Well, hell.

Whenever I post anything about goofy beliefs, urban legends, and superstitions -- like my piece Monday about spells to summon up demons -- it always impels my loyal readers to send me links with messages that say, "Yeah, okay, you think that's ridiculous, have you heard about this?"

One of those spurred by yesterday's demon-conjuring post was about a claim that Russian geologists had created a fourteen-kilometer-deep borehole in Siberia, and broke into a cavity underground.  The temperature of the cavity was measured at a toasty 1,000 C.  The leader of the team, a "Mr. Azakov," decided to drop a high-temperature microphone down the shaft -- because he had one of those with him (along with fourteen kilometers of cable) out in the middle of absolutely nowhere in Siberia, and besides, listening to superheated rocks is obviously what geologists do -- and when it reached the cavity, Azakov and the others heard the horrifying sounds of the screams of the damned.

So they forthwith concluded they'd drilled a Well to Hell.

There are a couple of things that are interesting about this one, once I get past the obligatory "but none of this actually happened" disclaimers.  Back in 1989 the Russians had drilled a pretty damn deep hole, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, but (1) it's twelve kilometers deep, not fourteen, (2) didn't hit a cavity of any kind, (3) was drilled on the Kola Peninsula, which is all the way on the other side of the country from Siberia, and (4) was associated with no supernatural phenomena whatsoever.  Oh, and the "screams of the damned" turned out to be a looped and digitally-altered recording grabbed from the shitty 1972 horror movie Baron Blood.  Of course, what are a few factual details between friends?  But the most interesting thing about this story is how -- and why -- it took off.

The first place the story was printed was in the Finnish newspaper Ammennusastia, which is run by a group of Pentecostal holy-rollers in the town of Leväsjoki.  From there it was grabbed by the American Trinity Broadcasting Network, an evangelical media source based in Costa Mesa, California, who claimed it was proof of the literal existence of hell, and broadcast it along with edifying messages along the lines of "We tried to warn you, but would you listen?  Nooooooo.  Well, here's what the all-loving and merciful God has in store for the likes of you."

It likely would have ended there, with scaring the fuck out of a few Bible-thumpers, if it hadn't been for Åge Rendalen, a Norwegian teacher.  Rendalen heard the versions from Finland and California and got pissed off at how gullible people are (a sentiment I wholeheartedly share), but decided the best response was to make the story even more ridiculous.  His reasoning was that if he exaggerated it, surely that would wake people up to how insane the claim is.  So he said that shortly after "Mr. Azakov" heard the screams through his high-temperature microphone, a "bat-like apparition" had exploded out of the borehole, "leaving a blazing trail across the Russian sky."  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gronono57, DeviantArt, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/]

What Rendalen then did was to take a completely unrelated article from a Norwegian newspaper (it was actually about a local building inspector), and claimed that his English-language story of flaming demons was the correct translation of the article.  He submitted both to the Trinity Broadcasting Network, along with his name and contact information -- planning on having a good laugh at anyone who got a hold of him, and then telling them what he'd done, along with a suggestion to learn some goddamn critical thinking skills, and possibly some elementary Norwegian while they were at it.

No one did.  Instead, the Trinity Broadcasting Network printed his English "translation" without the Norwegian version, claiming that it was proof that the original story was true.

The result is that the claim is still out there.  Despite the fact that:

• the original story was full of factual errors, including getting the location of the borehole wrong by over nine thousand kilometers;
• the soundtrack was swiped from a horror movie;
• the embellishments all came from a smartass Norwegian teacher who admitted up front he was lying; and
• the proof that the first story was true came from the second story, which was based on the first story.

Circular reasoning (n.) -- see reasoning, circular.

So if you're concerned that hell is a real place fourteen kilometers underneath Siberia, you can relax.  I have no doubt it's hot down there, but I'm pretty certain there are no tortured souls screaming in agony anywhere nearby.

As far as whether hell exists anywhere else, I expect I'll find out eventually.  I'm guessing that given my history, my chances of being welcomed by the Heavenly Host after I die are slim to none.  It's okay, harps aren't really my thing.  Maybe down in hell there'll be an infernal bagpipe band.  That'd be cool.

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The worm turns

In the episode of The X Files called "Ice," Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are sent with a small team of scientists to a remote Arctic research station in order to investigate the murder-suicide of its entire crew.  When they get there, they find one survivor -- the station's mascot, a dog, who shows signs of hyperaggressive behavior (obviously) reminiscent of what afflicted the researchers.

They eventually figure out what happened, but not before two of the people accompanying them are dead, and both Mulder and the third scientist are obviously afflicted with the same malady.  In digging up and thawing out permafrost, the researchers had inadvertently reanimated a deep-frozen parasitic nematode that causes drastic behavioral changes, and is transmissible from bites.  They do find a way to get rid of the infection, saving the lives of Mulder, the infected scientist, and (thank heaven) the dog, but the U.S. government destroys the base before any further study of the worm or its origins can be made.

It's a highly effective and extremely creepy episode, doing what The X Files did best -- leaving you at the end with the feeling of, "This ain't actually over."

I was forced unwillingly to recall my watching of "Ice" by two news stories this week.  In the first, scientists have "reawakened" -- deliberately this time -- a nematode that has been frozen for 46,000 years in the Siberian permafrost.

Dubbed Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, it's a previously unknown species.  This doesn't mean it's a truly prehistoric species; Phylum Nematoda is estimated to contain about a million species, of which only thirty thousand have been studied, classified, and named.  So it could well be that Panagrolaimus exists out there somewhere, in active (i.e. unfrozen) ecosystems, and the invertebrate zoologists just hadn't found it yet.

Still, it's hard not to make the alarming comparison to the horrific events in "Ice" (and countless other examples of the "reanimating creatures frozen in the ice" trope in science fiction).  This reaction is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that two-thirds of the nematode species known are harmless to humans, and even the ones that are parasitic usually aren't life-threatening.  There are a few truly awful ones -- which, for the sakes of the more sensitive members of my audience, I'll refrain from giving details about -- but most nematodes are harmless, so chances are Panagrolaimus is as well.

On the other hand, it doesn't mean that thawing frozen stuff out is risk-free, and the problem is, because of climate change, thawing is happening all over the world even without reckless scientists being involved.  The second study, conducted at the European Commission Joint Research Centre, appeared in a paper in PLOS - Computational Biology and described a digital simulation of a partially frozen ecosystem (that contained living microbes in suspended animation).  They looked at how the existing community would be affected by the introduction of the now reawakened species -- and the results were a little alarming.

It has been tempting to think that because the entire ecosystem has changed since the microbes were frozen, if they were reanimated, there'd be no way they could compete with modern species which had evolved to live in those conditions.  In other words, the thawed species would be unable to cope with the new situation and would probably die out rapidly.  In fact, that did happen to some of them -- but in these models, the ancient microbes often survived, and three percent of them became dominant members of the ecosystem.  

One percent actually outcompeted and wiped out modern species.

"Given the sheer abundance of ancient microorganisms regularly released into modern communities," the authors write, "such a low probability of outbreak events still presents substantial risks.  Our findings therefore suggest that unpredictable threats so far confined to science fiction and conjecture could in fact be powerful drivers of ecological change."

Now, keep in mind that this was only a simulation; no actual microbes have been resuscitated and released into the environment.

Yet.

Anyhow, there you have it.  Something new from the "Like We Didn't Already Have Enough To Worry About" department.  Maybe I shouldn't watch The X Files.  How about Doctor Who?  Let's see... how about the episode "Orphan 55"?  *reads episode summary*  "...about a future Earth so devastated by climate change that the remnants of humanity have actually evolved to metabolize carbon dioxide instead of oxygen..."

Or maybe I should just shut off the television and hide under my blankie for the rest of the day.

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The reanimators

An announcement a few weeks ago by microbiologist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University that he and his team had successfully resuscitated a 48,500-year-old virus from the Siberian permafrost brought horrified comments like, "I read this book, and it didn't end well" and "wasn't this an episode of The X Files?  And didn't just about everyone die?"  It didn't help when Claverie's team mentioned that the particular virus they brought back to life belonged to a group called (I shit you not) "pandoraviruses," and the media started referring to them by the nickname "zombie viruses."

Claverie's pandoravirus [Image courtesy of Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie]

The team hastened to reassure everyone that the virus they found is a parasite on amoebas, and poses no threat to humans.  This did little to calm everyone down, because (1) not that many laypeople understand viral host specificity, and (2) shows like The Last of Us, in which a parasitic fungus in insects jumps to human hosts and pretty much wipes out humanity, have a fuckload more resonance in people's minds than some dry scientific paper.

What's scary about Claverie's study, though, isn't what you might think.  First, the good news.  Not only is the virus they found harmless to humans, the team is made up of trained microbiologists who are working under highly controlled sterile conditions.  Despite what the "lab leak" proponents of the origins of COVID-19 would have you believe, the likelihood of an accidental release of a pathogen from a lab is extremely unlikely.  (The overwhelming consensus of scientists is that COVID is zoonotic in origin, and didn't come from a lab leak, accidental or deliberate.)  So the obvious "oh my god what are we doing?" reaction, stemming from a sense that we shouldn't "wake up" a frozen virus because it could get out and wreak havoc, is pretty well unfounded.

What worries me is the reason Claverie and his team are doing the research in the first place.

Permafrost covers almost a quarter of the land mass of the Northern Hemisphere.  A 2021 study found that every gram of Arctic permafrost soil contains between a hundred and a thousand different kinds of microbes, some of which -- like Claverie's pandoravirus -- have been frozen for millennia.  A three-degree Celsius increase in global average temperature could melt over thirty percent of the upper layers of Arctic soil.

So potentially, what Claverie's team did under controlled, isolated conditions could happen out in the open with nothing to keep it in check.

Concern over this isn't just hype.  In 2016, melting permafrost in Siberia thawed out the carcass of a reindeer that had died of anthrax.  Once thawed, the spores were still viable, and by the time the incident had been contained, dozens of people had been hospitalized, one had died, and over two thousand reindeer had been infected.  Anthrax isn't some prehistoric microbe that scientists know nothing about, which actually acted in our favor; once it was identified, doctors knew how to treat it and prevent its further spread.

But what if the thawing frost released something we haven't had exposure to for tens of thousands of years, and that was unknown to science?

"We really don’t know what’s buried up there," said Birgitta Evengård, a microbiologist at Umeå University in Sweden, which in a few words says something that is absolutely terrifying.

So the hysteria over Claverie's reawakening of the "zombie virus" focused on the wrong thing.  The reanimators we should be worried about aren't Claverie and his team; they're us.  There were already a myriad excellent reasons to curb fossil fuel use (hard) and try to rein in climate change, but this study just gave us another one.

As always, the problem isn't the scientists; the scientists are the ones trying to figure all this out in time to prevent a catastrophe.  (And, if I haven't made this point stridently enough already, the scientists have been trying to warn us about the effects of climate change for decades.)  The problem is the fact that politicians, and the voters who elect them, have steadfastly refused to do a damn thing about a problem that we could have addressed years ago and that has so many potential horrible outcomes you'd think any one of them would be sufficient justification for acting.  

So how about we stop worrying about the wrong thing and face the fact that we're the ones who need to change what we're doing?

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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!]

Unearthing the time capsule

It's said that there's no cloud without a silver lining, but sometimes the silver lining just adds to the whole situation's poignancy.

That was my response to the new show (opening in May) at the British Museum called Arctic: Culture and Climate.  The exhibit will contain priceless archaeological finds from the Canadian and Siberian Arctic, including a nine-thousand-year-old woven birch basket, a necklace made of mammoth ivory, a variety of objects carved from walrus teeth, bone needles, headbands, a spirit mask, clothing made of reindeer fur, a bag crafted from salmon skin, and a fantastic array of other artifacts, some of which date back to thirty thousand years ago.

The problem, of course, is why this beautiful exhibit is even possible -- the melting of the Arctic permafrost because of anthropogenic climate change.

"As the Arctic is melting, the permafrost, the frozen ground, is melting as well," said exhibit curator, archaeologist Jago Cooper.  "The things that people were living with in that landscape, which are incredibly well preserved in that frozen ground, are coming out as the ground is melting...  Archaeologists have to find the objects before they disappear on the surface of the earth because they are exposed to the elements.  It’s like the Library of Alexandria being on fire… You’re plucking out these books which are coming out, and yes, it’s a remarkable window into life, all coming out of the ground in one go...  This is a treasure trove, but its story is tragic."

The fact is, the Arctic is the region of the Earth where the climate is changing the fastest; current estimates are that within eighty years, summers in the northern Arctic will be entirely ice and permafrost-free.  Entire communities are disappearing as frozen-solid soil capable of holding up house foundations turns into marsh.  The only place on Earth I can think of that is changing this drastically and this fast is the coast of my home state of Louisiana, where communities on the fringe of coastal marsh, such as Isle de Jean Charles, are being swallowed up as sea levels rise.  But since both the Arctic and coastal Louisiana are occupied by poor and/or marginalized people mostly belonging to ethnic minorities, there has been little if any attention paid to the devastation climate change is wreaking.

The effects on the Arctic are multiple and widespread.  The 2019 Arctic "report card" from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was not so much sobering as outright terrifying.  Its findings include:

• 2019 was the Arctic's second-warmest year ever recorded.  (The warmest was 2016.)  July 2019 was the warmest month since records started in 1850.
• Cold-water fish populations are shrinking and retreating north, disrupting the food chain and affecting populations of Arctic predators such as seals, walruses, and polar bears.
• The amount of ice melted from the Greenland Ice Sheet in 2019 tied for highest volume ever lost (with 2012).
• The ice at the very north is itself destabilizing.  Only one percent of the marine ice in the Arctic Ocean is over four years old, so the "permanent Arctic ice sheet" is a thing of the past.
• The loss of ice cover in the summer is causing a feedback loop as darker/more absorptive open ocean retains more of the summer's heat and ramps temperatures up further.  The summers for the past ten years have broken record after record for high temperatures and speed of warm-up.

Horrifying news.  But most countries seem to take the stance of "oh, well, it doesn't affect us," and continue to sit on their hands.  It immediately put me in mind of the old comic strip, one that has shown up in many contexts, from Nazi aggression before World War II to Wall Street speculation to the spread of terrorism, but which seems tragically apt here:

Sometimes I get tired of shouting "WILL YOU PEOPLE PLEASE WAKE UP AND FOR FUCK'S SAKE DO SOMETHING?"  Heaven knows I've hit on this topic enough times here at Skeptophilia, my readers must be getting sick of my ringing the changes over and over.  But given that there are still climate change deniers out there, and people are paying more attention to noted climatologists like Meat Loaf than the actual scientists, we can't afford to let fatigue silence us.

The problem is, the scientific papers and even the heartbreaking exhibits like the one opening soon at the British Museum are almost entirely reaching people who already know that anthropogenic climate change is happening, and simultaneously are unable to change policy.  I can virtually guarantee the politicians aren't reading science journals (in the case of Donald Trump, I seriously doubt he's ever read anything longer than the label on a soup can).  So it's a case where there are two hermetically-sealed groups -- the science community and informed laypeople, who know what's happening but are unable to change it, and the elected leaders, who are able to change it but are either uniformed or else willfully participating in the disinformation campaign.

So I'll keep blogging, and other concerned people will continue working toward getting the truth out there, but until we change things at the ballot box, my guess is that to paraphrase Douglas Adams, nothing will continue to happen.

My only hope is that by the time we are able to act, it won't already be past the tipping point.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is simultaneously one of the most dismal books I've ever read, and one of the funniest; Tom Phillips's wonderful Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up.

I picked up a copy of it at the wonderful book store The Strand when I was in Manhattan last week, and finished it in three days flat (and I'm not a fast reader).  To illustrate why, here's a quick passage that'll give you a flavor of it:

Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. 

The only trouble is... well, we're not terribly good at any of those things.  Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you.  We imagine patterns where they don't exist.  Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking.  And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realize that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it.

Phillips's clear-eyed look at our own unfortunate history is kept from sinking under its own weight by a sparkling wit, calling our foibles into humorous focus but simultaneously sounding the call that "Okay, guys, it's time to pay attention."  Stupidity, they say, consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results; Phillips's wonderful book points out how crucial that realization is -- and how we need to get up off our asses and, for god's sake, do something.

And you -- and everyone else -- should start by reading this book.

[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!]

Paleo-walkabout

The classic account of the origins of Native Americans is that during the last Ice Age, the seas were lower, and what is now the floor of the Bering Sea was a broad, flat valley.  This allowed people to cross from Siberia into Alaska, and when the weather warmed and the seas rose, this cut off the "land bridge" and left the migrants North Americans for good.

Some cool new research out of the University of Copenhagen has shown that this story is a vast oversimplification, and that what actually happened is considerably more complex than a one-way hike from west to east.

In a paper in Nature called "The Population History of Northeastern Siberia Since the Pleistocene," by lead author Martin Sikora and no less than 53 co-authors, we find out that there wasn't just a single wave of migrants, and there was considerable back-and-forth, even after the seas flooded in and cut Alaska off from Siberia.  Sikora's team analyzed the DNA extracted from teeth from 34 different burials, from Finland all the way across to northeastern Siberia, and compared this to genetic material from Native American populations in northwestern North America.

What Sikora found is that there were several surges of migration across the "Bering Land Bridge," starting over thirty thousand years ago.  Each new wave of travelers mixed and mated with the preceding group of settlers -- and then some of them went back the other direction, settling in northeastern Siberia (where many of their descendants still live).  The authors write:

Northeastern Siberia has been inhabited by humans for more than 40,000 years but its deep population history remains poorly understood.  Here we investigate the late Pleistocene population history of northeastern Siberia through analyses of 34 newly recovered ancient genomes that date to between 31,000 and 600 years ago.  We document complex population dynamics during this period, including at least three major migration events: an initial peopling by a previously unknown Palaeolithic population of ‘Ancient North Siberians’ who are distantly related to early West Eurasian hunter-gatherers; the arrival of East Asian-related peoples, which gave rise to ‘Ancient Palaeo-Siberians’ who are closely related to contemporary communities from far-northeastern Siberia (such as the Koryaks), as well as Native Americans; and a Holocene migration of other East Asian-related peoples, who we name ‘Neo-Siberians’, and from whom many contemporary Siberians are descended.  Each of these population expansions largely replaced the earlier inhabitants, and ultimately generated the mosaic genetic make-up of contemporary peoples who inhabit a vast area across northern Eurasia and the Americas.

This study adds to some earlier work, published late last year, that found that the movement of those migrants once they got to North America was equally complex, going in (at least) three waves as they colonized the continent southward and eastward, with the second wave carrying people all the way to Tierra del Fuego.  This blows a neat hole into the idea that "Native American" is some kind of monolithic race of people all of whom are closely related -- which anyone who knows about the very disparate groups of Native American languages would find completely unbelievable anyhow.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons 맛좋은망고, Langs N.Amer, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So as usual, reality turns out to be both more complicated and more interesting than the accounts you usually hear.  The walkabout taken by the ancestors of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas was like most patterns of human movement; messy, unpredictable, with new groups mixing with old and the blended groups backcrossing and mixing with the ones who were left behind.  But this is what makes population genetics fascinating, isn't it?  It gives us a lens through which to view our own origins, and causes us to question the definition of terms like "race" that a lot of us think we understand -- but which, on analysis, turn out not to mean anything even vaguely scientific.

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Aptly enough, considering Monday's post about deciphering scripts, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Steven Pinker's brilliant The Stuff of Thought.  Here, experimental psychologist Pinker looks at what our use of language tells us about our behavior and neural wiring -- what, in fact, our choice of words has to do with human nature as a whole.

Along the way, he throws out some fascinating examples -- my favorite of which is his section on the syntax of swearing.  I have to admit, the question, "Just what does the 'fuck' in 'fuck you' actually mean?" is something I've never thought about before, although it probably should have given that I'm guilty of using the f-word a lot more than is generally considered acceptable.

So if you're interested in language, the human mind, or both, this is a must-read.  Although I'll warn you -- if you're like me, it'll leave you thinking, "Why did I just say that?" several times a day.

Language injection

Two of my biggest interests are genetics and linguistics, so when there's a study that combines the two, it makes my little heart go thumpety-thump.

I found out about a recent one yesterday from a friend and long-time reader of Skeptophilia, and it is a pretty cool intersection between the two fields.  The paper on the research, called "The Arrival of Siberian Ancestry Connecting the Eastern Baltic to Uralic Speakers Further East," was authored by a team led by Lehti Saag of the Department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tartu (Estonia), and found that an input of migrants from Siberia into northeastern Europe coincided with the diversification of the Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian).  This supports the relationship between the Finnic languages and the Yukaghir languages -- a small family of languages spoken in eastern Siberia.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ExRat, Finnic languages, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The team came to this conclusion after analyzing the DNA from 33 skeletons dated from 1200 B.C.E. to 1600 C.E., which allowed them to see how the genetics changed due to the infusion of migrants.

What's interesting is when this happened -- the first millennium B.C.E., which is a lot later than I would have expected (not that my opinion means much; my area of linguistic research in graduate school focused on Scandinavian and northern Germanic languages).  The newcomers from Siberia intermarried with the pre-existing western European populations, resulting in today's Finns, Estonians, and Hungarians:

Our findings are consistent with [Bronze-Age Estonia] receiving gene flow from regions with strong Western hunter-gatherer (WHG) affinities and [Iron-Age Estonia] from populations related to modern Siberians.  The latter inference is in accordance with Y chromosome (chrY) distributions in present day populations of the Eastern Baltic, as well as patterns of autosomal variation in the majority of the westernmost Uralic speakers.  This ancestry reached the coasts of the Baltic Sea no later than the mid-first millennium BC; i.e., in the same time window as the diversification of west Uralic (Finnic) languages.  Furthermore, phenotypic traits often associated with modern Northern Europeans, like light eyes, hair, and skin, as well as lactose tolerance, can be traced back to the Bronze Age in the Eastern Baltic.

"Since the transition from Bronze to Iron Age coincides with the diversification and arrival time of Finnic languages in the Eastern Baltic proposed by linguists, it is plausible that the people who brought Siberian ancestry to the region also brought Uralic languages with them," Saag said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Studying ancient DNA makes it possible to pinpoint the moment in time when the genetic components that we see in modern populations reached the area since, instead of predicting past events based on modern genomes, we are analyzing the DNA of individuals who actually lived in a particular time in the past."

When they merged with the indigenous population, it injected this Siberian DNA signature into a population that already had its own distinct characteristics.  "The Bronze Age individuals from the Eastern Baltic show an increase in hunter-gatherer ancestry compared to Late Neolithic people and also in the frequency of light eyes, hair, and skin and lactose tolerance," said Kristiina Tambets, also of the University of Tartu.  "We see these characteristics continuing amongst present-day northern Europeans."

The coolest thing about this is that a study of DNA extracted from skeletons can shed light on how languages have changed.  I'd love to see this done elsewhere -- especially in places where there are linguistic isolates, which are languages that seem to be unrelated to any other extant languages.  (Examples are Ainu, Basque, Korean, Etruscan, and Vedda.)  These intersections in research have resulted in some fascinating answers to previously unsolved questions -- and show us again that understanding the past is the window to understanding the present.

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I grew up going once a summer with my dad to southern New Mexico and southern Arizona, with the goal of... finding rocks.  It's an odd hobby for a kid to have, but I'd been fascinated by rocks and minerals since I was very young, and it was helped along by the fact that my dad did beautiful lapidary work.  So while he was poking around looking for turquoise and agates and gem-quality jade, I was using my little rock hammer to hack out chunks of sandstone and feldspar and quartzite and wondering how, why, and when they'd gotten there.

Turns out that part of the country has some seriously complicated geology, and I didn't really appreciate just how complicated until I read John McPhee's four-part series called Annals of the Former World.  Composed of Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California, it describes a cross-country trip McPhee took on Interstate 80, accompanied along the way with various geologists, with whom he stops at every roadcut and outcrop along the way.  As usual with McPhee's books they concentrate on the personalities of the people he's with as much as the science.  But you'll come away with a good appreciation for Deep Time -- and how drastically our continent has changed during the past billion years.

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

Escapees from Siberia

As you might expect from someone who is passionately interested in both genealogy and evolutionary genetics, when there's a study that combines both, it's a source of great joy to me.

This week, Nature published a study on the evolutionary history of humans in northern Europe, specifically the Finns.  Entitled, "Ancient Fennoscandian Genomes Reveal Origin and Spread of Siberian Ancestry in Europe," it was authored by no less than seventeen researchers (including Svante Pääbo, a Swedish biologist who is widely credited as founding the entire science of paleogenetics) from the Max Planck Institute, the University of Helsinki, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Vavilov Institute for General Genetics, and the University of Turku.

Quite a collaborative effort.

It's been known for a while that Europe was populated in three broad waves of settlement.  First, there were hunter-gatherers who came in as early as 40,000 years ago, and proceeded not only to hunt and gather but to have lots of hot caveperson-on-caveperson sex with the pre-existing Neanderthals, whose genetic traces can be discerned in their descendants unto this very day.  Then, there was an agricultural society that came into Europe from what is now Turkey starting around 8,000 years ago.  Finally, some nomadic groups -- believed to be the ancestors of both the Scythians and the Celts -- swept across Europe around 4,500 years ago.

Anyone with European ancestry has all three.  Despite the genetic distinctness of different ethnic groups -- without which 23 & Me genetic analysis wouldn't work at all -- there's been enough time, mixture, and cross-breeding between the groups that no one has ancestry purely from one population or another.

Which, as an aside, is one of the many reasons that the whole "racial purity" crowd is so ridiculous.  We're all mixtures, however uniform you think your ethnic heritage is.  Besides, racial purity wouldn't a good thing even if it were possible; that's called inbreeding, and causes a high rate of homozygosity (put simply, you're likely to inherit the same alleles from both your mother and father).  This causes lethal recessives to rear their ugly heads; heterozygous individuals are protected from these because the presence of the recessive allele is masked by the other, dominant (working) copy.  It's why genetic disorders can be localized to different groups; cystic fibrosis in northern Europeans, Huntington's disease in people whose ancestry comes from eastern England, sickle-cell anemia from sub-Saharan Africa, Tay-Sachs disease in Ashkenazic Jews, and so on.

So mixed-ethnic relationships are more likely to produce genetically healthy children.  Take that, neo-Nazis.

Map of ethnic groups in Europe, ca. 1899 [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, the current paper looks at the subset of Europeans who have a fourth ancestral population -- people in northeastern Europe, including Finns, the Saami, Russians, the Chuvash, Estonians, and Hungarians.  And they found that the origin of this additional group of ancestors is all the way from Siberia!

The authors write:

[T]he genetic makeup of northern Europe was shaped by migrations from Siberia that began at least 3500 years ago.  This Siberian ancestry was subsequently admixed into many modern populations in the region, particularly into populations speaking Uralic languages today.  Additionally... [the] ancestors of modern Saami inhabited a larger territory during the Iron Age.

The coolest part is that this lines up brilliantly with what we know about languages spoken in the area:

The Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, to which both Saami and Finnish languages belong, has diverged from other Uralic languages no earlier than 4000–5000 years ago, when Finland was already inhabited by speakers of a language today unknown.  Linguistic evidence shows that Saami languages were spoken in Finland prior to the arrival of the early Finnish language and have dominated the whole of the Finnish region before 1000 CE.  Particularly, southern Ostrobothnia, where Levänluhta is located, has been suggested through place names to harbour a southern Saami dialect until the late first millennium, when early Finnish took over as the dominant language.  Historical sources note Lapps living in the parishes of central Finland still in the 1500s.  It is, however, unclear whether all of them spoke Saami, or if some of them were Finns who had changed their subsistence strategy from agriculture to hunting and fishing.  There are also documents of intermarriage, although many of the indigenous people retreated to the north...  Ancestors of present-day Finnish speakers possibly migrated from northern Estonia, to which Finns still remain linguistically close, and displaced but also admixed with the local population of Finland, the likely ancestors of today’s Saami speakers.

Which I think is pretty damn cool.  The idea that we can use the genetics and linguistics of people today, and use it to infer migratory patterns back 40,000 years, is nothing short of stunning.

Unfortunately, however, I have zero ancestry in Finland or any of the other areas the researchers were studying.  According to 23 & Me, my presumed French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English ancestry was shown to be... French, Scottish, Dutch, German, and English.  No surprise admixtures of genetic information from some infidelity by my great-great-grandmother with a guy from Japan, or anything.

On the other hand, I did have 284 markers associated with Neanderthal ancestry.  Probably explaining why I like my steaks medium-rare and run around more or less naked when the weather's warm.  Which I suppose makes up for my lack of unexpected ethnic heritage.

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Ever wonder why we evolved to have muscles that can only pull, not push?  How about why the proportions of an animals' legs change as you look at progressively larger and larger species -- why, in other words, insects can get by with skinny little legs, while elephants need the equivalent of Grecian marble columns?  Why there are dozens of different takes on locomotion in the animal world, but no animal has ever evolved wheels?

If so, you need to read Steven Vogel's brilliant book Cats' Paws and Catapults.  Vogel is a bioengineer -- he looks at the mechanical engineering of animals, analyzing how things move, support their weight, and resist such catastrophes as cracking, buckling, crumbling, or breaking.  It's a delightful read, only skirting some of the more technical details (almost no math needed to understand his main points), and will give you a new perspective on the various solutions that natural selection has happened upon in the 4-billion-odd years life's been around on planet Earth.

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

Permafrost permayouth

You might have heard about people consuming pills of dried shark cartilage as nutritional supplements.  They're still widely available, in fact.  It's supposed to be anti-carcinogenic.  Why, you might ask, did people get this idea?

Because, the purveyors of shark cartilage pills say, sharks don't get cancer.  So if you grind up shark parts and consume them, you won't get cancer either.

There are just two problems with this practice:

• Sharks actually do get cancer, something that has been known since at least 1908.
• Shark cartilage has been tested and found to have no beneficial therapeutic value whatsoever.  It is, however, kind of critical for the shark itself, and the practice of killing sharks for their cartilage has led to widespread decline in sharks in many parts of the world.

This did not stop two of the most prominent cartilage shark spokespeople, I. William Lane and Linda Comac, from writing a book called Sharks Don't Get Cancer.  When the book was completely trashed by scientists and other reviewers, Lane responded by writing a second book four years later called Sharks Still Don't Get Cancer.

His publisher wisely recommended that Lane eliminate the subtitle he was planning to use, which was So Take That Nyah Nyah Nyah Nyah pfffttptbtbtbtbtb.

As usual, we have people who aren't letting little things like evidence and facts stand in the way of their claim.  You can still buy shark cartilage pills in many pharmacies, including a brand called, I kid you not, "BeneFin."

I bring all this up because yesterday I ran across a story about a woman who is doing something even stupider than consuming shark cartilage to prevent cancer; she is injecting herself with bacteria so she won't age.

It's not just ordinary, garden-variety bacteria, either.  These are bacteria that had been frozen in the permafrost of Siberia for, by some estimates, 3.5 million years, and now have been resuscitated by the thaw.  A Russian professor of geology named Anatoli Brouchkov noticed that the Yakut people who live in the area have a reputation for long lifespans, so he decided that (of course) it had to be because they were drinking melted permafrost water that had the bacteria in it.

Couldn't be genetics, or diet, or anything.

So he treated some plants, fruit flies, and mice with the bacteria, which has been dubbed "Bacillus F."  Brouchkov that they "seemed to have a rejuvenating effect," although gives no details about how he knew.  How do you distinguish between a rejuvenated houseplant and a tired, listless one?  Do non-rejuvenated fruit flies fly about in a dejected fashion?

Be that as it may, Brouchkov is certain enough of his claim that he's drinking water with Bacillus F in it himself.  But an actress who calls herself "Manoush" has gone a step further; she is now injecting herself with the bacteria.

Manoush, best known for such A-list blockbusters as Zombie Reanimation, The Shrieking, Philosophy of a Knife, and The Turnpike Killer, says she started taking the bacteria because like many of us, she's not so fond of the idea of getting old.  "Aging is a disease," she says.  "It is a genetic flaw to me.  Even as a teenager I could never accept the concept of getting older one day.  I don’t care what people think. I will stop at nothing to look and feel younger.  Nothing."

Which, I think we could all agree, would leave us with no option other than injecting 3.5 million-year-old Siberian permafrost bacteria directly into our bodies.

Manoush is absolutely convinced she's now aging backwards.  Me, I'm not sure.  I'm not fond of the gray hair, stiff joints, and crow's feet I've gotten in the past few years, but I don't think the answer is to jump on some loopy idea about anti-aging bacteria.  In fact, injecting bacteria into yourself is kind of a bad idea in general; perfectly normal, ordinary skin bacteria become a serious problem if they get into your bloodstream.  A friend of mine's father, in fact, almost died of a Staphylococcus aureus infection when his thumb got skewered by a rose thorn.

Staphylococcus aureus, I should point out, is a ubiquitous part of our skin flora.  On the surface of your skin, it's harmless.  Inside you, it can result in blood sepsis, which is a quick and spectacularly nasty way to die.

Staphylococcus aureus [image courtesy of the National Institute of Health]

So as much as I'd like perpetual youth, I'm not going to get in line behind Manoush for my bacteria injection.  I'll put up with the gray hair, which I'm told makes me look "distinguished," which isn't as good as "drop-dead sexy," but I guess I'll deal.