The usual suspects are very unhappy with the state of Europe.
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1 Jul 2012: Business agenda: A bad week for banks (or their customers), Italy trounces Germany (at the euro summit) and Brits put their faith in Spain (well, its beaches)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9366090/The-EU-has-opted-to-do-nothing-and-die.html
7:30PM BST 30 Jun 2012
7 Comments And so, in two pages of impenetrable Euro-speak issued in Brussels in the small hours of Friday morning, we saw the great European dream visibly dying. The mountains heaved, to paraphrase Horace, and gave birth to a ridiculous mouse. Faced with by far the most testing crisis in its history, all the EU could come up with was yet another meaningless fudge which will solve nothing.
What was really significant about this fiasco, though, was not what happened but what didn’t happen. Scarcely noticed here in Britain, the real drama that fizzled out at that European Council meeting was the one that has been dominating the Continental press, notably in Germany, for weeks. The cry has been going up – most forcefully from Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble (backed by Mrs Merkel), and also the “Future Group” of 10 EU foreign ministers – that the only way to solve the mortal crisis threatening to bring down the euro, the European economy and so much else, must be another giant leap forward in European integration.
“Banking union”, “fiscal union” are nothing like enough, they say. The European Commission, as the foreign ministers put it, must be turned into “a real government”. There should be a new bicameral parliament, with the existing EU Parliament, given new powers, as its lower house, and the Council of Ministers as its upper house, or Senate. At the head of it all should be a single President of Europe, elected by voters across the EU.
Tellingly, this echoed almost exactly what Jacques Delors proposed back in 1989 when the integrationist tide was at its full. As Mrs Thatcher put it on a famous occasion, Mr Delors wanted “the European Parliament to be the democratic body”, “the Commission to be the executive” and “the Council of Ministers to be the Senate”. It was this triple proposal that prompted Mrs Thatcher’s immortal reply: “No, no, no.”
But last Thursday, this brave talk of a “new Europe” wasn’t even on the table. To bring the vision about would have required a major new treaty, taking the best part of two years, and up to a dozen national referendums (several of which would probably have been lost), before it could be ratified. Instead, when it came to the test as to whether Europe was to take that further leap forward to the goal Delors and Jean Monnet dreamt of, today’s politicians, led by presidents Van Rompuy and Barroso, just flunked it. The result was not a victory for anyone – it was a defeat for everyone. The great European project has put itself in the predicament the Bismarck faced in 1941 – its steering gear disabled, forced to limp round in circles until it meets an inevitable doom. Gazing into the bottomless pit of debt, the EU’s leaders can neither move forward into the future nor escape from the prison they have made for themselves by their errors of the past. They must hang there in the wind, until the inexorable logic of the markets brings them to a real crunch point, more fateful for all our futures than anything they have yet dared imagine."
Maybe.
Maybe.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/what-did-the-eu-summit-accomplish/
"2 Comments
What Did the EU Summit Accomplish?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp6-wG5LLqE&feature=player_embedded
OK, the summit was clearly an upside surprise: in effect, the Latin bloc forced Merkel to bend, at least slightly. But was it good enough?
Charles Wyplosz argues, sensibly, that it was nowhere close. The main substantive thing was the agreement in principle to set up something more or less like a European version of the TARP, in which funds for bank recapitalization will be supplied by a consortium rather than lent to governments already overburdened with debt. Good move, and Irish bond buyers are especially happy. But even this doesn’t take effect right away.
Also some bond purchases, but not by the ECB, so limited in size. So think of this as a very small version of quantitative easing.
So what we know even for the US is that the TARP and QE were perhaps enough to forestall disaster, but not to produce recovery — and Europe has the additional problem of huge needed realignments in competitiveness, which would be much easier if the ECB announced a dramatic loosening — which is didn’t.
Not nearly enough, then. Yet markets were buoyed.
I guess you can argue that this was sort of a downpayment — that it is the harbinger of bigger policy changes to come. I hope so. But I suspect, like Wyplosz, that we’re overreacting to the simple if admittedly surprising failure to achieve disaster."
The first link:
http://www.voxeu.org/article/one-more-summit-crisis-rolls
"One more summit: The crisis rolls on
Charles Wyplosz, 30 Jun 2012
Charles Wyplosz argues, sensibly, that it was nowhere close. The main substantive thing was the agreement in principle to set up something more or less like a European version of the TARP, in which funds for bank recapitalization will be supplied by a consortium rather than lent to governments already overburdened with debt. Good move, and Irish bond buyers are especially happy. But even this doesn’t take effect right away.
Also some bond purchases, but not by the ECB, so limited in size. So think of this as a very small version of quantitative easing.
So what we know even for the US is that the TARP and QE were perhaps enough to forestall disaster, but not to produce recovery — and Europe has the additional problem of huge needed realignments in competitiveness, which would be much easier if the ECB announced a dramatic loosening — which is didn’t.
Not nearly enough, then. Yet markets were buoyed.
I guess you can argue that this was sort of a downpayment — that it is the harbinger of bigger policy changes to come. I hope so. But I suspect, like Wyplosz, that we’re overreacting to the simple if admittedly surprising failure to achieve disaster."
The first link:
http://www.voxeu.org/article/one-more-summit-crisis-rolls
"One more summit: The crisis rolls on
Charles Wyplosz, 30 Jun 2012
Reading the official documents from the June 28 summit requires linguistic and divination skills. The texts are convoluted and clearly aim at giving various positive impressions while shying away from deep commitments.
The new agreement suggests that in the future, banks will be bailed out by the collective effort of Eurozone countries. This means that should the bank rescue turn sour, losses will jointly assumed, in proportion to each country’s size – so, for examples, Greek taxpayers could take a share in poorly managed rescues of Italian banks. This is solidarity, but…
Such interventions limit the costs to taxpayers; they can even turn out a profit. Of course, the conditions could also be silly, raising the costs to taxpayers to huge levels.
At this stage, both outcomes are possible.
But this is not what the official text says, which makes one suspect that policymakers have not agreed to something simple and clean. Most likely, they will keep negotiating and come with the usual 17-headed monster that exhausted diplomats are want to invent.
This is important because a contagious banking crisis that hits several large banks would require much more money than is available in the EFSF-EMS facilities. In that case, the ECB will have to step in. In fact, the whole idea to have a single supervisor trusted by the ECB is to make it possible for the ECB to at long last act as a lender of last resort.
Unless the supervision regime is clear and clean, the ECB will not be able to do its job and a contagious crisis would turn into a full-blown disaster.
The pact allows for the mobilisation of various EU facilities for a total amount of some 1% of EU. Given that these amounts are tied to all sorts of criteria (small and medium enterprises, energy and broadband infrastructure, and other great causes), that they will be spent “across the whole European Union, including in the most vulnerable countries”, and that “fast disbursement” by the European bureaucracy does not operate on the same time scale as a financial crisis, this compact costs little and will do nothing for the Eurozone debt crisis.
- The clearest result is that EFSF/ESM funds can be used directly to support banks.
The new agreement suggests that in the future, banks will be bailed out by the collective effort of Eurozone countries. This means that should the bank rescue turn sour, losses will jointly assumed, in proportion to each country’s size – so, for examples, Greek taxpayers could take a share in poorly managed rescues of Italian banks. This is solidarity, but…
- First, this arrangement is to be finalised by the end of the year.
- Second, conditions will be attached to such rescue.
Such interventions limit the costs to taxpayers; they can even turn out a profit. Of course, the conditions could also be silly, raising the costs to taxpayers to huge levels.
At this stage, both outcomes are possible.
- Third, the arrangement is linked to the establishment of a “single supervisory mechanism involving the ECB”.
But this is not what the official text says, which makes one suspect that policymakers have not agreed to something simple and clean. Most likely, they will keep negotiating and come with the usual 17-headed monster that exhausted diplomats are want to invent.
This is important because a contagious banking crisis that hits several large banks would require much more money than is available in the EFSF-EMS facilities. In that case, the ECB will have to step in. In fact, the whole idea to have a single supervisor trusted by the ECB is to make it possible for the ECB to at long last act as a lender of last resort.
Unless the supervision regime is clear and clean, the ECB will not be able to do its job and a contagious crisis would turn into a full-blown disaster.
Compact for Growth and Jobs
The summit also agreed on a “Compact for Growth and Jobs”. This is a long and familiar litany of all the good supply-friendly reforms that have been advocated bi-weekly by the Commission for some twenty years plus a present to President Hollande. The present has been crafted in Berlin to give the new president a face-saving “victory”: he can go home and claim that he has obtained a victory in his determined war on austerity.The pact allows for the mobilisation of various EU facilities for a total amount of some 1% of EU. Given that these amounts are tied to all sorts of criteria (small and medium enterprises, energy and broadband infrastructure, and other great causes), that they will be spent “across the whole European Union, including in the most vulnerable countries”, and that “fast disbursement” by the European bureaucracy does not operate on the same time scale as a financial crisis, this compact costs little and will do nothing for the Eurozone debt crisis.
Conditionality Lite
Finally, the official texts include vague references to the possible use of EFSF/ESM funds to bail out governments with limited conditionality. It is very hard to understand what that really means beyond pleasing prime ministers Monti and Rajoy. Light conditionality, as they requested, is bound to collapse at the foot of the Bundestag, which must approve every single loan.Conclusion
At the end of the day, the summit was a little move in the right direction bank supervision, but keep watching; we still don’t know what will actually get put in place. There was nothing on collapsing Greece, nothing on unsustainable public debts in several countries, and no end in sight to recession in an increasing number of countries.There was no knock-out winner in this summit, but on points I’d have to say that the winner is the crisis.
The second link:
"The Spanish hangover
Cinzia Alcidi, Daniel Gros, 15 Apr 2012What is the problem in Spain? It started with a classic housing bubble financed by foreign capital, and as a textbook would predict, once the inflow of foreign capital stopped and the bubble burst, unemployment soared and the financial system went bust as well (Reinhart 2008).
The current fiscal problems mostly reflect the housing bust. The Spanish government is running a large fiscal deficit as the economy remains weak and the ever-increasing losses in the banking sector hang like a sword of Damocles over the public sector.[1]
On this ground, too much attention has thus been focused recently on the Spanish deficit overshoot in 2011 and what deficit might be attainable in 2012. More attention should be focused on the factors behind the deficit. We argue that the root problem is that the Spanish housing bubble was extreme and that the adjustment has simply been too slow. In particular, we provide a novel angle on two key questions: how long it will take to absorb the legacy of the bubble and how much it will cost?
The Spanish housing bubble
Most commentators concentrate on house prices, usually in real terms, as the measure the housing bubble and its developments (e.g. Münchau 2012). Data suggest that house prices have indeed adjusted, but not enough. Figure 1 shows the house price index for Spain (measured as relative to rents) at roughly the same level as in 2003 and still much above its pre-2000 levels. We favour the price-to-rent index to the real price because it should not be affected by immigration; any increase in demand for housing from that source should manifest itself in upwards pressure on both rents and prices. On the contrary, immigration should put more pressure on rents than on house prices since most immigrants are likely to be short of capital and thus likely to be renting, rather than buying.[2]
The chart confirms that house prices have followed the price-to-rent index since their peak in the last quarter of 2006 but are still higher than the pre-bubble period.
Figure 1. House prices in Spain
Source: OECD
An analogous chart for Ireland would show a full hump-shaped curve, with the current price/rent ratio already back to the level of late 1990s. While Ireland’s price adjustment is close to complete, one could argue that Spain is still only about halfway.
Though this might be true, here we argue that for macroeconomic developments, house prices are less important than the amount of real resources used in the housing sector. What matters for the real economy is the size of the construction sector (especially employment) and its time path relative to the long-run equilibrium. Figure 2 shows spending in construction as a share of GDP for the two countries with the biggest bubbles in Europe: Ireland and Spain.[3]
Figure 2. Housing overhang in Spain and Ireland
Note: Investment in construction as share of GDP on the vertical axis, the red line is the average over the period 1970-2000. Source: European Commission services (Ameco)
The figure can be used to compare the genesis of the housing overhang and its absorption in these two countries. In each chart, the area below the hump curve and above the long-run average of investment in construction (red line) represents our estimate of excess construction and thus our estimate of the overhang (of housing and other fixed structures).[4] For Ireland the cumulated excess of construction between 1997 and 2008 is equivalent to about €99 billion, or 55 % of (2008) GDP. In the case of Spain this is more than €380 billion or 37% of (2010) GDP.
It is often argued that Spain is different because there is a strong demand by foreigners for vacation homes. While this might be true, this is already taken into account in the long run average as shown by an ‘equilibrium’ rate of construction spending (relative to GDP) 5% points higher in Spain than in Ireland and above most European countries.[5]
How far along is the adjustment process?
The area below the red line representing average long-run construction investment measures the process of absorption of the bubble. As houses do not decay rapidly, the only way to bring supply and demand back in balance is by building less.
In both countries, the process is clearly incomplete in the sense that the area measuring the absorption is much smaller than the area measuring the overhang.
- In Ireland, the adjustment has taken place at high speed and about one third of the bubble has already been absorbed.
- In Spain, absorption has hardly started and the forecasts from the EU Commission for 2012 and 2013 (represented by the dotted line) suggest that the adjustment is likely to stagnate.
If construction were to continue at the still relatively high rate of today, the process of absorption of the bubble would take more than 30 years. More recent data, from different sources, on housing starts (and completions) indicate that the Commission forecasts for 2012 and 2013 might understate the fall in the construction activity, which is accelerating again. This might also be the main reason (rather than the fiscal adjustment) why growth rates for Spain are being revised downwards.
The relative good performance of the Spanish economy in 2010–2011 might thus have been due to the fact that during these years the adjustment in both the government accounts and the housing sector slowed down. The long-term costs of this delay are now becoming apparent.
Our very rough estimate of the construction overhang also informs the losses that the banking sector may be facing once adjustment is complete – at least from an order-of-magnitude perspective. In the end, the construction overhang represents the amount of real resources wasted in a sector whose expenditure was financed mostly by credit. It goes without saying that our estimated total of €380 billion exceeds by far the provisions and write downs accumulated by the Spanish banking system (and in particular the savings banks) so far.
Figure 3. Spain: Construction and current account deficit
The source of funding matters
A housing overhang per se does not have to lead to an acute financial crisis if it was financed by domestic savings (like in Japan and Germany). Unfortunately this as not the case in Spain.
Figure 3 shows that investment expenditure in construction has closely tracked Spain’s accumulation of foreign debt (i.e the current account).
- Over the last decade Spain has accumulated a stock of foreign debt of close to 90% of GDP.
- The Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure scoreboard of the Commission shows that Spain’s foreign debt already equals Greece’s (EC 2012).
The foreign debt level is rising because the current account is still in deficit. On present trends, it would increase to about 100% of GDP by 2016 (about the level of Portugal today). At this point Spain would clearly be in a danger of being cut off from the market.
What could be done?
Figure 3 shows that the current account adjustment, which was very quick in 2008–2009, slowed considerably when the adjustment in the construction sector slowed as well. The key short-run task for Spain is to stop the accumulation of further foreign debt so that the country no longer depends on continuing inflows of foreign capital. This can be achieved quickly only if the construction sector (which probably wastes further resources) were allowed to shrink further.
Of course this can work only if the resources liberated by the shrinking construction sector are employed elsewhere in the economy; at this stage the economy can grow only if exports grow as well.[6] This reallocation of labour towards the tradable sector is proceeding only very slowly and will require a fall in wages – at least relative to the rest of the Eurozone, and thus in particular relative to Germany. This requires a labour market in which wages can fall if there is an excess supply. The Spanish record on this account, however, is rather discouraging – as an be seen from the relationship between unemployment and wage growth (the Phillips curve) for Spain shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Spain’s recent Phillips curve
It is apparent that in Spain the Philips curve has deteriorated since 2007 (the rate of wage inflation was much higher in 2008 for the same level of unemployment as during the early 2000s). This is probably due to the backwards wage indexation, which transmits the terms-of-trade shocks from higher oil prices to the labour market. Inspection of this chart seems to suggest that an unemployment rate of over 20% is needed to keep wage inflation close to zero. In Germany, by contrast, wage inflation went to zero at an unemployment rate of about 10%.
Conclusion
All in all, it appears that Spain has not yet fully adjusted to the collapse of its enormous housing bubble, which propelled its economy on an unsustainable path until 2008. House prices have to fall further, the construction sector has to shrink further, and the reallocation of labour towards exportables is slowed down by a labour market that prevents wages from falling quickly enough."
Monday will not be pretty.
Flavor Is Price of Scarlet Hue of Tomatoes, Study Finds
By GINA KOLATA
A gene mutation that breeders latched onto because it makes a tomato uniformly red also stifles genes that contribute to its taste, researchers say.
It is a plot.
The low grade tomatoes are a recent development. I have been unhappy with the commercial crop for I don't know how long. I will study the farm stands carefully. Heirloom breeds are available. Growing good fruit looks like good business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/science/oldest-known-pottery-found-in-china.html?ref=science
"Fragments of ancient pottery found in southern China turn out to date back 20,000 years, making them the world’s oldest known pottery — 2,000 to 3,000 years older than examples found in East Asia and elsewhere.
The ceramics probably consisted of simple concave vessels that were likely used for cooking food, said Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at Harvard and an author of the study, which appears in the journal Science.
“What it seems is that in China, the making of pottery started 20,000 years ago and never stopped,” he said. “The Chinese kitchen was always based on cooking and steaming; they never made, as in other parts of Asia, breads.”
The crockery, found in Xianrendong Cave in Jiangxi Province, belonged to a group of mobile foragers, Dr. Bar-Yosef said. They were a hunting and gathering community; plant cultivation and agriculture probably did not arrive until about 10,000 years later.
On the other hand, plant cultivation in the Middle East arrived about 1,000 years before it did in China. Still, pottery was not used in the Middle East until much later, Dr. Bar-Yosef said.
“The kitchen of the Middle East was probably based on barbecues and pita breads,” he said. “For pita breads, you don’t have to have pottery — you can grind the seeds and mix it with water, and make it over the fire.”"
There is a tradition of steamed breads and boiled dumplings as old as grain culture.
This picture of Chinese prehistory is excessively simple.
The Han did not arrive until much later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China
This looks to be the Han in China.
Text and reference check:
"The Neolithic age in China can be traced back to between 12,000 and 10,000 BC.[6] Early evidence for proto-Chinese millet agriculture is radiocarbon-dated to about 7000 BC.[7] The Peiligang culture of Xinzheng county, Henan was excavated in 1977.[8] With agriculture came increased population, the ability to store and redistribute crops, and the potential to support specialist craftsmen and administrators.[9] In late Neolithic times, the Yellow River valley began to establish itself as a cultural center, where the first villages were founded; the most archaeologically significant of those was found at Banpo, Xi'an.[10] The Yellow River was so named because of loess forming its banks gave a yellowish tint to the water.[11]
The early history of China is made obscure by the lack of written documents from this period, coupled with the existence of accounts written during later time periods that attempted to describe events that had occurred several centuries previously. In a sense, the problem stems from centuries of introspection on the part of the Chinese people, which has blurred the distinction between fact and fiction in regards to this early history.
By 7000 BC, the Chinese were farming millet, giving rise to the Jiahu culture. At Damaidi in Ningxia, 3,172 cliff carvings dating to 6000-5000 BC have been discovered "featuring 8,453 individual characters such as the sun, moon, stars, gods and scenes of hunting or grazing." These pictographs are reputed to be similar to the earliest characters confirmed to be written Chinese.[12][13] Later Yangshao culture was superseded by the Longshan culture around 2500 BC."
Out of range.
continued.
http://web.archive.org/web/20071215094418/http://exchanges.state.gov/culprop/cn04sum.html
Human history in China extends back at least 1.7 million years. Early hominid remains such as Yuanmou Homo erectus and Beijing Homo erectus mark China as one of the most important regions in the world for the study of early man. At least 1000 archaeological sites mark the Paleolithic (150,000-10,000 B.C.) throughout the country. Stone choppers and other tools are found in the early part of the period. By the late Paleolithic, many fine stone tools like needles, scrapers, and blades became popular. Finely crafted bone and horn needles and beads testify to the high level of craftsmanship during the period.
The Neolithic Period (Early, Middle, and Late) lasted from 10,000 B.C. to 2100 B.C. Pottery production is the most important aspect of material culture. It is found as early as 10,000 years ago at sites in Jiangxi Province and Hebei Province, making China an important source of study for the origin of this craft. Important early cultures include Yangshao and Majiayao. In the late period, pottery is usually dark grey in many varied shapes and purposes. By the end of the period, pottery from the Longshan culture demonstrates a highly-developed technology and command of form. Examples of this pottery are exquisite in shape, uniformly jet-black, highly polished and egg-shell thin.
Stone tools are highly varied in shape and function and reflect the need to harvest and process grain. Stone sickles, millstones, axes and adzes are common throughout the region. In the late period, large stone spades and ploughs for tilling the fields were developed as well as arrowheads for hunting and fighting.
Stonework was not limited to utilitarian items. The art of jade processing developed as early as 8000 years ago. These were largely used for decorative or ritual purposes in the Hongshan culture of Northeast China and the Hemudu, Dawenkou and Liangshu cultures in east and southeast China. Tablets, tubes, beads, pendants, axes, adzes animal and human figurines have all been found. In the Lianzhu culture, a single tomb might have thousands of these articles.
Types of Late Neolithic sites include cities, temples and tombs. Evidence of large construction projects, water control facilities and other cooperative efforts suggests advanced social organization and an early urban civilization. Evidence of silk production and copper and bronze tools indicate an increasing sophistication in craft production.
http://www.imperialchina.org/Pre-history.html
For details on when the east met with the west, see my recent discussions on the Huns, the Yuezhi, the Tarim Mummies, the Yuzhi-Yushi misnomer, the Mongoloid-Caucasoid admixture, the fallacy of the Aryan bearer of the Chinese civilization, the fallacy of the Yuezhi jade trade, the Yuezhi migration timeline, as well as the location of Kunlun Mountain, Queen Mother of the West proto-Tibetan Qiangic jade trade with the Sinitic Chinese, and their possible routes of passages into Chinese Turkestan at http://www.imperialchina.org/Barbarians.htm which was embedded within the Huns.html and Turks_Uygurs.html pages. (Also see my discussion on the ethnic nature of ancient Huns belonging to the Jiang-rong group.) To expound the myth of Koreans and the Altaic-speaking people, most recent DNA analysis needs to be incorporated. Doctorate Li Hui from Fudan University of China had analyzed the DNA of Asians to derive a conclusion that the ancestors of Mongoloid Asians possessed a distinctive Mark M89 by the time they arrived in Southeast Asia. About 30,000 years ago, from the launching pad of Southeast Asia, the early Mongoloids went through a genetic mutation to Marker M122. Li Hui claimed that the early migrants to the Chinese continent took three routes via two entries of Yunnan and Guangxi-Guangdong provinces. The interesting theory adopted by Li Hui would be the migration of one Mongoloid branch of people who, at about 20,000 years, continued to travel non-stop along the Chinese coastline to reach the Liao-he River area of Manchuria where they developed into Altaic-speaking peoples, i.e., ancestors of Huns, Turks and Mongols. Though, there was not enough evidence in-between today's Vietnam and today's Manchuria to corroborate this speculation.
Combining Li Hui's study with the pottery excavation, we could see a clear path going north extending from around 15,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. Refer to Yaroslav V. Kuzmin's discourse on potteries to see the path of migration of proto-Mongoloids from southwestern China (approx. 15120±500 BP) to Northeast Asia (Manchuria [13 000 BP, or c. 14 000– 13 600 cal BC] and Japan [c. 11 800– 10 500 cal BC (c. 13 800–12 500 cal BP)]) to Siberia (11 000 BP, or 11 200– 10 900 cal BC).
In the timeframe of about 10,000 years and developing a genetic mutation to marker M134, one more branch of people who went direct north, per Li Hui, would penetrate the snowy Hengduan Mountains of Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau to arrive at the area next to the Yellow River bends. Owning to cold weather, big noses, heavy lips and longer faces developed among this group of people, i.e., ancestors of the Sino-Tibetans. Splitting out of this northbound migrants would be those who went to the east with a new genetic marker M117, i.e., ancestors of modern Han Chinese. Our ancestors, however, forgot that they had penetrated northward the Hengduan Mountains from the Indo-China "CORRIDOR" in today's Vietnam. "Walking down Mt Kunlun", i.e., the "collective memory of ethnic Han Chinese" that was echoed in Guo Xiaochuan's philharmonic-agitated epic, would become the starting point of the eastward migration which our Chinese ancestors remembered. (Li Hui grouped the 3000-year-old Chu and Qi people in the same category as Han Chinese, albeit meeting the ancient classics records as to Qi statelet's lineage from the Qiangic-Tibetan Fiery Lord.) The rest of the north-bound group of people would develop into ancestors of today's Tibetans. This seems to corroborate with Scholar Luo Xianglin's claim that early Sino-Tibetan peoples originated from Mt Minshan and upperstream River Min-jiang areas of Sichuan-Gansu provincial borderline and then split into two groups, with one going north to reach Wei-shui River and upperstream Han-shui River of Shenxi Prov and then east to Shanxi Prov by crossing the Yellow River.
One more branch of early Mongoloids, about 10,000 years ago, were commented to have entered China's southeastern coastline with genetic marker M119. Li Hui, claiming the same ancestry as the Dai-zu and Shui-zu minorities of Southwestern China, firmly believed that his ancestors had dwelled in Hangzhou Bay and Yangtze Delta for 7-8 thousand years. The people with M119 marker would be the historical "Hundred Yue Peoples". Li Hui then pointed out that the ancient Wu people, with M7 genetic marker, came to the lower Yangtze area about 3000 years ago. While Li Hui claimed that the M7 Wu people had split away from the northbound M134 Sino-Tibetan people, historical classics pointed out that Wu Statelet was established by two uncles of Zhou Dynasty King Wenwang, i.e., migrants from the Yellow River area. As to today's Koreans, at most they had a tiny ingredient of this group of early proto-Mongoloid who moved north from 15,000 years ago, just as the Homo sapiens had taken in a portion of the DNA from the Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Li Hui's claim that today's Koreans would be the mixtures of the early migrants to Manchuria and the later Dong-yi [Eastern Yi] migrants from Eastern China, did corroborate with this webmaster's historical analysis of Huns, Turks and Mongols which yielded the conclusion i) that there was no chance for an east-west through traffic across Gobi (Dazi, Tengri & Liusha [Kumtag]) in prehistory; ii) that the Mongoloid had a pattern of raiding to the west, not the other way around by the Indo-Europeans. This certainly dealt a blow to the Korean nationalists' claim of "Siberian origin" as well as the Tangun myth --which in my opinion was a 13th century A.D. forgery on basis of ancient Chinese scholars' statement that the Sushen-shi people at the Japan Sea submitted the tributes to China at the time of Lord Yao-Shun-Yu. (See Assertions By Wang Zhonghan for clues as to the relationship between Qiangic Proto-Tibetan and Altaic Proto-Hun activities: "the northern barbarians and western barbarians were similar [i.e., Qiangs] at Spring-Autumn time period, but by the time of late Warring States, Chinese began to see the northern barbarians as different from the western barbarians".)
This seems to be a period of little interest to the Han.
That does not mean it is not interesting.Initial agricultural efforts were touched on in a history of technology course
At Parsons in 96. Towns came before crops in the Levant. People lived by gathering and herding and trade. Good flint is worth moving. Lapis began to wander very early. I will dig out some references.
Time for sleep.
