Wanderlust

Maybe it's because I'm fundamentally a home body, but I find it really hard to understand what could have driven our distant ancestors to head out into uncharted territory -- no GPS to guide them, no guarantee of safety, no knowledge of what they might meet along the way.

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about the extraordinary island-hopping accomplished by the ancient Polynesians -- going from one tiny speck of land to another, crossing thousands of kilometers of trackless ocean in dugout canoes.  We don't know what motivated them, whether it was lack of resources on their home islands, being driven away by warfare, or simple curiosity.  But whatever it was, it took no small amount of skill, courage, and willingness to accept risk.

The wanderings of the ancestral Polynesians, though, are hardly the only example of ancient humans' capacity for launching out into the unknown.  Two papers this week look at other examples of our forebears' wanderlust -- still, of course, leaving unanswered the questions about why they felt impelled to leave home and safety for an uncertain destination.

The first, which appeared in PLOS-One, looks at the similarity of culture between Bronze-Age Denmark and southwestern Norway, and considers whether the inhabitants of Denmark took a longer (but, presumably, safer) seven-hundred-kilometer route, crossing the Strait of Kattegat into southern Sweden and then hugging the coast until they reached Norway, or the much shorter (but riskier) hundred-kilometer crossing over open ocean to go there directly.

While the direct route was more dangerous, it seems likely that's what they did.  If they'd skirted along the coastline, you'd expect there to be more similarity in archaeological sites along the way, in the seaside areas of southern Sweden.  There's not.  It appears that they really did launch off in paddle-driven boats across the stormy seas between Denmark and Norway, four thousand years ago.

"These new agent-based simulations, applied with boat performance data of a Scandinavian Bronze Age type boat," the authors write, "demonstrate regular open sea crossings of the Skagerrak, including some fifty kilometers of no visible land, likely commenced by 2300 B.C.E., as indicated by archaeological evidence."

Considering people twice as far back in time, a paper this week in Nature describes evidence that seafarers from what is now Italy crossed a hundred kilometers of ocean to reach the island of Malta.  A cave in Latnija, in the northern Mellieħa region of Malta, has bones of animals that show distinct signs of butchering and cooking -- and have been dated to 8,500 years ago.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Frank Vincentz, Malta - Mellieħa - Triq il-Latnija - Paradise Bay 05 ies, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"We found abundant evidence for a range of wild animals, including Red Deer, long thought to have gone extinct by this point in time," said Eleanor Scerri, of the University of Malta, who was the paper's lead author.  "They were hunting and cooking these deer alongside tortoises and birds, including some that were extremely large and extinct today...  The results add a thousand years to Maltese prehistory and force a re-evaluation of the seafaring abilities of Europe's last hunter-gatherers, as well as their connections and ecosystem impacts."

What always strikes me about this sort of thing is wondering not only what fueled their wanderlust, but how they even knew there was an island out there to head to.  I know that patterns of clouds can tell seafarers they're nearing land, but still -- to launch off into the open ocean, hoping for the best, and trusting that there's safe landing out there somewhere still seems to me to be somewhere between brave and utterly foolhardy.

I guess my ancestors were made of sterner stuff than me.  I'm okay with that.  Being a bit of a coward has its advantages.  As Steven Wright put it, "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."

So if y'all want to, you can take off in your dugout canoes for parts unknown, but I'm gonna stay right here where it's (relatively) safe.  I suppose it's a good thing our forebears had the courage they did, because it's how we got here.  And I hope they wouldn't be too embarrassed by my preference for sitting on my ass drinking coffee with cream and sugar rather than spending weeks at sea nibbling on dried meat and hardtack and hoping like hell those clouds over there mean there's dry land ahead.

Chacun à son goût, y'know?

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The man in the well

Some time around 1150 C.E. in the Faroe Islands, a comb-maker named Unås and his wife Gunnhild had a baby boy, whom they named Sverre.  Unås's brother Roe was the bishop of Streymoy, and once the boy was old enough Roe saw to it that Sverre was educated, intending that he would eventually be ordained as a priest.

However, Sverre had other ideas.  He had dreams that he was destined for greatness.  Then in 1175, when Sverre was about twenty-five, Gunnhild threw gasoline on the fire by telling him that his father wasn't actually the humble comb-maker Unås, but King Sigurd Munn of Norway, who had been killed by his brother Inge Haraldsson twenty years earlier, precipitating what would end up being a fifty-year civil war.

After finding out about his paternity, Sverre decided to head over to Norway and see what he could do to rectify the situation.

Historians differ on whether they accept the claim that Sverre was actually Sigurd's son.  The main source for this claim, Sverris Saga (thought to have been written by Karl Jónsson, Abbot of Þingeyraklaustur Monastery in Iceland), was certainly biased -- no aspersions meant toward the good abbot, but it was written under the direction and supervision of Sverre himself, so it's no surprise that in the saga the claim is treated as rock-solid fact.  And certainly, kings fathering children with mistresses isn't unusual.  But the whole thing definitely has overtones of mythology -- "the king's lost heir coming back to claim the throne" is a tale old as the hills.  (Interesting that most of the fictional ones, like Aragorn son of Arathorn and Taran the Wanderer, succeeded brilliantly, while the real-life ones, like Perkin Warbeck, Lambert Simnel, and Kaspar Hauser, almost always came to bad ends.)

Whether or not his claim was legitimate, Sverre certainly acted like he deserved the throne.  He landed in Norway in 1176, and predictably meeting with little support, allied himself with a rebel group called the Birkbeiners ("Birchlegs," so called because they were so poor they made themselves leggings out of birch bark).  And initially, that didn't go so well, either.  Sverre and the Birkbeiners were defeated in a series of battles, eventually whittling their numbers down to about seventy.  But in a turn of fate that is astonishing by any measure, in 1179 they beat the much larger forces of King Magnus V Erlingsson, seizing control of the entire district of Trøndelag.  

Magnus wouldn't give up, however, and certainly wouldn't accept Sverre as a co-regent. Sverre had to fight for another five years before fate once again intervened on his behalf.  After yet another battle between the Birkbeiners and the Heklungs (Magnus's supporters) led to an unexpected rout, the surviving Heklungs -- including Mangus himself -- attempted to flee on ships down the long, narrow Sognefjord.  The overloaded ships sank, drowning Magnus and the majority of his supporters, leaving Sverre the uncontested king of Norway.

A marble sculpture of Sverre Sigurdsson from Nidaros Cathedral (ca. 1200)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Sverre's reign, however, was never to see real peace.  There were conflicts with landholding nobles, conflicts with the church, uprisings from rival parties, and even (ironically) a pretender to the throne who claimed to be Magnus's long-lost son.  (The pretender, unsurprisingly, didn't last very long.)  It was during one of these fights, however, that an event occurred that is why the whole topic comes up today.

In 1197, Sverre's forces were trapped in Sverresborg Castle outside the city of Trondheim, and it wasn't looking good.  In a desperate attempt to end the siege and wipe out Sverre and the Birkbeiners once and for all, the besieging forces threw the dead body of one of the men killed in a skirmish into a well -- the main water source for the castle -- in the hopes that it would poison the water and either kill them outright or force them to give up.  In the end it did neither -- Sverre would live to fight on for another five years -- and the story would have seemed to be one of those odd historical filigrees that could as easily be fabricated as true.

Except that researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology believe they found the body.

The skeleton of a blond, blue-eyed man, approximately thirty years old at death, was found in a well near Sverresborg Castle that had been clogged with stones.  There were two deep cuts in his skull that are thought to be what caused his death.  From DNA extracted from a tooth, the scientists determined not only the bits about his appearance, but a surmise that he came from the province of Vest-Agder, in the very southernmost tip of Norway.

"This is the first time that a person described in these historical texts has actually been found," said Michael D. Martin, who co-authored the study.  "There are a lot of these medieval and ancient remains all around Europe, and they're increasingly being studied using genomic methods...  The important Norwegian Saint Olaf is thought to be buried somewhere in Trondheim Cathedral, so I think that if eventually his remains are uncovered, there could be some effort to describe him physically and trace his ancestry using genetic sequencing."

It's amazing that techniques of cutting-edge genetic analysis are being brought to bear on questions from history.  And in this case have corroborated a peculiar story from a saga long thought to be of questionable veracity -- giving us a lens into a turbulent, violent, and chaotic period of Scandinavian history.

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Grave conditions

When I retired in June of 2019, I made the big mistake of saying aloud, "Wow, I'm going to have so much free time now!"

Literally the week after my last day at work, we found out that one corner of our house foundation was sinking, and that if we didn't do something, the slab was going to crack, leading to the walls destabilizing.  Our house, basically, was sliding down the hill it was built on.

The upshot of it all was that we spent the next few months completely gutting our (formerly finished) downstairs so that foundation specialists could drill down, inside and outside, and install twenty-six hydraulic piers to prop the slab up and prevent further subsidence.  Pulling up the carpet and pulling down the wall coverings and ceiling uncovered a myriad other old-house problems, leading to a domino effect of increasingly costly repairs.  Almost a year later, we still haven't completed putting the downstairs back together, although I'm comforted by the fact that our house didn't fall down.

And at least we didn't find what a couple in Seivåg, Norway did when they pulled up the floor in their house to install insulation.  Mariann Kristiansen, whose great-grandfather built the house in 1914, was unaware that she'd been living on top of a Viking-era grave that archaeologists have dated to between 950 and 1050 C.E.

Amazingly enough, there were no ghosts involved.  I would have thought that a house built on a grave site would have been a perfect opportunity to bring out the ghosts, but no.  The whole thing, apparently, was handled completely pragmatically.

The grave came to light when Kristiansen found a bead of dark blue glass that at first she thought was the wheel of a toy car.  But when she poked around a little more and found an axe, she decided that her initial hypothesis wasn't correct.

It turns out that a layer of flat stones immediately beneath the house is probably the remains of a cairn built over a grave, although preliminary digging has yet to uncover any bones.  But the artifacts found are consistent with "grave goods" of the Viking era.

"I never heard of anything like that and I've been in business for nearly thirty years," said archaeologist Martinus Hauglid.  "They did a magnificent job, they reported it to use as soon as they got the suspicion that it actually was something old."

The grave site underneath the Kristiansens' house [Image courtesy of the Nordland City Council]

My first reaction was to wonder why other people had all the luck, since all we found when we ripped up the foundation was cracked plumbing and disgusting 1950s-era vinyl tile.  But a friend of mine pointed out that (1) living in upstate New York, it was unlikely that we'd find Viking graves anywhere nearby, and (2) it was probably better that we didn't find anything of the sort.  "This is going to be so expensive for that family, depending on the laws in Norway," she said.  "If you find bones here [in Canada], you’re on the hook for the cost of the archeologists, the exhumation, and reburial.  Could be 50k at least.  Not to mention the months of digging, your yard trashed, possibly your house.  A nightmare."

I hadn't even considered that downside.  I mean, we thought we had delays and setbacks in getting our house put back together; if we'd discovered some kind of valuable archaeological site underneath the floor, it's an open question as to whether we could even legally rebuild over the top of it.  At that point, the best option might be what Carol suggested, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, after finding out about the sinking-slab problem last June: "Hmm, let's see -- forty thousand dollars to prop up the foundation, or fifteen bucks for five gallons of gas and a box of matches.  Hard decision, right there."

I pointed out that twenty years in prison for arson was kind of a downside of the latter option, which she grudgingly admitted was a valid point.

I'm hoping that the laws in Norway support some kind of compensation for Kristiansen's find and the inconvenience thereof.  Archaeologist Hauglid gives me hope that'll happen.  "I guess, they will get some reward, that is normal in Norway, that people that find old artifacts get a reward from the state," he told reporters.

So I suppose I should be careful what I wish for.  I got enough of an object lesson in that by speculating about how bored I'd be once I retired.  At least we've now covered the floor back up, so anything down there is gonna stay buried.  Unless we're, like, sitting on top of a fault line or a volcanic vent or something.  Which, considering some of the other things that have gone wrong since we started this Adventure In Home Ownership, wouldn't be all that surprising.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one: acclaimed science writer Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way: A New Look at how Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think.

It's been known for some years that a lot of birds are a great deal more intelligent than we'd thought.  Crows and other corvids are capable of reasoning and problem-solving, and actually play, seemingly for no reason other than "it's fun."  Parrots are capable of learning language and simple categorization.  A group of birds called babblers understand reciprocity -- and females are attracted to males who share their food the most ostentatiously.

So "bird brain" should actually be a compliment.

Here, Ackerman looks at the hugely diverse world of birds and gives us fascinating information about all facets of their behavior -- not only the "positive" ones (to put an human-based judgment on it) but "negative" ones like deception, manipulating, and cheating.  The result is one of the best science books I've read in recent years, written in Ackerman's signature sparkling prose.  Birder or not, this is a must-read for anyone with more than a passing interest in biology or animal behavior.

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

Apocalypse whenever

I have an update for those of you who are worried about when the world is going to end, or civilization is going to fall, which honestly would happen anyhow if the world ended.

This update comes from sources that conveniently ignore the fact that previous predictions of the world's end have had a 100% failure rate.  Every time we're told that an asteroid is going to end it all, or the Rapture is going to happen, or the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons are going to run roughshod over the populace, what happens is...

... nothing.  Civilization, or what passes for it these days, just keeps bumbling along as usual.  There are no death comets, no killer plagues, no Second Comings of Deities.  All of which I find reassuring but at the same time vaguely disappointing, because I live in the middle of rural upstate New York and we could really use some excitement around here most days.

Of course, a batting average of zero isn't enough to discourage these folks.  This time it's gonna happen, cross our hearts and hope to die in horrible agony when the Earth explodes.

First, we have the Nibiru cadre, who have been predicting the arrival of Nibiru for decades, kind of like what happened in Waiting for Guffman but not nearly as funny.  This time, though, we can say for sure that Nibiru is approaching because there's going to be a "Blood Moon" (better known to those of us who aren't insane as a lunar eclipse).  Yes, I know that lunar eclipses happen every year, but this one is different.  Don't ask me how.

According to an article in Express, the fabled tenth planet is due to arrive any time now, and has been captured in a video.  Not a NASA video, mind you.  A video taken by an anonymous YouTube subscriber, which as we all know is a highly reliable source of scientific research.

"And now," writes the author of the article, Jon Austin, "conspiracy theorists have somehow tied it in with the infamous blood moon events of a year ago that appears [sic] to be happening again."

What?  Those events of last year wherein nothing happened?  Ah, yes, I remember thinking at the time, "Heaven help us all if this happens again!  Scariest non-events I've ever seen!"

According to this bizarre view of how the world in general, and astronomy in particular, works, the "blood moons" aren't caused by the Earth's shadow.  Nope.  The Nibiroonies have "now tried to tie together the two myths and even claim it is the shadow of Nibiru causing the blood moons."

Because it's not like if there was a planet near enough, and big enough, to cast a giant shadow over the moon, NASA would notice it, or anything.

Then we have the revelation that Obama and his evil henchmen are planning a scheme to destroy America and take down other major world governments along with it.  According to the site What Does It Mean?, the president and his collaborators have a Cunning Plan to unleash upon us, despite the fact that the guy only has five months left in office, so if he really has been intending to destroy the United States, he's gotten off to an awfully slow start.

But no, the article says, he's palling up with Hillary Clinton, who apparently rivals Obama himself for being the embodiment of pure evil.  And they've teamed up with the people who run Google for a conspiracy trifecta to accomplish the following:

1.) [D]isabling of advertisements on all websites critical of the Obama-Clinton regime, including the globally popular Antiwar.com, in order to destroy them.

2.) Deleting Donald Trump from the search list of candidates running for the US presidency. 

3.) Developing and employing a filter so that the name Donald Trump won’t even show up on anyone’s computer device or smart phone.

4.) Hiding in their search results information relating to Hillary Clinton’s health and the massive numbers of suspicions deaths associated with her.

5.) Being supported in their hiding Hillary Clinton health information by the New York Times, with one of their insiders admitting what they’re doing.

Myself, I would be thrilled if something would prevent my ever having to look at a photograph of Donald Trump again.  If that's what the conspiracy's about, I'm all for it.

And as evidence for all of this, they cite...

... InfoWars.  Yes, Alex Jones, who despite having a screw loose is still considered by some to have inside information about the plots that are running rampant in our government, but which never seem to accomplish a damn thing.

It's sort of like the "Obama's coming for your guns" thing you hear all the time from the far-right.  I mean, dude had eight years to take all our guns, and as a nation we're still as heavily armed as ever.  And the contentions that Obama's a radical Muslim.  Really?  He drinks beer, eats bacon, doesn't fast during Ramadan, and supports LGBT rights.  If the guy is a Muslim, he's the worst Muslim ever.

Last, we've got the weird coincidence of three separate lightning strikes that killed hundreds of reindeer (in Norway) and cattle (in the US), and which is said to be HAARP gearing up for a major strike on the populated places of the earth.  Add this to the fact that there's a hurricane in Florida as we speak, because that's not common or anything.  HAARP has done all this as a sort of test run, and next thing we know, there'll be earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and the works, and civilization will have no other choice besides giving up and collapsing.

What's funniest about all of this is that just last week, the University of Alaska - Fairbanks, which now owns HAARP, had an open house last week wherein they invited anyone with questions or suspicions to stop by for a tour of the place so they can see what it actually does, which is to study high-altitude atmospheric phenomena.  I coulda told them this strategy wouldn't work; if you demonstrate conclusively to the conspiracy theorists that HAARP was a harmless scientific study facility, they will either (1) tell you that the real HAARP had been moved elsewhere, or (2) that you are only saying this because you are under the influence of a mind-control beam, which is one of the things HAARP is supposedly able to do.  So you can't win.  These are people who think a lack of evidence is evidence.

Anyhow, there you have it.  Three ways in which we will almost certainly not be meeting the fall of civilization as we know it.  It's kind of anticlimactic, really.  We're moving into autumn, here in the northeast.  School's starting, the days are getting shorter, and we soon will be battening down the hatches for cold weather.  Myself, I think an apocalypse would be a nice change of pace.  I'm not in favor of wholesale destruction, mind you, but a minor catastrophe or two would go a long way toward alleviating the monotony.

Medium test

Think you can communicate with the spirits of the dead?

Well, you now have a chance to prove it.

Norwegian Rolf Erik Eikerno was diagnosed a couple of years ago with a terminal disease.  But instead of simply bemoaning his fate, Eikerno saw his illness as an opportunity.  He teamed up with the producers of the television program Folkeopplysningen ("The Public Enlightenment") to set up a puzzle for any would-be mediums.

Eikerno wrote a message on a sheet of paper, sealed the paper in an envelope, and locked the envelope in a vault.  Only the show's producers have the combination to the lock.  No one but Eikerno knows what is written on the paper, nor even whether it was written in Norwegian or English, a language in which he was fluent.

Shortly before his death, Eikerno made a public statement that if he was approached by anyone in the afterlife, he'd be happy to give them detailed information about what was in the note.  The program's staff have put out the following all-call:

Can you make contact with him?  Do you know someone who may be able to do so? 

Fill out the form further down in the article if you think you know what Rolf Erik wrote before he died. 

IMPORTANT: It is possible to answer only once.  The deadline is September 25th.
This is an experiment conducted by the TV-program "Folkeopplysningen".  Will anyone make contact?  The answer will be revealed in the ultimate episode of this years season, broadcast on Wednesday October 5th.

If you think you might know what Eikerno wrote, you can provide your answer at the link I posted above.

What's interesting about all of this is that it's been tried before.  Harry Houdini left a message with his wife, who offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could contact Houdini's spirit and tell her what the message was.  She even held a séance every Halloween -- fittingly, the anniversary of Houdini's death -- for ten years, hoping for some contact from her husband's spirit.  Nothing happened, and no one came forward with the correct message, although several tried unsuccessfully.  After ten years, his widow withdrew the offer and stopped having séances, reasoning that ten years was an adequate time for a ghost to make arrangements to contact her.  If she hadn't heard from him by then, she figured, she wasn't going to.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Be that as it may, Folkeopplysningen is going about things the right way.  Here's their description of the program's goals:

Every day we are bombarded with information and claims about what is good for us, what we should be careful about, and what choices we should make to live healthy, good and safe lives. 

"Folkeopplysningen" is a TV-program that investigates such claims.  We pick up subjects where there is a discrepancy between what people think they know, what commercial providers claim, and what science is telling us.  While we in the two first seasons scrutinized different kinds of alternative treatments and health related issues, we have been given free hands this year to look at any possible subject. 

We investigate everything, from finance to dieting, motivation business, cannabis, genetically modified food, ecological food and death.

So sort of a Norwegian version of Mythbusters, without the explosions.

In any case, it'll be interesting to see what turns up, although I'm perhaps to be excused if I'm doubtful anyone will come up with the right answer.  I've always said that my mind is open about an afterlife -- I have no real evidence one way or the other, although I expect that like everyone I'll get some eventually.  On the other hand, the idea that if there's an afterlife, it leaves behind remnant spirits who then can interact with humans -- I'm afraid the evidence is very much against.  If there are any well documented cases of spirit survival that can't be explained either as hoaxes or human gullibility and wishful thinking, I haven't heard about them.

I also doubt if any of the well-known (and well-paid) mediums -- people like Theresa Caputo, John Edward, Sally Morgan, and Sylvia Browne -- will volunteer to try the test out.  They tend not to like those nasty things called "scientifically controlled conditions."  I wonder why that is?

But if you disagree with me, here's your chance to prove me wrong.  As always, evidence and logic are the watchwords around here.