The drowned wall

Humans have been modifying their own environment for a very long time.

Our capacity for building stuff is pretty extraordinary.  Birds build nests, some mammals and reptiles burrow, spiders spin webs -- but compared to what we do, it's all pretty rudimentary stuff.  No other species on Earth looks around, takes materials from nature, and says, "Hey, if I cut this to pieces and move it around, I could do something new and useful with it" to the extent that we do.

I was thinking about all this when I read a paper this week about an archaeological discovery in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Germany.  As I discussed in more depth in a post a couple of days ago, ten thousand odd years ago the Earth (especially the Northern Hemisphere) was coming out of a catastrophic and sudden cooling episode called the Younger Dryas event, during which the sea levels were considerably lower (because so much seawater was locked up as polar and glacial ice).  In fact, much of what are now the Baltic and North Seas were dry(ish) land; you could walk from England to France across a broad, grassy valley that is now at the bottom of the English Channel.

The result is that a great many of the artifacts produced during that time are now underwater, and finding them can be a matter of luck.  That was certainly the case in this instance, where scientists demonstrating a multibeam sonar system for some students in a research vessel ten kilometers offshore in the Bay of Mecklenburg saw something extraordinary -- the remains of a 971-meter-long rock wall archaeologists say "may be the oldest known human-made megastructure in Europe."

Nicknamed the "Blinkerwall," it is made of rows of a total of fourteen hundred smaller stones connecting three hundred boulders that were pretty clearly too large to move.  What the wall's builders apparently did was built a barrier out of the smaller stones connecting the large ones into a zigzagged line.

Part of the Blinkerwall [Image credit: Philipp Hoy]

The purpose of the wall, of course, can only be guessed at, but the researchers suspect it was used for hunting.  "When you chase animals [such as reindeer], they follow these structures, they don’t attempt to jump over them," said Jacob Geersen, of the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde, a German port town on the Baltic coast.  "The idea would be to create an artificial bottleneck with a second wall or with the lake shore."

Once the animals were funneled into the narrow strip of land between the two barriers, they would be more vulnerable to spear-wielding hunters lying in wait.

The next step in the research, Geersen said, is to send divers down to the base of the wall, now submerged under twenty-one meters of water, to try and bolster this explanation by finding spearheads or other hunting implements.

You have to wonder what else might be down there.  Our intrepid ancestors have been finding new ways to make stuff for tens of thousands of years.  Wherever that impulse came from, there's no denying that it's served us well.  It always makes me wonder what traces will be left of our culture in ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million years -- and what deductions our descendants will make about our habits, practices, and lifestyles.

****************************************

The Higgs boson visits Atlantis

Well, the Higgs boson is apparently a reality, a finding that had one CERN researcher stating to reporters, "A lot of bets are going to be settled up today."  The likelihood that the particle observed in two separate experiments, CMS and ATLAS, was the Higgs was placed at 99.9999%, which seems like pretty good odds to me.  (Source)

The finding is a major vindication for the Standard Model, the theory that describes how particles interact, generating fields, forces, and a variety of other phenomena, and will surely be the springboard to launch a whole new set of experiments designed to expand what we know about physics.

Unfortunately, it has already been the springboard for a variety of Non-Standard Models by woo-woos who take the Higgs boson's nickname ("The God Particle") far too literally.  And it didn't help that within the past few weeks we have had announcements from two other fields, Mayan archaeology (the discovery of a text that allegedly confirms the calendar "end date" of December 21, 2012) and paleoclimatology/geology (a seafloor survey that describes the topography of "Doggerland," the land mass that spanned what is now the southern North Sea between Britain and Denmark when the sea level was lower, during the last ice age).

Maybe you'll see where this is going when I tell you that the media has already nicknamed Doggerland "Atlantis."  (Sources here and here)

So.  Yeah.  Higgs boson + Mayans + Atlantis = WHOA.  And if you add the Easter Island statues into the mix, we just have a coalescence of woo-woo-ness that makes you wonder why we don't just have a Celestial Convergence right here in our living rooms, just from reading about it.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will not be surprised that the assembly of these four unrelated topics together into some kind of Cosmic Hash is the brainchild of frequent flyer Diane Tessman, who has written about it here.  Ms. Tessman starts off with a little bit of self-congratulation:

It’s been a week of exciting, dynamic 2012 events! I made a prediction back in the early 1990s that archeological discoveries in the final phase of the Change Times would be landmark events that would answer long-unanswered questions.

I predicted that not only these landmarks were significant in themselves but they would be a catalyst for UFO disclosure, alien landings, and a change in reality-perception (level of consciousness) for all humankind.

Maybe my predictions expect too much to manifest from these pivotal archeological discoveries but this is not the time to be a skeptic, because after all, I was right about the astounding discoveries. We shall see about the rest of my predictions in the future.

Yup.  That we shall.

She then goes on to describe (1) how the discovery of mammoth bones, human artifacts, and terrestrial features like river beds on the North Sea floor shows that Atlantis is real, (2) the discovery that the Easter Island moai statues have bodies shows that UFOs are real, (3) the discovery of the new Mayan text shows that the whole Mayan prophecy nonsense is real, and (4) the discovery of the Higgs boson shows that God/Celestial Consciousness is real.  Or something like that.  With Diane Tessman, it's hard to tell, sometimes.  Here's what she had to say about the Higgs:

So, science has confirmed what spiritual people knew all along: There is a God Spark, a God particle. Of course many people feel “it” (he/she/it) is within us, not out there in the universe of physics. Truth might be, it is everywhere, just as sub-atomic particles are everywhere and just as consciousness itself is everywhere. The universe is consciousness!

Yup, I'm sure that's what the physicists at CERN are saying today.  "Wow, I'm glad we showed that the Higgs exists.  But after all, I felt it all around me, all the time, because, you know, consciousness.  And god.  And everything.  So we really didn't need to do that experiment, we could have just experienced the Higgs."

I get kind of hot under the collar when people who don't understand science hijack discoveries made by actual trained, working scientists for their own silly purposes.  It misleads, it muddies the water, and (worst) it cheapens the years of work done by the people who are some of the clearest thinkers in the world.  I'll be the first to admit that I understand only the vaguest, shallowest bits of the Standard Model and how the Higgs boson fits into it; but then, I don't go pontificating to my readers about what it all means as if I were a physicist.

Okay.  I should just calm down a little, because (after all) it's not like the scientists at CERN (or the geologists who are studying Doggerland, or any other working researchers) are losing much sleep over Ms. Tessman and her ilk.  So, I guess, let her have her spiritual quantum-physics-powered UFOs from Atlantis, or whatever the hell it is she believes in.  Me, I'm just going to have another cup of coffee and read some more press releases from the physicists, because however you interpret it, you have to admit that this stuff about the Higgs boson is pretty freakin' cool.