Voices on Grand Strategy, or Lack There of.

This past week saw China send it's first aircraft carrier out for sea trials. The reaction ranged from outright calls to a return to a Cold War footing to this inquiry from our State Department, which prompted this comment from CDR Salamander.

This is not helpful.

The PRC is a sovereign nation with legitimate maritime security requirements that are easily understood by anyone with an even rudimentary understanding of where maritime strategy and commerce come together.

The fact that the DOS would ask this in public does too things; it insults the Chinese through its patronizing tone and it makes our nation look like it is led by arrogant imperialists at best, simpletons at worst.

The good CDR goes on to suggest how the Chinese should respond.

"Here are our plans for our follow-on carrier development. Also, the Chinese people would like to know what plans the United States government has to bring its credit rating to back AAA. Our people worry about their investments. Until the Americans do that and assure worries in the investments by the Chinese people in the sovereign debt of the American government, we do not see the reason for their continued spending on such an unnecessarily large and offensively-minded military.

We have had concerns about the American ability to service their debt for some time and we've been quite open with them with regard to the lack of transparency from the Americans regarding their capabilities to ensure their own economic stability."

CDR Salamander is not one to trifle with defense issues, as having spent considerable time serving his country and continues to write astute and biting comments about the eroding state of our naval centric defense posture.

Read more:
State Dept. Makes Us All Look Stooopid

The bigger problem that looms before us, is when issuing a bumbling statement, the Dept of State, which speaks for our current leadership; reveals a dangerous lack of a grand strategy for managing the rise of a great power. Bryan McGrath offered up this next post on Information Dissemination where he argues that being prepared for war is the best way to avoid one.

I submit that while we are sometimes surprised by events (or appear to be), we have also been astoundingly and dramatically right in our prediction of the future on occasion. Put another way, if we are so bad at predicting the future, the entire concept of deterrence—conventional and otherwise—must be questioned. Because deterrence has at its heart—the animating impetus of an event or events yet to come which one does not desire to see. And I for one am not ready to make that leap. My case will be supported with only one vignette, but it is an important one. And then, it leads to a recommendation or two.

We must as a nation, face the possibility that the United States will someday fight a war with China. We must recognize that the way of human existence seems to presuppose conflict between a rising power and the status quo power where interests intersect. We must recognize that this conflict would be ruinous to China, to our nation, and potentially to much of the world. We must recognize that the central tenet of our national security strategy must be to ensure that such a war never happens. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case.

McGrath lays out a strategy that in an effort to discuss all possibilities, deserves a careful read.
On Predicting the Future

More on Chinese naval intentions can be found at.
Andrew Erickson

To put this all in prospective, here is a list of the current aircraft carriers in service in the world. China's would be joining India, South Korea and Thailand, other Asian nations who feel compelled to have an aircraft carrier.
World's Aircraft Carriers

Joining the discussion about the critical importance of having a "Grand Strategy" is Great Satan's Girlfriend Courtney Messerschmidt who posted this epistle in a style described as Dixie fried Esperanto by Carl Prine.of Line of Departure which hosted  this post. Here is a teaser to encourage you to check it out as well as the links to support her astute argument.

Uniquely powerful — the only one of her kind!

Hegemonic unipolarity and the “Off Shore Balancing” act are facing off at the highest (almost) levels of Great Satan’s Academic and Actualizing apex.

As best understood, the Offshore Balancing fans are frightened that gap shrinking, global orderliness and reinforcing desired myriad nation state behavior will become more dangerous, more difficult and more expensive. Control of and over the internat’l system should shrivel as Great Satan radically redefined her interests to maintaining home turf integrity and maybe might sorta try to prevent a massive near field competitor from commanding enough resources to threaten North America.

Off Shore Balancing by def means Great Satan would ease up on military commitments to NATO, Nippon, SoKo and Taiwan in general — though there are good cases to be made that Offshore Balancing would look a lot like hyperpuissance’s overbearing preponderance in PACRIM.

Read the whole post:
Courtney's Complaint

Crossroads of Global Economy

Closing out the post today, comes this from Thomas PM Barnett who serves up this evidence that the "Grand Strategy" that has guided the United States for the past half century and in complete hindsight, going back to Theodore Roosevelt, has led to a world order  that has seen the rise of a truly global middle-class. His comments are brief enough to post in full, but to get the full vision click on the link to view his parting comments and the link to the article and graphs.

It is THE amazing achievement of US grand strategy that we've created the conditions by which the chart of the direct left unfolds. If ANYBODY tells you that globalization is bad or unfair or says similar things about US "empire" since WWII, then simply show them the slide on the left, because it knocks those lies right out of the ballpark.

Or to be more succinct: the US-created and -enabled globalization process never replicated the dynamics of colonialism - i.e., kept the poor down. It did the exact opposite. The rest is just whiny bullshit propagated by little minds who refuse to accept it. We built a world order that enabled the rise of a global middle class, which means near-universal democracy is in the works (there will remain bedroom communities for the nonviolent rejectionists - we'll just ask them to put orange reflector signs on their buggies). 

Read more:
Chart of the day: Filling in the gaps on emerging economies = economic dynamic of century

How Will Two Goliaths Meet?

This past couple of weeks I have been following the progress of Thomas Barnett's ongoing effort to find a starting point for better relations with China. As noted in earlier posts here and here, Barnett in concert with the Center for America China Partnership are meeting over the next ten days with leading Chinese policy experts to discuss a grand strategy proposal for a bilateral and multilateral agreement between the United States and China. Several of the proposals ask that the United States rethink it's position in a definitive Geo-political way. Many of  the proposals on surface will give Americans pause, because it goes against what has been part of our national policy for the past half century. Is Barnett, as some have inferred, a "Panda Hugger" or is he being truly visionary? The answer for me lies in carefully reading history and thinking about both China's history and ingrained philosophy as well as the history and philosophy of the United States. Blog friend Mark of Zenpundit posted on this subject and got a variety of comments, some negative and sceptical that tend to reflect the perceived American image of China. 

Today our national creed has become to spread American style democracy around the globe, even to the point of a gun. The results have backfired in several places as nationalistic tendencies led to the election of leaders now bent on confronting our hegemony by inciting disdain for all things American. We should all be reminded of America's first foray into imperilism cum, "nation building" in 1900, which saw the Philippines racked with a war of resistance that cost thousands of American and Philippine lives and ended in the United States tarnishing it's image of being the shinning hope for the down-trodden. Ultimately we left behind a country still struggling to make it's way beyond the grinding poverty that still resides on many of their far flung islands.

Many Americans still see the rise of China in Cold War terms. China is continually referred to as Communist or the Chi-Coms who are still bent on changing the world into a collective farm and concrete block apartments of robotic people dressed in  drab Mao jackets and riding bicycles in mass transit to equally drab work assignments. For anyone who has visited China, you will quickly learn that image has joined Chairman Mao in his tomb. Mao jackets along side Russian style fur caps are sold only to tourists by hundreds of vendors, all eager to gain a middle class existence. This is aptly apparent when one considers that just a short thirty years ago, over 65% of the Chinese people lived in extreme poverty on less than $1 per day, but by 2007 it had fallen to 4%. Today, it is even lower, but still far behind our American standard of living. Bottom line, they accomplished this by emulating the best traditions of liberal Capitalism, not Communism. If anything, China is returning to her roots, as the Communist Party assumes the role traditionally held by the Mandarin class who administered policy for the imperial court. We may not like it, but with the growing nationalist pride many Chinese feel, seeing them elect a firebrand who becomes bent on starting wars is not in any one's best interest at this time. So in the short run it is better to allow them to progress towards a popularly elected representative government at their own pace.

China's String of Pearls

Other voices are calling out for similar approaches besides Barnett and his Chinese based counterparts John Milligan-Whyte and Dai Min. Intrepid author of a dozen books on geo-politics of our world Robert D Kaplan in his recent best seller Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, writes about American and Chinese cooperation in maritime matters. He concludes that.

"...I said that strong American-Chinese bilateral relations going forward are not only plausible but might be the best-case scenario for the global system in the twenty-first century, allowing for true world global governance to take shape."

One of the links in a previous posts had the following analogy by Kishore Mahbubani.

The world has changed fundamentally. Humanity hasn’t. Or, to put it more accurately, humanity has not changed its organizing principles to deal with a changed world. A simple metaphor demonstrates how fundamentally our world has changed. Before the contemporary era of rapid globalization, when humanity lived in 192 separate countries, it was like living in 192 separate boats. Hence, all the world needed was rules to prevent collisions. The 1945 rules-based order did just this, while also allowing for some cooperation. Today, as a result of a shrunken world, humanity no longer lives on 192 separate boats. Instead, all 7 billion of us live in 192 separate cabins on the same boat.

And though we live on the same boat, we have no captain or crew to manage the boat.

None of us would dream of sailing out to sea on a boat without captain or crew. Yet, this is precisely what humanity is doing with Earth as we sail into the 21st century. Global problems require coordinated global actions to solve them: from financial crises to global warming, from pandemics to global terrorism. Yet, despite this, we shy from creating institutions and processes of global governance. Note, global governance is not global government. Despite this crucial distinction, no national government dares to espouse greater global governance.

Now look at this editorial by Robert D Kaplan in the December 5, 2010 Washington Post.

Currency wars. Terrorist attacks. Military conflicts. Rogue regimes pursuing nuclear weapons. Collapsing states. And now, massive leaks of secret documents. What is the cause of such turbulence? The absence of empire. ¶ During the Cold War, the world was divided between the Soviet and U.S. imperial systems. The Soviet imperium - heir to Kievan Rus, medieval Muscovy and the Romanov dynasty - covered Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia and propped up regimes in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The American imperium - heir to maritime Venice and Great Britain - also propped up allies, particularly in Western Europe and East Asia. True to the garrison tradition of imperial Rome, Washington kept bases in West Germany, Turkey, South Korea and Japan, virtually surrounding the Soviet Union.

The breakup of the Soviet empire, though it caused euphoria in the West and led to freedom in Central Europe, also sparked ethnic conflicts in the Balkans and the Caucasus that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and created millions of refugees. (In Tajikistan alone, more than 50,000 people were killed in a civil war that barely registered in the U.S. media in the 1990s.)

The Soviet collapse also unleashed economic and social chaos in Russia itself, as well as the further unmooring of the Middle East. It was no accident that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait less than a year after the Berlin Wall fell, just as it is inconceivable that the United States would have invaded Iraq if the Soviet Union, a staunch patron of Baghdad, still existed in 2003. And had the Soviet empire not fallen apart or ignominiously withdrawn from Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden never would have taken refuge there and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, might not have happened. Such are the wages of imperial collapse.

Now the other pillar of the relative peace of the Cold War, the United States, is slipping, while new powers such as China and India remain unready and unwilling to fill the void. There will be no sudden breakdown on our part, as the United States, unlike the Soviet Union, is sturdily maintained by economic and political freedom. Rather, America's ability to bring a modicum of order to the world is simply fading in slow motion.

Read the whole article for Kaplan's razor sharp insight.
A world with no one in charge 

I will continue to write about this evolving process. The reality is that time is not standing still. The United States casts about seeking leadership that at times appear to the people in the developing economies as selfish as the infamous robber barons when they rail on about losing jobs overseas, as their children scorn school and many of their elders lobby for entitlements in the form of rich pensions and ever increasing government programs. Beyond the questions posed by forging bilateral relations, how do we as a nation re-discover our own national myth of greatness and opportunity amid the anguish caused by generations of indoctrinated navel gazing about our frailties and injustices. Kishore Mahbubani, Robert Kaplan and Tom Barnett all agree, the world is no longer made up of individual boats, but now if you will we are on a huge ark, with the survival of humanity at stake as in antiquities tale.

Taking Note of Two Knights of the Keyboad

This week has produced a bonanza of quality reads among the blogs that I read as regularly as a 19th century mountain man  runs his traps. Part of this rich bonanza of brain food can be traced to two individuals who over the past few weeks have posted an abundence of rich treatises on a broad range of subects from security, to business, social and politics.

As I noted last month, Thomas Barnett has moved into high gear producing up to a half score posts each weekday that distills the main thesis of the articles he gleens from a variety of media sources. The only way to pay his due is to take a moment and look back at yesterday, June 3, when he produced his normal ten posts ranging from nuclear armed subs to Dams to Sweet Potatoes and long term unemployment in America among six other outstanding reads that will provide a mornings worth of pondering more deftly and concisely than any of the MSM outlets. Click on his name above to read his latest posts.

And the other intrepid blogger who contributed to this week being a banner week for reads was Galrahn who returned to announce that he "has the bridge" at his must read, naval centric blog Information Dissemination . Without fanfare his byline appeared this past week to offer his astute observations about all things naval. Here is a couple of his posts that blow away some of the coastal fog surrounding stories about the sea. Here's two Hezbollah Threatens Unrestricted Naval Warfare Against Israel and Bloggers and Battleships that illustrate his depth of understanding of naval strategy. Galrahn's crew of felllow bloggers, Feng, Brian McGrath, Chris Rawley and GvG make up a strong crew able to steer you to the important issue of naval interest.

A Brief Lesson in Geography

Steve DeAngelis of Enterra Solutions has an interesting post discussing the importance of Geography in determining a nations destiny. Steve's post has a haunting ring of what happens when a country spurns it's destiny when it choses to ignore it's geographic advantages and wall itself off from interaction with the greater world.

Steve begins:

We have all heard someone say, "The world is getting smaller." The fact that we can witness events happening around the world in real-time or talk with someone half-way around the world using the Internet or travel to a distant location in less than a day adds credence to the proposition that the world is getting smaller. The U.S. Navy, however, has for years insisted that when it comes to moving goods or forces around the globe, geography still matters and the world remains a rather large sphere. A new book entitled Europe Between the Oceans by Barry Cunliffe highlights the notion that geography still matters. He insists, in fact, that it may be the most important thing that mattered in the past. Benjamin Schwarz wrote a glowing review of Cunliffe's book in The Atlantic ["Geography is Destiny," December 2008]. Schwarz begins by admitting that books concerning archaeology are seldom riveting.

What struck a chord for me as a historian was the unintended comparison between the two siamese's continents, Europe and Asia and how they exploited, or chose not to exploit their geographic advantages.

In an earlier post A String of 600 Year Old Pearls, I wrote about China's recent foray into the blue waters of the Indian Ocean, as it begins to excerpt some modum of blue water naval power. Six hundred years ago China was poised to dominate the oceans of the world. There seafaring technology was far advanced of any of their rivals. A teutonic shift in strategy led them to suspend that advance and wall themselves off from the sea within a decade of the death of the Emperor Yongle.

The result was to slowly decay, as emerging European naval powers expanded to the seven seas. In the four centuries that followed, China held her internal power, selling off her seed corn and aquiring vast stores of treasures in Spanish gold and silver. She became fat and bloated, unable to project her great power beyond her own borders. The plum was too ripe not to pick and in the 19th century, China went within the span of a century, from one of the richest nations to a beggar state, as her treasury was drained away by those who had taken advantage of the geography to sap her bloated dormint empire, First Opium War and Second Opium War.

Read the whole post: The Importance of Geography.

HG's Long Journey into His Past.

A few months ago, America's Future I signed up to participate in the National Geographic Genographic project . I wrote about it then and one reader suggested they would be interested in seeing the results if I was willing to share. Well, those results came back and they revealed a the journey that my male ancestors took after they left Africa about 60,000 years ago. I have printed out the results for all to see. If you are curious, and want to take part in this project, ckick on the link above for more information.

HG's GENETIC HISTORY

Your Y-chromosome results identify you as a member of haplogroup R1b.

The genetic markers that define your ancestral history reach back roughly 60,000 years to the first common marker of all non-African men, M168, and follow your lineage to present day, ending with M343, the defining marker of haplogroup R1b.

If you look at the map highlighting your ancestors' route, you will see that members of haplogroup R1b carry the following Y-chromosome markers:
M168 gt; M89 > M9 > M45 > M207 > M173 > M343

Today, roughly 70 percent of the men in southern England belong to haplogroup R1b. In parts of Spain and Ireland, that number exceeds 90 percent.

What's a haplogroup, and why do geneticists concentrate on the Y chromosome in their search for markers? For that matter, what's a marker?

Each of us carries DNA that is a combination of genes passed from both our mother and father, giving us traits that range from eye color and height to athleticism and disease susceptibility. One exception is the Y chromosome, which is passed directly from father to son, unchanged, from generation to generation.

Unchanged, that is unless a mutation—a random, naturally occurring, usually harmless change—occurs. The mutation, known as a marker, acts as a beacon; it can be mapped through generations because it will be passed down from the man in whom it occurred to his sons, their sons, and every male in his family for thousands of years.

In some instances there may be more than one mutational event that defines a particular branch on the tree. This means that any of these markers can be used to determine your particular haplogroup, since every individual who has one of these markers also has the others.
When geneticists identify such a marker, they try to figure out when it first occurred, and in which geographic region of the world. Each marker is essentially the beginning of a new lineage on the family tree of the human race. Tracking the lineages provides a picture of how small tribes of modern humans in Africa tens of thousands of years ago diversified and spread to populate the world.

A haplogroup is defined by a series of markers that are shared by other men who carry the same random mutations. The markers trace the path your ancestors took as they moved out of Africa. It's difficult to know how many men worldwide belong to any particular haplogroup, or even how many haplogroups there are, because scientists simply don't have enough data yet.

One of the goals of the five-year Genographic Project is to build a large enough database of anthropological genetic data to answer some of these questions. To achieve this, project team members are traveling to all corners of the world to collect more than 100,000 DNA samples from indigenous populations. In addition, we encourage you to contribute your anonymous results to the project database, helping our geneticists reveal more of the answers to our ancient past.

Your Ancestral Journey: What We Know Now.

M168: Your Earliest Ancestor

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: Roughly 50,000 years ago

Place of Origin: Africa

Climate: Temporary retreat of Ice Age; Africa moves from drought to warmer temperatures and moister conditions

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Approximately 10,000

Tools and Skills: Stone tools; earliest evidence of art and advanced conceptual skills
Skeletal and archaeological evidence suggest that anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago, and began moving out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world around 60,000 years ago.

The man who gave rise to the first genetic marker in your lineage probably lived in northeast Africa in the region of the Rift Valley, perhaps in present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, or Tanzania, some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago. Scientists put the most likely date for when he lived at around 50,000 years ago. His descendants became the only lineage to survive outside of Africa, making him the common ancestor of every non-African man living today.

But why would man have first ventured out of the familiar African hunting grounds and into unexplored lands? It is likely that a fluctuation in climate may have provided the impetus for your ancestors' exodus out of Africa.

The African ice age was characterized by drought rather than by cold. It was around 50,000 years ago that the ice sheets of northern Europe began to melt, introducing a period of warmer temperatures and moister climate in Africa. Parts of the inhospitable Sahara briefly became habitable. As the drought-ridden desert changed to a savanna, the animals hunted by your ancestors expanded their range and began moving through the newly emerging green corridor of grasslands. Your nomadic ancestors followed the good weather and the animals they hunted, although the exact route they followed remains to be determined.

In addition to a favorable change in climate, around this same time there was a great leap forward in modern humans' intellectual capacity. Many scientists believe that the emergence of language gave us a huge advantage over other early human species. Improved tools and weapons, the ability to plan ahead and cooperate with one another, and an increased capacity to exploit resources in ways we hadn't been able to earlier, all allowed modern humans to rapidly migrate to new territories, exploit new resources, and replace other hominids.

M89: Moving Through the Middle East

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: 45,000 years ago

Place: Northern Africa or the Middle East

Climate: Middle East: Semiarid grass plains

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Tens of thousands

Tools and Skills: Stone, ivory, wood tools

The next male ancestor in your ancestral lineage is the man who gave rise to M89, a marker found in 90 to 95 percent of all non-Africans. This man was born around 45,000 years ago in northern Africa or the Middle East.

The first people to leave Africa likely followed a coastal route that eventually ended in Australia. Your ancestors followed the expanding grasslands and plentiful game to the Middle East and beyond, and were part of the second great wave of migration out of Africa.
Beginning about 40,000 years ago, the climate shifted once again and became colder and more arid. Drought hit Africa and the grasslands reverted to desert, and for the next 20,000 years, the Saharan Gateway was effectively closed. With the desert impassable, your ancestors had two options: remain in the Middle East, or move on. Retreat back to the home continent was not an option.

While many of the descendants of M89 remained in the Middle East, others continued to follow the great herds of buffalo, antelope, woolly mammoths, and other game through what is now modern-day Iran to the vast steppes of Central Asia.

These semiarid grass-covered plains formed an ancient "superhighway" stretching from eastern France to Korea. Your ancestors, having migrated north out of Africa into the Middle East, then traveled both east and west along this Central Asian superhighway. A smaller group continued moving north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country.

M9: The Eurasian Clan Spreads Wide and Far

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: 40,000 years ago

Place: Iran or southern Central Asia

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Tens of thousands

Tools and Skills: Upper Paleolithic

Your next ancestor, a man born around 40,000 years ago in Iran or southern Central Asia, gave rise to a genetic marker known as M9, which marked a new lineage diverging from the M89 Middle Eastern Clan. His descendants, of which you are one, spent the next 30,000 years populating much of the planet.

This large lineage, known as the Eurasian Clan, dispersed gradually over thousands of years. Seasoned hunters followed the herds ever eastward, along the vast super highway of Eurasian steppe. Eventually their path was blocked by the massive mountain ranges of south Central Asia—the Hindu Kush, the Tian Shan, and the Himalayas.

The three mountain ranges meet in a region known as the "Pamir Knot," located in present-day Tajikistan. Here the tribes of hunters split into two groups. Some moved north into Central Asia, others moved south into what is now Pakistan and the Indian subcontinent.

These different migration routes through the Pamir Knot region gave rise to separate lineages.
Most people native to the Northern Hemisphere trace their roots to the Eurasian Clan. Nearly all North Americans and East Asians are descended from the man described above, as are most Europeans and many Indians.

M45: The Journey Through Central Asia

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: 35,000

Place of Origin: Central Asia

Climate: Glaciers expanding over much of Europe

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Approximately 100,000
Tools and Skills: Upper Paleolithic

The next marker of your genetic heritage, M45, arose around 35,000 years ago, in a man born in Central Asia. He was part of the M9 Eurasian Clan that had moved to the north of the mountainous Hindu Kush and onto the game-rich steppes of present-day Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and southern Siberia.

Although big game was plentiful, the environment on the Eurasian steppes became increasing hostile as the glaciers of the Ice Age began to expand once again. The reduction in rainfall may have induced desertlike conditions on the southern steppes, forcing your ancestors to follow the herds of game north.

To exist in such harsh conditions, they learned to build portable animal-skin shelters and to create weaponry and hunting techniques that would prove successful against the much larger animals they encountered in the colder climates. They compensated for the lack of stone they traditionally used to make weapons by developing smaller points and blades—microliths—that could be mounted to bone or wood handles and used effectively. Their tool kit also included bone needles for sewing animal-skin clothing that would both keep them warm and allow them the range of movement needed to hunt the reindeer and mammoth that kept them fed.

Your ancestors' resourcefulness and ability to adapt was critical to survival during the last ice age in Siberia, a region where no other hominid species is known to have lived.

The M45 Central Asian Clan gave rise to many more; the man who was its source is the common ancestor of most Europeans and nearly all Native American men.

M207: Leaving Central Asia

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: 30,000

Place of Origin: Central Asia

Climate: Glaciers expanding over much of Europe and western Eurasia

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Approximately 100,000

Tools and Skills: Upper Paleolithic

After spending considerable time in Central Asia, refining skills to survive in harsh new conditions and exploit new resources, a group from the Central Asian Clan began to head west towards the European subcontinent.

An individual in this clan carried the new M207 mutation on his Y chromosome. His descendants ultimately split into two distinct groups, with one continuing onto the European subcontinent, and the other group turning south and eventually making it as far as India.

Your lineage falls within the first haplogroup, R1, and gave rise to the first modern humans to move into Europe and eventually colonize the continent.

M173: Colonizing Europe—The First Modern Europeans

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: Around 30,000 years ago

Place: Central Asia

Climate: Ice Age

Estimated Number of Homo sapiens: Approximately 100,000

Tools and Skills: Upper Paleolithic

As your ancestors continued to move west, a man born around 30,000 years ago in Central Asia gave rise to a lineage defined by the genetic marker M173. His descendants were part of the first large wave of humans to reach Europe.

During this period, the Eurasian steppelands extended from present-day Germany, and possibly France, to Korea and China. The climate fostered a land rich in resources and opened a window into Europe.

Your ancestors' arrival in Europe heralded the end of the era of the Neandertals, a hominid species that inhabited Europe and parts of western Asia from about 29,000 to 230,000 years ago. Better communication skills, weapons, and resourcefulness probably enabled your ancestors to outcompete Neandertals for scarce resources.

This wave of migration into Western Europe marked the appearance and spread of what archaeologists call the Aurignacian culture. The culture is distinguished by significant innovations in methods of manufacturing tools, more standardization of tools, and a broader set of tool types, such as end-scrapers for preparing animal skins and tools for woodworking.

In addition to stone, the first modern humans to reach Europe used bone, ivory, antler, and shells as part of their tool kit. Bracelets and pendants made of shells, teeth, ivory, and carved bone appear at many sites. Jewelry, often an indication of status, suggests a more complex social organization was beginning to develop.

The large number of archaeological sites found in Europe from around 30,000 years ago indicates that there was an increase in population size.

Around 20,000 years ago, the climate window shut again, and expanding ice sheets forced your ancestors to move south to Spain, Italy, and the Balkans. As the ice retreated and temperatures became warmer, beginning about 12,000 years ago, many descendants of M173 moved north again to repopulate places that had become inhospitable during the Ice Age.

Not surprisingly, today the number of descendants of the man who gave rise to marker M173 remains very high in Western Europe. It is particularly concentrated in northern France and the British Isles where it was carried by ancestors who had weathered the Ice Age in Spain.

M343: Direct Descendants of Cro-Magnon

Fast Facts

Time of Emergence: Around 30,000 years ago

Place of Origin: Western Europe

Climate: Ice sheets continuing to creep down Northern Europe

Tools and Skills: Upper Paleolithic

Around 30,000 years ago, a descendant of the clan making its way into Europe gave rise to marker M343, the defining marker of your haplogroup. You are a direct descendent of the people who dominated the human expansion into Europe, the Cro-Magnon.

The Cro-Magnon are responsible for the famous cave paintings found in southern France. These spectacular paintings provide archaeological evidence that there was a sudden blossoming of artistic skills as your ancestors moved into Europe. Prior to this, artistic endeavors were mostly comprised of jewelry made of shell, bone, and ivory; primitive musical instruments; and stone carvings.

The cave paintings of the Cro-Magnon depict animals like bison, deer, rhinoceroses, and horses, and natural events important to Paleolithic life such as spring molting, hunting, and pregnancy. The paintings are far more intricate, detailed, and colorful than anything seen prior to this period.

Your ancestors knew how to make woven clothing using the natural fibers of plants, and had relatively advanced tools of stone, bone, and ivory. Their jewelry, carvings, and intricate, colorful cave paintings bear witness to the Cro-Magnons' advanced culture during the last glacial age.
This is where your genetic trail, as we know it today, ends.

The surprise ending that I am a direct descendant of Cro Magnon people has stimulated me to explore their culture further. The DNA supports what little I knew of my father's lineage, that his grandfather came over from Ireland in the 19th century. My mother's myocardial markers wait to be revealed.

America's Future

American Faces

New Citizens

Van Tran, California Assemblyman

Route of Human Expansion

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This Sunday was a time for catch up for me. I just finished voting via absentee ballot and in an unrelated task, sent in my DNA sample to the Genographic project sponsored by the National Geographic Society.

.Then I read Tom Barnett's column and I though how it related to the two tasks above.

Thomas Barnett leads off this Sunday with a optimist column that should give every American a greater understanding of our role in the world.

He begins:

As our financial crisis unfolds, Americans suffer a serious bout of existential ennui. Unsure of whom we are or our global role anymore, our self-doubt scares the world in near-equal measure. Predictably, both skeptics at home and challengers abroad tell us that we must get used to this post-American world. My advice is to resist these sirens' song.
From the perspective of grand strategy, such pessimism is unwarranted: just as our international liberal trade order -- known now as globalization -- encompasses the near-totality of the planet, vastly outreaching all previous attempts to establish a global order and doing so in a manner that both enriches and empowers individuals, too many Americans feel alienated from this world so clearly of our creation.

Dr. Frankenstein should recognize in this alleged monster the sum of his ambitions.

....As such, the proximate causes of our angst are readily identified: we've taken in a record number of immigrants in recent years, giving us a relatively high percentage of foreign-born residents, and we're suffering a magnificent economic correction. In the past when such conditions have met, we've isolated ourselves from a "chaotic" world, painfully attempting to transform our decidedly blended identity into one uniformly organic -- as in, "real" Americans.

Read the whole column:

Post-Caucasian world hardly post-American world

In my own local area, the changes that Tom Barnett describes has taken major purchase. For example, Vietnamese Americans, in the span of a generation are entering politics and assimilating at a rate almost unseen in our history. Orange County, California, bastion of conservative politics and the butt of jokes about it's perceived WASPist demographics, is now seeing the inclusion of Asian Americans in positions ranging from school boards, councilpersons, county supervisors, to the state legislature. Vietnamese American politicians are coming of age in Westminster ... This is just a micro look at what is happening and will happen across our land.

Like Tom's column points out with this excerpt:

...America has always been a land to which strangers came for re-invention, for we choose our family instead of merely accepting what tradition mandates. We have abandoned homelands and clans, married outside of race and class, and swapped religions with a unique urgency. The chance to be born again is the quintessential American right -- the pursuit of happiness individually defined.

I have written several posts defining my own experiences with the world, beginning with my service in Vietnam over 40 years ago, and re-examined during my passage to my current avocation. That conclusion is the importance of recognizing our strength as a country is in our ability to assimilate almost everyone into a nation of volunteers. A Resilient Nation.

If anyone needs further convincing of the fact that we are all cousins, you are invited to take the challenge and sign up for the National Geographic Genographic project. The great advantage is as American Cousins we have chosen on our own to be a family. And for those who are dissatisfied with the family and want to leave, unlike some places the express freedom of choice in America, allows the option to move. Although, it is better to stay and try and effect change in an environment that allows for change.

It is simple, and worth the fee to trace your genetic family tree back to it's source in Africa over 60,000 years ago. For those who are hesitant to accept this for creationism reasons, consider this. According to the data collected thus far, all people living today can be traced back to a single surviving genetic marker mother who lived in Africa about 100,000 years ago. Those whose roots can be traced back to other parts of the globe can trace their tree back to a single women and man living in Africa about 60,000 years ago. Don't take my word for it. I urge you to visit the link above and if you feel the need to know, plunk down the fee and swab your cheeks, send in the sample and await the results. It will be a fascinating journey!