Ohalo II, the Upper Paleolithic Site on the Sea of Galilee

Ohalo II, the Upper Paleolithic Site on the Sea of Galilee Ohalo II is the name of a submerged late Upper Paleolithic (Kebaran) site located on the southwest shore of the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret) in the Rift Valley of Israel. The site was discovered in 1989 when the level of the lake plummeted. The site is 9 kilometers (5.5 miles) south of the modern city of Tiberias. The site covers an area of 2,000 square meters (about a half an acre), and the remains are of an extremely well-preserved hunter-gatherer-fisher camp. The site is typical of Kebaran sites, containing the floors and wall bases of six oval brush huts, six open-air hearths  and a human grave. The site was occupied during the Last Glacial Maximum, and has an occupation date between 18,000-21,000 RCYBP, or between 22,500 and 23,500 cal BP. Animal and Plant Remains Ohalo II is remarkable in that  since it had been submerged, the preservation of organic materials was excellent, providing very rare evidence of food sources for late Upper Paleolithic/Epipaleolithic communities. Animals represented by bones in the faunal assemblage include fish, tortoise, birds, hare, fox, gazelle, and deer. Polished bone points and several enigmatic bone tools were recovered, as were tens of thousands of seeds and fruits representing almost 100 taxa from the living surface. Plants include an assortment of herbs, low shrubs, flowers, and grasses, including wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum), mallow (Malva parviflora), groundsel (Senecio glaucus), thistle (Silybum marianum(), Melilotus indicus and a slew of others too numerous to mention here. The flowers at Ohalo II represent the earliest known use of flowers by Anatomically Modern Humans. Some may have been used for medicinal purposes. The edible remains are dominated by seeds from small-grained grasses and wild cereals, although nuts, fruits, and legumes are also present. Ohalos collections include over 100,000 seeds, including the earliest identification of emmer wheats [Triticum dicoccoides or T. turgidum ssp. dicoccoides (kà ¶rn.) Thell], in the form of several charred seeds. Other plants include wild almond (Amygdalus communis), wild olive (Olea europaea var sylvestris), wild pistachio (Pistacia atlantica), and wild grape (Vitis vinifera spp sylvestris). Three fragments of twisted and plied fibers were discovered at Ohalo; they are the oldest evidence of string-making discovered yet. Living at Ohalo II The floors of the six brush huts were oval in shape, with an area of between 5-12 square meters (54-130 square feet), and the entrance-way from at least two was from the east. The largest hut was built of tree branches (tamarisk and oak) and covered by grasses. The floors of the huts were shallowly excavated prior to their construction. All of the huts were burned. The working surface of a grinding stone found at the site was covered with barley starch grains, indicating that at least some of the plants were processed for food or medicine. Plants in evidence on the stones surface include wheat, barley, and oats. But the majority of the plants are believed to represent the brush used for housing. Flint, bone and wooden tools, basalt net sinkers, and hundreds of shell beads made from mollusks brought from the Mediterranean Sea were also identified. The single grave at Ohalo II is an adult male, who had a disabled hand and a penetrating wound to his rib cage. A bone tool found near the skull is a piece of gazelle long bone incised with parallel markings. Ohalo II was discovered in 1989 when lake levels dropped. Excavations organized by the Israeli Antiquities Authority have continued at the site when lake levels permit, led by Dani Nadel. Sources Allaby RG, Fuller DQ, and Brown TA. 2008. The genetic expectations of a protracted model for the origins of domesticated crops. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105(37):13982-13986. Kislev ME, Nadel D, and Carmi I. 1992. Epipalaeolithic (19,000 BP) cereal and fruit diet at Ohalo II, Sea of Galilee, Israel. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology 73(1-4):161-166. Nadel D, Grinberg U, Boaretto E, and Werke E. 2006. Wooden objects from Ohalo II (23,000 cal BP), Jordan Valley, Israel. Journal of Human Evolution 50(6):644-662. Nadel D, Piperno DR, Holst I, Snir A, and Weiss E. 2012. New evidence for the processing of wild cereal grains at Ohalo II, a 23 000-year-old campsite on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Israel . Antiquity 86(334):990-1003. Rosen AM, and Rivera-Collazo I. 2012. Climate change, adaptive cycles, and the persistence of foraging economies during the late Pleistocene/Holocene transition in the Levant. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(10):3640-3645. Weiss E, Kislev ME, Simchoni O, Nadel D, and Tschauner H. 2008. Plant-food preparation area on an Upper Paleolithic brush hut floor at Ohalo II, Israel. Journal of Archaeological Science 35(8):2400-2414.

Top 3 Supreme Court Cases Involving Japanese Internment

Top 3 Supreme Court Cases Involving Japanese Internment During World War II, not only did some Japanese Americans refuse to relocate to internment camps, they also fought federal orders to do so in court. These men rightfully argued that the government depriving them of the right to walk outside at night and live in their own homes violated their civil liberties. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the U.S. government  forced more than 110,000 Japanese Americans into detention  camps, but Fred Korematsu, Minoru Yasui, and Gordon Hirabayashi  defied orders. For refusing to do what they’d been told, these courageous men were arrested and jailed. They eventually took their cases to the Supreme Court- and lost.​ Although the Supreme Court would rule in 1954 that the policy of â€Å"separate but equal† violated the Constitution, striking down Jim Crow in the South, it proved incredibly shortsighted in cases related to Japanese  American internment. As a result, Japanese Americans who argued before the high court that curfews and internment infringed upon their civil rights had to wait until the 1980s for vindication. Learn more about these men. Minoru Yasui v. the United States When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Minoru Yasui was no ordinary twenty-something. In fact, he had the distinction of being the first Japanese American lawyer admitted to the Oregon Bar. In 1940, he began working for the Consulate General of Japan in Chicago but promptly resigned after Pearl Harbor to return to his native Oregon. Shortly after Yasui’  arrived in Oregon, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942. The order authorized the military to bar Japanese Americans from entering certain regions, to impose curfews on them and to relocate them to internment camps. Yasui deliberately defied the curfew. â€Å"It was my feeling and belief, then and now, that no military authority has the right to subject any United States citizen to any requirement that does not equally apply to all other U.S. citizens,† he explained in the book And Justice For All. For walking the streets past curfew, Yasui was arrested. During his trial at the U.S. District Court in Portland, the presiding judge acknowledged that the curfew order violated the law but decided that Yasui had forsaken his U.S. citizenship by working for the Japanese Consulate and learning the Japanese language. The judge sentenced him to a year in Oregon’s Multnomah County Jail. In 1943, Yasui’s case appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that Yasui was still a U.S. citizen and that the curfew he’d violated was valid. Yasui eventually ended up at an internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho, where he was released in 1944. Four decades would pass before Yasui was exonerated. In the meantime, he would fight for civil rights and engage in activism on behalf of the Japanese American community. Hirabayashi v. the United States Gordon Hirabayashi was a University of Washington student when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. He initially obeyed the order but  after cutting a study session short to avoid violating the curfew, he questioned why he was being singled out in a way  his white classmates were not. Because he considered the curfew to be a violation of his Fifth Amendment rights, Hirabayashi decided to intentionally flout it. â€Å"I was not one of those angry young rebels, looking for a cause,† he said in a 2000 Associated Press interview. â€Å"I was one of those trying to make some sense of this, trying to come up with an explanation.† For defying Executive Order 9066 by missing curfew and failing to report to an internment camp, Hirabayashi was arrested and convicted in 1942. He ended up jailed for two years and did not win his case when it appeared before the Supreme Court. The high court argued that the executive order was not discriminatory because it was a military necessity. Like Yasui, Hirabayashi would have to wait until the 1980s before he saw justice. Despite this blow, Hirabayashi spent the years after World War II getting a master’s degree and a doctorate in sociology from the University of Washington. He went on to a career in academia. Korematsu v. the United States Love motivated Fred Korematsu, a 23-year-old shipyard welder, to defy orders to report to an internment camp. He simply did not want to leave his Italian  American girlfriend and internment would have separated him from her. After his arrest in May 1942 and subsequent conviction for violating military orders, Korematsu fought his case all the way to the Supreme Court. The court, however, sided against him, arguing that race did not factor into the internment of Japanese Americans and that internment was a military necessity. Four decades later, the luck of Korematsu, Yasui, and Hirabayashi changed when legal historian Peter Irons stumbled upon evidence that government officials had withheld several documents from the Supreme Court stating that Japanese Americans posed no military threat to the United States. With this information in hand, Korematsu’s attorneys appeared in 1983 before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco, which vacated his conviction. Yasui’s conviction was overturned in 1984 and Hirabayashi’s conviction was  two years later. In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which led to a formal government apology for internment and payment to of $20,000 to internment survivors. Yasui died in 1986, Korematsu in 2005 and Hirabayashi in 2012.