e2’s most wanted

A South Korean businessman was ordered detained today for his alleged role in a bribery conspiracy for a $206 million telecommunications contract involving employees of the Army Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES), Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich of the Criminal Division announced.

Gi-Hwan Jeong, 44, was arrested in Dallas on Nov. 19, 2008, on a criminal complaint charging him with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, to commit wire fraud and to commit bribery, and one count of bribery. In ordering Jeong’s detention, Magistrate Judge Paul D. Stickney of the Northern District of Texas found probable cause to support the charges and that Jeong was a flight risk.

According to the affidavit in support of the complaint, AAFES provides goods and services worth billions of dollars to U.S. Armed Forces service members and their families around the world, often referred to as “PX services.” The affidavit alleges that Jeong paid bribes to AAFES employees, who are considered U.S. government employees, to assist his company, SSRT, in connection with a $206 million contract to provide telecommunication services to AAFES customers.

The affidavit further alleges that an AAFES employee attempted to terminate the contract with SSRT for poor performance, but supported the contract after receiving payments from Jeong. This case is being prosecuted by Senior Trial Attorney Richard C. Pilger and Trial Attorney Richard B. Evans of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section, headed by William M. Welch II, Chief. The case was investigated by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation.

A criminal complaint is merely an allegation, and every defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

“The new release is designed to make Family Historian as easy to pick up and learn, and as easy and fun to use, as we could make it”, says Simon Orde, managing director of Calico Pie. “We’ve got a completely new component window called the Focus Window which is the new hub of the program. It’s a big step forward in user interface terms. At the same time we’ve completely re-written the Property Box – the main data entry window – to make it much easier and nicer to use too.

There are also a lot of new features relating to pictures and multimedia which is another big focus of the new version. And there are loads of other great new features. Family Historian has always been a very innovative program, and there’s a lot of innovation in version 4”.

New features in version 4 include:

• A new hub component window called the “Focus Window”, with views for spouses & children, parents & siblings, ancestors and descendants. It is designed to make adding relatives and moving around a family tree, completely intuitive and easy.

• The main ‘Property Box’ (for data entry) has been reworked so that it too is now easier than ever to use. Users can configure its appearance, customize it, move it, resize it, or ‘dock’ it to the side of the application window.

• Project management capability has been added. The program automatically looks after all your project files for you (including picture files and other multimedia, saved charts and more) in a dedicated folder on your hard disk.

• Multi-level undo/redo lets you make changes in confidence, knowing that if you make a mistake you can easily undo it (this is the most voted-for feature on users’ wish lists).

• Full support for same sex relationships has been added.

• Support for multimedia, and especially pictures, has been significantly enhanced. Thumbnail views have been added to make browsing pictures easy. You can now link pictures to events and attributes. Adding pictures and multimedia is easier than ever, as is browsing all the pictures in your project - thanks to extensive filtering options, including keyword filtering, in the Multimedia Window. Support for pictures has been improved in reports, and there is an all-new multimedia report.

• Charts, reports and queries can all now be saved in PDF format. With charts, you also have the option of saving the entire chart as a one-page PDF file.

• Extensive power-user features have been added, giving power-users much greater scope to extend and customize the program than ever before. Ordinary users can also benefit through the ability to download program extensions written by power users, from Family Historian user websites (e.g. www.fhug.org.uk).

• Enhancements to charts and diagrams.

• Improved support for website generation and for family tree CD creation. … and much more.

Christmas Offer While stocks last, customers who buy Family Historian 3 now (full version) from participating stockists, will be sent a free CD upgrade to version 4 when it becomes available. The CD upgrade is expected to have a recommended retail price of £23.95.

The participating stockists are:

• My History (UK) tel. +44 (0)1709 586758 www.my-history.co.uk

• S&N Genealogy Supplies (UK) tel. +44 (0)1722 716121 www.genealogysupplies.com

• TWR Computing (UK) tel. +44 (0)1709 580066 www.twrcomputing.co.uk

• Gould Genealogy (Australia) tel. (08) 8396 1110 www.gould.com.au

• Beehive Books (New Zealand) tel. 64 9 521 1518

Anyone who buys the download version of Family Historian 3 now (full version) will get a free downloadable upgrade to version 4 when available (see www.family-historian.co.uk/products). Awards for Version 3 Your Family Tree magazine gave Family Historian 3.1 its Family History Software of the Year award for 2008 (Dec 2008). Which? Computing gave Family Historian 3.1 their Best Buy award and their highest overall score in a group test of eight top genealogy programs (July 2008).

Windows XP: The Official Magazine gave Family Historian 3.1 their Editor’s Choice award and highest score in a group test of four top genealogy programs (Dec 2007). Computeractive magazine gave Family Historian 3 their Buy It! award – the second time it has won this award (July 2006) Personal Computer World magazine gave Family Historian 3 their Personal Computer World Recommended award (May 2006). Other reviewers said of version 3: “The best genealogy package just got better” (Family Tree magazine), “The best just got better” (Norfolk Roots), “Brilliant and dead easy to use” (Univadis), “The diagrams are superb” (National Genealogical Society News magazine), “One of the best, if not the very best, in its class” (Australian Family Tree Connnections), “Superb picture handling and the best set of charts around” (Your Family Tree), “Without the slightest hesitation, I am happy to label this the best piece of genealogical software I have ever used” (The Banyan Tree).

Most of the hunting and gathering societies studied in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries had technologies similar to those that were widespread in the Mesolithic period, which occurred about 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, after the ice ages ended but before cultivation was invented and animals domesticated.

Modern hunters live in marginal forest, mountain, arctic, or desert environments where cultivation is impracticable.  Although by no means "primeval," the hunters of recent times do offer clues to the types of family found during that 99 percent of human history before the agricultural revolution.  They include the Eskimo, many Canadian and South American Indian groups, the forest BaMbuti (Pygmies) and the desert Bushmen of Southern Africa, the Kadar of South India, the Veddah of Ceylon, and the Andaman Islanders of the Indian Ocean.  About 175 hunting and gathering cultures in Oceania, Asia, Africa, and America have been described in fair detail.

In spite of their varied environments, hunters share certain features of social life.  They live in bands of about 20 to 200 people, the majority of bands having fewer than 50.  Bands are divide into families, which may forage alone in some seasons.  Hunters have simple but ingenious technologies.  Bows and arrows, spears, needles, skin clothing, and temporary leaf or wood shelters are common.  Most hunters do some fishing.  The band forages and hunts in a large territory and usually moves camp often.

Social life is egalitarian.  There is of course no state no organized government.  Apart from religious shamans or magicians, the division of labor is based only on sex and age.  Resources are owned communally; tools and personal possessions are freely exchanged.  Everyone works who can.  Band leadership goes to whichever man has the intelligence, courage, and foresight to command the respect of his fellows.  Intelligent older women are also looked up to.

The household is the main unit of economic cooperation, with the men, women, and children dividing the labor and pooling their produce.  In 97 percent of the 175 societies, hunting is confined to men; in other 3 percent it is chiefly a male pursuit.  Gathering of wild plants, fruits, and nuts is women’s work.  In 60 percent of societies, only women gather, while in another 32 percent gathering is mainly feminine.  Fishing is solely or mainly men’s work in 93 percent of the hunting societies where it occurs.

For the rest, men monopolize fighting, although interband warfare is rare.  Women tend children and shelters and usually do most of the cooking, processing, and storage of food.  Women tend, also, to be foremost in the early household crafts such as basketry, leather work, the making of skin or bark clothing, and, the more advanced hunting societies, pottery.  (Considering that women probably invented all of these crafts, in addition to cookery, food storage, and preservation, agriculture, spinning, weaving, and perhaps even house construction, it is clear that women played quite as important roles as men in early cultural development.)  Building dwellings and making tools and ornaments are variously divided between the sexes, while boat building is largely done by men.  Girls help the women, and boys play at hunting or hunt small game until they reach puberty, when both take on the roles of adults.  Where the environment makes it desirable, the men of a whole band or of some smaller cluster of households cooperate in hunting or fishing and divide their spoils.  Women of nearby families often go gathering together.

The change to humanness brought two bodily changes that affected birth and child care. These were head size and width of the pelvis. Walking upright produced a narrower pelvis to hold the guts in position. Yet as language developed, brains and hence heads grew much bigger relative to body size. To compensate, humans are born at an earlier stage of growth than apes. They are helpless longer and require longer and more total care. This in turn caused early women to concentrate more on child care and less on defense than do female apes.

Language made possible not only a division and cooperation in labor but also all forms of tradition, rules, morality, and cultural learning. Rules banning sex relations among close kinfolk must have come very early. Precisely how or why they developed is unknown, but they had at least two useful functions. They helped to preserve order in the family as a cooperative unit by outlawing competition for mates. They also created bonds between families, or even between separate bands, and so provided a basis for wider cooperation in the struggle for livelihood and the expansion of knowledge.

It is not clear when all these changes took place. Climatic change with increased drought began regionally up to 28 million years ago. The divergence between prehuman and gorilla-chimpanzees stems had occurred in both Africa and India at least 12 million years ago. The prehuman stem lead to the Australopithecenes of East and South Africa, about 1,750,000 years ago. These were pigmylike, two-footed, upright hominids with larger than ape brains, who made tools and probably hunted in savannah regions. It is unlikely that they knew the use of fire.

The first known use of fire is that of cave-dwelling hominids (Sinanthropus, a branch of the Pithecanthropines) at Choukoutien near Peking, some half a million years ago during the second ice age. Fire was used regularly in hearths, suggesting cookery, by the time of the Acheulean and Mousterian cultures of Neanderthal man in Europe, Africa, and Asia before, during, and after the third ice age, some 150,000 to 100,000 years ago. These people, too, were often cave dwellers and buried their dead ceremonially in caves. Cave dwelling by night as well as by day was probably, in fact, not safe for humans until fire came into use to drive away predators.

Most anthropologists conclude that home life, the family and language had developed by the time of Neanderthal man, who was closely similar and may have been ancestral to modern homo sapiens. Some anthropologists believe that the Australopithecenes already had language nearly 2 million years ago, while another thinks that language and incest prohibitions did not evolve until the time of homo sapiens some 70,000 to 50,000 years ago. It seems that family life built around tool use, the use of language, cookery, and a sexual division of labor must have been established sometime between about 500,000 and 200,000 years ago.

Judging from the fossil record, apes ancestral to humans, gorillas, and chimpanzees roamed widely in Asia, Europe, and Africa some 12 to 28 million years ago. Toward the end of that period (the Miocene) one appears in North India and East Africa, Ramapithecus, who may be ancestral both to later hominids and to modern humans. His species were small like gibbons, walked upright on two feet, had human rather than ape cornerteeth, and therefore probably used hands rather than teeth to tear their food. From that time evolution toward humanness must have proceeded through various phases until the emergence of modern homo sapiens, about 70,000 years ago.

In the Miocene period before Ramapithecus appeared, there were several time spans in which, over large areas, the climate became dryer and subtropical forests dwindled or disappeared. A standard reconstruction of events is that groups of apes, probably in Africa, had to come down from the trees and adapt to terrestrial life. Through natural selection, probably over million of years, they developed specialized feet for walking. Thus freed, the hands came to be used not only (as among apes) for grasping and tearing, but for regular carrying of objects such as weapons (which had hitherto been sporadic) or of infants (which had hitherto clung to their mothers’ body hair.

The spread of indigestible grasses on the open savannahs may have encouraged, if it did not compel, the early ground dwellers to become active hunters rather than simply to forage for small, sick, or dead animals that came their way. Collective hunting and tool use involved group cooperation and helped foster the growth of language out of the call systems of apes. Language meant the use of symbols to refer to events not present. It allowed greatly increased foresight, memory, planning, and division of tasks – in short, the capacity for human thought.

With the change to hunting, group territories became much larger. Apes range only a few thousand feet daily; hunters, several miles. But because their infants were helpless, nursing women could hunt only small game close to home. This then produced the sexual division of labor on which the human family has since been founded. Women elaborated upon ape methods of child care and greatly expanded foraging, which in most areas remained the primary and most stable source of food. Men improved upon ape methods of fighting off other animals and of group protection in general. They adapted these methods to hunting, using weapons which for millennia remained the same for the chase as for human warfare.

Out of the sexual division of labor came, for the first time, home life as well as group cooperation. Female apes nest with and provide foraged food for their infants. But adult apes do not cooperate in food getting or nest building. They build new nests each night wherever they may happen to be. With the development of hunting-gathering complex, it became necessary to have a G.H.Q., or home. Men could bring meat to this place for several days’ supply. Women and children could meet men there after the days’ hunting and could bring their vegetable produce for general consumption. Men, women, and children could build joint shelters, butcher meat, and treat skins for clothing.

Later, fire came into use for protection against wild animals, for lighting, and eventually for cooking. The hearth then provided the focus and symbol of home. With the development of cookery, some humans – chiefly women and perhaps some children and old men – came to spend more time preparing nutrition so that all people need spend less time in chewing and tearing their food. Meals – already less frequent because of the change to a carnivorous diet – now became brief, periodic events instead of the long feeding sessions of apes.

A number of well-known anthropologists have argued that various attitudes and customs often found in human societies are instinctual rather than culturally learned and come from our primate heritages. They include hierarchies of ranking among men, male political power over women, and the greater tendency of men to form friendships with one another, as opposed to women’s tendencies to cling to a man.

Some of us might be disagree with those conclusions and think that they stem from the male chauvinism of our own society. A ‘scientific” argument which states that all such feature of female inferiority are instinctive is obviously a powerful weapon in maintaining the traditional family with male dominance. But in fact, these feature are not universal among nonhuman primates, including some of those most closely related to humans. Chimpanzees have a low degree of male dominance and male hierarchy and are sexually virtually indiscriminate. Gibbons have a kind of fidelity for both sexes and almost no male dominance or hierarchy. Howler monkeys are sexually indiscriminate and lack male hierarchies or dominance.

The fact is that among nonhuman primates male dominance and male hierarchies seem to be adaptations to particular environments, some of which did become genetically established through natural selection. Among humans, however, these features are present in variable degrees and are almost certainly learned, not inherited at all. Among nonhuman primates there are fairly general differences between those that live mainly in trees and those that live largely on the ground. The tree dwellers (for example gibbons, orang-utans, South American howler, and woolly monkeys) tend to have to defend themselves less against predators than do the ground dwellers (such as baboons, macaques, or gorillas). Where defense is important, males are much larger and stronger than females, exert dominance over females, and are strictly hierarchized and organized in relation to one another. Where defense is less important there is much less sexual dimorphism (difference size between male and female), less or no male dominance, a less pronounced male hierarchy, and greater sexual indiscriminacy.

Comparatively speaking, humans have a rather small degree of sexual dimorphism, similar to chimpanzees. Chimpanzees live much in trees but also partly in the ground, in forest or semiforest habitats. They build individual nest to sleep in, sometimes on the ground but usually in trees. They flee into trees from danger. Chimpanzees go mainly on all fours, but sometimes on two feet, and can use and make simple tools. Males are dominant, but not very dominant, over females. The rank hierarchy among males is unstable, and males often move between groups, which vary in size from two to fifty individuals. Food is vegetarian, supplemented with worms, grubs, or occasional small animals. A mother and her young form the only stable unit. Sexual relations are largely indiscriminate, but nearby males defend young animals from danger. The chances are that our prehuman ancestors had a similar social life.

Is it wrong to conclude that we came from a state of “original promiscuity” before we were fully human?.

Some nonhuman primates do have enduring sexual bonds and restrictions, superficially similar to those in some human societies. Among gibbons a single male and female live together with their young. The male drives off other males and the female, other females. When a juvenile reaches puberty it is thought to leave or be expelled by the parent of the same sex, and he eventually finds a mate elsewhere. Similar de facto, rudimentary "incest prohibitions" may have been passed on to humans from their prehuman ancestors and later codified and elaborated through language, moral custom, and law. Whether this is so may become clearer when we know more about the mating patterns of the other great apes, especially of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. Present evidence suggests that male chimpanzees do not mate with their mothers.

Orang-utans live in small, tree-dwelling groups like gibbons, but their forms are less regular. One or two mothers may wander alone with their young, mating at intervals with a male; or a male-female pair or several juvenile males may travel together.

Among mountain gorillas of Uganda, South Indian langurs, and hamadryas baboons of Ethiopia, a single, fully mature male mates with several females, especially in their oestrus periods. If younger adult males are present, the females may have occasional relations with them if the leader is tired or not looking.

Among East and South African baboons, rhesus macaques, and South American woolly monkeys, the troop is bigger, numbering up to two hundred. It contains a number of adult males and a much larger number of females. The males are strictly ranked in terms of dominance based on both physical strength and intelligence. The more dominant males copulate intensively with the females during the latter’s oestrus periods. Toward the end of of oestrus a female may briefly attach herself to a single dominat male. At other times she may have relations with any male of higher or lower rank provided that those of higher rank permit it.

Among some baboons and macaques the young males travel on the outskirts of the group and have little access to females. Some macaques expel from the troop a proportion of the young males, who then form "bachelor troops." Bachelors may later form new troops with young females. Other primates are more thoroughly promiscuous, or rather indiscriminate, in mating. Chimpanzees and also South American howler monkeys live in loosely structured groups, again (as in most monkey and ape societies) with a preponderance of females. The mother-child unit is the only stable group. The sexes copulate almost at random and most intensively and indiscriminately during oestrus.