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We often hear today that there's an unprecedented "patent litigation explosion" that's killing innovation. Last week, the New York Times plied this claim without abandon in its hit piece on high-tech patents. It's become so commonplace that this phrase garners over 1.3 million hits on Google. It's especially common fare in discussions about the "smart phone war." It was raised repeatedly by my fellow panelists, for instance, at a congressional briefing a few days ago (you can listen to the audio of the event here).
Of course, a blog posting is not a law review article and so I can't get into all of the weeds here, but a blog is ideal for a few quick reactions to this tread-worn trope in the public policy debates about patents.
First, it's simply untrue. Award-winning economist, Zorina Khan, reports in her book, The Democratization of Invention, that patent litigation rates from 1790 to 1860 fluctuated a lot, but averaged 1.65%. Today's patent litigation rates are around 1.5%. As Yoda would say: patent litigation explosion this is not, hmm, no. In fact, for three decades in Khan's study patent litigation rates were higher than today's litigation rate. From 1840-1849, for instance, patent litigation rates were 3.6% — more than twice the patent litigation rate today.
This was during a time, as reported by patent law professor Michael Risch, when patents were handwritten, and even worse, patents were extremely vague, incoherent and sometimes outright unintelligible. And, as Professor Risch and others have so ably reported, patent law was very much unsettled at this time as well given the many new ways that the American patent system departed from English patent law.
And it wasn't just that the law was new and that patents were vague, as early scientific and technological discoveries were just as difficult to comprehend as the new scientific and technological discoveries are today. Long before Judge Richard Posner was complaining of the lack of technical competence at the PTO or Judge Learned Hand was complaining about his own ignorance of biochemistry in assessing the validity of early pharma patents, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story was explaining in 1841 that
Patents and copyrights approach nearer than any other class of cases belonging to forensic discussions, to what may be called the metaphysics of law, where the distinctions are, or at least may be very subtle and refined, and sometimes, almost evanescent.
Frankly, with all of the rampant uncertainty in early patent law and in early developments in science and technology — early nineteenth-century scientists, for instance, were still vigorously debating whether the atomic theory of matter was valid — it's surprising that the patent litigations rates weren't astronomically higher than just 1.65%, or with many similar problems today that our patent litigations rates are only 1.5%.
The historical patent litigation rates are significant because they also include the same "patent wars" that we are experiencing with the "smart phone war." The very first patent war began in 1851, and was called at the time in the popular press the "Sewing Machine War." The Sewing Machine War had all of the allegedly new problems about which there is much breathless commentary on the "smart phone war" today: lawsuits in multiple venues, expensive litigation, numerous overlapping patents, non-practicing (patent-licensing) entities obtaining injunctions against manufacturers, "defensive patenting," inventors' sales of patents to firms, etc., etc. There was even widespread popular outcry over the Sewing Machine War, as it was fought as much in the newspapers as it was in the courts. As the classic saying goes: What's old is new again.
Importantly, the Sewing Machine War was ultimately resolved by patent-owners innovatively creating the very first patent pool in American history, called the Sewing Machine Combination, which functioned successfully until its last patent expired in the 1870s. The Sewing Machine Combination unleashed a tremendous amount of commercial, technological and even social innovation — including new innovative manufacturing techniques, innovative commercial practices, and even helping change social prejudices about women's ability to use machines. As a result, the sewing machine was fundamental to the success of the Industrial Revolution in the U.S., as I have detailed extensively in my historical research.
But even after the Sewing Machine War was brought to an end in 1856 by the Sewing Machine Combination, so-called "patent wars" continued to occur with every pioneering leap forward in technological innovation — the incandescent light bulb, telephone, electrical systems, automobile, airplane, and radio were all subjects of patent wars. Today's patent lawyers remember very well the "diaper wars" and the "stent wars" of the 1980s, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in patent damages awards. If cutting-edge innovation in disposable diapers (a multi-billion-dollar industry, as any parent knows) is the subject of intense patenting and extensive litigation, then frankly we should be unsurprised that this occurs again with 21st-century cutting-edge innovation in smart phones, tablet computers and other digital devices.
Unfortunately, the complaints today about today's patent litigation crisis arise more from unchecked intuitions about what feels like a bad situation, from unrealistic assumptions about how much certainty we can achieve in the patent system, and from emotionally-compelling anecdotes about innovators running into trouble with patents — like the ones that dominated the New York Times hit piece on high-tech patents a week ago.
As I said in a previous blog posting, it's time to bring objectivity and a historical-based perspective to public policy discussions about patent litigation, the smart phone wars, and the role of property rights in innovation.
First published on the blog www.truthonthemarket.com. A website providing academic commentary on law, business and economics.


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Ahmad Abu Khattallah does not dispute claims he was at the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi the night it was attacked. "We had heard there was some shooting at the area," says the man with a beard down to his chest. "February 17th [a brigade tasked with protecting the mission] asked us to help them extricate some of their men holed up in the mission." But when asked who was behind the Sept. 11, 2012 assault that took the life of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, Khattallah gazes without emotion at his mobile phone as he sits for one of several interviews with TIME in a local hotel. "The attack came from the people," he says, pausing to capture his thoughts. "I don't know if anything was planned." He grows vehement when confronted with allegations that he masterminded the raid (the Associated Press interviewed a witness who claims that Khattallah, who heads a militia called Abu Obaida Bin Jarra, guided fighters around the compound.) "The attack," Khattallah insists, "that was not us."
In a number of meetings over two weeks, Khattallah discussed everything from Islam's respect of other religions to his qualms with Washington's Middle East policies. But it is his alleged role in the Benghazi debacle that has made him a person of interest for Americans. As if to belie accusations that could well catapult him to the top of the FBI's Most Wanted List, Khattallah has not gone into hiding and wanders the streets of Benghazi freely.
He is certainly a person that many in Benghazi believe can get things done. During an interview at his sparsely furnished house in Benghazi's Layti neighborhood, his living room filled up with men seeking his help to resolve problems. Under Muammar Gaddafi's rule, Khattallah was incarcerated several times. The dictator's security services frequently arrested pious Muslims for sporting long beards or spending too much time in mosques. With his facial hair, Khattallah was one of the usual suspects. Like many Libyans, he took up arms against the government during the 2011 revolution, coming to prominence after the assassination of the rebels' chief of staff Abd al-Fattah Yunis in August 2011. Many rebel officials believe Khattallah was behind the killing. TIME brought up the subject during one of the interviews but Khattallah refused to go into it saying "The revolution is over. And we don't talk about the past."
(MORE: After Benghazi, Is al-Qaeda Back?)
Ostensibly a building contractor, Khattallah refuses to give his age but he looks to be in his 40s. Not a jovial man, he nevertheless often has a smile on his face. And while he often answered questions quickly, a pensive look would come over him at some times before venturing a cautious response. There would be many ambivalent and ambiguous statements. At times, he would respond to questions with queries his own, at others he would refuse to answer them altogether. For example, when asked "how many people does Ansar al-Shari'a have?" Khattallah unhelpfully replies that the Islamist group "has many people." The organization had been linked to the attack though it has denied involvement. The New York Times claimed that Khattallah is a leader of the group. When asked if Ansar al-Shari'a members were involved in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack, he simply says, "We didn't see them there that night."
A number of Libyans say Khattallah belongs to the takfir movement which believes that Muslims who do not demonstrate a requisite level of piety can be declared infidels, thus allowing them to be killed. When asked about takfirism, Khattallah simply says, "The people who curse our Prophet are infidels." In Arabic, the words have additional resonance. The word for "infidel" has the same root as takfir.
He prefers focusing on Western hostility toward Islam. "Stop thinking of us as terrorists," he says, "and start to build a friendly relationship with the people." When asked his opinion of the attack on the Benghazi mission, he says swiftly, "I don't support the attack on American diplomats in Libya, but if Americans get involved in Libyan issues they need to watch out what they are going to get." When asked again if he supported attacks against Americans, he says, "I don't have an answer for that."
In the murky world of Libyan militias that dominate the country's new security landscape, people like Khattallah have gained authority and status. Intelligence services have not interrogated him. Khattallah claims he has even been in contact with President Muhammad Muqaryef, though he is not forthcoming about the communication was about. He insists the president never said Khattallah was a suspect in the Benghazi incident, even though CBS News cited Muqaryef as saying so. "We can't move against Khattallah and his gangs," says a senior militia leader. "They control the street. Khattallah was involved in the attack. We know this." The militia leader, however, refused to have his name made public because he was fearful of being targeted by radical Islamists for cooperating with the U.S.
MORE: The Benghazi Attack: A Bigger Question Missed by All the Finger-Pointing

subset: commoncrawl


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Women Will Soon Be Allowed to Serve in Ground Combat
For the first time, women in the armed forces will be moved into combat roles. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta will make the official announcement Thursday.
Since they were first permitted to join the armed forces, women have been restricted from participating in active ground combat. This policy will be eliminated, clearing the way for 237,000 jobs for women in the various branches on the front lines of battle.
A senior defense official, speaking with NBC News, said, "We are moving in the direction of women as infantry soldiers."
Reactions in Congress, where such a policy change must be considered for 30 days, were mixed. Senator Carl Levin (D.-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said, "I support it. It reflects the reality of 21st-century military operations."
His Senate colleague, Patty Murray (D.-Wash.) also supported the move: "It's important to remember that in recent wars that lacked any true front lines, thousands of women already spent their days in combat situations serving side-by-side with their fellow male service members." Murray heads the Veterans Affairs Committee.
However, in the House of Representatives, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R.-Calif.) criticized the decision: "The question you've got to ask yourself every single time you make a change like this is: Does it increase the combat effectiveness of the military? ... I think the answer is no." Hunter is a member of the Armed Services Committee and an Iraq War veteran.
The move comes with the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which will join Thursday's announcement with Panetta, the departing head of the Pentagon. The various branches of the armed forces will have until January 2016 to implement the changes.


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January 01, 2014
Happy New Year 2014
Here's my #1 item:
Any ancient African DNA.
The study of prehistoric Eurasians has revealed that modern populations are not simply descended from the people who lived in the same areas even a few thousand years ago.
The people best preserving the genetic legacy of central European Neolithic farmers can be found on the island of Sardinia; of west European hunter-gatherers in the shores of the Baltic; of Upper Paleolithic Siberians in the jungles of the Amazon; of Middle Paleolithic Siberians in Papua and Australia.
And yet, the model for Africa largely remains one of continuity across two hundred thousand years, since the emergence of anatomically modern humans in eastern Africa.
There have been hints that this isn't the case; the study of modern populations has revealed evidence for both archaic African, and -more recently and surprisingly- even a little archaic Eurasian ancestry in virtually all Sub-Saharan Africans. Populations from one of the presumed cradles of H. sapiens (Eastern Africa) are now conclusively known to be recent mixtures of West Eurasians, and even the Bushmen of southern Africa, the subject of so many TV documentaries as an exemplum of the ur-Humans did not escape this admixture.
Paleoanthropology also hints that some of the people who lived in sub-Saharan Africa well into the Lower Stone Age may have been quite divergent, and so do modern human Y-chromosomes. T
So the €1,000,000 question is: who lived in Africa 5 or 10 or 50 or 100 thousand years ago?
57 comments:
- Fiend of 9 worlds said...
Based on the evidence the only reasonable conclusion I can come to is that the people living there have been largely absorbed by the constant migrations into africa.
- Wednesday, January 01, 2014 4:32:00 am
- Unknown said...
THe sudanese university who published this went off line, but I saw the site before it went down, and the results were pronounced valid by the university, altough they are vague and I do not trust the authencity to much.
Haplogroups A-M13 was found at high frequencies among Neolithic samples. Haplogroup F-M89 and YAP appeared to be more frequent among Meroitic, Post-Meroitic and Christian periods. Haplogroup B-M60 was not observed in the sample analyzed.
- Wednesday, January 01, 2014 5:42:00 am
- INFINITO said...
Needless to always look for the same thing for years never found. If I say that my research leads me to prove, that the man has been widespread (not coincidentally) around the planet along with all species of animals and plants? The territory made after a selection of adaptation of species?
- Wednesday, January 01, 2014 6:55:00 am
- mooreisbetter said...
Here's my 2014 wish list:
(1) People realizing that the letter lines of Y-DNA ancestries are just arbitrary splits assigned years ago that have little relevance to how closely related two distant lines may be. For example, the splits within the various clades of "I" and "R" are so deep, they might have been later (also arbitrarily) assigned their own letters, if there were more letters left. See the Haplogroup K to T transition.
(2) People realizing that the companies that advertise knowing your exact percentage of one nationality or another -- or your likelihood of getting a disease -- are fraudsters, and seeing more prosecutions of the same. None other than the New York Times just reported how one reporter took the same test at three different companies and got three different results. I've also heard of people with traceable ancestries within the Alps being told they were Native American, and when pressed, the testing company employee asked, "isn't that what you wanted?"
(3) Getting some more Ancient DNA from far Western Europe: the British Isles, France, Portugal, Ireland, etc.
(4) We've seen a lot of I Y DNA in Ancient Specimens. I'd like to see a workable model as to whether the modern hotspots like Bosnia and Croatia were the source -- or a modern refuge. That is, no one can really state whether I-bearing men expanded (into Mesolithic Central Europe) from said hotspots after the Paleolithic or whether the modern concentrations can be explained by I-bearing men starting elsewhere in Europe and then moving to seize territory in more southerly climes.
(5) Speaking of #4, another 2014 wish is for people to understand what I call the Goths/Huns model. There is too much chest thumping among people in DNA, based on their misguided pride and notions of ethnic superiority. Some of this, I suspect, is subconscious.
Everyone would be wise to know the Huns/Goths story, to see how the truth is always more complex.
Many people used to be tempted to depict the Goths as fierce warriors and conquerors, who victimized the more domesticated peoples in their way. This was both praise and the pejorative. Savage yet pure supermen, right? This was a concept popular among historians in the 1800s with Anglo-Germanic notions of superiority.
But the truth is much more nuanced. As scholarship has come to recognize in the last 100 years, the "mighty Goths" were really victims themselves. Far from conquering all, they were themselves pushed out of their territory by the Huns, and it was the Huns' might that necessitated the Goths, in turn, like dominoes, trying to pick on other tribes in their general area. Again, this is praise and pejorative. The Goths were not as savage and bloodthirsty as thought: but they were themselves forced out of their lands by a mightier force, which forced them to try to conquer.
I hope this parable can inject some subtlety into the oversimplified discourse that you see on half of these boards. You know what I'm talking about: wacky, oversimplified notions of R1b conquerors and R1b being pure Indo-European and other such nonsense.
(6) I'd like people to similarly realize that admixture models can be more complex than we give them credit to be. More on this later. - Wednesday, January 01, 2014 7:13:00 pm
- apostateimpressions said...
I would like to see more research on the origins of the British. How much comes from the Germanic tribes and how much from the Celts? I would also like to see more about the origin of the Celts in Britain. It is said that they came to Britain from the Hallstatt area in southern Germany/ Austria that became the core of ancient Celtic civilization: can that be verified? And how much, if any, is Mesolithic or pre-Celtic? How much Meso or pre-C came with Celtic or Germanic waves (if you see what I mean)? Thanks
Enjoy 2014, all eyes on interest rates and oil production. - Wednesday, January 01, 2014 8:18:00 pm
- Grey said...
My wish list is:
Wei Valley
Hyperboreans - Wednesday, January 01, 2014 8:32:00 pm
- Grey said...
4) dwarves - Wednesday, January 01, 2014 8:38:00 pm
- Fanty said...
@more is better
Well, from those ancient DNA tests we kind of learned another thing:
Drift/founder effects seem stronger than expected because there does not seem to be a logical connection between uniparental markers and autosomal DNA.
Countries with tons of WHG Y-DNA and decent WHG mtDNA show quiet low WHG autosomal DNA, while countries with almost zero WHG uniparental markers show extreme high levels of WHG autosomal DNA.
So, the question wether the Balkans are a source or a destination of WHG Y-DNA could aswell be: By pure random (drift) WHG males had more male children than others in the balkans while elsewhere they randomly had less. ;-)
The neolithic is already too far back that Y-DNA can have a meaning. For example, the tested WHG and EEF people lived BEFORE the MRCA of all existing I1 people for example.
Single males who lived like 1-2 thousand years after the tested persons managed to be responsable for 40% of the males of whole modern countries. How could any uniparental distribution of that time have anything to do with modern ones if something like this is possible? - Wednesday, January 01, 2014 11:40:00 pm
- BradFoley said...
@mooreisbetter: "None other than the New York Times just reported how one reporter took the same test at three different companies and got three different results." This is an inaccurate representation of what was (at best) indifferently accurate reporting.
Therefore my wishlist is as follows
1) people learn to interpret uncertainties, such as probabilities and proportional increases in risk
2) people learn to understand what science in progress means
I know 23andMe (at least) provides only minimally useful health info (some of their other problems, such as ancestry assignment, have been thoroughly dealt with on this blog). But this is the state of the art for gene-phenotype associations. The plain truth is, we have few robust associations, 23andMe is upfront about that, but the only way we're going to get there is through larger, more detailed samples. - Thursday, January 02, 2014 12:29:00 am
- Hector said...
Where is the evidence for "Middle Paleolithic Siberians in Papua and Australia"? If it is about haplogroup M and P, the assertion is rather comical because you need to explain all other descendents of M526+.
- Thursday, January 02, 2014 1:03:00 am
- Dienekes said...
Where is the evidence for "Middle Paleolithic Siberians in Papua and Australia"? If it is about haplogroup M and P, the assertion is rather comical because you need to explain all other descendents of M526+.
M and P are not Middle Paleolithic. - Thursday, January 02, 2014 1:16:00 am
- Hector said...
Middle Paleolithic spans up to 300000 years ago so the split between M and P as well as M526+'s is included in there.
- Thursday, January 02, 2014 1:36:00 am
- Dienekes said...
Middle Paleolithic spans up to 300000 years ago so the split between M and P as well as M526+'s is included in there.
The split between M and P happened in the Upper, not Middle, Paleolithic.
- Thursday, January 02, 2014 3:30:00 am
- Hector said...
Actually I meant "up to 30000" but 0 was added accidentally. It should be remembered that these terminologies are defined in terms of stone tool industry so regional variations exist.
Anyway 41000-52000 ago in Papua NG and Australia would be generally classified as middle paleolithic.
I think you actually were referring to Denisovans and in that case there is obviously no evidence that they were Siberians as their distribution is unknown. - Thursday, January 02, 2014 4:38:00 am
- DocG said...
As I see it, all these years of listening too attentively to the speculations of archaeologists and paleontologists have skewered our sense of what happened in history, especially as it pertains to those of us alive today.
If we take for example the Out of Africa model, what that suggests is that a very small part of the African population of that time migrated out of Africa into Asia and that, if the model is accurate, this population is ancestral for most people now living outside of Africa. However, it tells us literally nothing about the ancestry of all the many groups both in and out of Africa whose lineages went extinct, which could in fact represent the great majority of people who ever lived on Earth.
When we examine archaic DNA or archaic bones and stones, we first of all must rest content with a miniscule sample, which in itself creates problems, but more important we can never be sure if the lineages of any of these tiny samplings actually survived to the present day. Chances are most did not.
When we examine the DNA of living people, we CAN be sure of that. That to me is a huge difference, and I think it a mistake to lump the two very different groups into one pile and treat it simply as historical or evolutionary evidence. - Thursday, January 02, 2014 5:30:00 am
- Rob said...
"That is, no one can really state whether I-bearing men expanded (into Mesolithic Central Europe) from said hotspots after the Paleolithic or whether the modern concentrations can be explained by I-bearing men starting elsewhere in Europe and then moving to seize territory in more southerly climes."
If one were to speculate, I'd say the latter: from nearby "Carpathia" toward the Balkans. But there was nothing to 'seize'. they entered, or were allowed to enter, an empty landscape (it seems).
- Thursday, January 02, 2014 10:02:00 am
- Dienekes said...
I think you actually were referring to Denisovans and in that case there is obviously no evidence that they were Siberians as their distribution is unknown.
Ok, there is no evidence that a population whose only existing sample is from Siberia was Siberian. - Thursday, January 02, 2014 12:25:00 pm
- eurologist said...
We've seen a lot of I Y DNA in Ancient Specimens. I'd like to see a workable model as to whether the modern hotspots like Bosnia and Croatia were the source -- or a modern refuge. That is, no one can really state whether I-bearing men expanded (into Mesolithic Central Europe) from said hotspots after the Paleolithic or whether the modern concentrations can be explained by I-bearing men starting elsewhere in Europe and then moving to seize territory in more southerly climes.
It only takes a few minutes of internet search that the highly specific I-subgroups in Croatia cannot be much older than ~2,000 years. My best bet is and has been that they are part of the regional, combined East-Germanic and Slavic expansion after the fall of the Roman Empire. - Thursday, January 02, 2014 1:55:00 pm
- AdygheChabadi said...
@Daniel Szelkey
"THe sudanese university who published this went off line, but I saw the site before it went down, and the results were pronounced valid by the university, altough they are vague and I do not trust the authencity to much.
Haplogroups A-M13 was found at high frequencies among Neolithic samples. Haplogroup F-M89 and YAP appeared to be more frequent among Meroitic, Post-Meroitic and Christian periods. Haplogroup B-M60 was not observed in the sample analyzed."
I would also love to know if those results you reported are, indeed, valid as the Meroitic language is the subject of my research right now. If those results are valid, then that would indicate that, by the Y-chromosome, the Kushites/ Meroites were not very different from the people of southern Egypt and northern Sudan today.
I also have to agree with Dienekes. Genetically, Africa is a treasure trove. There are probably genetic lineages yet to be discovered there. I think Africa has some surprises yet to be revealed. Africa can be a beast to assay.
I would, also, love to see some Admixture results on Afroasiatic Chadic speakers. I am fascinated by what it may reveal about those who carry Y-DNA R1b among them. Afroasiatic speakers from East Africa have been well assayed, many of them anyway. - Thursday, January 02, 2014 2:43:00 pm
- Hector said...
Denisovan-like hominids admixed into Papua NG and Australians are of unknown provenance of course.
Denisovans that left remains were in Siberia. These two are not equivalent. - Thursday, January 02, 2014 6:29:00 pm
- Dienekes said...
Denisovan-like hominids admixed into Papua NG and Australians are of unknown provenance of course.
Denisovans that left remains were in Siberia. These two are not equivalent.
This in no way conflicts with "The people best preserving the genetic legacy of ... Middle Paleolithic Siberians in Papua and Australia." which is a factually correct statement. - Thursday, January 02, 2014 6:34:00 pm
- Adrian Purcell Heathcote said...
I haven't seen this commented upon so it may have been missed. Researchers at the University of Adelaide have claimed that Australian Aborigines left Africa some 20,000 years before the waves that became Asians and Europeans. I read about this some time ago, but couldn't post. I've found this press release with the following (though this article doesn't contain all of the claims that I'd seen in the earlier version):
""It definitely strongly supports the idea that Aborigines were an early and separate wave of human expansion Out of Africa, before the subsequent wave that established Europeans and Asians. This has long been thought to be the case, due to the very early archaeological signs of Aboriginal presence in Australia (~50 kyr) and existing genetic data, but the highly-resolved view available from a genomic sequence is a really valuable contribution. While the information is only from a single individual, it provides a powerful view of the common, shared heritage of the movement of the ancestors of modern Aboriginal populations from Africa around half the world to Australia – which is one of the most important and poorly understood stories of human history.
However, while this is a major step forward, the key unresolved question remains the unique story of Aboriginal history within Australia, ie what has happened in those 50,000 years of life in the harsh Australian environment? Unfortunately, the information from a single individual tells us very little about this fascinating, and critically important part of human history. Aborigines are one of the oldest continuous human populations outside Africa, as they note in the paper, and due to the geographic isolation and limited archaeological records – remain one of the most mysterious chapters in human history."
the press release is here :
- Friday, January 03, 2014 12:22:00 pm
- Grey said...
""It definitely strongly supports the idea that Aborigines were an early and separate wave of human expansion Out of Africa"
Wild speculation but...
I think Out of the Tropics was a much more fundamental step than Out of Africa so how could you get Out of Africa before Out of the Tropics?
Answer, if the tropical environment ever expanded far enough north due to climate for early humans to spread around the coastal bottlenecks without changing environment and then retreated south again this could leave humans in the remaining tropical zones of south and south-east asia without ever needing to adapt to a non-tropical environment.
Even wilder...
I = dwarves?
- Saturday, January 04, 2014 10:30:00 pm
- terryt said...
Thanks for the link Locrian, although it is not part of this Dienekes post. Several extracts from the link:
"Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans have long been under-represented in global surveys of human DNA"
Very, very true. In fact in admixture estimates both are grouped together while we know they have almost totally different haplogroups and so are very likely to be different autosomally. The two are also usually lumped in with Melanesians and even Polynesians who have a substantial East Asian component.
"this man was part of population that had split perhaps 75,000 to 62,000 years ago from the other groups of Homo sapiens that had also exited Africa in the initial, single dispersal event. But the authors show that the subsequent expansion into Asia most likely occurred in multiple waves, with the Aboriginal Australian being descended from the first wave to wash on to Australia's shores. The timing of the genetic split, before 62,000 years ago, fits neatly with the initial colonisation of Australia and Papua New Guinea some time between 60,000 and 45,000 years ago, based on archaeological discoveries such as stone tools and human fossils. The existence of Denisovan DNA in the Aboriginal Australian's genome indicates that original dispersing population of Homo sapiens must have encountered resident Denisovans en route to Australia, possibly in New Guinea".
I don't see how Denisovans could have reached New Guinea before reaching Australia as the contact with SE Asia seems to have been Timor. Although I agree that the 'expansion into Asia most likely occurred in multiple waves' I see no reason why the Denisova element may not be exactly what it seems to be: the contribution of a Central Asian ancestral population. If the ancestors of the Australian Aboriginals passed through Central Asia in the first wave of expansion from Africa they would have mixed with Denisovans there. I have long argued that mt-DNA N and Y-DNA C look far more likely to have moved east via Central Asia rather than through South Asia, and these are the two most common haplogroup branches in Australia. Subsequent climate cooling would have eliminated humans through much of Central Asia leading to the apparent complete separation of Australian Aboriginals and other Eurasians. That would explain exactly why 'It definitely strongly supports the idea that Aborigines were an early and separate wave of human expansion Out of Africa, before the subsequent wave that established Europeans and Asians'. - Saturday, January 04, 2014 11:27:00 pm
- Simon_W said...
I used to be a stern critic of Maciamo's and Colin Welling's theories too, but now that it has become apparent that an ANE component is linked to the R-haplogroups and that it spread at a late date, and moreover that it's relatively weak in non-IE or late indoeuropeanized populations, I can only take my hat off to them and congratulate that their concept appears to be basically right. Of course it would be nice if we had some really old R1b from eastern Europe, but my guess is that it will be found. The uncertainty whether R1b was earlier in IE Celts or in non-IE Basques is resolved by the observation that Basques have much less autosomal ANE-admixture. I would suggest that Basque R1b is from IEs who became assimilated to the Basque culture. There was a time, when such an event would have been quite natural, and that was the time of the spread of the Bell Beaker culture from the Iberian peninsula to central Europe. Certainly I don't agree with Maciamo in every detail; for instance the Unetice culture seems much more linked with the Corded Ware / R1a complex, it's unlikely that it was dominated by R1b. And we can also discuss that R1b began to migrate quite early to the Carpathian basin, possibly already at the time of the Tiszapolgar culture. There is the alternative view that IE spread with Early European Farmers. It has been noted that this is hard to reconcile with the reconstructed PIE vocabulary and culture, and also with the relationships between IE subgroups who are seperated by large geographical distance, like Celtic and Italic, for instance. But the strongest counter-argument is still the large number of non-IE languages in southern Europe and the near and middle East. Alone in the area around the origin of farming we've got Hattic, Hurrian, Sumerian, Kassite, Elamite, and the three Caucasus language families, plus Sumerian which belongs to the successful families. Most of these are isolated languages; Hurrian may be related with Northeast Caucasian, and Elamite perhaps with Dravidian. Turning to southern Europe we've got Eteocypriot, Eteocretan, the language of Linear A which appears to have sounded very different from Eteocretan, we've got North Picene, the Tyrsenian family with Lemnian, Etruscan and Raetic, and finaly in Iberia there was Basque-Aquitanian, Iberian and Tartessian. So it's madness to ascribe the Indoeuropeanization of southern Europe to the spread of farming. There may be a psychological fallacy in thinking the pre-IE languages don't matter just because they are poorly attested and understood.
- Sunday, January 05, 2014 12:18:00 pm
- Simon_W said...
the three Caucasus language families, plus Sumerian which belongs to the successful families.
Oops I meant Semitic, not Sumerian. - Sunday, January 05, 2014 12:21:00 pm
- Simon_W said...
@ apostateimpressions
I think it's instructive to play around with the Dodecad K12b Oracle in the mixed mode. But first we have to exclude the CEU30 sample. It resembles the English too much and just obscures the relationships. Then we see: The sample English_D is similar to:
"52.7% British_D + 47.3% Dutch_D" "0.3846"
The Dutch_D sample is probably the best approximation to the Anglo-Saxons that is available in K12b, the German_D sample being too southern. The British_D sample appears to have quite some Celtic ancestry, maybe from Wales?
Next we find the blend:
"49.3% Dutch_D + 50.7% Cornwall_1KG" "0.4723"
Very similar to the above finding, and Cornwall is known to be strongly Brythonic ancestry-wise.
In my experience, the British_Isles_D sample seems to be the most Germanic one from Britain, I suspect it contains some people from Yorkshire or surroundings.
In the end it might interest you what blend of Dutch_D with British_D or Cornwall_1KG approximates yourself best, and this can be calculated when you've got your autosomal raw data. - Sunday, January 05, 2014 3:51:00 pm
- Adrian Purcell Heathcote said...
- This comment has been removed by the author.
- Monday, January 06, 2014 12:19:00 pm
- Adrian Purcell Heathcote said...
terry said: "Thanks for the link Locrian, although it is not part of this Dienekes post. Several extracts from the link:"
Yes I should have been clearer as to what I saw as the connection to the ancient African dna issue. My thought was that if the claim is correct that the Australian aborigines left Africa first then the best picture that we may have of what ancient Africans were like may come from them — minus the Denison component they picked up in their Volkswanderung (I recall an earlier article that suggested this took them up to Siberia and then down through China — taking them through the heart of Denisovan territory). - Monday, January 06, 2014 12:21:00 pm
- terryt said...
"My thought was that if the claim is correct that the Australian aborigines left Africa first"
I doubt we could say that Australian Aborigines 'left Africa first'. It appears that all we can say is that they expanded from somewhere outside Africa 'first'. Y-DNA evidence shows that F remained for quite some time in some isolated region before expanding through South Asia whereas C expanded quite quickly after the C/F split. From that I think we can gather that South Asia was not the immediate main highway usually claimed for it.
"the best picture that we may have of what ancient Africans were like may come from them — minus the Denison component they picked up in their Volkswanderung"
Possible, except that Australian Aborigines look even less 'African' than do Papuans. Papuans are mainly Y-DNA K(xLT) and mt-DNA M. Besides which it is easy to differentiate between most Papuans and most Africans. Much of the difference between any 'original' OoA population and modern Africans can probably be explained by the expansion of the West African phenotype over that last few thousand years though.
"I recall an earlier article that suggested this took them up to Siberia and then down through China — taking them through the heart of Denisovan territory".
Where did you read that? Although I have long suspected that to be the case I have never seen any paper suggesting it to be so. It certainly makes sense to me in many different ways. - Monday, January 06, 2014 11:58:00 pm
- apostateimpressions said...
Thank you Simon, interesting stuff. I would guess that Holland is a reasonable approximation to the Anglo-Saxons because they came here via the Frisian coast and they also settled there. Frisia would likely be the best approximation if we could get data for that region. And as you say, the AS were NW continental Germanics from Denmark and NW Germany so Holland would be a better fit than more southerly Germany.
I would guess that Wales and Cornwall are 50% Germanic. I am not sure what to suggest as a better approximation for the Celtic British. Perhaps southern Ireland would function in that role? I would guess that NI is 50% Germanic and SI about 5%. I heard that Ireland was settled through Britain, so Ireland might make sense in that respect as an approximation for the Celtic British.
Is it possible that you could calcucate the Engish as (Irish + Holland)? It would not give a definate figure for admixture proportions but it would be interesting. - Tuesday, January 07, 2014 9:46:00 pm
- Simon_W said...
@ apostateimpressions
No, the Dodecad K12b Oracle doesn't want to suggest this. But anyway, I cannot believe that Wales would be 50% Germanic, never. They are predominantly English speaking now, true, but afaik the language shift was mostly effectuated by social forces in the past few centuries, not by mass immigration of Anglo-Saxons. And this is very evident on the y-chromosomes: Judging by the maps at Eupedia the Welsh have less than 1% of R1b-U106! That's the R1b-subvariant that's typical for Germanic tribes. For comparison: In most parts of England this marker is had by 20-30% of the male population. Which is of the same magnitude as in the old Anglo-Saxon homelands in NW Germany and W Denmark. Therefore I think the Welsh are hardly Germanic and a good approximation of the Celtic Britons, and the English may be predominantly Germanic on the paternal side, and about equally Celtic one the maternal one... - Thursday, January 09, 2014 9:12:00 pm
- apostateimpressions said...
Simon, yet most Welsh and Cornish men have the Frisian Y chromosome segment, which implies that most of their male lines are AS. Southern Ireland has much lower levels. So I doubt that the Welsh function well as an approximation to the Celtic British.
The AS was not a male invasion, the entire AS relocated to Britain and left their homeland empty of people. We would expect heavy AS input also on the female side.
Entire family clans set out to sea, usually in the spring and summer when the water was calm. Their ships were bulging with household goods, cows and horses. According to an old chronicle, the land of the Angles was soon "abandoned." - Friday, January 10, 2014 5:52:00 am
- apostateimpressions said...
Sorry, page one of the link:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/the-anglo-saxon-invasion-britain-is-more-germanic-than-it-thinks-a-768706.html - Friday, January 10, 2014 5:55:00 am
- Onur Dincer said...
Simon, yet most Welsh and Cornish men have the Frisian Y chromosome segment, which implies that most of their male lines are AS. Southern Ireland has much lower levels. So I doubt that the Welsh function well as an approximation to the Celtic British.
Apostate, it is very unlikely for most Welsh or Cornish to possess Anglo-Saxon admixture. That is because their native languages were in inferior status all through their existence under the English rule. So a Welsh, Cornish, Gaelic Scot or Irish person admixing with an Anglic-speaking person would most probably switch to the Anglic language. Thus the genetic segment in Britain you associate with Anglo-Saxons should be something native to Britain and, to a lesser extent, Ireland and thus not necessarily connected to the Anglo-Saxon invasions. Maybe Anglo-Saxons increased its levels in the historically Anglic-speaking parts of Britain, but that is all. - Saturday, January 11, 2014 8:02:00 am
- Grey said...
There's a distinction between North and South Wales as the North is much more mountainous.
Personally i'd expect DNA from North Wales to contain lots of interesting secrets but whether those secrets were Celtic or pre-Celtic I wouldn't want to bet. I think those mountains may have been a refuge from both Celtic and Germanic invasions.
(The latter based on nothing more than climbing in north wales and noticing (or imagining) different phenotypes.)
- Sunday, January 12, 2014 1:14:00 am
- Adrian Purcell Heathcote said...
terry said "Where did you read that? Although I have long suspected that to be the case I have never seen any paper suggesting it to be so. It certainly makes sense to me in many different ways."
I have been racking my memory trying to think where I read this (in the last 6 months I'm sure) but I can't remember. If I come across it again I will let you know.
- Sunday, January 12, 2014 11:43:00 am
- Simon_W said...
Apostateimpressions, that Spiegel article is written in a very unscientific language, presumably to make it more readable for complete laymen. What do they mean by "Frisian y-chromosome segment"?? But I believe I've heard about this research before, they compared the y-DNA of England, Wales and Friesland and found the English to be much closer to the Friesians than to the Welsh. This is actually what I'm saying too, as far as y-DNA is concerned. The map is a bit odd, with Cornwall apparently being more "Frisian" than most of the remaining south of England. However, if the Eupedia map of R1b-U106, aka R1b-S21 is correct, and I assume it's correct, then the Welsh can only have negligible Germanic admixture, because from that map it's obvious that R1b-U106 is strongly correlated with Germanic influence, and there are no truly Germanic admixed populations who have little or none of it. So it would be a mystery how the Welsh could have acquired Germanic admixture without acquiring R1b-U106 as well. But that said we can also see a little bit of Germanic admixture in Cornwall there (5-10% R1b-U106), and it's not clear to me what that British_D sample was composed of – clearly it cannot be purely Welsh, otherwise it would be called Welsh_D. But, it seems to be similarly Celtic as the Cornish sample. Therefore the Celtic Britons were probably a bit more Celtic than either samples. But on the other hand, the Dutch_D sample isn't identical to the Anglo-Saxons either. The Angles and Saxons were from the area where in the iron age the Jastorf culture was flourishing. The Dutch in contrast are from the area of the Harpstedt-Nienburger group and from farther southwest of it. It's not even undisputed if that latter culture was already Germanic and when it had become so. And there were similar cultural differences in more ancient periods, like in the late bronze age: the Netherlands rather belonged to the Urnfield groups than to the Nordic bronze culture, and already in the Chalcolithic the two areas belonged to different groups of the TRB. And this long history of differences can also be seen physically: The Dutch are on average very leptoprosopic (narrow faced), the Saxons (and Angles) had and have more Cromagnoid admixture. And after all, Dutch, the official language of the Netherlands, comes from the Frankish, not from the Saxons. But of course, there are also areas of Saxon and Frisian dialect in the Netherlands. It's true that the homeland of the Angles and Jutes became quite depopulated when they emigrated, that's why the remainders became assimilated by the incoming Danes. The Saxon area however remained Saxon, and the Low German dialects are still derived from Old Saxon. In short, while the Celtic Britons were a little more Celtic than the Cornwall_1KG sample, the Anglo-Saxons were a bit more eastern genetically than the Dutch_D Sample.
- Sunday, January 12, 2014 2:24:00 pm
- Simon_W said...
Btw, of interest, the progression of the English-Cornish language border:
Too late for Anglo-Saxons marching in, they merely admixed with already mixed English neighbours. - Sunday, January 12, 2014 3:20:00 pm
- Chad said...
I think that we should not forget the Belgae, when speaking of England and the Saxon input. The East Midlands, down to 2/3 across the south coast was Belgic people. At least the ruling class and culture How much the genes moved towards the continent prior to the Saxon invasion is the thing that should be sorted out first. Then we can measure the Saxon influence. We need autosomal data from those Saxon graves to know what the true effect was.
http://www.ancestraljourneys.org/celtictribes.shtml#Belgae - Monday, January 13, 2014 4:39:00 am
- Chad said...
Perhaps, a whole round of samples from Wales, Midlands, SE and NE England; and testing from samples of Belgae and Saxon burials on both sides of the Channel and Sea will be necessary. Probably not coming in the near future. Does anyone know if they have started autosomal testing on any of the old graves, including Sutton Hoo?
- Tuesday, January 14, 2014 5:10:00 am
- Chad said...
Here's a couple links on British testing. Interesting reading.
Now to pick apart what is native, Belgae, Saxon and Dane. - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 6:05:00 am
- Simon_W said...
I would bet the R1b variant typical of the Belgae was U152 aka S28, and that they didn't have much U106/S21. It would make sense if their autosomal makeup was best preserved in Belgium, especially in the Walloons - and in the Dodecad K12b analysis, the Belgian sample isn't very similar to the Dutch sample, and presumably even less to the Anglo-Saxons. In the end everything came from the continent sooner or later, and there may have been pre-Germanic links to northern Europe too...
- Tuesday, January 14, 2014 9:12:00 pm
- Chad said...
@ Simon_W
I'm not so sure about the Walloons. It is possible. We need old samples. The Belgae should have had a decent amount of L-21 and possibly similar I varieties found in the isles. Modern Belgium is only part of the old Belgae realm. The Belgic tribes covered everything West of the Rhine, to the present day Eastern border of Normandy. I am curious if the Belgic tribes of Britain had something to do with the 'invitation' of West Germanic tribes (old neighbors, and partial cousins if the Roman accounts are true), all grouped and labeled as Saxons, as S-21's strongest signals are in those old Belgic areas.
Yes, you're right that everything came in at some point from the continent. I think with all of this pots are people stuff coming up now, it may be safe to assume these people with hill-forts, coins, and wheeled pottery were certainly all Belgic, at least in part. Who knows how long they had been living there, maybe forgetting that they had crossed the channel 2-300 years ago or so. Hopefully some samples will be published this year and this debate about replacement vs. integration will end. - Thursday, January 16, 2014 5:29:00 am
- Simon_W said...
@ Chad Rohlfsen
Interesting links, thank you!
I agree that the similarity of the southeastern cluster with Belgium must be due to the Belgae, not to the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings as the texts suggest - the latter influences are rather reflected in the observed similarity with Germany and Denmark. Moreover the Danish influence proper was strongest in northeastern England, so this may have caused the northeast to form its own cluster. - Thursday, January 16, 2014 12:15:00 pm
- Simon_W said...
On the other hand it doesn't overlap well with the distribution of Danish place names, so presumably it's more a matter of relative isolation.
- Thursday, January 16, 2014 12:26:00 pm
- apostateimpressions said...
Bodmer has surmised the same as everyone else. He should give some figures if he has analysed the data. How much of British ancestry is Germanic? Give me figures for each region. When is he going to open up the data to all other researchers? Or is it a secret? Likely the British establishment does not consider it PC.
Why has no researcher examined the autosomal data from AS burials. Is science quite dead in Britain?
Interesting, were the Belgae Celtic or Germanic?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgae - Friday, January 17, 2014 4:46:00 am
- Chad said...
Did anyone else hear the rumor that La Brana 1's yDNA is C-V20? Very interesting, if true. Supposedly the paper comes out in 10 days.
- Saturday, January 18, 2014 7:12:00 am
- Simon_W said...
But while we're at it, it would be equally interesting to have some autosomal a-DNA from Elbe Germanic tribes and from Celts and Gallo-Romans from southwestern Germany and Switzerland. Then we could calculate how Germanic the Alemannic speaking dialect group in southwestern Germany, Switzerland and the Alsace region really is. The problem is very similar to the one in England: A Romanized Celtic population experiences Germanic influx after the Romans left and shifts the language to a Germanic one. From my trials with the Dodecad oracle I can say that if we take the German_D sample as an approximation to the Germanics, then, surprisingly, the Gallo-Romans in southwestern Germany and Switzerland appear to have been North Italian-like. Which makes me think of a thick Raetic substrate under the dominant Celtic layer.
But leaving such ethnocentric issues asside, I would love to see more ancient y- and autosomal DNA from all of Western Eurasia and northern Africa, and from the Mesolithic to the Iron age. Especially we need more from eastern and southeastern Europe and from the northwest. And while the hunter-gatherer – early farmer encounter has got quite some treatment by now, we still need to learn much more about the dramatic changes during the chalcolithic and bronze age in particular. - Saturday, January 18, 2014 4:54:00 pm
- Chad said...
I would really be interested in Alsatian and Pomeranian German samples, as that is about 1/4 of my ancestry. I wonder if they are ever going to test some of these people. Didn't they test a tooth of the Armsbury Archer, or someone like that, and find that his enamel showed he grew up around central Europe (Austria)?
I believe the Belgae may be an intermediary type. The Romans called them Gallo-Germanic and it seems a few of the tribes may have spoken more of a Germanic language. However, Germanic and Celtic R1b have the same parent, so how different can they really be? Romans couldn't tell Northern Europeans apart except for clothes and language. - Sunday, January 19, 2014 3:33:00 am
- Simon_W said...
Chad Rohlfsen, yeah you're right, northeastern France almost up to Paris (and in fact including the Upper Normandy) and parts of the Netherlands and Germany left of the Rhine were Belgic too, so at least we should add the northeastern French to the candidates of the most Belgic descendants, since the Germanic speakers are likely to be somewhat more Germanic admixed.
And true, they must have had some L21. Even in Bologna there is 10,3% L21, possibly the legacy of the Boii, who probably originated in southern Germany. But the majority of the British L21 appears to have been on the Isles for longer, I surmise it's from the earliest q-Celtic wave which may well have arrived in the middle Bronze age.
An important question, to which also Apostatesimpressions alludes to, is whether the Belgae were in any way Germanic or rather straightforwardly Celtic. The link you provided suggests the latter to be true, on the basis of recorded place names and personal names. The association with the Germanics is explained as merely refering to the Belgae's roots in the country east of the Rhine, what Caesar called Germania.
Judging from the Eupedia maps, S21 peaks in the Netherlands and eastern Friesland, both Germanic speaking areas. It correlates with known Germanic influence very well, except for the relatively high incidence in Austria – I guess the ancient Norici, whose language isn't known well, may originally have been closer to Germanics than to Celts, an idea the Eurologist often expressed too. In contrast, the Romance speaking parts of the old Belgic realm are more U152/S28 than S21, although S21 is quite strong towards its eastern fringe, but we must not forget that there was also a real Frankish invasion and settlement. After all the Franks even gave their name to France.
- Sunday, January 19, 2014 1:32:00 pm
- Simon_W said...
- This comment has been removed by the author.
- Sunday, January 19, 2014 4:27:00 pm
- Simon_W said...
Already Cavalli-Sforza showed with the "classical" serological markers, that the English are close to the Dutch and Danes, the Belgians close to the Germans, Swiss and Austrians, and the Scottish close to the Irish, but quite remote from the others.
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800x600q90/534/rc5k.png - Sunday, January 19, 2014 4:44:00 pm
- Simon_W said...
Chad Rohlfsen, I'm not sure how your wish relates to ancient DNA. The Alsatians are still alive and well, although their German dialect is strongly endangered by French speech. I agree that it would be interesting to compare their DNA to ancient Elbe Germanic tribes and to Gallo-Romans from the Alsace region. The German Pomeranians who are still with us, however are an old generation. I doubt that there is going to be any study on them as long as some are still alive. But at least in the case of the uniparental markers we're in the lucky situation that it can be studied even in mixed descendants – as long as they correctly know the origin of the respective lineages. Of course it would be interesting to compare their DNA to northwestern Germans (northern Low Saxons and Westphalians being the main source of their German ancestry) and to Pomeranian Slavs who no longer exist as an ethnic group, except for the Kashubians on the lower Vistula. As for the tooth enamel sample you alluded to, this was about the isotopes, not the DNA; yes IIRC they showed he was from central Europe.
- Monday, January 20, 2014 10:19:00 pm
- Chad said...
In reference to the tooth of the archer; yes, I know it was isotopes. Another interesting deal with isotopes that I saw recently involved the Indo Europeans changing from heavy fish and wild game eaters, to finally eating their cattle and sheep regularly instead of just at special or religious occasions. This happened about the time they travelled down the Black Sea coast into the Balkans. Very interesting.
- Tuesday, January 21, 2014 2:17:00 am
- Grey said...
I think the Belgae were Celts from the Celtic / Germanic frontier who migrated to a more peaceful region for a quieter life hence being rougher and tougher than the people around them.
- Tuesday, January 21, 2014 3:40:00 pm
- Chad said...
Just a few things again with the links to Scandinavia among the British. In the Mesolithic some of the Motala people settled in Britain. This is attested for archeologically. I am trying to find the link regarding the dig sites. Also in Kent, there was a dig recently in Bronze and Iron Age graves. Of the 25 samples, 9 were local (probably a Loschbourg/Motala mix), 8 from Southern Norway or Sweden (2 Bronze, 6 iron), and 5 were from the western Mediterranean(4 Bronze and 1 Iron). This is all according to the isotopes. I am trying to find the best link for this as well. So obviously Britain has always been connected with the future Germanic people. It is no wonder in the new plot with ANE,WHG,EEF that Britain is so close to Scandinavia. Lots of shared ancestry to the Mesolithic-the Iron Age. All pre-Saxon, likely.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2336094/Bronze-Age-burial-site-3-000-years-ago-contain-Scandinavian-western-European-migrants.html - Wednesday, January 22, 2014 6:12:00 am


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Lee began work on "The Surrendered," published in March by Riverhead Books, more than a decade ago. The riveting first chapter describes June riding on top of a train car with her 7-year-old twin siblings, Hee-Soo and Ji-Young. They have joined the throngs of refugees fleeing south on the eve of the Korean War, piling onto a train so packed that they must ride on top. When the train stops short, the twins are thrown to the ground. The wheels have severed Hee-Soo's legs and Ji-Young's foot. Hee-Soo is dead. June watches helplessly as the life drains from Ji-Young's body.
The scene was inspired by the experience of Lee's father, who witnessed his younger brother falling from a boxcar and losing his life as the family left Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea, in 1950. Lee was born in Seoul and emigrated from South Korea to the United States when he was 3, but didn't know the details of his father's experiences before the war until he was studying the subject in a college course and pressed his father for details. The story of his uncle's death troubled Lee for years, and eventually formed the catalyst for "The Surrendered."
"The kernel of that story, which had really haunted me from the time I heard it, was something I wanted to honor and retell," said Lee, who has taught at Princeton since 2002.
Nonetheless, he put his notes aside several times to work on other novels. "I think for me this was certainly the most difficult time I've had writing a book," Lee said. "I felt like I was on a mission to Mars and I had nothing with me."
The novel was challenging in some ways because it departs from the approach of his previous works, which were in-depth psychological investigations of a central character, told in the first person. Lee started writing "The Surrendered" with a single main character -- Hector, a Korean War veteran. But he eventually expanded it to become the entwined stories, over 30 years and three continents, of three characters whose lives have been shattered and rebuilt in the shadow of the Korean War.
"Chang-rae Lee is a true author of globalization," said Edmund White, a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center. "All of his books, but especially his latest, 'The Surrendered' -- which moves from Korea to New Jersey and New York and ends in Italy -- reveal his grasp of the international situation and the tragedies of contemporary war. As a friend, teacher and writer, Chang is gentle but strong, wry but serious, boyishly curious but completely adult."
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became "the spiritual and emotional backdrop" to the writing of "The Surrendered," Lee said. "I think the wars -- and 9/11 -- informed the novel in a way I hadn't really expected or counted on. Those events encroach upon our lives, consciously or unconsciously."
As he shaped his characters, Lee found himself studying their imagined physical dimensions much the way a visual artist would. Besides Hector there is June, the Korean orphan who in adulthood is ravaged by stomach cancer, and Sylvie, the wife of a missionary who crosses paths with June and Hector at the orphanage she helps run in Korea after the war.
"I saw myself in the position of a sculptor, rather than a writer, really looking at what I imagined them to be on the outside and inside, in a way that I hadn't really looked at characters before," he said. "Maybe it was a different way to see usage on their bodies, and wounds."
He also researched the Korean War, mainly by reading first-person accounts and studying newspaper photographs from the period, especially images of Korean refugees and ruined Korean villages. To write one of the novel's climactic scenes, Lee traveled to Italy to visit an astonishing tribute to war: a chapel in the village of Solferino in which floor-to-ceiling shelves along every wall are stacked with the skulls and bones of soldiers who died in the 1859 Battle of Solferino, a decisive conflict in Italy's history.
Lee was struck by the hue of the chapel, which he describes in "The Surrendered" as "awash in a light pewter shade, this rubbed, high-burnished grayness."
"The chapel was shockingly startling and impressive, and made sense of a lot of things I was thinking about" in writing the novel, Lee said. He came to see the church's color and tone as "the hue of the book, of the characters and their emotions," he said.
The novel's precise, often elegiac prose was not arrived at easily.
"The way I write is, it's methodical to the point of pathology," he said. "I work through every sentence over and over again -- 10 times, 20 times. I can't seem to move on until I get each sentence the way I want to leave it, until I get it -- I don't know if 'right' is the right word -- but I really work in those units. I like to put a lot of pressure and attention on every sentence, and I really can't move on until I'm satisfied by the previous sentence." Lee acknowledges that his method "is not a great way to write long novels -- it's kind of torture. I don't recommend it to my students."
Examining fiction, sentence by sentence
What he does stress in the classroom is that the most important element of learning to write fiction is studying how others write.
On a Wednesday afternoon in February, Lee's "Advanced Fiction" class gathered in his office, eight students arranged around Lee on couches and chairs. Before workshopping several student pieces, the class discussed Rick Moody's "Boys," a short story about childhood and growing up that uses the repetition of a phrase to move the characters through their lives.
"Let's just take apart that word: 'boys,'" Lee began. "What is this word? Who are these people? Maybe we can unpack it."
"There are no names for the boys, no coherent identities," pointed out junior Johannes Muenzel.
"If there isn't any differentiation, what's the effect of that?" Lee asked.
The discussion shifted to the story's point of view.
"I perceived the house as being the protagonist," said senior Janet Tambasco.
"That's a great idea," Lee said. He asked the students about the story's refrain, "Boys enter the house."
"What is that doing for the story?" Lee asked. "Why does he have to repeat it?" For every story, said Lee, the reader must answer the question: Why does the author like it this way?
"It feels like an English class in some ways, and I really appreciate that," said junior Chloe Hall after class. "There's a lot to learn from studying more experienced writers."
For sophomore Zack Newick, who took Lee's "Introduction to Fiction" class last fall, reading short fiction by Junot Díaz, Richard Ford and Susan Minot, among others, for the class helped him appreciate "how differently one could approach the art form," Newick said.
And Lee's copious notes on Newick's stories were "especially helpful in showing me how I could channel my highly stylized voice into the constraints of narrative," Newick said.
Sophomore Jenna Devine, who also took Lee's "Introduction to Fiction" class, said Lee's "attention to detail and ability to pinpoint exactly what your piece needs is amazing."
At times, Lee finds he needs to gently nudge students to explore darker themes in their fiction, such as betrayal, addiction or violence, some of the themes in "The Surrendered."
"Sometimes students seem shy about writing about people who do the wrong thing -- we're all taught to do the right thing and focus on the right thing," Lee said. "But all of literature is about people who do the wrong thing, despite themselves. What would the story be if they did the right thing? No story at all. Fiction wants to look at all the things that go wrong."


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His agenda tattered by last year's confrontations and missteps, President Barack Obama begins 2014 clinging to the hope of winning a lasting legislative achievement: an overhaul of immigration laws.
It will require a deft and careful use of his powers, combining a public campaign in the face of protests over his administration's record number of deportations with quiet, behind-the-scenes outreach to Congress, something seen by lawmakers and immigration advocates as a major White House weakness.
In recent weeks, both Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, have sent signals that raised expectations among overhaul supporters that 2014 could still yield the first comprehensive change in immigration laws in nearly three decades. If successful, it would fulfill an Obama promise many Latinos say is overdue.
The Senate last year passed a bipartisan bill that was comprehensive in scope that addressed border security, provided enforcement measures and offered a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants in the United States illegally. House leaders, pressed by tea party conservatives, demanded a more limited and piecemeal approach.
Indicating a possible opening, Obama has stopped insisting the House pass the Senate version. And two days after calling Boehner to wish him happy birthday in November, Obama made it clear he could accept the House's bill-by-bill approach, with one caveat: In the end, "we're going to have to do it all."
Boehner, for his part, in December hired Rebecca Tallent, a former top aide to Sen. John McCain and most recently the director of a bipartisan think tank's immigration task force. Even opponents of a broad immigration overhaul saw Tallent's selection as a sign legislation had suddenly become more likely. Boehner also fed speculation he would ignore tea party pressure, bluntly brushing back their criticism of December's modest budget agreement.
"The question is what are the core things that Republicans can't move away from, what are the core things that Democrats can't walk away from," said Republican pollster David Winston, who regularly consults with the House leadership. "You may have preferences and then you may have core elements. That's part of the process of going back and forth."
If successful, an immigration compromise could restore some luster to Obama's agenda, tarnished in 2013 by failures on gun legislation, bipartisan pushback on his efforts to take military action against Syria and the disastrous enrollment start for his health care law.
Obama has repeatedly argued that final immigration legislation must contain a path toward citizenship for immigrants who are in the United States illegally. Opponents argue citizenship rewards lawbreakers, and many Republicans are loath to support any measure granting citizenship no matter how difficult and lengthy that path may be.
But some advocates of reform are beginning to rally around an idea to grant immigrants legal status in the U.S. and leave the question of citizenship out of the legislation. In other words, they can work, but not vote.
"I don't think this is a good idea because citizenship is important, but I don't think it is a big deal breaker either," Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., a leading congressional advocate for overhauling U.S. immigration law, said in a speech last month. "Right now we have to stop the deportations that are breaking up families. And if we do not get citizenship this year, we will be back next year and the year after that."
While strong majorities of Hispanics continue to back a pathway to citizenship, a Pew Research Center poll last month found that being able to live and work in the U.S. legally without the threat of deportation was more important to Latinos by 55 percent to 35 percent.
"Is the sticking point going to be we have to have immediate voting privileges for those who came here illegally?," Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican who voted against the Senate immigration bill, said Sunday on ABC. "If the Democrats are willing to come halfway, I think we can pass something, some meaningful reform that would help the 11 million who are here."
That the immigration argument is now over legalization versus citizenship is remarkable enough. A 2005 Republican House immigration bill, instead of legalizing immigrants, would have made them felons if they were not authorized to be in the U.S.
"That's seismic shift in the debate," said Randy Johnson, senior vice president of the pro-overhaul U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Obama, whose support among Latinos has dropped from nearly 80 percent to 55 percent, has been under increasing pressure to use his executive powers to limit deportations. Obama's Homeland Security Department has deported 1.9 million people during the president's nearly five years in office, prompting protests ranging from a 22-day fast by activists in Washington to outbursts at Obama public events.
"As long as we have a failure to achieve immigration reform, combined with the record-breaking level of deportations, there will continue to be great dissatisfaction in the Latino community with the president," said Janet Murguia, the president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza, a leading Latino advocacy group.
A House Republican retreat later this month could help GOP leaders devise a strategy. Some Republicans and Democrats say Boehner could wait until after the filing deadlines for 2014 primary elections, thus protecting some incumbents from tea party or other conservative challenges. That would mean no meaningful votes until after April.
The White House's own strategy has not impressed before. Immigration advocates and Democratic lawmakers say the White House last year mistakenly assumed that the bipartisan Senate bill would create enough momentum to bulldoze its way through the House.
"They completely misunderstood the impact that the Senate bill would have," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, a key Democrat on immigration who sits on the House Judiciary Committee. "To think that that would magically transform the House of Representatives was never in the cards."
Associated Press Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta and AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report
Follow Jim Kuhnhenn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jkuhnhenn
Copyright © 2013 Capitol Hill Blue
Copyright © 2013 The Associated Press All Rights Reserved.


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Vet Returns To N.Korea For 1st Black Navy Aviator
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 21 JUL 13) … Jean H. Lee
PYONGYANG, North Korea – Two years after he made history by becoming the Navy's first black pilot, Ensign Jesse Brown lay trapped in his downed fighter plane in subfreezing North Korea, his leg broken and bleeding. His wingman crash-landed to try to save him, and even burned his hands trying to put out the flames.
A chopper hovered nearby. Lt. j.g. Thomas Hudner could save himself, but not his friend. With the light fading, the threat of enemy fire all around him and Brown losing consciousness, the white son of a New England grocery-store magnate made a promise to the black son of a sharecropper:
"We'll come back for you."
More than 60 years have passed. Hudner is now 88. But he did not forget. He has come back.
Hudner, now a retired Navy captain, arrived in Pyongyang on Saturday with hopes of traveling in the coming week to the region known in North Korea as the Jangjin Reservoir, accompanied by soldiers from the Korean People's Army, to the spot where Brown died in December 1950.
The reservoir was the site of one of the Korean War's deadliest battles for Americans, who knew the place by its Japanese name, Chosin. The snowy mountain region was nicknamed the "Frozen Chosin," and survivors are known in U.S. history books as the "Chosin Few."
The Battle of the Chosin Reservoir lasted for 17 brutal days. Some 6,000 Americans were killed in combat, and thousands more succumbed to the cold. Brown and many others who died there are among more than 7,910 Americans still missing in action from the war.
Though the fighting ended with an armistice signed 60 years ago July 27, North Korea and the U.S. remain technically at war. Efforts to recover remains have come in fits and starts, with little recent progress.
Next week's mission is to pick up where search teams have left off by locating the exact spot of Brown's crash. Armed with maps and coordinates, they hope to work with North Korean soldiers to excavate the remote area, a sealed site controlled by the North Korean military.
Approval for the unusual journey comes as North Korea prepares for festivities marking the upcoming armistice anniversary. Pyongyang is expected to use the milestone to draw international attention to the division of the Korean Peninsula as well as to build unity among North Koreans for new leader Kim Jong Un.
Hudner does not plan to stay for a massive military parade expected on July 27. But he said he hopes his visit will help to foster peace and reconciliation on the tense Korean Peninsula.
Japan occupied Korea for decades, until the end of World War II. Then the Soviets and the Americans moved in, backing rival fledgling governments and dividing the country halfway at the 38th parallel.
War broke out in June 1950, with the communist North Koreans marching into Seoul. They were countered by U.S.-led U.N. forces that charged north, taking Pyongyang and continuing up the peninsula.
By November, U.S. Marines had dug in around the Chosin reservoir and in Unsan County to the west. The plan was to push north as far as the Yalu River dividing Korea from China.
What they didn't know was more than 100,000 Chinese ground troops had slipped across the Yalu to fight for the North Koreans. They boxed in 20,000 U.N. forces, mostly U.S. Marines.
Hudner and Brown were members of Fighter Squadron 32, dispatched to the region deep in North Korea's forbiddingly mountainous interior to support the trapped ground troops and carry out search-and-destroy missions.
Theirs was a close-knit squadron. But the two men, both in their 20s, came from completely different worlds.
Hudner, of Fall River, Massachusetts, was a privileged New Englander who was educated at prep school and had been invited to attend Harvard. Brown, of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, broke the Navy's color barrier for pilots in 1948, months after President Harry S. Truman ordered the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces.
It wasn't an easy role for Brown to take on, Hudner recalled. "People who didn't know him gave him a hard time just because he was black."
But those who got to know Brown grew to respect the serious, unfailingly considerate young man who impressed his peers with his dedication to flying – and his gentle sense of humor.
"The squadron, almost to a man, protected him any way they could," Hudner told The Associated Press before his departure, his pale blue eyes sparkling. "He was a friend who, I'd say, was beloved by almost everybody who knew him. A very special person."
Late the afternoon of Dec. 4, 1950, Brown and Hudner were part of a six-plane formation over the Jangjin Reservoir, one like dozens of missions in the months previous.
This time, ground fire struck Brown's plane, forcing him to land behind enemy lines. When Brown waved for help from his crumpled, smoking cockpit after slamming into the mountainside, Hudner acted quickly.
"I thought: 'My God, I've got to make a decision,'" he said. "I couldn't bear the thought of seeing his plane burst into flames."
Hudner crash-landed his plane in high winds and snowy rocks about 100 yards from the downed fighter. As flames engulfed Brown's plane, and still under the threat of attack, Hudner scrambled to pack the fuselage with snow, burning his hands in the process. He took his cap off and pulled it over Browns' ears, then radioed for help as Brown remained trapped in the cockpit, bleeding heavily, his leg crushed and his body temperature dropping in the subzero conditions.
A Marine helicopter arrived, but the pilot and Hudner could not extract Brown from the wreckage.
Before losing consciousness, his thoughts turned to his wife, whose name he whispered in his last command to Hudner: "If I don't make it, please tell Daisy I love her."
Hudner reluctantly got into the rescue helicopter. Brown is believed to have died soon after. The next day, U.S. military planes dropped napalm on the wreckage to keep the enemy from getting his body.
Hudner was awarded the Medal of Honor, the U.S. military's highest award, for trying to save Brown. Brown posthumously received the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
"He was a leader," Hudner said. "He had great promise had he not been so tragically killed."
Hudner went onto a distinguished naval career and later served as Massachusetts' commissioner of veterans' services, eventually settling in the revolutionary town of Concord, Massachusetts.
A few years ago, he was contacted by author Adam Makos about doing a book on his wartime heroics. It was Makos, Hudner said, who suggested returning to the crash site. Hudner hadn't thought it possible, given the abysmal state of U.S.-North Korean relations.
They enlisted Chayon Kim, a South Korean-born U.S. citizen who had been involved in the campaign to build a Korean War Memorial in Washington, and who took the Harlem Globetrotters and former NBA star Dennis Rodman to North Korea earlier this year.
She agreed to take Hudner, fellow Korean War veteran Dick Bonelli, and their group to North Korea. Kim, who says she has built ties over the years with the North Korean military, asked the army to supply soldiers to help with the search.
Hudner hopes to bring Brown's remains home to the aviator's 86-year-old widow, Daisy, and their daughter, Pam Knight, who was a toddler when her father died.
"I think it would add some peace and maybe some closure," Brown's widow said Thursday. "But if they do find the remains, and they can convince me that it is his remains, we would want a full military funeral at Arlington Cemetery.
"He deserves that," she said, speaking to AP at her home in Hattiesburg, where a picture of Brown's plane sits on the mantle over the fireplace. "That would give him a final resting place."
Hudner, who turns 89 next month and is in frail health, has braced himself for what he knows will be difficult journey. There are few paved roads outside Pyongyang, and the route to the region where Brown died is a steep mountain path, treacherous even in good weather.
"I won't be at the bar boozing it up for very long when I get there," he joked.
The political complications may be greater still. The Koreas remain divided by the world's most militarized border, and Washington and Pyongyang lack diplomatic relations.
Diplomatic forays have sputtered over the years, stalled by a standoff over North Korea's nuclear ambitions. Earlier this year, Pyongyang threatened to launch a nuclear war if provoked; Washington sent bombers into the region in what defense officials acknowledged was meant as a warning.
America is still Enemy No. 1 to North Koreans, who consider the posting of 28,500 U.S. troops across the border in South Korea to be an "occupation" of the Korean Peninsula.
Hudner arrived at a time known in North Korea as the "anti-American period," a month devoted to recounting the atrocities allegedly perpetrated by U.S. soldiers during the Korean War and leading up to July 27. Since this is the 60th anniversary of the armistice, it is all the more prominent.
Posters show North Koreans with eyes blazing as they attack American soldiers with bayonets. "Sweep away the imperialist American aggressors," they read. Students file through exhibition halls that lay out the alleged toll: More than 1.2 million soldiers and civilians killed.
More than 36,000 American military personnel died in Korea fighting as part of the U.S.-led U.N. forces, including the nearly 8,000 never accounted for, according to the U.S. Defense Department.
For decades, the families of missing U.S. soldiers have pressed the government to search for their remains.
The first joint U.S.-North Korea searches began in 1996. Teams uncovered 229 sets of remains, but in 2005, with Washington and Pyongyang locked in a nuclear standoff, the U.S. government suspended the searches, citing security concerns.
Last year, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command prepared to resume the search. But those plans were scrapped following North Korea's decision to launch a long-range rocket – widely seen as a test of missile technology. Additionally, the search program itself has been criticized as "inept" and "dysfunctional" in an internal Pentagon study recently obtained by the AP.
Hudner and the team don't know if they'll find Brown's remains or the wreckage of the two planes.
But Makos, who intends to make the trip the last chapter of his book about the two men, said Brown's place in history makes it especially important to make the attempt.
"He's a Jackie Robinson in many ways. He's a Joe Louis," he said. "He's a historic figure, yet he's lying on a Korean mountainside."
Associated Press reporters Chris Carola in Albany, New York, and Stacey Plaisance in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, contributed to this report.
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Morgan Three-Wheelers
UNTIL LAST YEAR – until 1 March last year, to be precise – three-wheelers were generally regarded as pretty uncool devices. Blame for that lies entirely with the Reliant Regal van that featured in the British TV sit-com Only Fools and Horses. Drive a three-wheeler and you're a loser, was the perception.
That all changed on March 1st, because that was press day at the Geneva motor show, and the day when Morgan unveiled its latest model, called, logically enough, the 3 Wheeler. (Relatively) cheap and (extremely) cheerful, it created more of a stir than any of the exotics on show at Geneva that year. More than a few senior industry figures and designers were spotted giving it a covert going-over, followed by subtle nods of approval.
Morgan hasn't exactly been a shrinking violet in recent years, with the launch of the controversially cross-eyed Aero 8 in 2000 and the Batman-esque Aeromax Coupe' in 2004. But even by its own standards, this appeared to be a completely barking move. In the teeth of a global recession, how many people would be willing to stump up $45,000 for a 'car' with a two-cylinder engine and less than the full complement of wheels at each corner?
Quite a lot, it seems. One year on, Morgan has 900 orders for the 3 Wheeler and can't turn them out fast enough. Bizarrely, the 3 Wheeler has proved to be just right for these belt-tightening times. Everything about it says 'fun!' and that's just what people want in a recession. OK, it's still an expensive toy for most – but it's nowhere near as expensive as an Aston or Ferrari. Or even a four-wheeled Morgan.
The really clever bit is that the 3 Wheeler unashamedly cribs the looks of Morgan's classic Aero three-wheelers of the late '20s and early '30s without looking like a pastiche. That's quite an achievement, given that the new car is actually based on a US-made three-wheeler called the Liberty Ace. Morgan extensively reworked the body styling, while the cockpit shows the influence of Morgan's boyish and bold-thinking head of design, Matthew Humphries. The dash panel, for example, has a blocky and militaristic 'techy' look to it – with a safety catch for the engine starter button that's infamously borrowed from the Eurofighter's bombhatch release.
With a huge V-twin, 2.0-liter engine up front (which was to have been Harley-Davidson, until negotiations broke down and Morgan switched to boutique US engine maker S&S Cycle Inc) and a fat 205/55 rear tyre, the
3 Wheeler is a hoot to drive. Morgan suggests a 0-60mph time of 4.5sec, which is ambitious but feasible, given the car's light weight and the V-twin's enormous torque. The acceleration is only one part of the experience, though. There's the noise, memorably described by David Lillywhite road test as turning from '…devil's lawnmower to classic Moto Guzzi to WW1 fighter plane'; and there's the visual excitement of being able to see the front wheels hammering up and down at speed, just a hand's stretch away.
All three of those elements are just as much a feature of Roger Orford's 1934 Aero Super Sports, the sporty three-wheeler of the pre-war years. And if you sat down with a pen and paper to draw up a profile of the archetypal Morgan three-wheeler owner, Roger is exactly the kind of person you'd end up with. Cheerful, generous and almost supernaturally enthusiastic, he bought his first three-wheeler in 1959 and has owned this particular example since 1965.
Published Dec 7th, 2015