The mystery of "Somerton Man"

It's understandable, I suppose, that I get really torqued by the misuse of the word skeptic to mean "doubter" or "disbeliever."

Skeptics respect evidence, facts, logic, and the scientific method; their litmus test is, "Is this supported by what we know to be true?"  They rid themselves of biases -- insofar as is possible -- and start from a position of clear-eyed curiosity, proceeding from there to wherever the data leads.

So please stop calling people like RFK Jr. "vaccine skeptics" and ones like Lee Zeldin "climate skeptics."  They are science deniers, pure and simple, ignoring mountains of hard data in favor of their own ideological stances.

The trouble with being a skeptic, though, is that it can leave us in the position of saying "we don't know, and may never know."  When the information we have is insufficient to reach a conclusion, we have to hold making up our minds in abeyance, indefinitely if need be.  This can be intensely frustrating.  Humans want answers, and sometimes those answers are simply not forthcoming.  At that point, being pressed to respond to the question, "But what do you think the answer is?" is completely pointless.

If we're respecting the skeptical process, we don't think anything.  We don't know, and that's that, at least until more evidence comes to light.

We've seen a few examples of this here at Skeptophilia -- the strange disappearance of Frederick Valentich, the nineteenth-century footprints in the snow in Devonshire, the origin of the mysterious Kaspar Hauser, and the famous Dyatlov Pass incident, to name several.  Today, though, I'd like to tell you about a different one, just as peculiar and intriguing, and no less mystifying -- the odd case of "Somerton Man."

The bare bones of the case go something like this.

On 1 December 1948, the dead body of a man was found on Somerton Beach, south of Adelaide, Australia.  He was well-dressed, in a suit and tie, and propped against a seawall; several passersby thought he might have gotten drunk and passed out or fallen asleep there, and walked right past him, before someone thought to check for a pulse.  Police were called, and here's where things get even weirder; he had no identification, all the tags had been cut from his clothing, and in his pocket was a torn slip of paper with the printed words "Tamám shud" -- Farsi for "it is finished."  The only other things in his pocket were a comb, a box of matches, a cigarette packet, and an unused train ticket and bus ticket.

The man was quite ordinary; about 180 centimeters tall, maybe in his forties, with reddish-blond hair and gray eyes.  His autopsy showed signs of internal bleeding and inflammation of the spleen and liver, perhaps consistent with poisoning, but toxicology tests were unable to recover any specific toxin responsible.

Photographs of the dead man's face published in newspapers resulted in no identifications.

But a month later, officials at the Adelaide railway station were going through items that had been left behind or unclaimed, and turned over to police a brown suitcase (also with its label removed) that had been checked in on November 30.  It proved to contain a red dressing gown, a pair of slippers, a pair of trousers with sand in the cuffs, and various small personal items.  Most interestingly, it also contained a card of orange waxed thread that matched thread used to repair the pocket of the trousers the man was wearing when he died.  A laundry bag in the suitcase had a tag saying "T. Keane."  But a search found that no one named Keane had been reported missing in Australia -- nor in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Ireland.

The case took a significantly bizarre turn when a man the authorities named as "Ronald Francis" -- police policy in Australia in the 1940s often protected witnesses in infamous cases by using pseudonyms, and his actual identity has never been made public -- responded to an inquiry about the odd piece of paper with "Tamám shud" printed on it.  He came forward with a copy of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat that had part of the last page torn out (and indeed, the book ends with those words).  The torn scrap matched the missing piece in the book perfectly.  But Francis's statement gets even stranger than that.  The book wasn't his, he said; he'd found it tossed in the back seat of his open-topped convertible, only a day or two after the body was found on Somerton Beach, and hadn't thought to look through it until he saw an article in the local newspaper that mentioned the torn slip with the Farsi words.  Weirdest of all, on the back of the book were some faint indentations, as if someone had used it to support a piece of paper they were writing on.  Here is an enhanced image of the indentations:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It certainly looks like a code -- but short passages are notoriously difficult to decrypt, and this one has resisted all attempts at decipherment.

Also scribbled in the book was a telephone number, which turned out to belong to a nurse named Jessica Ellen Thomson who lived only four hundred meters north of where the body was found.  She claimed not to have any idea who the man was -- but the police investigator in charge of the inquiry later said when she looked at a photograph of the corpse, she had seemed "completely taken aback, to the point of giving the appearance that she was about to faint."  She said she had once owned a copy of the Rubaiyat but had given it to a friend, Alf Boxall, during the war.  The police pursued a hypothesis that the dead man was Boxall, but that came to naught when Boxall was found alive and well in Sydney, and still had his copy of the Rubaiyat -- with Thomson's name handwritten on the inside front cover -- and an intact last page.

Jessica Thomson died in 2007, and her daughter Kate gave an interview in 2013 in which she stated outright that she thought her mother had lied -- she had known the man's identity, Kate said, and was covering something up, but what that might be she wasn't sure because her mother had never wanted to talk about the case.  She also stated that her mother had known Russian but never explained to her how or why she'd learned it, and expressed a surmise that her mother and the dead man might have been spies for the Soviets.  But inquiries into that angle, too, ended up turning up nothing of note.

On the 14th of June, 1949, Somerton Man -- still unidentified -- was buried at the government's expense in Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery.  

About the only progress in the case came in 2022, with a tentative (and distant) genetic match of hairs from the dead man to members of a Webb family of Melbourne.  One member of the family, Carl Webb, born in 1905, was a shady character, described as "moody, violent, and threatening."  He had a history of mental illness (including suicide attempts), and had vanished for parts unknown in 1947.  Interestingly, Webb had a sister named Freda who married a man named John Keane -- recall the tag on the laundry bag saying "T. Keane" -- but Webb had never gone by the name, to anyone's recollection, and no members of John Keane's family were unaccounted for (or seemed to have anything at all to do with the case).

So it certainly seems like Webb could be a possibility.  But this leaves the connection to the code, the slip of paper, and Jessica Thomson still unexplained -- as well as how and why he died.

In the end, we're left with a mystery.  Almost eighty years ago, a well-dressed dead body showed up on an Australian beach, and to this day we have no easy solution to explain what happened to him.  The only person who may have had more information was Thomson, and she died eighteen years ago without ever divulging to anyone what, if anything, she knew about the mysterious man.

Frustrating, isn't it?  There's a deep drive in us to know the answers, and sometimes, they stay tantalizingly out of our reach.  But as skeptics, we have to be willing to state "I don't know," and let things lie.  It may be that some time in the future, more information about the mysterious life and death of "Somerton Man" will be unearthed, but until then -- he is, and will remain, a complete cipher.

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Deep impact

It's remarkably hard to find evidence of impact craters on the Earth.

If you're thinking, "What's the difficulty?  Just look for a big hole in the ground," you're probably thinking of one of two things -- either craters on the Moon, or Barringer Crater near Winslow, Arizona.  The craters on the Moon stick around pretty much indefinitely because the airless, waterless surface experiences virtually no erosion; as far as Barringer, the impact that caused it only happened around fifty thousand years ago, which is the blink of an eye, geologically speaking.  (Plus, it's in the high desert, with little vegetation to hide underneath.)

With older impact craters, the forces of erosion eat away at the telltale signs -- the raised, oval or circular ridges, especially.  The oldest craters have been destroyed by subsequent tectonic shifts and faults, and (for ones in oceanic plates) because the damaged strata themselves were subducted and melted.

One massive impact crater that was only detected in 1983 -- despite the fact that tens of thousands of people live more or less right on top of it -- is the one left by the Chesapeake Bay Impact Event, which occurred during the Eocene Epoch, on the order of 35.5 million years ago.  At that point, the impact site, on the southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula, was coastal tropical rainforest; the global temperature was still dropping following the massive Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, but was still a good two degrees Celsius warmer than today.  The mass of the impactor isn't known for certain -- it was completely vaporized -- but it's estimated to have been about three kilometers across and traveling at eighteen kilometers per second, and punched a hole eight kilometers deep into the crystalline basement rock, blasting the sediments on top to smithereens and creating a crater over eighty kilometers across.  Because at least part of the impact was in the shallow ocean, it also created a massive tsunami that travelled inland as far as the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Since the impact, it refilled -- first with unconsolidated, unsorted sediments, essentially broken up pieces of the rock that was blown out from the collision, then with eroded material as the whole place gradually settled down.  Part of it was refilled with seawater.  The only way it was discovered was the presence of an anomalous "fault" that turned out to be the edge of the crater wall, followed by the analysis of some rock cores that showed a huge, thick layer of jumbled junk that geologists figured out was the debris formed as the crater walls slumped inward.  It also explained the North American Tektite Field, an enormous splatter field of what amounts to cooled droplets of melted rock.

But visiting the area today, you don't see much that would tell you that only thirty-five million years ago, the place got slammed by an enormous chunk of rock from outer space.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the United States Geological Survey]

Even the much larger Chicxulub Impact Crater, near the Yucatán Peninsula, took a lot of work to identify.  It's just shy of twice as old as the Chesapeake Bay site (about 66 million years), and is almost entirely underwater and filled with oceanic sediments.  Today, the impact site that ended the 180-million-year hegemony of the dinosaurs is only visible to sensitive gravitometers and magnetometers.

Which makes the discovery of an impact crater 3.47 billion years old, in East Pilbarra, Western Australia, even more astonishing.

A paper in Nature Communications this week, authored by Christopher Kirkland of Curtin University et al., shows convincing evidence of an impact crater over a hundred kilometers wide near the northwestern coast of Australia.  The center of the crater shows regions of shocked crystalline rock, along with layers of breccia (the same sort of jumble of debris found at the Chesapeake Bay site).  Further stratigraphic work has confirmed that this was, indeed, the site of a "massive hypervelocity impact."  This makes it the only Archaean-age crater known to have survived.

The authors write:

Despite the high modeled frequency of bolide impacts in the early Archaean, the rarity of verified impact craters of Archaean age suggests that: (a) the impact flux was much less than predicted by lunar data; (b) the evidence has been eradicated, or (c) that we have failed to recognise them.  On a young Earth covered in primitive (mafic–ultramafic) crust, identifying shatter cones or impact breccias may represent the best chance of finding other large Archaean impact structures.  However, these highly fractured rocks will be the first to undergo (presumably intense) weathering and erosion.  Notwithstanding their fragility, we believe many more Archaean craters await discovery.

Myself, I think it's astonishing that they've found even one.  For any traces to have survived for nearly three and a half billion years is staggering.  At that point, life was only getting started; the first known microbes appeared 3.7 billion years ago, and when the impact occurred, it would still be another half a billion years before the first certain multicellular life.  So unlike the Chesapeake Bay and Chicxulub Impacts, which were (respectively) regionally and globally devastating to life, the East Pilbarra collision probably didn't make much of... um... an impact.

But it definitely stirred things up, created an enormous crater and rain of debris, and would have been a dramatic thing to witness.  From a safe distance.  The fact that even today, 3.47 billion years later, geologists can detect the hole it left behind, indicates that it was one hell of a punch.

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Walkabout

A couple of days ago, a long-time reader of (and frequent contributor of topics for) Skeptophilia sent me an email saying "Time to get your Archaeo-Geek excited!", with a link to a study about archaeological finds in Australia.  I was really confused at first because I read "Geek" as "Greek" and was puzzled about how there could be an ancient Greek settlement in Australia. 

I need new glasses.

Anyhow, once I got that sorted, I found that the actual research was pretty amazing.  A team of archaeologists led by Kasih Norman of Griffith University has discovered artifacts dating back to the Late Pleistocene Epoch -- on the order of twenty thousand years ago -- indicating a large human population living in a thriving ecosystem, with rolling hills and a large freshwater lake, all of which are now at the bottom of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

The authors write:

The submerged Northwest Shelf of Sahul (the combined landmass of Australia and New Guinea at times of lower sea level) was a vast area of land in the Late Pleistocene that connected the Australian regions of the Kimberley and western Arnhem Land during times of lower sea level than today.  The shelf extends >500 km northwest from the modern-day shoreline with a now-submerged landmass of ∼400,000 km2, an area more than 1.6 times larger than the United Kingdom.  The region might have been an area of initial entry for the peopling of Sahul.  Irrespective of the precise locations people used to disperse into Sahul, the Northwest Shelf is adjacent to the oldest known archaeological sites in Australia , and might have been one of the first inhabited landscapes on the continent.  Archaeological evidence for Late Pleistocene use of the continental shelves of Sahul by the First Australians is demonstrated on multiple large islands that are remnant portions of the continental margin, including Barrow Island, Kangaroo Island, Hunter Island, and Minjiwarra (Stradbroke Island).

The distribution of artifacts, which include stone axes, flint tools, and arrowheads, indicate at east two major pulses of settlement, which is cool because it lines up with what we know about the linguistics of the region.  The majority of the indigenous languages of northern and central Australia -- 306 of the 400 recorded native languages -- belong to the Pama-Nyungan family, which is (as a group) a linguistic isolate, related to no other known language group.  The rest are scattered clusters of unrelated languages, indicative of arrivals at different times or from different places, apparently when the Gulf of Carpentaria was mostly dry land and you could walk from New Guinea to Australia without getting your feet wet.

Eventually, of course, as we were coming out of the last ice age, the sea level rose and gradually that block of lowlands filled in from both sides, isolating Australia from the islands to the north and halting the walkabout that allowed for easy settlement.  But at its height, the archaeologists believe the now-submerged region could have been home to between fifty and five hundred thousand people.

"[Sea level rise] likely caused a retreat of human populations, registering as peaks in occupational intensity at archaeological sites," the authors write.  "Those who funneled into an archipelago on the shelf would go on to become the first maritime explorers from Wallacea [what is now the islands of eastern Indonesia], creating a familiar environment for their maritime economies to adapt to the vast terrestrial continent of Sahul."

Further research into the archaeology, topography, and paleoecology of the region is sure to turn up more information about a landscape that has altered dramatically in the last fifteen-thousand-odd years.  It also spurs researchers to look at other regions flooded by sea level rise -- like Doggerland, now beneath the turbulent waters of the North Sea -- perhaps to recover more clues about where and how our distant ancestors lived.

"Now submerged continental margins clearly played an important role in early human expansions across the world," the researchers write.  "The rise in undersea archaeology in Australia will contribute to a growing worldwide picture of early human migration and the impact of climate change on Late Pleistocene human populations."

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Birds down under

I've been an avid birdwatcher for many years, and have been fortunate enough to travel to some amazingly cool places in search of avifauna.  Besides exploring my own country, I've been to Canada (several times), Belize (twice), Ecuador (twice), Iceland (twice), England (twice), Scotland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Malaysia.

One place I've never been, though, is Australia, which is a shame because it's got some incredible animals.  And despite a pretty well-deserved reputation for having far more than their fair share of wildlife that's actively trying to kill you, most tourists come back from trips to Australia alive and with all their limbs still attached in the right places.

The main reason for Australia's unique ecosystems is that it's been isolated for a very long time.  During the breakup of Pangaea, the northern part (Laurasia, made up of what is now Europe, North America, and most of Asia) separated from the southern part (Gondwanaland, made up of what is now Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia, and India), something on the order of 180 million years ago.  The other pieces gradually pulled apart as rifting occured, but Australia remained attached to Antarctica until around thirty million years ago.  At that point, the whole thing had a fairly temperate climate, but when the Tasman Gateway opened up during the Oligocene Period, it allowed the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, isolating and cooling Antarctica and resulting in the extinction of nearly all of its native species.  Australia, now separate, began to drift northward, gradually warming as it went, and carrying with it a completely unique suite of animals and plants.

The reason all this comes up is a sharp-eyed Australian loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link to a news story about a recent discovery by a dedicated amateur fossil hunter and birdwatcher, Melissa Lowery, who was looking for fossils on the Bass Coast of Victoria and stumbled upon something extraordinary -- some 125 million year old bird footprints.

Lowery's bird footprints [Image by photographer Rob French, Museums Victoria]

At that point, the separation of Australia and Antarctica was some 65 million years in the future, the sauropod dinosaurs were still the dominant animal group, and Victoria itself was somewhere near the South Pole.  Lowery's find led to a full-scale scientific investigation of the area, and uncovered a great many more bird tracks, including some with ten-centimeter-long toes.  Also in the area were the footprints of dozens of kinds of non-avian dinosaurs.

"Most of the bird tracks and body fossils dating back to the Early Cretaceous are from the Northern Hemisphere, particularly from Asia," said Anthony Martin, of Emory University, who led the study.  "Our discovery shows that there were many birds, and a variety of them, near the South Pole about 125 million years ago."

Of course, being a birdwatcher, I'm intensely curious as to what these birds looked like, but there's only so much you can tell from a footprint, or even fossilized bones.  It's simultaneously intriguing and frustrating to think about the fact that these animals -- and all the other animals and plants that lived alongside them -- had every bit of the diversity, all the curious and wonderful and beautiful adaptations and behaviors, that our modern wildlife does.

Imagine what it would be like to transport yourself back to Australia in the early Cretaceous, and witness all of that with your own eyes and ears.  (With, of course, a guarantee of coming back alive and with all your limbs still attached in the right places.  Back then, Australia was a rougher place than it is now.)

So thanks to the reader who sent me the link -- it's renewed my desire to visit Australia.  If I can't see the amazing birds they had 125 million years ago, at least I can have a look through my binoculars at some of the ones they have today.

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Do not cross

Back in 1859, renowned British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace wrote a paper about a peculiar phenomenon, which has since been called Wallace's Line in his honor.  He had noted that west of a wavering line that runs basically from northeast to southwest across Indonesia, the flora and fauna is much more similar to what you find in India and tropical southeast Asia; east of that line, it resembles what you find in Australia and Papua-New Guinea.

Map from Wallace's original paper [Image is in the Public Domain]

The change is striking enough that it didn't take a naturalist of Wallace's caliber to notice it.  Italian explorer Antonia Pigafetta mentioned it in his journals way back in 1521, and various others considered it a curiosity worth noting.  None, though, did the thorough job of studying it that Wallace did, so naming it after him is justified.

However -- even Wallace had no idea why, or how, it had happened.

Ordinarily, faunal and floral assemblages change gradually, unless there's a major geographical barrier.  I saw an example of the latter first-hand when I was in Ecuador -- there's a completely different set of birds as you cross from the west slope to the east slope of the Andes Mountains.  (Some did make the leap, but by and large, you run into a whole different group of species from one side to the other.)

Here, though, there's no obvious barrier.  In fact, if you'll look closely at the map, you'll see that Wallace's Line goes right between the islands of Bali (on the west) and Lombok (on the east) -- a distance of only 35 kilometers, easily narrow enough for birds to cross, not to mention other species swimming or rafting their way from one island to the other.  Even so, the species on Bali are distinctly Asian, and the ones on Lombok distinctly Australian.

On one side, kangaroos and koalas, cockatoos and birds of paradise and cassowaries; on the other, bears and tigers, trogons and drongos and minivets and babblers.

How did this happen -- and more perplexingly, what's kept the line intact?

The explanation for the first part of this question had to wait until the discovery of plate tectonics in the 1950s.  The Australian region and Asia have very different species because they are on different tectonic plates that used to be a great deal farther away from each other; in fact, until 85 million years ago, Australia was connected to Antarctica (something we know not only from our understanding of plate movement, but because prior to that Australia and Antarctica have similar fossils, which began to diverge at that point as Australia moved north and Antarctica moved south).  Australia has been gradually approaching Asia ever since, with its unique assemblage of species riding in like some latter-day Noah's Ark.

What, though, is keeping them from mixing?  The reason the topic comes up today is because of a paper last week in Science that has proposed a neat explanation; the problem is the climate.

Researchers at ETH-Zürich led by evolutionary biologist Loïc Pellissier noted that there were exceptions to the boundary of Wallace's line, but the species that crossed it almost always went one way -- from the Asian region into the Australian region.  Some species of Australian snakes, for example, have their nearest relatives in Asia, as do the wonderful Australian flying foxes.  But there are virtually no examples of species that went the other way.

What was preventing organisms from island-hopping their way from Australia to Asia was Asia's much wetter climate -- if you go from west to east across Indonesia and into Australia, the average rainfall by and large goes steadily downward.  The contention is that it's easier for organisms from a rainy climate to adapt to gradually drying out than it is for extremely dry-adapted organisms to deal with the already high biodiversity (and thus much higher competition with species already well suited to the conditions) found in more rainy regions.

You have to wonder what will happen when Australia and Asia finally collide -- something that is, in a sense, already happening, but will result in a complete fusion of the two continents in two hundred million years or so.  This will result in a situation a little like the collision of India with Asia eighty million years ago, which raised the Himalaya Mountains.  (In fact, that collision is ongoing; as India pushes north, like a giant plow, the Himalayas are continuing to rise.  Which is why you find marine fossils at the top of Mount Everest -- the Himalayas aren't volcanic, they're marine and continental debris scooped together and piled up by the motion of India.)

The collision of Australia and Asia will, of course, eradicate Wallace's Line (although the mountain range it will create could still provide a barrier for species mixing, just as the Andes do in Ecuador and Peru).  Of course, two hundred million years is a very long time -- about three times as long as it's been since the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs -- so who knows what species will have evolved in the interim?

Or if we'll have any distant descendants of our own around to see it?

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Rock recall

First, we had a "Quantum Pendant" that was supposed to realign your chakra frequencies (or something like that), but was recalled when the authorities found the rock it was made from was actually radioactive.  Then we had the warning issued because people with ear wax impactions were sticking lit candles in their ears to "suck out the wax," which resulted in several hospitalizations and at least one person setting their house on fire. Yet another warning was put out by doctors when the woo-woos started recommending taking off all your clothes and exposing your butthole to direct sunlight, risking a sunburn that I don't even want to think about.  Then there were the homeopathic "remedies" that were taken off the shelves because, by some horrific mistake, they turned out to have some actual active ingredients.

So you'd think after all this -- and, allow me to say, I didn't make any of the above up -- either (1) the general public would realize that the woo-woo alt-med types are full of shit and stop listening to anything they say, or (2) I'd stop being surprised by what new idiotic "natural health" fads crop up.

Neither of those, in fact, has happened.

This comes up because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a link to a story out of Australia about a company that distributes chunks of a rock called rough serpentine to stores specializing in woo-woo crystal nonsense.  Serpentine is common -- it's a characteristic rock found in areas that once were part of oceanic plates -- but it's pretty enough.  It often has green and black bands, and occurs in two main forms, a shiny, smooth "platy" variety (sometimes nicknamed "false jade"), and a fibrous, grainy "rough" variety.  If you're curious about what they claim serpentine can do, one source says that it "is believed to help establish control over one's life.  According to metaphysical beliefs, serpentine provides a clearing of thought to better facilitate meditation.  Serpentine is said to clear clouded areas of the chakras and stimulate the crown chakra, promoting spiritual understanding and psychic abilities."

Pretty impressive, no?

There's a wee problem with rough serpentine, though.

It contains asbestos.

Rough serpentine [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Tiia Monto, Talk on Serpentine, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Asbestos exposure, as I probably don't need to mention, is associated with lung cancer, emphysema, and mesothelioma.

"Consumers should immediately stop using this product and wrap it in thick sturdy plastic or a heavy duty sturdy plastic bag where the seal cannot be broken," said a spokesperson for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.  "The supplier – Alliz Trading Pty Ltd – will contact consumers to provide advice about safe disposal of the stones and arrange a full refund."

I really shouldn't be surprised this happened.  It's all part and parcel of the "if it's natural, it must be good for you" mentality, which conveniently ignores the fact that strychnine is all-natural and 100% organic.

For what it's worth, this was completely natural, too.  I'm guessing the dinosaurs' chakras were pretty fucking clouded afterward, though.  Pity no one was around to give them some serpentine.

In any case, it brings home the fact that modern science and medicine have done a good job of improving our lives.  Yes, they're far from perfect.  I'm aware of the issues with the pharmaceuticals industry, and the ongoing health insurance mess here in the United States.  I know that modern technology has created a good many problems itself.  But on balance, we live longer, healthier lives, and more of our children survive to adulthood, than ever before, and that's not because more of us are waving crystals around, taking "remedies" that have been diluted to the point that there's basically nothing left but water, or (heaven forfend) exposing our nether orifices to direct sunlight.

So learn a little science, okay?  And stay away from rocks containing asbestos.  Those things are dangerous.

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Walkabout

I'm always amazed at the depth of information paleontologists can glean from fossils.

And I'm not even including the ones that show exceptional preservation, like the ichthyosaur fossils I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago, that were so well preserved that they could even determine features like countershading.  Ordinary fossils contain a wealth of information about the organisms they came from -- if you know where to look, and how to interpret it.

Take, for example, the paper by a team from the University of Bristol and the University of Uppsala that appeared last week in the journal Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Paleontology.  Conducted by Christine Janis, Adrian O'Driscoll, and Benjamin Kear, the study analyzed the bones of prehistoric kangaroos, and reached a rather startling conclusion: a good many ancient kangaroo species didn't have the group's signature hop.

The determination came from looking at the strength and articulation of the leg bones, as well as the animal's overall size.  In particular, the short-faced kangaroos, or sthenurines, may have preferred to walk on all fours -- or might even have had a bipedal stride like a human.

The skeleton of Simosthenurus occidentalis, which I find vaguely terrifying. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ghedoghedo, Simosthenurus occidentalis, CC BY-SA 3.0]

You can see why they're called short-faced kangaroos in the artist's recreation of Procoptodon goliah below, in which I notice two things:

1. These creatures looked like a cross between a bunny rabbit and Godzilla.
2. The woman posing next to it has a stance like a Glamour magazine model, which is an odd thing to do if you're confronted with an eight-foot-tall kangaroo with giant claws.  Me, I'd be running like hell, if I didn't just wet my pants and then faint.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura, Procoptodon goliah NT, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The striding kangaroos seem to have split off from the hopping kind about fifteen million years ago, during the Miocene Epoch, when Australia was a lot wetter than it currently is.  The climate back then would have favored large herbivores like the sthenurines (thank heaven these things weren't carnivorous), and they simply became too heavy to jump efficiently.  Even smaller sthenurines, though, had a different leg articulation -- they all appear to have been walkers rather than hoppers.

The last of the striding kangaroos went extinct during the last Ice Age, when the climate took a turn toward more arid conditions.  Aridity meant fewer plants, and slower growth for the ones that survived, and the largest marsupials in Australia died out.

Just as well.  Even the kangaroos that are left can kick you into the middle of next week; every year people, mostly stupid tourists, are injured by kangaroos.  Australians also have to contend with the various venomous snakes, spiders, and jellyfish, a relative of the nettle (the gympie-gympie) whose spines inject a neurotoxin that causes intense pain for years, and a highly-aggressive bird called the cassowary that looks like the bastard child of a turkey and a velociraptor.  The last thing those poor people need is giant kangaroo-bunnies striding around like they own the place.

Because the kangaroo-bunnies probably were vicious.  Down there, it's kind of an inevitability.

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The glass grass

The attitudes and practices of colonialism did incalculable damage, and not least on the list is the fact that (by and large) the colonizers completely disregarded indigenous people's knowledge of their own lands.

The inevitable result was that much of that knowledge was lost.  Not only general, broad-brush information such as how to raise food in climates unfamiliar to the colonial cultures, but specific details like the uses of native plant and animal species.  The colonizers, secure in their own arrogance, instead imported the species they had back home -- thus adding another problem on top of the first.

Because, of course, this is a huge part of why there's such a problem with invasive exotics.  Some jumped accidentally; but a great many were deliberate imports that have proceeded to wreak havoc on native ecosystems.  Consider, for example, the problems caused by the introduction of European rabbits to Australia -- and the millions of dollars that have been spent since trying to control them.

I bring up Australia deliberately, because it's a prime example of colonizers completely ignoring millennia of experience and knowledge by indigenous people, embodying Adam Savage's oft-quoted line "I reject your reality and substitute my own."  You'd think they would have listened, wouldn't you?  Not only does Australia have a tough climate by most anyone's standards, plagued by droughts and floods that seem to alternate on a monthly basis, its native species have adapted by becoming tough and resilient.  The indigenous Australians managed in much the same way; learning how to deal with the climate's vagaries -- and relying on the native plants and animals to provide sustenance.

This meant making use of damn near everything, including species that seem on first glance to be worse than useless.  Take, for example, spinifex grass (Triodia spp.), which grows all over inland Australia.  Not only is it able to survive in broiling hot desert conditions -- it can survive temperatures of 60 C -- it puts down roots as long as thirty meters in an attempt to access what groundwater there is.  In a place where any kind of vegetation is fair game for herbivores, spinifex has developed ways to defend itself; it absorbs silica from the soil and deposits it in the tips of the leaves.  Silica, I probably don't need to point out, is better known as glass.

Walking through a field of spinifex in shorts is a good way to come out with your legs embedded with thousands of glass splinters.

An Australian grassland ecosystem, with two species of spinifex -- the green plants are soft spinifex (Triodia pungens), and the gray-green ones are lobed spinifex (Triodia basedowii). [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hesperian, Triodia hummock grassland, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Despite its difficulties, the indigenous Australians made full use of this odd plant.  The fibers of the stems were used for weaving and thatching huts; the waxes and oils extracted from it were hardened into a resin that could be used as a glue or a sealant.  And now, spearheaded by the Indjalandji-Dhidhanu people of the upper Georgina River, spinifex is being reintroduced as a 21st-century commodity -- with potential international markets.

Scientists at the University of Queensland, working with Indjalandji-Dhidhanu elder Colin Saltmere (himself an adjunct professor of architecture), have analyzed spinifex's unique properties, and found that not only does the resin (used for thousands of years by indigenous peoples) have properties similar to moldable plastic, the fibers in the stems have high flexibility, exceptional resistance to fatigue cracking -- and eight times the tensile strength of an equal diameter of steel.  The potential applications are already a very long list, including cable manufacture, production of resilient membranes (possibly superseding latex in gloves, for example), and creation of substitutes for wood, plastics, and carbon nanofibres.

"For thousands of years, spinifex was a building block for the Aboriginal societies in the desert; now it will continue to play a role in advancing local Aboriginal communities through business and employment opportunities," Saltmere said.  "The fine fibres at a nanoscale make this plant remarkable – and because it is so fine, we can make a fully renewable gel that is 98% water, and on a scale where we can sustainably generate hundreds of thousands of tonnes of material."

What seems to me to be nothing more than common sense -- "Listen to the people who know the land way better than you do" -- was effectively ignored for hundreds of years.  It's heartening that at least some of those voices are now being heard.  And given what's happening to the climate, we're going to need every advantage we have.  Better late than never, I suppose.  In this case, making use of a strange crop that was considered little more than a weed by the European colonizers, the multiple uses of which are only now becoming wider knowledge outside of the communities of indigenous Australians.

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The strange case of Frederick Valentich

As skeptics, sometimes we have to admit that there are cases when we don't know the answer to a question -- and may not ever know.

It's not that it isn't frustrating.  Believe me, I get that.  One such question that is near and dear to my heart is whether or not there is intelligent extraterrestrial life.  While speculation runs rampant -- and I've done my own share of speculating -- the fact is, we have exactly zero evidence for it.  There are equally persuasive arguments for intelligent aliens being widespread and for humanity being, for all intents and purposes, alone in the universe.  It's very hard to derive a meaningful conclusion from the absence of data coupled with a huge and largely unexplored search field, so right now -- however much we'd like to meet the Vulcans and whatnot -- the most honest answer is "we don't know."

The same can happen with much less grandiose realms of inquiry.  Which brings me to a mystery I stumbled on a couple of days ago -- the puzzle of what happened to Frederick Valentich on October 21, 1978.

Valentich was a twenty-year-old Australian man who dreamed of a career in aviation, but a poor track record with academics and some rather erratic behavior kept getting in the way.  He applied twice to the Royal Australian Air Force, and was rejected both times because of "inadequate educational qualifications."  He successfully joined the RAAF Air Training Corps, and did part-time study to try for his commercial pilot's license -- but failed the qualifying examinations in all five subjects, not once but twice.  He got a license to fly small aircraft, but didn't even do well at that, straying into controlled air space over Sydney once, and then twice deliberately flying into a cloud (his license was only rated to allow him to fly in "visual meteorological conditions") -- behavior that was on the verge of grounding him permanently.

None of this discouraged him.

Frederick Valentich shortly before his disappearance [Image is in the Public Domain]

On the afternoon of October 21, 1978, Valentich took off from Melbourne Airport in a Cessna 182L heading toward King Island, about halfway between the southern coast of Australia and the northern tip of Tasmania.  His purpose is unknown; he told a friend he was going to meet some friends, and another that he was picking up a parcel of seafood, but neither turned out to be true.  At 7:06 PM he radioed Melbourne Air Traffic Control that he was flying at 1,400 meters and was being followed by a "large aircraft with four bright landing lights."  It kept getting closer and then moving away, he said.

Melbourne asked Valentich for more information.  He said that he was having engine problems, but the aircraft was still following him.  Then there was a silence, followed by Valentich saying, "It's not an aircraft."

Those were his last words.  They were followed by what are described as "metallic scraping noises," then... nothing.

A search commenced the next day, and over four days covered over a thousand square kilometers.  Neither Valentich nor any confirmable trace of his airplane were ever found.

A variety of explanations have been suggested to account for Valentich's disappearance.  These include:

• He was poorly qualified to fly, and in the dim light condition of early evening he became disoriented, possibly flying upside down.  The lights and the mysterious aircraft he saw were his plane's reflection in the ocean.  The problem with this is that a Cessna 182L has a gravity-feed fuel system, so the engine would have cut out quickly if he had been flying upside down.  And if he wasn't upside down, what was the mysterious aircraft?
• Valentich staged his own disappearance.  There were reports of a light plane making a landing in a field near Cape Otway, on the south coast, but upon investigation Melbourne police found no evidence of it.  Either the reports were incorrect, or the plane had taken off again, which leaves us with the same problem as before.  And if he did land somewhere, there's the problem that his plane only had the fuel capacity to reach Tasmania, or somewhere along the south Australian shore.  So where is his plane -- and where is he?
• Valentich did go down somewhere in the Bass Strait, and the remains simply have never been found.  An interesting analysis by pilots who've studied the case suggests that he fell prey to the "illusion of a tilted horizon" -- a sensory illusion occurring because of the mixed signals coming from the eyes and the inner ear.  Valentich may have then overcompensated, sending the plane into a "graveyard spiral" ending with his plummeting into the ocean.  As a pilot friend of mine once told me, "Rule one is 'always trust your instruments over your senses.'"  (The link to the analysis also contains a complete transcript of the conversation between Valentich and Melbourne Air Traffic Control, if you're curious.) 
• Valentich crashed his plane deliberately -- i.e., he committed suicide.  There's no evidence that he was suicidal, although that by itself isn't disproof.  And once again, we have the problem that no trace of the crash was ever discovered.
• And, of course: the aircraft Valentich saw was an alien spacecraft, and he was abducted.  A group called Ground Saucer Watch produced photographs taken from Cape Otway, allegedly on the day Valentich disappeared, that show "a bona fide unknown flying object, of moderate dimensions, apparently surrounded by a cloud-like vapor/exhaust residue," but the photographs are of poor quality and have generally been dismissed as evidence by skeptical inquirers.

It's a curious case, to say the least, made more curious by the aforementioned fact that he'd lied about his reason for heading toward King Island, and also that according to his father, Valentich was obsessed with UFOs and had expressed fear about being abducted.  Then, there's the following account, as related in Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs, by Jerome Clark:

Several years after the incident, several members of a family -- an uncle, his son, and two nieces -- came forward to relate an experience they underwent on October 21, 1978.  As the story went, they were hunting rabbits on Cape Otway when one of the girls asked, "What is that light?"  Looking up, the uncle spotted an airplane (apparently Valentich's, the only one that would have been in the air at the time in question) and identified it as an aircraft light.  "No," the niece insisted.  "The light is above the airplane."  The four watched the plane and the light until it disappeared behind some nearby hills.

So what are we to make of all this?

Honestly, there's not much here to make.  Once again, we are faced with a complete absence of hard evidence.  Other than the conversation between Valentich and Melbourne Air Traffic Control, we've got nothing to go on other than anecdote.  Each of the above explanations is possible (even, loath though I am to admit it, the alien abduction one).  Certainly each one admits to arguments against.  It's likely that his plane went down in Bass Strait due to pilot error, but likely doesn't mean case closed.

So the rather unsatisfying conclusion is that we don't know what happened to Frederick Valentich, and probably never will.

When faced with a situation like this, the best we can do is hold our opinion in abeyance, forever if need be.  I get that it's frustrating; the human mind's drive to know stuff is mighty powerful.  But as good skeptics we need to admit it when the evidence is simply inadequate to draw a conclusion, any conclusion.

And it seems like, in the strange case of Frederick Valentich, we might never have a better answer than that.

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Mammals down under

Sometimes all it takes is one new discovery to send scientists back to the drawing board.

Of course, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson correctly points out, scientists are always at the drawing board, or should be.  "If you're not at the drawing board," he says, "you're not doing science."  But still, it does seem sometimes like things are pretty well figured out, and then...

... boom.

There was a "boom" moment in the field of mammalian evolution this week, delivered by a paper in the journal Alcheringa: The Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.  The authors -- led by the brilliant paleontologist and polymath Timothy Flannery, of the University of Melbourne -- describe a fossil find that would seemingly be of interest only to people fascinated by minutiae of paleontology; a jawbone of a tribosphene, a proto-mammal with distinctive triangular, three-pointed molars, from the early Jurassic Period in Australia.

The problem is, it kind of shouldn't have been there.  Tribosphenes, which are in a group that is ancestral to both marsupial and placental mammals, were thought to originate in Laurasia, the northern half of the (at that point, split) supercontinent Pangaea.  (Laurasia comprised land that is now found in North America, Europe, and Asia.)  Australia, on the other hand was part of the southern half of Pangaea, called Gondwana, along with Africa, Antarctica, and South America.

This origin for the tribosphenes was considered so certain that they used to be called boreosphenes -- from the Greek word Βορέας, which was the name of the god of the north wind.

Guess it's a good thing they changed the name.

Eomaia, an early tribosphene mammal from China [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com), Eomaia NT, CC BY-SA 3.0]

There's no doubt that there were tribosphenes in Laurasia, too; one of the earliest, Tribactonodon, can be found in the Lower Cretaceous Durlston Formation in England.  (Others have been found in Mongolia and in Portugal.)  The idea was that they started in Laurasia and only later spread southward to Gondwana -- so Australia's iconic marsupials originally started out much farther north.

The discovery of a tribosphene in Australia sixty million years earlier than that indicates that some rethinking may be in order.

"I was re-analyzing these fossils that turned up in Victoria from the age of dinosaurs," Flannery said, in an interview with Australian Geographic.  "And then I started looking more widely for similar sorts of fossils found elsewhere and it turned out all of them were in the southern hemisphere and all are Jurassic or Cretaceous in age [from 199–66 million years ago]...  And we realized the thing that unites all these Southern Hemisphere fossils is they have these very strange, complicated molars that let the animals puncture shear and crush, all at the same time, what they were eating.  I resisted the conclusion as long as I could, but the evidence is compelling.  These shrew-like animals from Australian are actually the ancestors of both the earliest placentals and the earliest marsupials."

"We’ve been able to show that the relevant fossils that look like they are anatomically likely to be close to the common ancestor of marsupials and placentals are found exclusively in the southern continents and are from an older time period than the oldest mammal similar fossils seen the north," said Kristofer Helgen, who co-authored the paper.  "And that indicates these groups of mammals had their ancestry in the southern continents at an earlier time period and then later colonized the northern continents.  It absolutely turns our previous understanding on its head."

Which is tremendously exciting.  Far from being frustrated by stuff like this, these are the moments scientists live for -- when they find out that our previous understanding is incomplete, skewed, or flat wrong.  That's when the real process of discovery happens, and often when we gain a lens on a bit of the universe we weren't seeing clearly.

It's why I get so profoundly frustrated with the ridiculous attitude, "why study science?  It could all be proven wrong tomorrow."  To me, that's a completely backwards way of looking at it.  The truth is that science, unlike just about every other path to knowledge humans have ever utilized, has the ability to self correct.  When scientists find out a bit of our understanding is wrong, they neither throw their hands up in despair, nor do they double down on the error; they take steps to fix it.

And isn't that better than remaining in a state of error, incomprehension, or ignorance?

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