Sphere itself

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia asked me what I knew about a strange geological oddity called "Klerksdorp spheres," which are round-ish objects with a metallic sheen, often with two or three parallel grooves at the equator, most commonly found near Ottosdal, South Africa.  They're a prominent feature in the arguments of the Ancient Astronauts crowd, where they're often claimed to have been dropped here on Earth during an alien visitation billions of years ago, only to be unearthed today.

His email said:

I'm not saying I agree with them -- in general I don't just accept far-fetched explanations -- but I've seen lots of photos of these things and they're peculiar.  It's hard for me to imagine how they could form naturally.  They're all over the place on webpages about "out of place artifacts," and a lot of people think they're evidence that we were visited by aliens in the distant past, or at least that early civilizations had a lot better technology than we thought was possible.  At least I thought I'd ask you what you think, and whether there's any chance these things aren't natural.

Well, first of all, thanks for asking.  To me, even if you lean toward weird or paranormal or non-scientific explanations, you can go a long way toward avoiding drowning in the Great Swamp of Woo simply by admitting that you don't know for sure.

The thing is, though, the paragraph from the email is basically the argument from incredulity -- "I can't imagine how this could happen" = "it must be aliens/magic/the supernatural/God."  (Intelligent design creationism is really nothing more than a religious version of the argument from incredulity.)  The proper response to "I can't imagine how this could happen" should be one of two things: (1) "... so I simply don't know the answer," or (2) "... so I'll try to find out more scientifically credible evidence about it."

As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it -- in this case, referring to UFOs -- "Remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for.  It stands for 'unidentified.'  Well, if something is unidentified, it means you don't know what it is.  If you don't know what it is, that's where the conversation should end.  You don't then go on to say that 'therefore it must be' anything."

Anyhow, I chose option #2 and did a bit of looking into the question posed by the writer.  I won't argue that the Klerksdorp spheres are odd-looking:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of photographer Robert Huggett]

If I found something like this, my first thought would certainly be to wonder if it was some sort of human-made artifact.  The thing is, they've been found in a three-billion-year-old pyrophyllite deposit in South Africa -- not somewhere you'd expect to find modern ball-bearings.

Here's the problem, though.  Rather than doing any kind of sober analysis, the Alien Manufacture cadre has perpetually misrepresented the actual facts about the spheres.  One of the worst is the "Vedic creationist" Michael Cremo, author of the book Forbidden Archaeology, who believes (amongst other things) that humans in more or less their present form have been around for millions, possibly billions, of years.  Here are a few of the verifiable facts that Cremo and others get wrong:

• The objects are "perfect spheres."  Anyone with intact vision can see from the example shown that they're relatively symmetrical oblate spheroids, but are far from perfect spheres.
• They're made of a nickel-steel alloy "only known from human manufacture."  In fact, detailed analysis found them to be composed of a combination of hematite (Fe2O3) and wollastonite (CaSiO3).
• The objects, once placed on a shelf in a "vibration-free case" in a museum in Klerksdorp, "rotated by themselves."  This seems to have been a misquotation of the museum curator, Roelf Marx, who stated that the spheres had been jostled by tremors caused by underground blasting in gold mines, and that maybe the cases weren't as vibration-free as they needed to be.
• They're "far harder than tempered steel."  In fact, the ones tested are around 5.0 on the Mohs scale of hardness.  For reference, that's a bit softer than window glass.
• They even get the nature of the mine wrong; the Wonderstone Mine, where most of the Klerksdorp spheres were found, has been repeatedly called a "silver mine" even though silver has never been mined there.  It's a pyrophyllite mine -- a silicate mineral with a multitude of industrial uses, including as an additive to clay in brick-making.

I've nothing against speculating; sometimes shrewd guesses lead to productive lines of scientific inquiry.  But fer cryin' in the sink, at least don't lie about the facts.  Nothing is gained by misrepresenting the actual verifiable data, except possibly to destroy every vestige of credibility you had.

In fact, the Klerksdorp spheres -- odd-looking though they admittedly are -- are almost certainly concretions, sedimentary rocks that start out with a grain of something (probably in this case wollastonite), and then have repeated deposits of additional minerals, creating concentric layers in exactly the same way pearls form in oysters.  (In fact, Klerksdorp spheres that have been cut in half show the internal onion-like layers you'd expect in a concretion.)  The grooves seem to be the external manifestation of lamina, parallel internal sheets that are indicative of the objects' orientation when they formed.

In other words: they're entirely natural.  They're not alien ball bearings or artifacts from a three-billion-year-old human civilization.  They are not "out-of-place artifacts;" they are, in fact, found exactly where they should be.

So to the original reader who emailed me; honestly, thanks for asking, and keep asking questions like that.  There's nothing wrong with being puzzled, and even (for a time) wondering if something strange is going on.  As long as you don't stop there, you're on the right path.  The argument from incredulity isn't a problem until it becomes a solid wall.

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Becoming human

I think one of the uniting characteristics of the topics that interest me is that they all have something to do with altering our perception of the commonplace reality around us.

This capacity for (in writer Kathryn Schulz's words) "seeing the world as it isn't" led me to writing fiction, but also to the weird and counterintuitive bits of quantum physics, the expansive vision of astronomy, and the fields studying that which no longer exists -- history, archaeology, paleontology.  It's this last one that brings this whole topic up, with a pair of discoveries revealed this week that leave me kind of awestruck.

The first, which came my way from my buddy Andrew Butters over at the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math, is about the discovery in South Africa of a two-million-year-old skull of Paranthropus robustus, a hominin considered a "cousin species" that coexisted with our direct ancestor species Homo erectus.

The find is remarkable from a number of perspectives, not least that a complete skull of any hominin is pretty unusual.  "Most of the fossil record is just a single tooth here and there so to have something like this is very rare, very lucky," said Angeline Leece, who participated in the research.  She added an evocative description of what the world was like when the owner of this skull was still alive and loping around on the African savanna.  "These two vastly different species, Homo erectus with their relatively large brains and small teeth, and Paranthropus robustus with their relatively large teeth and small brains, represent divergent evolutionary experiments,"  Leece said.  "Through time, Paranthropus robustus likely evolved to generate and withstand higher forces produced during biting and chewing food that was hard or mechanically challenging to process with their jaws and teeth — such as tubers.  Future research will clarify whether environmental changes placed populations under dietary stress and how that impacted human evolution."

It's fascinating to imagine what the world was like to these creatures, during a time when there were several intelligent hominin species coexisting.  I remember my evolutionary biology professor making that point; a lot of our attitude that species are these hard-and-fast little cubbyholes comes from the fact that we have no near relatives still alive.  Much more common in the natural world are groups of closely-related species all competing and coexisting.

But it's still a little hard to picture wandering around the place and seeing other human-like, but not-quite-human, animals out there doing their thing.

It also bears keeping in mind that the other animal species they'd have been around weren't like the ones today, either.  This point was driven home by the second discovery revealed this week, of a twelve-thousand-year-old frieze of cliffside paintings in Cerro Azul, Colombia, that show not only the usual assemblage of South American animals -- snakes, alligators, turtles, bats, monkeys, porcupines -- but mastodons, giant sloths, camelids, and some sort of three-toed ungulate with a trunk.

"These really are incredible images, produced by the earliest people to live in western Amazonia," said Mark Robinson, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, who participated in the study.  "The paintings give a vivid and exciting glimpse in to the lives of these communities.  It is unbelievable to us today to think they lived among, and hunted, giant herbivores, some which were the size of a small car."

A small part of the Cerro Azul frieze

The size, scope, and detail of the drawings is phenomenal.  The paintings were made with ochre, a yellowish or reddish mineral, and cover the cliff face not only for miles horizontally, but for almost twenty meters vertically.  Whatever the purpose of this art -- whether it was purely decorative or had some kind of magical or symbolic significance -- the artists certainly were highly motivated.  Some parts of the frieze would have required ladders or climbing equipment to create, pretty impressive for what was at the time a more or less pre-technological society.

"These rock paintings are spectacular evidence of how humans reconstructed the land, and how they hunted, farmed and fished," said archaeologist José Iriarte, also of the University of Exeter.  "It is likely art was a powerful part of culture and a way for people to connect socially.  The pictures show how people would have lived amongst giant, now extinct, animals, which they hunted."

I find it fascinating that even back then -- at the tail end of the last Ice Age, when merely surviving must have been a challenge -- people were creating art.  And the fact that much of that art was depicting animals no longer extant adds a whole other layer of mind-boggling to the find.  This, and the South African skull discovery, give us a window into understanding how we became human -- how we went from savanna-dwelling apes to intelligent beings who have art, music, literature, science, and technology.

It's a journey that took us from the East African Rift Valley to pretty much every point on the surface of the Earth -- and has driven us along the way to look with wonder into the unknown vastness of the universe.  As Carl Sagan so poignantly put it, "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

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One of the most compellingly weird objects in the universe is the black hole -- a stellar remnant so dense that it warps space into a closed surface.  Once the edge of that sphere -- the event horizon -- is passed, there's no getting out.  Even light can't escape, which is where they get their name.

Black holes have been a staple of science fiction for years, not only for their potential to destroy whatever comes near them, but because their effects on space-time result in a relativistic slowdown of time (depicted brilliantly in the movie Interstellar).  In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, The Black Hole Survival Guide, astrophysicist Janna Levin describes for us what it would be like to have a close encounter with one of these things -- using the latest knowledge from science to explain in layperson's terms the experience of an unfortunate astronaut who strayed too close.

It's a fascinating, and often mind-blowing, topic, handled deftly by Levin, where the science itself is so strange that it seems as if it must be fiction.  But no, these things are real, and common; there's a huge one at the center of our own galaxy, and an unknown number of them elsewhere in the Milky Way.  Levin's book will give you a good picture of one of the scariest naturally-occurring objects -- all from the safety of your own home.

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

ManBatPig

Reports are coming in from KwaMbonambi, a village in the KwaZulu Natal District of South Africa, of a shapeshifting monster terrorizing small children.

The monster was first spotted by a seven-year-old, who reported that he was at school and was cornered by "a short man with a long beard" in the bathroom.  Instead of looking for a creepy child molester type, the boy's mother came to the only reasonable conclusion: her son was being visited by an evil spirit called a "Tokoloshe."

So I started looking through my top-secret Cryptozoology Files to see if I could find anything out about the Tokoloshe, or if this was just a one-off.

Once I looked into it, I kind of regretted opening that particular can of worms.

Apparently this is far from the first time such a creature has been seen.  Reports of a Tokoloshe visitation from Karoo District back in 2013 gave us a clearer picture.  About those sightings, local warrant officer Zandisile Nelani said, "The community says that the monster changes shape while you are looking at it."  He went on to say that the monster had started out as a man in a suit, but had changed to a pig and then to a bat.  He hastened to add that although the creature had scared a number of residents, no people or livestock had been harmed by it.

This incident reminded me, against my will of the "ManBearPig" episode of South Park, which I had forgotten about, and honestly, I kind of wish it had stayed forgotten.

As little as two months ago, there were Tokoloshe sightings in Mozambique, where the creature was accused of running around having sex with married women, but was finally captured and paraded through the village.  Here are a couple of photographs:

Because that's not fake-looking at all.

There is a long-standing tradition of the Tokoloshe (or Thokolozi) from the southern parts of Africa.   Descriptions vary.  We have the little bearded man sighted by the first grader in KwaZulu Natal, and the wild-haired demon in the photograph above; but informed sources tell me that the Tokoloshe most often appears as a brown-skinned man, hairy all over, with only one buttock.  This last feature seems a little odd, and makes me wonder if he only has a right butt cheek, only a left one, or just one huge symmetrically-placed butt cheek, the last-mentioned option bringing up other anatomical considerations that I would prefer not to think about.  

On the other hand, the photograph of the sighting in Mozambique clearly shows a guy with the standard-issue two butt cheeks.  So not sure what to make of that.

Another characteristic of the Tokoloshe is that he is said to be very well-endowed in the reproductive equipment department.  Without going into graphic detail, let's just say that he is well-endowed to the point that tighty-whities would be pretty much out of the question.  Between that and having only one buttock, getting fitted at the tailor's must be a fairly humiliating experience, and possibly accounts for his legendary ill temper.

So we have here one very odd-looking dude.  But the key feature that identifies all three of the above sightings as the Tokoloshe is his shapeshifting ability.  The Tokoloshe carries around with him a magic pebble that allows him to become invisible and look like pretty much anything he wants to; in fact, he is said to be able to take the shape of many different animals, and also to fly.  So I think we have a definite match.

Being able to look like like whoever you want would also be handy given the Tokoloshe's legendary propensity for seducing women.  If you get accused of sleeping with another man's wife, you can just say, "It wasn't me, it was just the Tokoloshe impersonating me."  Which is pretty convenient.

What should the inhabitants of the villages visited by this evil spirit do?  One possibility is to make a Tokoloshe Repellant, but the problem is that the recipe I found requires Tokoloshe fat.  Obtaining that would seem to be a bit of a stumbling block, although one site I looked at said that it might be purchased from a muti, or purveyor of traditional medicine.  You can also appease the Tokoloshe by putting out food for him, but you must remember not to put salt in it; he apparently shares with many European spirit creatures the characteristic of not liking salt.  Sometimes witches subdue a Tokoloshe, and keep him around for their own purposes, about which I will leave you to speculate.  They do this by a combination of magic and luring him with food, and keep him docile by "trimming the hair over his eyes."

As for the mom of the first grader, she was counseled by Thandonjani Hlongwane, chairman of the KwaZulu Natal Traditional Healers' Association, to pay a hundred rand to get some "strong mufti" (magic) to keep the Tokoloshe away and protect her son.  The mother has taken her son out of school, a decision supported by the chairman of the local school board, Paradise Jali, who said, “We will establish a regular prayer programme.  That is the only way we can fight this.”

Because clearly fighting one superstition with a different superstition is the best way to handle things.

So the good news for the people of South Africa and Mozambique is that Tokoloshes mostly seem fairly harmless.  Apparently even the women who have been seduced by Tokoloshes report that the experience was pretty pleasant, and in fact there are some reports that women who have had sex with a Tokoloshe will never be satisfied by sex with their husbands and boyfriends.   In either case, the bad news (other than the obvious bad news to the aforementioned husbands and boyfriends) is that there doesn't seem to be much they can do about his presence.  They only have two choices, as far as I can see: either to put out food to appease a magical spirit with enormous junk and one buttock, or to try not being so damn gullible.

I know which one I think would be more effective.

Water into wine, version 2.0

If you want the best insurance against being taken in by swindlers, hoaxers, and charlatans, cultivate a healthy skepticism and a rational view of the world.

Whenever I see something that pushes the boundaries of credulity, my first thought is, "what other explanations are there?"  I try not to dismiss it out of hand; a habit of instant disbelief is as lazy as gullibility.  But I do look for a scientifically plausible explanation, rather than just jumping on the woo-woo bandwagon.

Unfortunately, though, a good many people don't see it this way.  Which is why the money keeps flowing to people like South African preacher Lesego Daniel.

Daniel claims to be able to work miracles, and performs them before standing-room-only crowds.  And he has his followers convinced that he can turn gasoline into pineapple juice.

He has one of his helpers pour what he says is gasoline into a basin, and sets it aflame; and then takes a bottle of it, says a prayer, and gives it to volunteers to drink.  Some cough and gag...

... but they just keep coming up anyhow.  And, apparently, believing.

"It has a lot of fumes," said Daniel, after taking a sip from the bottle himself.  "But I don't have any side effects."  And the true believers go wild.

Pastor Daniel has a video of his dog-and-pony show uploaded to YouTube, and it's worth watching.  "With the flame that will burn here," he shouts to the enthusiastic crowd, "that it is evident enough for you to have faith."

Now, if you've watched the video, you probably noticed what I did; that (1) there were many opportunities for sleight-of-hand, and switching the bottle with the gasoline for a different bottle; and in any case, (2) there's no certainty that Daniel himself actually swallowed any of the liquid.  It'd be easy enough just to put the bottle to your lips, and mime swallowing.  But this hasn't stopped his followers from coming to his performances, and giving him donations of cash for his blessings.

"The level of anointing is not the same," says a disclaimer on his video link.  "If you cannot turn water into wine, do not try this."

This, by the way, is the same man who last year had his followers eating grass, saying that it "would rid them of their sins and heal them of any ailments they may have had."

When people ask me what appeals to me about skepticism, I always answer the same way; skepticism starts from doubt and then proceeds toward either belief or disbelief, based on the evidence.  Other approaches to knowledge, especially those that value faith, require you to turn off your brain and "simply believe."

And there is no way in the world that I would want to cede my own understanding to anyone else -- especially given the fact that there are charlatans like Lesego Daniel in the world.

Retroactive prayer pay

Yesterday there was a story in News24, a media outlet in South Africa, that a Lichtenburg man, Nelson Thabo Modupe, has submitted a bill to Eskom, the South African electric company, for 250,000 Rand (about $23,000).

The reason?  There were storms during the 2010 FIFA World Cup finals, which were held in Johannesburg.  When the weather turned bad, Mr. Modupe prayed to god that there wouldn't be a power outage, and there wasn't, because by his prayers he "saved the power utility the burden and humiliation" that would have ensued had there been a loss of electricity during the game.  So he figures that Eskom owes him some big bucks for having had the foresight to pray.

[Spain vs. Portugal at the 2010 World Cup.  Image courtesy of photographer Andrew Deacon and the Wikimedia Commons]

Predictably, there has been a significant hue and cry against Mr. Modupe's case.  "I think he misunderstands the power of prayer," one person wrote, in the comments section of the News24 article. 

"(I)t seems like it's only Christianity, people use to make a quick buck," said another.  "I can give you a few quick quotes from the bible, but that won't be enough, you must know the Author, and the Author I know is not an Author of confusion."

"For money?" said a third.  "Imagine Moses charging admission fees for anyone wanting to cross the Red Sea."

Now, wait just a moment.  I can see your criticizing him for wanting to profit out of the whole thing; after all, Jesus himself had a few things to say about money, and none of them were good.  But I get the impression that most of the folks who wrote to respond to the story were religious themselves, and they were virtually unanimous in ridiculing Mr. Modupe and his FIFA World Cup Miracle.  And I was reading the comments, and thinking, "Aren't you people the ones who supposedly think that prayer works?"

I mean, I could understand it if one of us atheists made fun of the whole thing.  Whenever I hear of someone claiming, after the fact, that something happened because (s)he prayed for it, I always kind of roll my eyes a little, because it's pretty convenient to attribute to god's divine grace something that has already happened.

But why aren't the Christians cheering Mr. Modupe along?

I've thought about this before.  Back in biblical days, all sorts of weird shit happened -- donkeys talked (Numbers 22:21-39), the Earth stopped turning so that Joshua could finish fighting a battle (Joshua 10:12), and god told a man to slit his son's throat, only saying at the last moment that he was just kidding (Genesis 22).  These days, you have to wonder what would happen if someone claimed any of this stuff.  My general feeling is if someone killed a bunch of members of another religion, and then said that god had commanded him to do so (1 Kings 18:36-40), the judge -- Christian or not -- would throw the guy in jail, or worse.

So you have to wonder if the self-proclaimed bible-believing, god-obeying Christians really believe what they're saying.  If god told one of you to kill your own child, would you do it?  If he told you that you should jump off a cliff, because he would catch you with his Mighty Hand and Outstretched Arm and lower you gently to the ground, would you do it?  Why did such miracles happen every second Thursday, back in biblical times, but now people who believe such things are considered to be crazy -- even by the Christians themselves?

Kind of strange, isn't it?  Being an evidence-based kind of guy, myself, all it would take is one or two such miraculous occurrences to turn me into a True Believer, so you'd think it'd be in god's best interest to exert himself a little.  But there have been no talking donkeys, no times the Earth has stopped turning, nothing but things like "no power outages at the World Cup."

Oh, but wait.  "Thou shall not put the Lord thy God to the test."  (Matthew 4:7)  Mighty convenient, that.

In any case, I expect that Mr. Modupe will lose his lawsuit.  I mean, the power of prayer is one thing, but the power of the almighty dollar (or South African Rand, as the case may be) is another thing entirely.  But it does open up some pretty major philosophical questions, which I don't begin to know how to answer.

After all, I'm not the one who's claiming that all of this stuff works.