Globe-trotting with the gods

Despite my fairly persistent railing against people who make outlandish, unverifiable claims, I find it even more perplexing when people make outlandish, demonstrably false claims.  I mean, it's one thing to claim that last night you had a visitation from the ghost of your late Aunt Gertrude, and she told you the secret recipe for making her Extra-Zesty Bean Dip.  I couldn't disprove that even if I wanted to, which I don't, because I actually kind of like bean dip.

But when someone makes a statement that is (1) falsifiable, and (2) clearly incorrect, and yet (3) stands by it as if it made complete sense... that I find baffling.  "I'm sorry," they seem to be saying, "I know you've demonstrated that gravity pulls things toward the Earth, but I believe that in reality, it works the opposite way, so I'm going to wear velcro shoes so I don't fall upward."

And for once I am not talking about young-Earth creationism.

This all comes up because of an article from the site Unexplained Mysteries that a friend sent me yesterday.  Entitled "Easter Island Heads -- They Speak At Last," it was written by L. M. Leteane.  If that name sounds familiar to regular readers of this blog, it's because Leteane has appeared here before, most recently for claiming that the Central American god Quetzalcoatl and the Egyptian god Thoth were actually the same person, despite one being a feathered snake and the other being a shirtless dude with the head of an ibis, which last I checked hardly look alike at all.  Be that as it may, Leteane concludes that this is why the Earth is going to end when a comet hits it in the year 3369.

So I suppose that given his past attempts, we should not expect L. M. Leteane to exactly knock us dead in the logic department.

But even starting out with low expectations, I have to say that he has outdone himself this time.

Here's the basic outline of his most recent argument, if I can dignify it by calling it that.  Fasten your seatbelts, it's gonna be a bit of a bumpy ride.

1. The Bantu people of south-central Africa came originally from Egypt, which in their language they called Khama-Roggo.  This name translates in Tswana as "Black-and-Red Land."
2. Charles Berlitz, of The Mystery of Atlantis fame, says that Quetzalcoatl also comes from "Black-and-Red Land."  Berlitz, allow me to remind you, is the writer about whose credibility the skeptical researcher Larry Kusche said, "If Berlitz were to report that a ship was red, the chances of it being some other color is almost a certainty."
3. The Olmecs were originally from Africa, but then they accompanied the god Thoth to Central America.  In a quote that I swear I am not making up, "That is evidently why their gigantic sculptured heads are always shown helmeted."
4. The Babylonian goddess Ishtar was also a real person, who ruled in the Indus Valley for a while (yes, I know that India and Babylonia aren't the same place; just play along, okay?) until she got fed up and also moved to Central America.  She took some people with her called the Kassites.  This was because she was heavily interested in tin mining.
5. Well, three gods in one place are just too many (three too many, in my opinion), and this started a war.  Hot words were spoken.  Nuclear weapons were detonated.  Devastation was wreaked.  Passive voice was used repeatedly for dramatic effect.
6. After the dust settled, the Olmecs, who were somehow also apparently the Kassites and the Bantu, found themselves mysteriously deposited on Easter Island.  A couple of more similarities between words in various languages and Pascuanese (the language of the natives of Easter Island) are given, the best one being Rapa Nui (the Pascuanese name for the island) meaning "black giant" because Rapa is a little like the Hebrew repha (giant) and Nui sounds like the French nuit (night).  This proves that the island was settled by dark-skinned giant people from Africa.  Or somewhere.
7. The Olmecs decided to name it "Easter Island" because "Easter" sounds like "Ishtar."
8. So they built a bunch of stone heads. q. e. d.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons TravelingOtter, Moai at Rano Raraku - Easter Island (5956405378), CC BY 2.0]

Well. I think we can all agree that that's a pretty persuasive logical chain, can't we?

Okay, maybe not.

Let's start with the etymological funny business.  Unfortunately for L. M. Leteane, there is a critical rule in such discussions, which is, "Don't fuck with someone who is actually a linguist."  I have an M. A. in historical linguistics, so I have a fairly decent idea how language evolution works.  I also know you can't base language relationships on one or two words -- chance correspondences are all too common.  So just because roggo means "red" in Tswana (which I'm taking on faith because Leteane himself is from Botswana, and my expertise is not in African languages), and rouge is French for "red," doesn't mean a damn thing.  Rouge goes back to the Latin ruber, then to Ancient Greek ἐρυθρός, and finally to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root reudr.  Any resemblance to the Tswana word for "red" is coincidental.  And as for "Rapa Nui" meaning "black giant," that's ridiculous; Pascuanese is a Polynesian language, which is neither Indo-European nor Semitic, and has no underlying similarity to either French or Hebrew other than all of them being languages spoken by people somewhere.

And as far as "Easter Island" being named after Ishtar... well, let's just say it'll take me a while to recover from the headdesk I did when I read that.  Easter Island was so named by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, because he first spotted it on Easter Sunday in 1722.  He called it Paasch-Eyland, Dutch for "Easter Island;" its official name is Isla de Pascua, which means the same thing in Spanish.  Neither one sounds anything like "Ishtar."  (In fact, "Easter" isn't a cognate to "Ishtar," despite the fact that some anti-Christian types circulate that claim every spring, apparently to prove that the Christians are a bunch of thinly-disguised pagans.)

And as for the rest of it... well, it sounds like the plot of a hyper-convoluted science fiction story to me.  Gods globe-trotting all over the world, bringing along slave labor, and having major wars, and conveniently leaving behind no hard evidence whatsoever.

The thing I find maddening about all of this is that Leteane mixes some facts (his information about Tswana) with speculation (he says that the name of the tin ore cassiterite comes from the Kassites, which my etymological dictionary says is "possible," but gives two other equally plausible hypotheses) with outright falsehood (that Polynesian, Bantu, and Indo-European languages share lots of common roots) with wild fantasy (all of the stuff about the gods).  And people believe it.  His story had, last I checked, been tweeted and Facebook-liked dozens of times, and amongst the comments I saw was, "Brilliant piece of research connecting all the history you don't learn about in school!  Thank you for drawing together the pieces of the puzzle!"

So, anyway.  I suppose I shouldn't get so annoyed by all of this.  Actually, on the spectrum of woo-woo beliefs, this one is pretty harmless.  No one ever blew himself up in a crowded market because he thought that the Olmecs came from Botswana.  My frustration is that there are seemingly so many people who lack the ability to think critically -- to look at the facts of an argument, and how the evidence is laid out, and to see if the conclusion is justified.  The problem, of course, is that learning the principles of scientific induction is hard work.  Much easier, apparently, to blather on about feathered serpents and goddesses who are seriously into tin.

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I've been interested for a long while in creativity -- where it comes from, why different people choose different sorts of creative outlets, and where we find our inspiration.  Like a lot of people who are creative, I find my creative output -- and my confidence -- ebbs and flows.  I'll have periods where I'm writing every day and the ideas are coming hard and fast, and times when it seems like even opening up my work-in-progress is a depressing prospect.

Naturally, most of us would love to enhance the former and minimize the latter.  This is the topic of the wonderful book Think Like an Artist, by British author (and former director of the Tate Gallery) Will Gompertz.  He draws his examples mostly from the visual arts -- his main area of expertise -- but overtly states that the same principles of creativity apply equally well to musicians, writers, dancers, and all of the other kinds of creative humans out there. 

And he also makes a powerful point that all of us are creative humans, provided we can get out of our own way.  People who (for example) would love to be able to draw but say they can't do it, Gompertz claims, need not to change their goals but to change their approach.

It's an inspiring book, and one which I will certainly return to the next time I'm in one of those creative dry spells.  And I highly recommend it to all of you who aspire to express yourself creatively -- even if you feel like you don't know how.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Answers, ignorance, and mitochondrial DNA

Something I fight continuously, as a teacher, is the idea that the most important thing is THE ANSWER.

It's the fault of the way education is usually conducted, of course.  Whether because teachers were themselves taught that way, or because of expediency, THE ANSWER is always considered to be the critical thing.  It doesn't matter how you got there; process isn't the concern.  As long as you have THE ANSWER in the appropriate space, you get full credit.

The problem is, by the time students get to high school, I'm expecting that they'll be moving beyond that, and it's often a battle.  I've had more than one student say, "Just tell me what to write down," as if somehow that was going to engender understanding.  My frustration on this point is what resulted in the following actual conversation:

Student:  What do I write down for question #7?
Me:  Whatever you think the correct explanation is.
Student:  But what if my explanation isn't right?
Me:  Then I'll mark it wrong.
Student:  But I don't want to write down the wrong answer!
Me:  Then don't.

In my own defense, I wasn't simply trying to be snarky; it just gets tiring to know that my refrain of "I will not think for you" often falls on deaf ears.

I find myself wondering how deep this inclination goes, and if it's because as a culture, we're taught to expect that there always is a single correct answer.  The biblical maxim of "Ask and ye shall receive" is pretty deeply ingrained.  We're uncomfortable with not knowing.

We're even more uncomfortable where there may be no way to know.

I ran squarely into this with my genealogical pursuits a couple of days ago.  There's a pair of sisters who were amongst the founding mothers of Acadia (as people of French descent call Nova Scotia).  Their names are Catherine and Edmée LeJeune, and they show up in Acadia in the early 1600s.  (I actually descend, on my mother's side of the family, from both of them.)

No one knows where they were born, or who their parents were.  The early records simply aren't complete enough.  This has led to speculation that they may have been Natives -- there are numerous records of early French settlers marrying Native women.  Could it be that the LeJeune sisters were members of the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, or some other Native tribe of eastern Canada?

The whole thing was a moot point for decades; like I said, the documentation simply does not exist.  This didn't stop rampant speculation on both sides of the question.  Instead of just leaving their origin as "unknown," people seemed to need to fill in the blank with something.

Then, along came mitochondrial DNA analysis.  mtDNA is only inherited through the maternal line, so any matrilineal descendant of either sister should pinpoint their origin.  Matrilineal descendants (several of them) were traced, offered up blood samples, and the results all agreed; Catherine and Edmée were of the haplotype U6a7a, a signature that is characteristic of North African ancestry.

In my mind, this seemed to settle it.  The Moors made significant inroads into southwestern Europe in the Middle Ages, and there are huge numbers of people in Spain, Portugal, and southern France who have North African ancestry.  Catherine and Edmée most likely were born in France.  But that wasn't good enough; the people who had already decided that they were Native weren't content to let it rest.

Enter Dr. Howard Barraclough "Barry" Fell, professional zoologist and amateur archaeologist and linguist, who in 1976 published a book called America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World.  In it, using the cherry-picking lexicography favored by people who aren't actually trained in linguistic analysis, Fell came to the conclusion that the Mi'kmaq orthography, one of the only pre-Columbian North American writing systems, was descended from none other than...

... ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Now I hasten to state that most linguists consider Fell to be a well-meaning but misguided amateur.  (For a particularly insightful take-down of his conclusions, check out this site, courtesy of linguist and scholar Richard Flavin.)  But this hasn't stopped sites like "Mi'kmaq/Ancient Egyptian Connection" from surfacing, wherein we find that the ancient Egyptians made it not only to Nova Scotia, but all the way to Illinois and... Australia!

Now, I know the Egyptians were pretty cool.  But if you're gonna make a claim like that, I'm gonna need something more than a few chance correspondences between words and symbols before I buy in.

But the "have an answer at all costs" crowd wouldn't let it lie, especially once the Mormons got involved, and used Fell's so-called research to support their contention that the Native Americans were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

Why can't we just say "we don't know?"  Why can't we focus on the reality -- the Mi'kmaq and other Native groups made their way to North America at some unspecified time in the past, and (more specifically) Catherine and Edmée LeJeune had some North African ancestry somewhere -- and consider how awesome the process of knowing is?  We can actually use blood samples from distant descendants of long-dead individuals to determine the movements of groups of people thousands, or tens of thousands, of years ago.

Cool, no?

Not cool enough, apparently.  We need THE ANSWER.

Now, let me be clear on this: there's something to be said for having a correct picture of what's going on.  But when there's uncertainty, it's critical to be comfortable with a partial answer, and even more critical to understand the whole context of knowledge within which we are working.  In the long haul, I'm happier knowing about mtDNA and the migration of human groups than I would be just to have a final answer to fill in for my distant foremothers' birthplace.

But unfortunately, I appear to be in the minority.