation and global famine, to the urban crisis [remember that?] to the global cooling/warming/cooling/change/whatever crisis, to today's global economic meltdown, it has always been the Democrats who have been America's most prominent scare mongers. Remember the predictions that a Republican victory would result in seniors being thrown out into the street, that lynching would be reinstituted, that women would be denied rights, that the US would embark on an endless war of conquest, that they would end social security, etc? They were all advanced by the Party of Fear -- the Democrats.

The latest evidence of this is the Young Messiah's article in the Washington Post in which he describes the current economic troubles in catastrophic terms. It is, according to Obama, "an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression", one that "we may not be able to reverse".

The solution? Pass massive spending legislation like the so-called "stimulus bill" laden with liberal wish list goodies.

Read it here.

Classic scaremongering, plain and simple, and a staple of Democrat political strategy.

I thought this President promised change, but what he offers is simply more of the same.

UPDATE:

Lindsay Graham agrees. Read it here.

The Face of Pure Evil

It just doesn't get any worse than this. Read AP's interview with the woman who trains other women to be suicide bombers [here].

Here's the technique. Insurgents rape and sexually abuse a woman who is then declared unclean and shunned by her friends and family. Perhaps they threaten to kill her for having disgraced the family honor. Then the "broken" woman is sent to "The Mother of Believers" for counseling.

And what does she counsel? She tells the woman that the only way to regain her, and her family's honor, is to offer herself as a suicide bomber.

Pure, distilled evil!

The Incompetents and the Fools

It is becoming ever more apparent that Bambi is in over his head and hasn't got a clue. Tom Elia writes:

At the dawn of the Obama Administration we have witnessed: four high-level appointees blow up over various issues, tax and otherwise (Richardson, Daschel, and Killefer get axed; Geitner stays); the appointment of at least 12 lobbyists to positions in the Administration -- in direct contradiction of campaign promises; a pork-laden economic stimulus bill without precedent in US history; and the reversal of campaign positions concerning controversial policies like rendition.

The first couple of weeks of the Obama Administration has simply reinforced my stated belief that the Obama campaign and subsequent election represents the biggest, most successful political con of my lifetime.

Read it here.

HT: Instapundit

UPDATE:

Is it too soon to declare this a failed presidency? Victor Davis Hanson seems to think not:

We are quite literally after two weeks teetering on an Obama implosion—and with no Dick Morris to bail him out—brought on by messianic delusions of grandeur, hubris, and a strange naivete that soaring rhetoric and a multiracial profile can add requisite cover to good old-fashioned Chicago politicking.

Read it here.

Lies Of the Left -- Situational Morality

So let me get this straight -- When President Clinton initiated the rendition program that allows us to send captured terrorists to other countries for questioning and incarceration that was no big deal, nothing to complain about. But then when President Bush continued the program it became eeeeeeevil! because Bush, you see, is a Republican [and therefore by definition eeeeeevil!]. But now that President Obama not only continues but expands the rendition program everything is all of a sudden hunky dory. And now Democrat hacks in the punditocracy insist that there is no flip flopping going on!

Jeez!

Read about it here. [The guy is upset because lefties are putting party ahead of principle. Why is he surprised? In the long history of the Left, it has always been so.]

Lileks Takes On the Antihumanists

The anti-human element in the environmentalist movement was on full display last week when Jonathon Porritt, Chairman of Britain's Sustainable Development Commission, urged the government to adopt policies promoting abortion and contraception as a way of addressing environmental concerns.

You see, for environmentalists, people are the basic problem.

James Lileks takes on this despicable nonsense in his latest screedblog.

[C]hildren, to some, are not bundles of joys, but bundles of sticks whose inevitable combustion harms the planet. It doesn’t matter whether reducing the population might deprive the world of another Mozart or a scientist who can cure cancer; the latter would just mean people living longer and going more harm....

Lileks..., nobody does it better.

Read it here.

Happy Groundhog Day

Reports from the land of the stinging gnats confirm that Phil saw his shadow and predicts six more weeks of winter. Nobody cares though -- the Steelers rule!!!!!!

The Iraqi Election

Iraq just finished holding a successful round of elections. There was little attending violence -- so little that the Times of London could proclaim Iraqi Fighters Swap Bullets for Ballots [here].

In a reasonable world this would be hailed as a strong indication that there has been a successful conclusion to the American effort in Iraq, one to which we as a people could point with pride. But the MSM had little positive to say about this historic event. There was little reporting on the elections and much of what was reported was designed to downplay their significance. The elections were criticized and to some extent dismissed on the grounds that there was less participation than many anticipated. There was little discussion of positive indicators such as the fact that Sunni participation was markedly higher than in the past, that the Maliki administration made significant gains, that secular leadership was strengthened, and that Iran-backed troublemaker, Muqtada al Sadr, was largely shut out.

On ABC's This Week the Democrat position was laid out clearly. The peaceful elections were nice, but great problems remain and the outcome of our Iraq involvement is still not clear and anyway the only real significance of the election is to hasten our departure from Iraq and the region. And, even if we do consider Iraq to have been something of a success, it came at far too great a cost, not only in men and money, but also in policy terms. Iraq, according to the liberal critique, absorbed too much of Washington's attention, causing us to neglect far more seriousn problems in Afghanistan, in Palestine, and in the U.S. economy. Thus responsibility for the current economic troubles, for the Gaza incursion, and for the perilous conditions in Pakistan and Afghanistan are squarely laid at the feet of Dubya and the hated Neocons who invaded Iraq.

I fear that this interpretation, which in the end is little more than an attempt to shift blame for current problems onto the previous administration and to facilitate withdrawal from international responsibilities will prevail. Certainly the MSM in this country is receptive to it.

The Historians' War Over the New Deal

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the founder of the modern Democratic Party. His political success became the standard against which subsequent Democrats measured their own accomplishments. You can see it in little things and great. FDR gave rise to HST, to JFK, to LBJ, to HHH -- it was not until Jimmy Carter that Democrat Presidential aspirants felt comfortable displaying a nickname rather than initials. Similarly Roosevelt's New Deal gave rise to the Fair Deal, the Great Society, and is today invoked by the present occupant of the White House as a template for his own proposed policies.

A generation of liberal historians, led by the great sycophant Arthur Schlesinger Jr, produced a narrative that held Roosevelt to be the greatest of the Twentieth Century Presidents, perhaps the greatest of all time -- the man whose wise stewardship of the economy led America out of the Depression and whose political skills saved it from radicalism [historians disagreed as to whether the primary threat came from the left or the right, but whatever Roosevelt saved us from it]. And then, to cap it all off, he defeated Hitler and saved the world from racist tyranny. This naive and self-serving narrative was the standard account presented to generations of students in the middle decades of the Twentieth Century. Sure, in the Seventies it began to be challenged by left wing scholars, and foreign writers questioned the primacy of American actions in WWII, and finally in the Eighties conservatives began to question the essential character of Roosevelt's economic reforms. But the cult of FDR still dominated American history texts right up to the 1990's.

In the new conservative narrative Roosevelt's economic policies, rather than being wise and rooted in sound Keynesian economic theory, were incoherent, contradictory and counter-productive. They retarded, rather than facilitated economic recovery. The conservative narrative is summarized in Sunday's Washington Post by Amity Schlaes, whose book The Forgotten Man is an excellent popular critique of the New Deal based on current scholarly understandings. Read her article here. Go ahead, do it -- it's not long.

Shlaes points out that Roosevelt's New Deal policies did not do much to reduce unemployment; did not stimulate the economy; marked a massive intrusion of government into the private sector, crowding out investment capital; represented a sustained attack on capitalism and capitalists that discouraged investment; and instituted a formal and legalistic hostility between labor and capital that seriously inhibited economic growth. As for government spending -- after eight years of government intervention Roosevelt's advisor Henry Morgantheau could sum up the results this way:

"We have tried spending money.... We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . I say, after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started . . . and an enormous debt to boot."

Despite the historians' assault on Roosevelt's record Democrats remain true to his vision. They have been forced to admit that the New Deal did not bring recovery, but assert [as Obama did recently] that the failure was because Roosevelt did not push his reforms far enough and that sufficient government regulation and spending did not come until World War II [which Paul Krugman recently characterized as a massive public works project], when the economy really did recover. This is the argument being put forth by supporters of the current administration which has announced its intent to emulate FDR's policies.

Who is right? My sense is that the conservative critique is far more accurate than the standard narrative on which current political leaders were raised. But consideration of who is right or wrong are largely irrelevant to the current debate. Democrats have a narrative that justifies all that they have done or sought to do over the course of the past eight decades. They will not abandon it anytime soon. Conservatives have a counter-narrative that will inform their critiques of Obama's administration. It, too, is not likely to change much. In today's political climate history is not used as a guide, but rather as a justification, for current policies and political postures. But then, as any serious student of historiography can tell you, it has always been so.

UPDATE:

Also see this column by Penn economist Harold Cole and UCLA economist Lee Ohanian in the Wall Street Journal.

The New Deal is widely perceived to have ended the Great Depression, and this has led many to support a "new" New Deal to address the current crisis. But the facts do not support the perception that FDR's policies shortened the Depression, or that similar policies will pull our nation out of its current economic downturn.

I agree with Instapundit who writes that current nostalgia "isn’t based on the New Deal helping the country. It’s based on the New Deal helping politicians."

One Word

STEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Limits of Change

From the LA Times:

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward....

Maybe Bambi is beginning to come to terms with reality.

Read it here.

One question though -- can we still call it "outsourcing torture" now that the Young Messiah is doing it?

Innocents Abroad

So Obama proclaims himself to be the weak horse, extends a hand in friendship and gets this reaction:

From AFP

US President Barack Obama's offer to talk to Iran shows that America's policy of "domination" has failed, the government spokesman said on Saturday.

"This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed," Gholam Hossein Elham was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency.

"Negotiation is secondary, the main issue is that there is no way but for (the United States) to change," he added.

After nearly three decades of severed ties, Obama said shortly after taking office this month that he is willing to extend a diplomatic hand to Tehran if the Islamic republic is ready to "unclench its fist".

In response, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad launched a fresh tirade against the United States, demanding an apology for its "crimes" against Iran and saying he expected "deep and fundamental" change from Obama.

Read it here.

The naivete of this crew is beyond belief. Almost as bad as the crap that gets slung around in Ivy League seminar rooms. Let's hope that Obama is a fast learner cause he's starting from a really big deficit.

"Obama Dozed, People Froze!" -- The Young Messiah's Katrina Moment

That's from Ed Driscoll [here]. Instapundit adds, "President Obama doesn't care about white people" [here]. The American Thinker is even more emphatic, "President Obama Hates White People and Wants them to Die" [here]. Of course, this is simply mocking the absurd reportage and commentary that accompanied the Katrina disaster -- but there is a serious point to be made.

There has been a major regional disaster in Kentucky and adjacent states where an ice storm has delivered sub-freezing temperatures [thank you Al Gore] and has knocked out power to more than a million people.

AP reports:

Dozens of deaths have been reported and many people are pleading for a faster response to the power outages. About 536,000 homes and businesses across Kentucky were without power, down from more than 600,000 the largest outage in state history, surpassing the damage last year from the remnants of Hurricane Ike.

The outages disabled water systems in much of the western part of the state, where some in rural areas resorted to dipping buckets in a creek. Authorities warned it could be days or weeks before power was restored in the most remote spots.

That's right, dozens of deaths, widespread suffering, local officials overwhelmed -- just the sort of thing that FEMA is supposed to take care of, but...

Local officials grew angrier at what they said was a lack of help from the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Read it here.

Hey, just like Katrina without the widespread looting and shooting at cops and relief workers. And there is one more significant difference -- there is no media outrage. No denunciation of the federal authorities whose response to the disaster has been woefully inadequate.

The Jammie Wearing Fool writes:

Can you imagine the media reaction if this were George W. Bush? Heck, we're still hearing about Hurricane Katrina nearly four years later.

Is Obama even aware what's going on in Kentucky? I know he's very busy between trashing Wall Street and Rush Limbaugh, but could he at least acknowledge these poor folks and get them some help?

Read it here.

And the Thinker writes:

[W]here is our president? Shouldn't he be visiting these ravaged areas? It must be that he HATES WHITE PEOPLE AND WANTS THEM TO DIE. That is the only possible explanation for this incredible failure of our national government to relieve the suffering of these people.

Isn't it interesting that now that we have a Democrat as president that all of a sudden, disaster relief is a state and local matter and the federal government should stand aside and allow them to do their jobs?

Read it here.

Indeed it is.

UPDATE:

From the Sundries Shack, a concise definition of the situation:

[I]t’s not unfair for us to hold the Obama administration to the same standards the MSM and Democrats held the Bush administration.

By those standards, the President is failing and people are dying.

And the Anchoress writes: "Hell of a job, Barry!"

[W]hy isn’t the president down there, hugging people? Why was he schmoozing congress with steak dinners* while people were suffering? Why is this going on for almost a week without the president going in there and fixing everything? It’s been way more than 100 hours! Where is Obama? Why does the government not show us what is really going on? Where are the pictures of stranded people? We want to see the pictures! People have died! Show us the bodies!

Hey, I’ve watched the professionals in the mainstream media - I know these are the questions we're supposed to be asking. They'll get to them any day now...any day.

Read it here.

Obama did make a phone call after the event expressing his condolences. That's it..., that's all!

Anchoress asks:

Remember when Bush called Nagin and a dithering Gov. Blanco days in advance of Katrina declaring a state of emergency ahead of the storm and begging both of them to evacuate NOLA, and asking Blanco to please let the Feds in to take control of the situation - and her refusal? Does anyone remember this stuff? Seems all Bush had to do was make a phone call a few days after the fact and that would have been sufficient, after all!

Lies of the Left -- The Endangered Rainforest

Another Emily Litella moment from the lefties. For decades now the "scientists" have been screaming at us about the devastation of the rainforest, predicting all sorts of dire outcomes if immediate action [such as issuing them lots of lucrative grants and contracts] is not taken.

Well. now it seems that all the well-orchstrated hysteria was just a pile of horse hockey. Even the New York Times has been forced to admit that it was all a big lie.

[In Panama] and in other tropical countries around the world, small holdings... — and much larger swaths of farmland — are reverting to nature, as people abandon their land and move to the cities in search of better livings.

These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.

[emphasis mine].

Read it here.

As rational people [conservatives] have long been saying, the cure for environmental woes is more development, not less, but the anti-capitalist ideologues, impervious to facts, just keep screaming.

A Trip South

The weather has been horrible up on the mountain so "She Who Must Not Be Named" and I have retreated down to Baltimore where the Winter Restaurant Week is being observed. It's a pretty good marketing device. Top restaurants throughout Charm City are offering limited menus for reasonable prices. It's a good opportunity to visit places you wouldn't normally go and to sample their offerings and not spend too much. We did this a few months ago and enjoyed it, so once again we have been restaurant hopping.

So far we have sampled the Brewers Art [good food but loud and crowded]; the Rusty Scupper [not bad, but not particularly good -- standard tourist fare]; the Capital Grille [good steak and seafood, a business crowd] Bistro 300 at the Hyatt [not good at all]; Meli's in Fells Point [superb, everything was perfect, great pastries]; the Lebanese Taverna in Harbor East [good khofti and the best pita bread anywhere]; and the Black Olive, also in Fells Point [great ambience, excellent seafood, especially the crabcakes]. Tonight we are going out again but I don't know where. "She" will let me know.

What all this means is that I don't have much in the way of new Pennsylvania pictures to post, but here are some I took in on the road and in Baltimore instead. Think of it as an advertisement for a nice day trip for those of you still stuck up in the frozen tundra.

UPDATE:

We finished up our tour of Baltimore restaurants tonight with a visit to Pazo, part of the Cindy Wolf/Tony Foreman empire. Cindy and Tony sit on top of the Baltimore food chain and all of their restaurants are great. "She" particularly likes Pazo, I prefer Cinghali, Charleston is generally considered the best restaurant in the State, but as I said, they're all good. The restaurant week menu consisted of tapas, a choice of entrees [small servings], and a dessert for two. Good food, excellent service, delightful ambience. Only one problem -- the place is dark, really dark, and unless you are young with very sharp eyes you might want to bring a flashlight in order to read the menu. I had been to Pazo before and brought a pocket light with me. We were glad I did.



The frozen Susquehanna. Brrrrrr.



The Inner Harbor -- a view from the Rusty Scupper.



Snowcapped sentinels outside the Capital Grille.



Inside the National Aquarium -- Whale Bones



Also inside the Aquarium -- "You Lookin' At Me?"



Finally, over at Harbor East, a memorial to the fallen -- Polish officers exterminated by Stalin at the outset of World War II. A reminder that there are far more important things in this world than restaurant week.

Another Democrat Tax Cheat

Gotta love those Democrats. There's a good reason why they don't mind raising taxes -- they don't plan on paying them.

AP reports:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Former Sen. Tom Daschle, picked by President Barack Obama to lead the administration's health reform efforts, recently filed amended tax returns to report $128,203 in unpaid taxes and $11,964 in interest, according to a Senate document obtained by The Associated Press.

The White House acknowledged Friday that "some tax issues" had emerged in connection with the nomination, but a spokesman said the president is confident the former Senate Democratic leader will be confirmed as the new health secretary.

Read the whole thing here.

Media Racists Report Steele Victory

My former Lieutenant Governor, Michael Steele, was today elected Chairman of the NRC. He is an excellent choice to be the public face of the Republican Party. He is bright, personable, articulate, media savvy, and well-respected within the Party. But, in these supposedly "post-racial" times the punditry place primary emphasis on only one characteristic of this multi-faceted individual -- the color of his skin.

CNN reports: Steele Becomes First African-American RNC Chairman. [here]

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Members of the Republican National Committee elected their first-ever African-American party chief on Friday, choosing former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele to chair the organization after six tumultuous rounds of voting. [here]

Ben Smith leads off with: Michael Steele makes history as the first black chairman of the Republican National Committee.... [here]

Wonkette leads with this nonsense: Congratulations to Michael Steele, who finally beat out that actual Confederate slaveowning plantation owner to become the first African-American President of the United States! [here] I have no idea what they are talking about, but the racial obsession is blatant.

Then there's this:

Republicans elect Steele first black chairman

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Republican Party picked its first black chairman on Friday as it elected former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele to rebuild the party after a string of devastating defeats.

AP:

Michael Steele becomes first black RNC chairman

WASHINGTON – The Republican Party chose the first black national chairman in its history Friday, just shy of three months after the nation elected a Democrat as the first African-American president.

NPR:

Leaders of the fractured and demoralized national Republican Party on Friday turned to a charismatic, nationally recognized African-American to lead it into the future.

The Chicago Tribune:

GOP elects first African-American party chairman

By Peter Wallsten |Washington Bureau

8:50 PM CST, January 30, 2009

WASHINGTON -- Republican officials voted Friday to elect their first black national party chairman, a response in part to election defeats that have left the party's base more white and Southern at a time when the country is growing more diverse.

Carlos Slim's New York Times:

Republicans Choose First Black Party Chairman

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

Published: January 30, 2009

WASHINGTON — Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, was elected the chairman of the Republican National Committee on Friday as the party chose its first African-American leader in a vote that signaled a desire by Republican leaders to put a new face on an embattled party.

BBC News leads with

Change has come to the Republican Party. To the top of it, at least.

For the first time in the Republicans' history (and for only the second time in the history of America's two major parties) an African American has been elected party chairman.

It goes on and on and on. This obsession with skin color is more than bizarre. It's demented. And such heightened racial sensitivity is nothing less than systematic racism. That's right -- racism. the people who wrote these stories and the editors who approved them are blatantly proclaiming the fact that they are racists. Future American historians will have a great time tracing the development of this cultural deformity but for now it is enough to note the prevalence of racist themes in the mainstream and liberal media.

Noah's Flood Update

A few years ago geologists Bill Ryan and Walt Pitman caused quite a stir when they published a study of Black Sea sediments that suggested a sudden and massive inundation of the region approximately 7,500 years ago. They suggested that this event, triggered when waters from the Aegean Sea broke through a land bridge at the Bosphorous, was the factual basis for Middle Eastern flood legends, including the Biblical account of Noah's Flood [here].

Their study was widely popularized and generally well-received by a credulous and sensationalistic journalistic estabilishment, although some geologists questioned the evidence as to the size and duration of the inundation and nearly all archaeologists rejected the causal link they asserted between the Black Sea flood and the Noah story. I myself was quite sceptical. The Sumerian stories upon which the Biblical account is based were simply too far distant both geographically and temporally from the original event for such a connection to be plausible. Moreover, the Mesopotamian stories were clearly of local origin and contained no hints of a Black Sea context.

Still, there remained the tantalizing possibility that the Black Sea inundation may have been linked to the spread of neolithic cultures along the Rhine/Danube axis into Northern Europe. The scenario proposed by figures as illustrious as Colin Renfrew was that flooding of lands along the Black Sea shorelines forced agriculturalists to migrate westward into Central, and eventually Northern Europe producing what archaeologists call the Bandkeramik Culture [here]. These ideas, however, have never been generally accepted.

Now new evidence from Danube delta sediment studies [here] casts further doubt on the flood scenario. In now appears that the inundation did take place, but was on a far smaller scale than was previously hypothesized. Earlier estimates suggested that the waters in the Black Sea basin rose as much as eighty meters and submerged many thousands of square miles of fertile land. The new study suggests that the rise in sea level was probably no more than ten meters and that the area submerged was much smaller than previously thought. In other words, there is now little reason to believe that the Black Sea inundation precipiated any major migration.

Oh well, it was a fun idea to play around with.

Homo Erectus Update

It has long been assumed that the first human ancestors to leave Africa were representatives of the species Homo Erectus, which was thought to have originated in East Africa approximately 1.8 million years ago. Recently, though, redating of geological layers at the African find sites makes it appear that the earliest appearance of Homo Erectus in Africa dates to around 1.65 million years ago [here]. Also Homo Erectus remains, dating to approximately 1.8 million years ago were found in the Republic of Georgia [here]. There are some interesting morphological differences between the Georgian and African specimens, but the real significance of the find is that the fossils outside Africa are significantly older than anything found there. This calls into question the whole "out of Africa" scenario for early human development which is the currently ruling paradigm, raising the possibility that Homo Erectus evolved from earlier hominids, as yet unidentified, somewhere in Asia. That possibility has just been given an important boost by a report of Homo Erectus remains dating to approximately 1.83 million years ago found in Malaysia [here].

It is too early to declare the "Out of Africa" scenario dead -- the fossil record is far too spotty to support such a conclusion. Moreover, genomic analysis still points strongly to an African origin for modern humans. But what just a few years ago seemed to be a clear and straightforward story of human evolution has become much more problematic.

That's the way science seems to work. Just when a clear and ideologically satisfying developmental scenario seems to be screaming out at you, things get complicated again. Policy makers would do well to remember that.

UPDATE:

According to John Hawks, what was found in Malaysia was not human remains but human artifacts, tools of a type commonly associated with Homo Erectus. He notes that this is not in itself surprising, since there is other evidence of early homo in the region, but that the method of dating is a bit "wonky" and may not be very accurate. [here]