Old New England

What do you know about the founding of New England?

No, not that New England, the other one.  Although there are some significant parallels, notably a king in a completely different country granting settlers land despite the fact that he didn't own it and it inconveniently happened to be already occupied by someone else.  (Hardly the only time this has happened, of course.  See the history of South and Central America, Indonesia, India, and pretty much the entire continent of Africa for other notable examples.)

This particular New England is on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea, in what is now Ukraine and Russia.  According to three medieval manuscripts -- the French Chronicon Universale Anonymi Laudunensis, Orderic Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History, and the Icelandic Játvarðar Saga -- it was founded in the late eleventh century by a group of pissed-off Anglo-Saxon noblemen who, after the Norman Invasions of 1066, didn't like that the country had been taken over by a bunch of Frenchmen, so decided to up stakes and leave.  There's some indication that they were led by prominent English thegn Siward Barn, who had been imprisoned by William the Conqueror, and after being released in 1087 disappears from the records entirely.

This, apparently, may have been because he went to Constantinople.

The English group was mostly made up of powerful and wealthy landowners; after the Conquest, the peasant class pretty much went on with their miserable lives just as before, only with new kings and masters.  Most of them probably reacted to William's accession to the throne the same way these guys did:

"King of the who?"

In any case, Siward and his disaffected noblemen decided to take off for greener pastures (figuratively, not literally, as it turned out) and sailed to the Mediterranean, sacking the city of Ceuta near the Straits of Gibraltar, and pillaging and plundering their way from Mallorca to Menorca to Sicily (which at that point was also being run by the Normans).

It was in Sicily where they found out that Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenos was in trouble from Muslim invaders (and also from the goddamn Normans, who just would not mind their own business), so they decided to head over to Constantinople and give him a hand.  The battle went poorly for the Muslims (ultimately they'd come back and pretty much take over the place, but this was a significant setback, at least for the time being); the Normans were routed completely, and limped back to Sicily to regroup and figure out who they would annoy next.  Alexius was grateful enough to tell the English they could stay in Constantinople permanently if they wanted.  Siward said thanks but no thanks -- figuring, probably correctly, that he'd remain in a subservient position if they stayed there, and after all that was why they'd left England in the first place -- and asked Alexius if he had any other deals to offer.

Alexius said "Sure do," and described a region on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea that Siward and his friends could have.  This was ignoring the aforementioned minor details that (1) Alexius didn't own the land in question, and (2) someone else did.  So it was no skin off his nose either way.  But Siward thought that sounded just ducky, and after all they'd already proven to everyone they could pillage with the best of 'em, so they took off for the spot in question, wiped out the people who lived there, and settled down.

They called the spot "New England."  They named some towns they founded "London," "York," and "Sussex," amongst others named after "other great towns in England."  Eventually they intermarried with the local population (what was left of it), and were assimilated into the Byzantine, and ultimately the Russian, Empires.

The most reliable of the three sources, Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History, spells out in detail how it all went down:

[They] went into voluntary exile so that they might either find in banishment freedom from the power of the Normans or secure foreign help and come back and fight a war of vengeance.  Some of them who were still in the flower of their youth travelled into remote lands and bravely offered their arms to Alexius, emperor of Constantinople, a man of great wisdom and nobility...  This is the reason for the exodus of the English Saxons to Ionia; the emigrants and their heirs faithfully served the holy empire, and are still honored among the Greeks by the Emperor, nobility, and people alike.

It's a pretty fantastic story, but is it true?

As amazing as it sounds, it appears to be.  It's attested in three unrelated sources -- details differ some, but they all substantially agree on the main points.  Further, linguist Ottar Grønvik found distinctive West Germanic -- i.e., Anglo-Saxon -- words, morphology, and syntax in Crimean Gothic, a Germanic language spoken in the region until the sixteenth century.  Most strikingly, there are still place names on the northeastern coast of the Black Sea that seem to come from this settlement; notably a Londina River and a town named Susacho (from "Sussex" -- later renamed Novorossiysk by the Russians).

None of which is proof, of course.  My training as a linguist impressed upon me the danger of taking chance sound or spelling correspondences as hard evidence of an etymological common root.  But I have to admit that the case still seems pretty strong to me.

So there you have it; a New England that pre-dated the more famous one by five centuries.  It'd be interesting to do some DNA testing of the people who live there now and see if there are any discernible traces of English ancestry.  Not that it's likely to happen soon; the coast of the Black Sea is once again a pretty dangerous place to wander around.  But curious to think that almost a thousand years ago, some Anglo-Saxon long-distance soldiers-for-hire may have settled there, never to see Merrie Old England again.

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Drinking scepters

I mean no disrespect to archaeologists, but there's a fundamental difficulty with trying to understand a vanished culture when all you have is fragmentary remains; too often, there's just insufficient evidence to be certain if you're doing more than guessing.

This was one of the main points of the classic essay "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," by Horace Miner, which appeared in American Anthropologist in 1956.  Miner was riffing on the determination of anthropologists to analyze everything as if it were part of some kind of tribal religious artifact, so applied those same biases to things commonly found in American bathrooms -- mirrors, sinks, bottles of shampoo, combs and brushes, and so on.  The essay is hilarious but at the same time neatly poniards the tendency to interpret, and very likely misinterpret, the significance of objects left behind by cultures we know little about.

The topic comes up because of a paper out of Cambridge University that appeared in Antiquity last week.  It concerned a set of gold and silver tubes that had been dug up at the Maikop kurgan (grave mound), in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, way back in 1897.  The tubes were decorated with intricate carvings; several had ornaments shaped like bulls or oxen. 

Details of some of the Maikop tubes

The beauty of the decoration, and the fact that they were fashioned from precious metals, led to their being called "scepters."  This automatically conjured up images of use as symbols of authority by royalty, or instruments for invoking spirits (think "magic wands") by priests.  Some, more prosaically, thought they might form the struts supporting a canopy, once again for someone of high prestige.

Over a century later, the artifacts were re-examined, including a microscopic analysis of residue found inside the tubes.  This residue had a couple of odd components; grains of barley starch and cereal phytoliths (mineral crystals found inside plant seeds).  The interior of the end of the tube was shaped in such a way that it would have accommodated a conical piece of plant stem, particularly a piece of cut reed (Phragmites) that could have acted as a filter.  The conclusion?

The researchers believe that the "scepters" were actually straws for drinking beer.

Now, in favor of their use by (or in honor of) a prestigious person, there are admittedly the facts that (1) the straws were made of gold and silver, and (2) they ended up in the grave at Maikop.  The surmise is that they were probably made for, and used at, the funeral of the person buried in the kurgan, and the beer drinking wasn't just to get a buzz, but was part of the ritual.  But we're not talking insignificant amounts, here.  The authors write:

[A] single, early second-millennium BC burial in Tell Bagüz near Mari in eastern Syria, containing eight bronze tip-strainers, appears to support our hypothesis.  The set of eight drinking tubes in the Maikop tomb may therefore represent the feasting equipment for eight individuals, who could have sat to drink beer from the single, large jar found in the tomb.  The volume of this vessel (32 litres) suggests that each participant's share would be about four litres (or seven pints) per person.

Okay, I'm admittedly a lightweight -- two pints is my limit -- but seven?  Even considering that it's likely our modern brewing techniques result in a beer with higher alcohol content, that is a lot of beer to drink at one go.  I can see the funeral going as follows:

Priest:  Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to pay our respects to our departed brother... um... hang on.  *runs outside to take a piss*  *returns*  Okay, where was I?  Oh, yeah... our departed brother, who left this life only a day ago...

Participant 1:  Hold on a second.  *runs outside to take a piss*  *returns*  Thanks, do go on.

Priest:  ... only a day ago, and was sadly gathered unto the arms of...

Participant 2:  Sorry.  *runs outside to take a piss*  *returns*  All right, what were you saying?

Priest (annoyed):  Anyone else, before I go on?

*five more people run outside to take a piss*

Be that as it may, the current analysis is pretty interesting, and it sounds like their hypothesis is supported by some decent evidence, but I do still think you have to be cautious not to over-conclude.  Trying to piece together a culture based on (extremely) fragmentary evidence is a sketchy enterprise.  Once again, I'm not meaning to diss the archaeologists, here; they do fantastic, and fascinating, work, and it's better to at least have a guess about the purpose of an artifact than simply to shrug our shoulders.

But it always makes me think about what archaeologists five thousand years from now will make of the artifacts left behind by us.  Think about it; trying to infer modern culture from the cover of a barbecue grill, a car tire, a piece of a mug saying "I 💙Cancun," a bird feeder, and a flip-flop.  Considering how far off the mark you could go with those makes misinterpreting beer straws as royal scepters seem like kind of a near miss.

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It's kind of sad that there are so many math-phobes in the world, because at its basis, there is something compelling and fascinating about the world of numbers.  Humans have been driven to quantify things for millennia -- probably beginning with the understandable desire to count goods and belongings -- but it very quickly became a source of curiosity to find out why numbers work as they do.

The history of mathematics and its impact on humanity is the subject of the brilliant book The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization by Michael Brooks.  In it he looks at how our ancestors' discovery of how to measure and enumerate the world grew into a field of study that unlocked hidden realms of science -- leading Galileo to comment, with some awe, that "Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe."  Brooks's deft handling of this difficult and intimidating subject makes it uniquely accessible to the layperson -- so don't let your past experiences in math class dissuade you from reading this wonderful and eye-opening book.

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Creatures from the permafrost

In the episode of The X Files called "Ice," some geophysicists working in northern Alaska bring up a 250,000 year old ice core from what is thought to be a buried meteor crater.  Of course, being The X Files, the ice core contains frozen (but not dead) organisms that are pathogenic to humans.  Like the rabies virus, these pathogens make you violent, so that you'll injure and then infect other hosts; unlike the rabies virus, these are macroscopic, and in fact can be seen moving under the skin of infected individuals.

Mulder and Scully barely escape with their lives, but not before death and destruction is wrought amongst the hapless geophysicists, only one of whom survives.  

To say that show didn't specialize in cheerful endings is a vast understatement.

The reason this rather horrifying episode came to mind is a discovery announced last week by some Russian scientists of organisms brought up from 24,000 year old Siberian permafrost.  To put this into perspective, when these organisms were buried, there were still woolly rhinos, mammoths, and cave bears stalking around the place.  And when the unearthed animals were warmed back up, they cheerfully came back to life and began to reproduce.

Well, maybe not "cheerfully."  It's hard to tell, because these animals are bdelloid rotifers, which are known for having a fairly poor repertoire of facial expressions.  Plus, they reproduce parthenogenetically, meaning that the species is all female, and they produce offspring without having sex.

So there goes another reason they'd be cheerful about the whole thing.

A bdelloid rotifer [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Damián Zanetta]

As amazing as it may seem, rotifers are actually true animals, despite their small size.  They have eyespots, a nervous system, a brain (albeit a tiny one), and a complete digestive tract.  Plus, they're right up there with tardigrades for indestructibility.  There are modern bdelloids, and one of the things the scientists want to do is to compare the genomes of the current ones with the ones that were resurrected from the permafrost.  Because they're parthenogenetic, their genomes should only vary because of mutations -- the advantage of sex is that it scrambles the genes every generation, producing greater variation in the population.

Also, it's kind of fun, but that probably is not as significant evolutionarily.

As far as Life Following Art, and the scientists digging around in Siberia releasing some horrific pathogen, I probably should cool my jets.  "The most spectacular implication of the research was that there may be all sorts of animals frozen in the permafrost that could awake as global warming melts the permafrost," said Matthew Cobb, professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, who was not involved in the research.  "[This] doesn’t mean that terrifying things are going to come out and eat us, but it gives scientists the possibility of studying how the rotifer has adapted to resist the bad effects of freezing, and… [the] opportunity to explore the difference between existing species and their predecessors."

But of course, that's what he would say.  Right before we all end up with worms squiggling around under our skin and making us violently insane.

So that's our fascinating but kind of scary scientific discovery for today.  A critter who can go into stasis for 24,000 years, frozen solid, without food, and come back to life as if nothing had happened.  It brings to mind cryogenic stasis of humans -- a staple of space-travel science fiction -- I wonder what we might learn about how bdelloid rotifers can accomplish such an amazing feat of survival.  And it does make me wonder what else is down there, waiting to be brought back to life.  Given the rate the world is warming, and how fast the permafrost is melting, we may find that out all too soon.

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I'm in awe of people who are true masters of their craft.  My son is a professional glassblower, making precision scientific equipment, and watching him do what he does has always seemed to me to be a little like watching a magic show.  On a (much) lower level of skill, I'm an amateur potter, and have a great time exploring different kinds of clays, pigments, stains, and glazes used in making functional pottery.

What amazes me, though, is that crafts like these aren't new.  Glassblowing, pottery-making, blacksmithing, and other such endeavors date back to long before we knew anything about the underlying chemistry and physics; the techniques were developed by a long history of trial and error.

This is the subject of Anna Ploszajski's new book Handmade: A Scientist's Search for Meaning Through Making, in which she visits some of the finest craftspeople in the world -- and looks at what each is doing through the lenses of history and science.  It's a fascinating inquiry into the drive to create, and how we've learned to manipulate the materials around us into tools, technology, and fine art.

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

The horse warriors

I'm always drawn to a historical mystery.

The difficulty, of course, is given that a huge amount of our history has either highly unreliable records or else no records at all, a lot of mysteries will never get resolved satisfactorily.  Two examples I read about recently which are as fascinating as they are frustrating are the true identity of Jack the Ripper, and the fate of the "Princes in the Tower" -- the two young sons of English King Edward IV, who disappeared in around 1483 and were probably murdered.  

As a quick aside, it bears mention that in the latter case the alleged culprit, King Richard III, was not the horrific, amoral villain you might think, if your only source is the play by Shakespeare.  He was actually competent and not a selfish monster, nor was he a hunchback; the Shakespearean smear job makes for great theater, and appeased the anti-Yorkist monarchy of the time, but has unfairly tarred a man who -- if Henry Tudor hadn't decided to swipe the throne -- probably would have been considered a pretty good leader.  He may still have had the princes killed, though; such behavior by a king anxious to eliminate rivals and put his own claim to the throne beyond question was not at all uncommon at the time.  But Shakespeare having Queen Margaret call him a "deformed, bunch-backed toad" seems a little excessive.

Sometimes there's an entire ethnic group that is mysterious, again usually because we have mostly archaeological evidence to go by, supplemented by dubiously accurate accounts written down by other (often hostile) cultures.  In fact, the whole reason why the subject of historical mysteries comes up is because of a paper I read a couple of days ago about the Scythians, the central Asian "horse warriors" who bumped up against the cultures their territory bordered -- principally Greece, Rome, China, and Persia -- and whose accounts form the basis of our knowledge of who they were.

The Golden Stag of Kostromskaya, one of the most famous Scythian artifacts (ca. 7th century B.C.E.) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joanbanjo, Placa en forma de cérvol tombat, trobada al túmul de Kostromskoy a Kuban, segle VII aC, CC BY-SA 3.0]

In "Ancient Genomic Time Transect from the Central Asian Steppe Unravels the History of the Scythians," which appeared last week in Science Advances and was authored by a huge team led by Guido Alberto Gnecchi-Ruscone of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, we read about a genomic study of the remains of over a hundred individuals from Scythian burial sites, and find out that they were hardly a single unified ethnic group -- their genomes show a significant diversity and represent multiple origins.  So the Scythians seem more like a loose confederation of relatively unrelated people than the single unified, monolithic culture of fierce nomads depicted in the writings of their rivals.

The authors write:

The Scythians were a multitude of horse-warrior nomad cultures dwelling in the Eurasian steppe during the first millennium BCE.  Because of the lack of first-hand written records, little is known about the origins and relations among the different cultures.  To address these questions, we produced genome-wide data for 111 ancient individuals retrieved from 39 archaeological sites from the first millennia BCE and CE across the Central Asian Steppe.  We uncovered major admixture events in the Late Bronze Age forming the genetic substratum for two main Iron Age gene-pools emerging around the Altai and the Urals respectively.  Their demise was mirrored by new genetic turnovers, linked to the spread of the eastern nomad empires in the first centuries CE.

 If that's not intriguing enough, last week there was also new information uncovered about an artifact from the same place but a lot earlier, the "Shigir idol," which was uncovered from a peat bog in the Ural Mountains in 1890.  Its age is apparently greater than scientists have thought -- the new study suggests it's about 12,500 years old, making it the oldest wooden representation of a human figure known.

The Shigir idol [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Владислав Фальшивомонетчик, Большой шигирский идол, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia," said study lead author Thomas Terberger, of the University of Göttingen, in an interview in the New York Times.  "The landscape changed, and the art—figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock—did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered."

What it brings home to me is the humbling thought of how little we actually know of our own history.  For every mystery we know about -- like Jack the Ripper and the Princes in the Tower we began with -- there are probably thousands of other equally fascinating events we don't have any way of knowing about.  The vast majority of humans died without leaving any extant traces, and since human remains and biodegradable artifacts (like the Shigir idol) only survive under specific (and uncommon) conditions, the vast majority of those are gone beyond recall, too.  When we luck out and find tangible evidence, like the Scythian burials, we can sometimes glean further information about a culture we knew little about.  The unfortunate but tantalizing truth, though, is that most of our own history is both unknown and unknowable.

Which for me makes it even more appealing, although inevitably, as frustrating as it is fascinating.

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The sad truth of our history is that science and scientific research has until very recently been considered the exclusive province of men.  The exclusion of women committed the double injury of preventing curious, talented, brilliant women from pursuing their deepest interests, and robbing society of half of the gains of knowledge we might otherwise have seen.

To be sure, a small number of women made it past the obstacles men set in their way, and braved the scorn generated by their infiltration into what was then a masculine world.  A rare few -- Marie Curie, Barbara McClintock, Mary Anning, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind -- actually succeeded so well that they became widely known even outside of their fields.  But hundreds of others remained in obscurity, or were so discouraged by the difficulties that they gave up entirely.

It's both heartening and profoundly infuriating to read about the women scientists who worked against the bigoted, white-male-only mentality; heartening because it's always cheering to see someone achieve well-deserved success, and infuriating because the reason their accomplishments stand out is because of impediments put in their way by pure chauvinistic bigotry.  So if you want to experience both of these, and read a story of a group of women who in the early twentieth century revolutionized the field of astronomy despite having to fight for every opportunity they got, read Dava Sobel's amazing book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.

In it, we get to know such brilliant scientists as Willamina Fleming -- a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid, but who after watching the male astronomers at work commented that she could do what they did better and faster, and so... she did.  Cecilia Payne, the first ever female professor of astronomy at Harvard University.  Annie Jump Cannon, who not only had her gender as an unfair obstacle to her dreams, but had to overcome the difficulties of being profoundly deaf.

Their success story is a tribute to their perseverance, brainpower, and -- most importantly -- their loving support of each other in fighting a monolithic male edifice that back then was even more firmly entrenched than it is now.  Their names should be more widely known, as should their stories.  In Sobel's able hands, their characters leap off the page -- and tell you a tale you'll never forget.

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

A miscalculation of scale

In the first pages of Stephen King's book The Tommyknockers, a woman out walking her dog in rural Maine stubs her toe on an object protruding from the ground, and when she kneels down to see what it is, she sees that it is a curved bit of metal that can't be pried loose.  It seems to extend indefinitely as she digs away the loose soil around it.

It turns out to be [spoiler alert] the upper edge of an enormous spaceship that crash landed on Earth millions of years ago, embedding itself nose-downward, and eventually being buried by geological processes until only a little bit of it was above ground.

Kind of an interesting mental picture, isn't it?  A spaceship collides with Earth, only to be rediscovered by archaeologists or paleontologists (or random people walking their dogs) ages later.  It does, however, bring to mind Neil deGrasse Tyson's comment about the Roswell incident: "A super-intelligent alien species knows how to cross the galaxy, but then they can't even land the damn spaceship?  If they're that incompetent, maybe they should just go home."

I bring all this up because of a discovery in Russia I found about because of a loyal reader.  Some coal miners, working at a mine in the Kuznetsk Basin in Siberia, unearthed a strange object that they claim is an extraterrestrial spacecraft.  Boris Glazkov, who found the object, said, "have to say it wasn't hard to see as it was really distinctive and large.  I've never seen anything like this object, which is obviously not natural, out here in the middle of nowhere before.  It is a real mystery."

The Kuzbassrazrezugol Mining Company, Glazkov's employer, confirmed discovery of the object, saying it was discovered at a depth of forty meters.  And everyone associated with the find is in agreement; what we have here is a crashed flying saucer.

So without further ado, let's take a look:

Pretty strange, eh? You can see why I thought of The Tommyknockers.  Imagine this thing making a fiery plunge through the atmosphere, carrying its panicked alien crew hurtling toward the Earth, then burying itself deep in the ground, killing all that were aboard.

But then the object's discoverers provided a second photograph, one that gave us perhaps a little more information than they intended:

Interesting how big it looks when you have no way of knowing how big it actually is.

And this reminded me of a second book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by the brilliant Douglas Adams.  In particular, I recalled a passage about a pair of alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvuntt, that wanted to launch an attack on Earth:

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy... 

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

So the miners who discovered this thing must believe that alien races are really tiny, if that's their spaceship.  Makes you wonder what we've been so afraid of, all this time.  If the aliens show up, waving around their itty-bitty laser pistols, we could just step on 'em.

Or, failing that, hire a small dog.

And of course, there's a completely natural explanation for this thing.  It's what's called a "concretion" -- a symmetrical glob of sedimentary deposits that have become cemented together.   They can look pretty peculiar:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hannes Grobe/AWI, Concretion-PS2119 hg, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But that doesn't mean they're evidence of aliens.

Also, if this was a "flying saucer," wouldn't it be made out of something other than rock?  But maybe this was a Stone Age spaceship.  Maybe instead of laser pistols, the tiny aliens inside brandished clubs and flint knives.

Of course, we could still step on 'em.

So that's our latest non-evidence for aliens out of Siberia.  Kind of a pity, really.  It would have been cool if it had been real.  However, I'd prefer it if such a discovery wasn't followed by what happened in The Tommyknockers.  Without giving away any more of the plot, let me remind you that it's a Stephen King novel.  Suffice it to say that Bad Shit Happens.  So maybe we should all be glad that what the Russian coal miners discovered was just a big round rock.

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Richard Dawkins is a name that often sets people's teeth on edge.  However, the combative evolutionary biologist, whose no-holds-barred approach to young-Earth creationists has given him a well-deserved reputation for being unequivocally devoted to evidence-based science and an almost-as-well-deserved reputation for being hostile to religion in general, has written a number of books that are must-reads for anyone interested in the history of life on Earth -- The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, Climbing Mount Improbable, and (most of all) The Ancestor's Tale.

I recently read a series of essays by Dawkins, collectively called A Devil's Chaplain, and it's well worth checking out, whatever you think of the author's forthrightness.  From the title, I expected a bunch of anti-religious screeds, and I was pleased to see that they were more about science and education, and written in Dawkins's signature lucid, readable style.  They're all good, but a few are sheer brilliance -- his piece, "The Joy of Living Dangerously," about the right way to approach teaching, should be required reading in every teacher-education program in the world, and "The Information Challenge" is an eloquent answer to one of the most persistent claims of creationists and intelligent-design advocates -- that there's no way to "generate new information" in a genome, and thus no way organisms can evolve from less complex forms.

It's an engaging read, and I recommend it even if you don't necessarily agree with Dawkins all the time.  He'll challenge your notions of how science works, and best of all -- he'll make you think.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

Turned to stone

Let me say up front, both for my skeptical and not-so-skeptical readers, that I'm not saying I believe the account I'm about to tell you.  I'd need way more hard evidence even to consider the possibility of whether it's true (the ECREE principle in action -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence), although it definitely makes a bizarre story, and opens up the question of what possible motive the major players would have to lie.

The incident in question happened in 1993 in Russia.  Here's the abbreviated version of it, but you can read more about it on the original report or at a (quite sensationalized) account at the site UFO International Project.

A troop of soldiers were out on routine training maneuvers when "a quite low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer" flew over.  One of the soldiers panicked and shot at it with a hand-held surface-to-air missile, and the spaceship slammed to the ground nearby.  As the soldiers approached the wreck, a gap opened in the side, and five humanoid aliens came out.

So far, not so different from a lot of accounts of close encounters of the third kind.  But here's what happened next:

It is stated in the testimonies of the two soldiers who remained alive that, after freeing themselves from the debris, the aliens came together and "merged into a single object that had a spherical shape."  That object began to buzz and hiss sharply, and then became brilliant white.  In a few seconds, the spheres [sic] grew much bigger and exploded by flaring up with an extremely bright light.  At that instant, 23 soldiers who had watched the phenomenon turned into... stone poles.  Only two soldiers who had stood in the shade and were less exposed to the luminous explosion survived.  

The remains of the "petrified soldiers" were transferred to a government lab near Moscow.  The CIA got wind of the event -- the report doesn't say how -- and called it "extremely menacing... if true."  But if you looked at the original report, you may have noticed that the only media outlet that reported on it when it happened, was...

... the Weekly World News.

Which, by the way, they call "authoritative."

Yup, the Weekly World News, that venerable purveyor of such believable stories as "Kim Kardashian Pregnant With Bigfoot's Love Child."  (Okay, I made that title up, but I've seen ones that bad and worse.)  So immediately I saw that, I went into eyeroll mode.

On the other hand, don't forget what happened to Lot's wife.  (Statue by sculptor Hamo Thornycroft, 1878) [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hamo Thornycroft (1850-1925), Hamo Thornycroft-Lot's Wife, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Equally eyeroll-worthy was the last comment in the UFO International Project website, which wondered if the Chinese terracotta army was also made of people who were petrified by aliens.  Which, even if you buy the Russian story whole-cloth, is idiotic.  The terracotta army is, unsurprisingly, made of terracotta, which is a low-fired ceramic clay.  The statues were also made from molds (which they've found examples of), in several pieces, and put together afterwards.  They were painted with colored lacquer, remnants of which are still on some of them.

None of which you'd expect if these were the remains of people flash-petrified by aliens.

Leaving me wondering why I'm even wasting my time replying to that bit.  But as a side note to whoever wrote the UIP piece; if you're making a wild claim, it does not help your cause to support it with an even wilder one.  If you say you've rid your house of evil spirits by waving around quartz crystals, your credibility is not enhanced by then claiming you'd also accomplished the same thing with a salami.

But despite all that, it's still a weird story, because the report is actually a CIA document, released as part of the government's declassification (and FOIA).  So if the Russian account is a hoax (probable), and it got reported to the CIA as true by some external source that also leaked the story to the Weekly World News (really probable), why did the CIA even give it this kind of undeserved credibility?

From what I've read, the CIA pretty much has to record every claim reported to them, reasonable or not, but it still strikes me as odd and extremely specific.  Clearly the claim didn't originate with the Weekly World News; the CIA report states that the information (and photographs, not included in the FOIA release) were directly from a KGB inquiry.

So while (as I said) I still think the great likelihood is that it's a hoax or fabrication, it's kind of peculiar one.  If there are any readers who have greater knowledge of government document policy than I have (kind of a low bar, honestly), let me know what you think in the comments.

In any case, the take-home message is, if you see a low-flying spacecraft, don't shoot it down with a surface-to-air missile unless you fancy being turned into a large rock.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Dyatlov revisited

Seven years ago, I wrote a post here at Skeptophilia about one of the most enduring mysteries of the twentieth century -- the deaths of nine hikers in the Ural Mountains in 1959, at a spot that later was named after the leader of the nine -- Igor Dyatlov.

The "Dyatlov Pass Incident" has all the hallmarks of an episode of The X Files.  The nine hikers set out in late January, almost exactly sixty years ago, with no inkling of what would happen.  When the group still hadn't showed up by the end of February, a good two weeks after their projected return date, a rescue team was sent out.

What they found is nothing short of extraordinary.  The members of the hiking group showed a variety of horrifying injuries, and a few had what looked like radiation burns.  More than one had removed most of their clothing -- and then frozen to death.  The tent they'd slept in was slit open, as if they were so desperate to get out they didn't even have time to unzip the flap.  (There are more details on my original post, if you're curious.)

The upshot of it all is that it's never been definitively established what exactly happened.  The more prosaic explanations, for example that the hikers stumbled onto a Cold War Russian weapons test, have been categorically denied by the Russian government.  (At which point the conspiracy theorists waggle their eyebrows significantly and say, "Of course they denied it.")  The more out-there explanations include an attack from the Ural version of the Abominable Snowman and/or aliens.

The reason this all comes up is not just because just last week we passed the sixtieth anniversary of the Dyatlov team's departure, but because of a surprise announcement by the Russian government that they're reopening an investigation into the incident.  Aleksandr Kurennoy, the official spokesperson of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, released a statement on the Efir Internet channel regarding the resumption of the case.  "Our goal is to establish which of the 75 existing theories could be confirmed by reliable evidence," Kurennoy said.  "Between March 10-20, employees of the Sverdlovsk Region Prosecutor's Office will fly to the site of the incident together with geodesy experts and employees of the Emergencies Ministry.  The procedural deadlines have expired for all the other competent bodies, but this is not the case with prosecution agencies.  Apart from that, a new law has come into force that authorizes the prosecution to commission special expert evaluations as part of a probe."

I'm a little surprised about this in a couple of respects.  For one thing, the Russian government is not exactly well known for transparency, and it's odd that they want an investigation into a mystery where one of the possible solutions is shady dealings by the Russian government itself.  It's entirely possible, of course, that they'll release a report that makes them look good regardless what they find, although it does bring up the question of why they'd stir things up in the first place.  Seems like letting sleeping dogs lie would be the more prudent course.

Second, though, is what on Earth they could hope to find now, sixty years after the incident occurred.  There wasn't that much evidence to start with; in fact, the bodies of four of the nine were only recovered during the spring thaw when May came.  Heading out into a snow-covered wilderness, six decades after the fact, is unlikely to uncover anything new one way or the other.

So the whole thing is more than a little puzzling.  As much as I'd like to know what happened at Dyatlov Pass in the winter of 1959, my hunch is that we probably will never know enough to make a certain determination.  What's clear, though, is that this has renewed interest in the incident, especially amongst the conspiracy theorists, who are hoping like hell to get more fuel for their various fires.

Which they'll probably claim no matter what the Russians find.

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Humans have a morbid fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you.  Look at the number of movies made and books written about tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes, not to mention hordes of predatory dinosaurs picking people off the streets.  But in the "horrifically dangerous" category, nothing can beat black holes -- collapsed stars with a gravitational field so strong not even light can escape.  If you fell into one of these things, you'd get "spaghettified" -- stretched by tidal forces into a long, thin streamer of goo -- and every trace of you would be destroyed so thoroughly that they'd not even be theoretically possible to retrieve.

Add to that the fact that because light can't escape them, you can't even see them.  Kind of makes a pack of velociraptors seem tame by comparison, doesn't it?

So no wonder there are astrophysicists who have devoted their lives to studying these beasts.  One of these is Shep Doeleman, whose determination to understand the strangest objects in the universe is the subject of Seth Fletcher's wonderful book Einstein's Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable.  It's not comfortable reading -- when you realize how completely insignificant we are on the scale of the universe, it's considerably humbling -- but it'll leave you in awe of how magnificent, how strange, and how beautiful the cosmos is, and amaze you that the human brain is capable of comprehending it.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Mr. Fluffums the psychic

Attention pet lovers: do you want a truly unique, unusual pet?  One that will be the talk of the town?  If so, there's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to buy...

... a psychic cat.

Sadly, I am not joking about this.  On the site Avito, which is a sort of Russian version of Craigslist, there's a guy selling his cat, and one of the selling points is that the cat is allegedly psychic.  The seller, Vladimir, says the cat is pretty special:

It possesses an array of magic powers.  Chiefly among them, is that it sees ghosts and spirit and, as such, it can determine their presence in your home, regardless of whether the apparitions are good or evil...  If you buy him, you need to deal with it, you need good hands.

I'm not entirely certain what the last line means.  It could be a problem with Google Translate, which heaven knows has its issues.  However, maybe it's some kind of warning that the cat is potentially dangerous, and needs to be purchased by someone with a "firm hand."

Unfortunately, though, my experience with cats is that the firmness of your hand has absolutely no effect on their behavior.  The last cat I owned, who was named Geronimo and who died two years ago at the ripe old age of 18, had very expressive eyes, which he used to communicate three things:

1. My food bowl is empty.
2. I hate you.
3. Fuck off and die.

Nothing I did had the least impact on his bad habits, which included clawing the hell out of the furniture and peeing on things when he got in a snit, which was pretty much daily.  I'm honestly glad that Geronimo wasn't psychic, because he'd have probably used his powers to stare at me balefully until my skull exploded.

But I digress.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Anyhow, you must be wondering why Vladimir is selling this amazing animal, whom he has named "Sibgeo," given that he clearly believes in its powers himself.  He doesn't want to, he says, but he's moving to an apartment where pets aren't allowed, so he's trying to find Sibgeo a new home.  Which I suppose is nice enough.  But I haven't told you how much he's asking for it:

Five million rubles, which comes to about seventy-five thousand dollars.

I don't know about you, but I would not pay seventy-five thousand dollars for a cat, even if I had seventy-five thousand dollars of discretionary income available, which I don't.  Hell, I wouldn't pay seven hundred and fifty dollars.  Actually, toward the end of Geronimo's life I considered paying someone to take him, but my wife would have objected, and given that she was the one person in the universe who Geronimo tolerated, I couldn't exactly argue with her about it.

Initially I scoffed at the idea that anyone would pay that kind of money for a cat, psychic or not, but then I found out that last year, another psychic cat in Russia (I guess they're more common there) sold for eighty-three thousand dollars.  So I guess that's the going rate.  Or maybe Vladimir has a cat he doesn't want, and is trying to cash in on the psychic thing since it worked for the first guy.

But the whole thing brings up a question: how would you tell if a cat is psychic?  It's not like you'd think, "Wow, that cat is really getting fat, I should put him on a diet," and the cat would say, "I heard that, asshole."  Apparently, the way Vladimir knows is just that the cat acts weird sometimes.  For example, Vladimir was considering buying a house, and brought Sibgeo along, and Sibgeo started "behaving oddly."  Vladimir later found out that the house had been owned by a family whose grandmother "led a bad life," and Sibgeo was trying to warn him.

Why the grandmother's behavior had anything to do with it, since (1) she was dead, and (2) the rest of the family was moving out, I have no idea.  Maybe Sibgeo could tell us.

The more global problem is that a pet's odd behavior really doesn't tell you much.  In my experience, pets in general act weird more or less all of the time, and I doubt that any of it means they're psychic.  My guess is that domestication has kind of short-circuited them genetically, and all of them are eccentric, just in different ways.  (Ask your coworkers about "odd pets they've owned" if you doubt me.  You'll be there all day listening to stories.)

For example, another cat I owned, Puck, looked like this sleek, graceful, elegant black cat until she turned and looked at you.  First, I think she had mild strabismus, because her eyes never seemed to quite line up.  Second, she had one missing fang, so most of the time her tongue poked out of her mouth on that side.  Third, she had a creaky, irritable meow that sounded like "mehhhhhffff."  Fourth, she expressed affection by jumping into your lap, digging her claws into your leg, and then ramming the top of her head into your face.  She was actually quite a sweet-natured animal, but even people who loved cats had to admit that Puck looked and acted like she had a screw loose.

So that's today's news from the World of the Weird, Pet Edition.  Seventy-five thousand dollar psychic cats.  Me, I'm gonna stick with my dogs.  I don't have to worry about what they're thinking, because I already know, given that each of them came equipped with only a single thought.  Guinness's is "Let's play ball!"  It's his answer to everything.  Lena's is "Derp?"  She always has this comical perplexed-but-happy look on her face, as if she has no idea what's going on, but is determined to enjoy it anyhow.

I'll take that over a ghost-spotting cat any day.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a charming inquiry into a realm that scares a lot of people -- mathematics.  In The Universe and the Teacup, K. C. Cole investigates the beauty and wonder of that most abstract of disciplines, and even for -- especially for -- non-mathematical types, gives a window into a subject that is too often taught as an arbitrary set of rules for manipulating symbols.  Cole, in a lyrical and not-too-technical way, demonstrates brilliantly the truth of the words of Galileo -- "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."

Relics of a lost age

If I can be allowed to geek out a little, today's post is about two new discoveries in the field of paleontology.

The mid-Permian period was (1) a challenging time to live, when the climate was rapidly warming and drying, and (2) at 270 million years before the present, was a really long time ago.  Not only was the climate getting dicey, the world was heading for catastrophe -- the lockup of the supercontinent Pangaea, as all the world's land masses fused into one and the rest of the Earth was covered by a giant ocean, is thought to have been the kickoff to the largest wipeout the Earth has ever seen -- the Permian-Triassic extinction.  Not only did the formation of the supercontinent (and superocean) 252 million years ago drastically change the climate, the event coincided with the formation of the Siberian Traps, when four million cubic kilometers of basaltic lava flowed out over what is now eastern Russia.  The resulting massive burning of organic matter spiked the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, simultaneously causing the oxygen content to crash and triggering a warm-up that resulted in average ocean surface temperatures of 40 C (104 F).

The result: 95% of the species on Earth became extinct.

Of course, one of the lineages that made it through the bottleneck was our own ancestors.  Back in the mid-Permian -- pre-mass-extinction -- there was a group of protomammals called Gorgonopsians, which included some seriously scary carnivores (one, Inostrancevia, had a 45-centimeter-long skull and saber teeth -- preceding the more famous "saber-toothed tiger" Smilodon by a good 260 million years).

Permian protomammal fossils are quite rare, however.  So it's pretty awesome that paleontologist Christian Kammerer, paleontology curator of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, discovered fossils of not one, but two new species of mid-Permian protomammals in a small museum in Russia.

Called Gorynychus matsyutinae and Nochnitsa geminidens, the two were drastically different in size.  Gorynychus was probably one of the apex predators of its time, with a 25-centimeter-long skull and big, nasty, pointy teeth.  Nochnitsa, also a predator, was weasel-sized.  The genera were both named after beasts from Russian mythology -- the three-headed dragon Zmey Gorynych and the malevolent, vampiric night spirit Nochnitsa.

Artist's reconstruction of Gorynychus and Nochnitsa [by Matt Celeskey @clepsydrops, from the press release from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences; used with permission]

These lineages both made it through the bottleneck, but not unscathed.  Their descendants, eighteen or so million years later, underwent some rapid evolution during the Permian-Triassic extinction, especially with respect to size.  "In the age before the dinosaurs, when protomammals were the dominant life on land, you had two different groups that switch off on which is the top predator," Kammerer said.  "You have wolf- to lion-sized saber tooth animals wiped out by a mass extinction, and [the Nochnitsa-like animals] take over.  But [Gorynychus-like animals] aren’t wiped out altogether in this extinction, and they take over and become a small insect eating predator, not large carnivores anymore."

Kammerer and his co-author (and co-discoverer of the fossils), Vladimir Matsyutin of the Vyatka Paleontological Museum of Kirov, Russia, were excited not only about having found fossils of two hitherto-unknown species, but about the potential for other discoveries tucked away in museums.  "I would guarantee you there are thousands of undescribed species in museum collections,” Kammerer said.  "Most new species are found in museum collections for the sole reason that there are literally millions of species on Earth today and many more in the fossil record.  When you’re going out and collecting specimens, you won’t know those things.  The people in the museum knew they were protomammals but they didn’t know they were new species."

So that's today's cool science story, about some of our (very) distant relatives.  I've always been fascinated with the early mammals -- for some reason, much more than the charismatic megafauna that were just getting their start at the same time (the dinosaurs, of course).  And the fact that these critters were out doing their thing as the Earth was heading toward the largest catastrophic extinction ever just adds a nice little frisson to the discovery.  You kind of want to warn them about what's coming, you know?

Oh, well, probably wouldn't have helped.  It's not like you can hide from four million cubic kilometers of lava.

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This week's recommended read is Wait, What? And Life's Other Essential Questions by James E. Ryan.  Ryan frames the whole of critical thinking in a fascinating way.  He says we can avoid most of the pitfalls in logic by asking five questions: "What?"  "I wonder..." "Couldn't we at least...?" "How can I help?" and "What truly matters?"  Along the way, he considers examples from history, politics, and science, and encourages you to think about the deep issues -- and not to take anything for granted.