The collapse

I've mentioned before that I have an absolute fascination with historical mysteries, which is why if I had the opportunity to visit one place and period, it would be somewhere in western Europe during the "Dark Ages" -- the time between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (usually placed at 476 C.E., when the puppet emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by the Scirian leader Odoacer) and the founding of the Carolingian dynasty and re-consolidation of power by Charlemagne 325 years later.  During that interval, damn little is known for sure -- we have some names, like Clovis and Charles Martel and Arthur Pendragon -- but how many of the accounts from that period are true and how many later inventions and add-ons, we'll probably never be certain.

There's another time period, though, that is (if anything) more mysterious still -- partly because it's much further in the past.  This is the Late Bronze Age Collapse, that happened in the twelfth century B.C.E., in which two of the most powerful civilizations in ancient Eurasia, the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittites, suddenly disintegrated, and others in the region, including the Egyptian New Kingdom and the Assyrian Empire, were seriously weakened (although ultimately survived and rebuilt).

Whatever happened, it happened fast.  Two of the main cities of the Hittite Empire, Hattusa and Karaoğlan, both burned right around the same time, and from the archaeological evidence, so many people died their bodies were never buried.  Greece was equally hard-hit, with just about every Mycenaean palace and citadel burned or demolished; the period afterward has been nicknamed the "Greek Dark Ages," a period of about four hundred years from which we have almost no records.  Whatever caused it, the Greek peninsula seems to have been left largely depopulated.  One estimate is that ninety percent of pre-collapse settlements in the Peloponnese, the southernmost region of Greece, were abandoned during that one event.

The Mycenaean "Mask of Agamemnon," ca. 1550 B.C.E. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Xuan Che, MaskOfAgamemnon, CC BY 2.0]

So what caused the collapse?

The simple answer is that we don't know.  It may well have been a confluence of bad stuff; earthquakes, plagues, and famines are all possibilities, although it's hard to imagine why any of the three would then lead people across an entire region to destroy just about every last city.  Another possibility is severe and prolonged drought caused by a climatic shift, followed by open rebellion by people desperate for food and water.  (Recall that back then, the kings were considered to be intercessors to the gods on the behalf of the people; when the rain stopped falling and the crops all died, it's entirely possible the people overthrew their own rulers for not intercessing hard enough.)

It's also possible that both the Mycenaeans and the Hittites were overcome and destroyed by a mysterious group called the "Sea Peoples," who are mentioned in records of the Egyptian New Kingdom (the Egyptians were also attacked, but successfully repelled them and managed to survive).  Who these Sea Peoples were isn't known for sure, but they may have been an alliance between the Lukka of coastal southwestern Anatolia, the Peleset of what are now Israel and Lebanon (the name is probably a cognate to the biblical name "Philistine"),  and the Weshesh, who may have been from Sicily or southern Italy.  But the truth is, we're not sure of that, either.  The Sea Peoples left no records of their own and seem to have moved around a lot, so any artifacts they left behind haven't told us much.

And of course, it could be a combination of all of these.  Changes in climate and natural disasters are known to have been responsible for famines and epidemics, and when those happen, people often up stakes and try to move to a more congenial venue -- which is inconvenient for the people who already live there.  The attacks by the Sea Peoples may have been a result, not the root cause, of the collapse.

But there's no doubt that the effects were devastating.  The eastern Mediterranean would take four centuries to recover completely, leaving behind a historical whodunnit that still puzzles us today.  But it does highlight how tenuous survival was back then.  The people of the ancient world were one bad harvest between relative comfort and famine.  Epidemics were regular visitors, sometimes wiping out settlements entirely.  When things get desperate, the veneer of civility disintegrates pretty rapidly.

It's to be hoped our modern civilization would be resilient enough to weather such calamities, should they strike, but the reality is, we're not really that different from our distant ancestors.  It's nice to think that in severe trials, we'd help each other -- that we might remember Benjamin Franklin's words, "We must hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately."  Like us, the Bronze Age empires probably thought they'd be around forever, but when catastrophe struck, they seem to have promptly self-destructed.

Let's hope we can learn some lessons from their failure.

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The enduring mystery of the Huns

In 376 C.E., an enormous group of Germanic-speaking Goths, primarily from the Tervingi and Greuthungi tribes, showed up along the Danube River, which had long stood as an uneasy boundary between the Germanic peoples and the Roman Empire.

Most people are aware that the Roman Empire -- especially the western half of it -- would, for all intents and purposes, collapse completely less than a hundred years after that.  What's less well-known is that up to this point, it was doing pretty well; no one, in 375 C.E., would have looked around them and thought, "Wow, these people are doomed."  British historian Peter Heather analyzed all the usual factors cited in Rome's fourth-century troubles, including an uncontrolled and rebellious army, restive peasantry, food shortages from a drop in agricultural production, and conflicts with Persia on the eastern border.  None appear to be sufficient to account for what was about to happen.  Rome had stood for almost a thousand years -- to put that in perspective, four times longer than the United States has been a nation -- and had survived much worse, including the chaotic "Year of Five Emperors" (193 C.E.), which started with the murder of the paranoid and megalomaniacal emperor Commodus, made famous in the movie Gladiator.

The Roman Empire had dealt with border conflicts pretty much during its entire history.  Given its expansionist agenda, it was directly responsible for a good many of them.  But this time, things would be different.  No one at the time seems to have seen it coming, but the end result would write finis on the Pax Romana.

The difference was a group of people called the Huns.

Reconstruction of a Hunnic warrior [Image licensed under the Creative Commons George S. Stuart creator QS:P170,Q5544204 Photographed by Peter d'Aprix & Dee Finning; Owned by Museum of Ventura County, Attila the Hun on horseback by George S Stuart, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The Huns are a historical enigma.  For a group so widely known -- every schoolkid has heard of Attila the Hun -- their origins are pretty much a complete mystery.  (For what it's worth, they did not give their name to the nation of Hungary; the name "Hungary" comes from the Oghur-Turkic word onogur, meaning "the ten tribes of the Oghurs."  And the Magyars, the Finno-Ugric ethnic group that makes up the majority of the ancestry in modern Hungary, didn't even come into the region until the ninth century C.E.)

As far as the Huns go, we don't even know much about what language they spoke, because they left no written records.  There are a handful of words recorded in documents from the fourth and fifth centuries, and some personal names, but the evidence is so thin that linguists haven't even been able to determine what language family Hunnic belonged to -- there are arguments that it was Turkic, Iranian, Yeniseian, Mongolian, Uralic, and Indo-European, or perhaps a linguistic isolate -- but the fact is, we simply don't know.

So basically, the Huns swept into eastern Europe from we-don't-know-where.  Certainly they at least passed through the central Asian steppe, but whether that's where they originated is a matter of pure conjecture.  There's even a contention they might have come from as far away as what is now northern China, and that they're allied to the Xiongnu culture, but the evidence for that is slim at best.

Roman chronicler Ammianus Marcellinus, who witnessed many of the events of the late fourth century that were to lead to the downfall of the Roman Empire, was grudgingly impressed by what he saw of the Huns:

The people called Huns exceed every measure of savagery.  They are aflame with an inhuman desire for plundering others' property...  They enter battle drawn up in wedge-shaped masses.  And as they are lightly-equipped, for a swift motion, and unexpected in action, they purposely divide suddenly into scattered bands and attack, rushing about in disorder here and there, dealing terrific slaughter...  They fight from a distance with missiles having sharp bone, instead of their usual points, joined to the shafts with wonderful skill; then they gallop over the intervening spaces and fight hand-to-hand with swords.

Ammianus, though, didn't know any better than anyone else where the Huns had originated; his best guess was that they'd lived on "the shores of the ice-bound ocean," but never provided any reason why he thought that.

When they did explode onto the scene, though -- wherever they'd come from -- the effects were catastrophic.  The Goths, Alans, and Sarmatians of what are now the Balkan countries of eastern Europe were shoved farther and farther west, and all of a sudden, the Roman Empire had a serious problem on its hands.  The emperor at the time, Valens, was ill-equipped to deal with a hundred thousand refugees, mostly from Germanic-speaking tribes who had long been considered little more than barbarians.  (To be fair, it's hard to imagine how anyone would be well-equipped to deal with this.)  His decision to treat the Goths as enemies, rather than joining forces with them against the greater threat of the Huns, led to the Battle of Adrianople in 378.

Valens lost both the battle and his life.

While there was some attempt to come to terms with the Goths (or even turn them into allies) by Valens's successor Theodosius I, the stage was set.  The domino effect of Huns shoving the Goths and the Goths shoving the Romans continued, chipping away at the Western Roman Empire, ultimately leading to the Gothic leader Alaric sacking Rome itself in 410.  The Huns made their way into Gaul, and even into Italy, under Attila.  This forward motion continued until the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, fought in 451 near what is now the town of Châlons, France, at which a combined force of Romans and Goths finally defeated the Huns and forced them back.

Perhaps the most curious thing about the Huns was that after that battle, they began to fall apart themselves with a speed that was just this side of bizarre.  Attila died in 453 -- from what appears to have been an esophageal hemorrhage -- and none of his many sons proved capable as a leader.  They fractured into various factions which rapidly succumbed to internecine squabbling, and their power waned as fast as it had waxed seventy years earlier.  What happened to them after that is just as much of a mystery as everything else about them; most historians believe that what was left of the Huns were absorbed into other ethnic groups in what are now Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania, and they more or less ceased to exist as an independent culture.

So we're left with a puzzle.  One of the most familiar, instantly recognizable civilizations in history is of unknown origin and had an unknown fate, arising from obscurity and fading back into it as quickly.  But what's certain is that after they surged through Europe, the western half of the Roman Empire never recovered.  The last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus, abdicated in 476.  The western half of Europe fragmented into petty kingdoms ruled by various Germanic chieftains, and the power center shifted to Constantinople, where it would remain until Charlemagne came to to the throne three hundred years later.

Historical mysteries never fail to fascinate, and this is a baffling one -- a mysterious people who swept into Europe, smashed an empire that had stood for a thousand years, and then vanished, all within the span of a single century.  Perhaps one day historians will figure out who the Huns were, but for now, all we have is scanty records, the awed and fearful accounts of the people who witnessed them, and a plethora of questions.

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Pottery in motion

Making pottery is a complicated enterprise.

I say this from some degree of personal experience.  About ten years ago, on the urging of my artist wife, I took a class to learn how to throw pottery.  For those of you who have no experience with this particular avocation, I'm not talking about hurling plates against the wall, which, of course, you wouldn't need to take a class for.  "Throwing," in pottery parlance, is the process of using a spinning pottery wheel to shape symmetrical vessels out of clay.  Some people still use old-fashioned "kick wheels" -- where the axle of the wheelhead attaches to a heavy stone disk set in motion with the feet, and the momentum of the disk keeps the wheel spinning (for a while, at least).  Fortunately -- because learning to use a kick wheel takes a whole different level of coordination -- I learned to throw on an electric wheel, the speed of which is controlled by a foot pedal a little like the accelerator of a car.

Which is hard enough.  The first pieces I made looked like they were created by a kindergartner, or perhaps an unusually talented chimp.  I'm not very artistic, and improvement was slow, but I've gradually gotten to the point where I can turn out a decent-looking piece of pottery.

One of my better efforts

My first pottery teacher told us, "Never get attached to a piece until it's cool, in your hands, after the final firing."  It's good advice.  There are a million things that can go wrong.  After the piece is thrown, it still needs to be trimmed (removing excess clay at the bottom and finishing the shaping), have any modifications added (such as the spout and handle on the pitcher in the photograph).  Then it needs to dry -- without cracking.  (Cracks usually happen because the piece dried too fast or else unevenly, often when it has thicker walls at the bottom -- a common amateur mistake.)  Then it has to be "bisque fired," converting the raw clay to ceramic, usually at a temperature of about 1000 C.  Then it's cooled, and (most often) coated with a glaze to make it both attractive and water-tight, and re-fired at a higher temperature (depending on the clay and glaze used, between 1200 and 1400 C).  At every stage, the piece can crack, warp, or sag.  The glaze can malfunction in innumerable ways, including forming blisters or pock marks, pulling away from the clay (crawling), splintering as it cools (shivering), or even adhering to the clay and then shrinking and triggering spiral cracks (dunting).

Or, as happens all too often, you can just take the piece out and think, "why did I glaze it this way?  This looks like crap."

But every once in a while, all the stars align, and you get a piece that's really nice.

My favorite coffee mug

The reason all this comes up is a new study in Nature Human Behavior that looked at two interesting things: first, how far back the tradition of pottery-making goes; and second, once it arose, how quickly it spread.  The earliest pots known come from about 16,000 years ago in China and Japan, but after that it very quickly spread amongst the hunter-gatherer societies, and by 10,000 years ago it was found throughout the Near East and Europe.  (Pottery-making in Africa and the Americas is thought to have had an independent origin, but showed up around the same time.)

The authors write:

Human history has been shaped by global dispersals of technologies, although understanding of what enabled these processes is limited. Here, we explore the behavioural mechanisms that led to the emergence of pottery among hunter-gatherer communities in Europe during the mid-Holocene.  Through radiocarbon dating, we propose this dispersal occurred at a far faster rate than previously thought.  Chemical characterization of organic residues shows that European hunter-gatherer pottery had a function structured around regional culinary practices rather than environmental factors.  Analysis of the forms, decoration and technological choices suggests that knowledge of pottery spread through a process of cultural transmission.  We demonstrate a correlation between the physical properties of pots and how they were used, reflecting social traditions inherited by successive generations of hunter-gatherers.  Taken together the evidence supports kinship-driven, super-regional communication networks that existed long before other major innovations such as agriculture, writing, urbanism or metallurgy.

What blows me away about all this is that -- as I said earlier -- pottery-making ain't easy, and that goes double if you don't have modern technology to help.  First, you have to find a source of usable clay, which is by itself not simple.  Clays, depending on their chemical composition, fuse and turn into ceramic at different temperatures; an iron-rich earthenware, such as the clays used by the amazing potter Lucy Martinez, of the San Ildefonso Pueblo community, fire to a much lower temperature than kaolin-rich fine-grained clay of the type used in the classic Jingdezhen porcelains.  Fire a piece made from earthenware clay to the temperature used for porcelain, and it will simply melt into a puddle all over your kiln shelf.

Then there's learning which materials to use as glazes.  Our ancestors didn't have the refined glazes in plastic bottles that I use; they had to learn which naturally-occurring minerals would melt and coat the surface.  Not only did they have to concern themselves with coverage and water-tightness, they had to learn -- the hard way -- about safety.  Many of the prettiest glazes contain such dangerous heavy metals as cobalt, barium, and lead, and using vessels with those glazes for cooking or serving food could be downright dangerous.  (Now, chemists have done extensive testing on glazes to determine whether they're "food safe;" lead and barium have been almost entirely eliminated, and cobalt formulated so it stays put in the glazed surface and doesn't leach into your bowl of soup.  Fortunately for potters, because cobalt is an essential ingredient for just about all beautiful blue glazes.)

So what's amazing is that our ancestors learned all this by trial-and-error.  No wonder that after that -- as the researchers found -- the technology spread like wildfire.  Everyone would want to learn something that useful.

It's cool that in these days of mass production there are still people who want to learn this ancient skill.  Maybe today, with our electric wheels and factory-processed clays and bottled, tested glazes, we've got it easy compared to our forebears, but we are still using the same skills of shaping and refining and decorating that were developed ten thousand years ago.  When I get on the wheel to make a serving bowl or a coffee mug or a pitcher, I'm working in a medium that links me, in an unbroken line, back to nomadic hunter-gatherers who discovered that with little more than natural materials, a hot enough fire, and a pair of strong hands, you could make something that would last for millennia.

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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!]

Pseudohistory of the world

I have wondered for some time what starts a person down the path of inventing some crazy crackpot theory.  When I was a teenager, I went through a wishful-thinking, proto-woo-woo stage myself, during which I desperately wanted stuff like Tarot cards to work.  But after I messed around a little with them, I figured out pretty quickly that (1) the card patterns were entirely random, and (2) any meaning that emerged consisted of what I, or the person for whom the reading was being done, was imposing upon them.

I.e., Tarot cards don't work.  Another cool idea smashed to smithereens upon the shores of reality.

But for some folks, apparently that fact-checking protocol never kicks in.  So what starts out as a minor glitch in thinking grows, and grows, and eventually becomes this enormous counterfactual ball of bullshit, and all the while its inventor sits there thinking (s)he has revolutionized human knowledge.

Take, for example, Anatoly Fomenko, a Russian mathematician who for some reason left his chosen field of study and decided to become a historian.  But he didn't do what most historians do, to wit, examining primary documents and reading scholarly papers on historical research; he set out to revise history.

Because evidently, we've been doing history wrong.

Passage from a 10th century manuscript of Thucydides's The Peloponnesian War, even though it apparently never happened [Image is in the Public Domain]

He invented something that he calls the New Chronology.  And when he calls it "new," he's not just whistlin' Dixie.

Here are a few features of his "New Chronology:"

• None of the dating methods we use are accurate.  I mean, none.  This includes archaeological stratigraphy, dendrochronology, proxy records, and radioisotope dating.
• Pretty much nothing that occurred before the Early Middle Ages (8th century C. E.) actually occurred.  What we think we know about those times comes from Renaissance-era forgeries, hoaxes, and lies.
• This includes the entire Roman Empire, the city-states of the Ancient Greeks, and the pharaonic period of Egypt.
• Jesus never existed.  The biblical story of Jesus is a mythologized account of the life of Byzantine emperor Andronikos I Komnenos.
• The 2nd century Almagest of Ptolemy, one of the most famous mathematical treatises of the ancient world, was written in the 17th century.
• The Tatar and Mongol invasions never happened.  Russia has pretty much always been inhabited by Russians.  And lemme tell you, the Russians are awesome.  They are pretty much the awesomest people ever.
• The Old Testament Jerusalem is the same place as Constantinople.  Why then, you might ask, do we have a city that is now called "Jerusalem" which is in a completely different location?   Stop asking questions.
• The Anglo-Saxon King Egbert of Wessex is the same person as Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great.
• Because the name "England" is a cognate to the Byzantine imperial dynasty, the "Angeli."
• Yes, I know that England and Byzantium are on opposite sides of Europe.  I believe I've already told you once to stop asking questions.

And so on and so forth. Jason Colavito, writing for Skeptic magazine, did a blistering takedown of Fomenko's theory (if I can dignify it with that name), which you would think would be unnecessary, given that a better name for "New Chronology" would be "My First Big Book of Batshit Insane Ad Hoc Assumptions."

Now, the fact that some crank has written some crazy books (seven of them, in fact) isn't an indicator of anything particularly odd, except that it still doesn't answer my original question of how someone wouldn't realize pretty quickly that what they were proposing made no sense whatsoever (with luck, before (s)he'd written seven books about it).  But what I find more surprising is that there are people who believe Fomenko.  And they include Russian chess grand master Garry Kasparov.

Yes, I realize that being a chess grand master doesn't necessarily mean that you're sane in other respects.  But Kasparov seems to be a pretty reasonable guy, all things considered -- he's a political activist and has been articulate in his criticism of Vladimir Putin, and currently is on the board of directors of the Human Rights Foundation.

And yet, somehow, he thinks that Anatoly Fomenko's "New Chronology" makes sense.

All of which hammers home the point that I don't really understand human thought processes all that well.  Because however good you are at chess or mathematics, you're not going to convince me that the ancient Greeks didn't exist.

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Finding a person who is both an expert in an arcane field like quantum physics, and is also able to write lucidly about it for the interested layperson, is rare indeed.  Such a person is Sean Carroll, whose books From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture explore such ideas as the Big Bang, the Higgs boson, and what exactly time is -- and why it seems to flow in only one direction.

In his latest book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll looks not only at the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, but at the problem at the heart of it -- the "collapse of the wave function," how a reality that is a field of probabilities (experimental data agrees with quantum theory to an astonishing degree on this point) somehow converts to a reality with definitive outcomes when it's observed.  None of the solutions thus proposed, Carroll claims, are really satisfying -- so physicists are left with a dilemma, a theory that has been experimentally verified to a fare-thee-well but still has a giant gaping unexplained hole at its center.

Something Deeply Hidden is an amazing read, and will fascinate you from page 1 until you close the back cover.  It will also repeatedly blow your mind in its description of a universe that doesn't behave at all like what common sense says it should.  And Sean Carroll is exactly the author to navigate these shark-infested waters.  This is a book you don't want to miss.

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

Pseudohistory of the world

I have wondered for some time what starts a person down the path of inventing some crazy crackpot theory.  When I was a teenager, I went through a wishful-thinking, proto-woo-woo stage myself, during which I desperately wanted stuff like Tarot cards to work.  But after I messed around a little with them, I figured out pretty quickly that (1) the card patterns were entirely random, and (2) any meaning that emerged therefrom consisted of what I, or the person for whom the reading was being done, was imposing upon them.

I.e., Tarot cards don't work.  Another cool idea smashed to smithereens upon the shores of reality.

But for some folks, apparently that fact-checking protocol never kicks in.  So what starts out as a minor glitch in thinking grows, and grows, and eventually becomes this enormous counterfactual ball of bullshit, and all the while its inventor sits there thinking (s)he has revolutionized human knowledge.

Take, for example, Anatoly Fomenko, a Russian mathematician who for some reason left his chosen field of study and decided to become a historian.  But he didn't do what most historians do, to wit, examining primary documents and reading scholarly papers on historical research; he set out to revise history.

Because apparently all along, we've been doing history wrong.

He invented something that he calls the New Chronology.  And when he calls it "new," he's not just whistlin' Dixie.

Here are a few features of his "New Chronology:"

• None of the dating methods we use are accurate.  I mean, none.  This includes archaeological stratigraphy, dendrochronology, proxy records, and radioisotope dating.
• Pretty much nothing that occurred before the Early Middle Ages (8th century C. E.) actually occurred.  What we think we know about those times comes from Renaissance-era forgeries, hoaxes, and lies.
• This includes the entire Roman Empire, the city-states of the Ancient Greeks, and the pharaonic period of Egypt.
• Jesus never existed.  The biblical story of Jesus is a mythologized account of the life of Byzantine emperor Andronikos I Komnenos.
• The 2nd century Almagest of Ptolemy, one of the most famous mathematical treatises of the ancient world, was written in the 17th century.
• The Tartar and Mongol invasions never happened.  Russia has pretty much always been inhabited by Russians.  And lemme tell you, the Russians are awesome.  They are pretty much the awesomest people ever.
• The Old Testament Jerusalem is the same place as Constantinople.  Why then, you might ask, do we have a city that is now called "Jerusalem" which is in a completely different location?  Stop asking questions.
• The Anglo-Saxon King Egbert of Wessex is the same person as Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great.
• Because the name "England" is a cognate to the Byzantine imperial dynasty, the "Angeli."
• Yes, I know that England and Byzantium are on opposite sides of Europe.  I believe I've already told you once to stop asking questions.

And so on and so forth.  Jason Colavito, writing for Skeptic magazine, did a blistering takedown of Fomenko's theory (if I can dignify it with that name), which you would think would be unnecessary, given that a better name for "New Chronology" would be "My First Big Book of Batshit Insane Ad Hoc Assumptions."

Now, the fact that some crank has written some crazy books (seven of them, in fact) isn't an indicator of anything particularly odd, except that it still doesn't answer my original question of how someone wouldn't realize pretty quickly that what they were proposing made no sense whatsoever (with luck, before (s)he'd written seven books about it).  But what I find more surprising is that there are people who believe Fomenko.  And they include Russian chess grand master Garry Kasparov.

Yes, I realize that being a chess grand master doesn't necessarily mean that you're sane in other respects.  But Kasparov seems to be a pretty reasonable guy, all things considered -- he's a political activist and has been articulate in his criticism of Vladimir Putin, and currently is on the board of directors of the Human Rights Foundation.

And yet, somehow, he thinks that Anatoly Fomenko's "New Chronology" makes sense.

All of which hammers home the point that I don't really understand human thought processes all that well.  Because however good you are at chess, or mathematics, you're not going to convince me that the ancient Greeks didn't exist.

There were giants in those days

My students, as a final projects, are required to perform an experiment of their choice, and report back the results of their research.  And one of the directions I give them is, "Beware of over-concluding."

It's an easy enough error to slip into.  If you test the effects of increasing concentration of nitrogen-based fertilizers on the growth of marigold plants, and you find that increasing amounts of soluble nitrogen make marigold seedlings grow faster, you cannot extrapolate that and assume that all plants will respond in the same fashion.  It is a difficulty that plagues medical researchers; a drug that has beneficial effects in test animals may not behave the same way in humans.

The woo-woos, however, raise over-conclusion to an art form.  They will take some anomalous observation, and run right off the cliff with it -- coming to some pronouncement that is so ridiculous that the word "unwarranted" doesn't even do it justice.  Take, for example, the conclusion the woo-woos are drawing from the announcement that Italian "anomalist" researcher Matteo Ianneo has discovered the ruins of an ancient city in the Saudi Arabian desert:

If you look carefully, you can see the ancient ruins next to it, even an old profile.  This is a sensational discovery that no one had noticed. In photographs from 2004, one can observe that there was nothing in this place, it was definitely covered by sand...  The strong winds and desert storms have brought to light this discovery that I think is very sensational.  Now archaeologists are to affirm this archaeological area.  Perhaps it is certainly ancient ruins belonging to an ancient and magnificent city, which dates back to a long time ago.  I hope I have given a contribution to science, in order to find a small piece that the story is all redone, and it’s hard to tell.

Well, so far, so good.  And so far, nothing too surprising.  The Saudi Arabian desert is full of ruins, many of them dating to a time when the climate there was far more congenial for human habitation:

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

First, though, it bears mention that Ianneo isn't the most credible witness himself.  He is, after all, the guy who announced last year that he'd found an alien base on Mars.  But even leaving that aside for a moment, take a look at what noted wingnut and Skeptophilia frequent flyer Alfred Lambremont Webre had to say about Ianneo's discovery:

Many who know of Matteo Ianneo's fantastic discoveries on the surface of Mars, other planets and earth, know how remarkable his findings are.  As a researcher and investigative journalist myself, I personally believe Matteo has surpassed all others involved with extraterrestrial geophysics... 

The lost cities that are spoken about in our earthly legends may be truth.  Gigantic monuments populate our Earth and it is my belief that they were created by actual giants who were moving in to leave a clear trace of their coming to our planet.  These giants were produced by continuous changes and an evolution in DNA.  It is also quite possible Giants were the very gods narrated in our remote history. The legends are from millions or perhaps billions of years ago.  Most of earth has suffered many cataclysms since then, and it is a misfortune that much of this history was destroyed. 

The gods of these legends existed long ago and at one time, they were very real to our ancestors, these beings of great intelligence and height were to be envied.  They were most likely our actual creators.  They built gigantic monuments so wondrous, many of the ruins still defy logic to this day.  Majestic pyramids and gigantic monuments were created for us, for our humanity.  Their technologies were able to model and mold the rock, to do with it whatever they wanted. 

Their technology had to have been very advanced.  Many of them were been able to save people to help them escape from their dying worlds, by bringing them here to our Earth.  The stories have all been redone and retold over and over throughout the years.  Many men of the earth chose to hide the truth a very long time ago, out of fear.  This history has already taught us.  The truth can have other implications, some truth that most humans cannot accept.

We have an observation: ruins of a city in Saudi Arabia.  Webre's conclusion: there used to be technologically advanced alien giants on the Earth, who created the human race, and whose existence is being systematically covered up by the powers-that-be.

It reminds me of the wonderful quote from Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode called "Heaven and Hell," wherein he describes the wild speculation people indulged in when it became obvious that the planet Venus was covered with a thick layer of clouds:

I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus.  Why not?   Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds.  Well, what are clouds made of?  Water, of course.   Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.  Therefore, the surface must be wet.   Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp.   If there's a swamp, there's ferns.   If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs.  Observation: I can't see anything.  Conclusion: dinosaurs.

But Webre has apparently one-upped even the "anomalists" that Sagan was parodying, with his wild talk of giant aliens and directed evolution and ancient gods.  He even goes on to tell us what the giant aliens felt like when humans turned out to be so difficult:

Atlantis and other cities have existed in the distant past, most of these great civilizations fell and these Gods probably view us with a great sadness.  Ancient peoples in the past were always power hungry, war crazed and violent in nature, some possibly even dealt with nuclear war. 

The possession of the planet was the only important thing to carry on.  But something went wrong. The suspicious and greedy nature of these peoples caused them to rebel and destroy all their knowledge. 

Today, I present my discovery that I’ve kept for a long time. I have made a very complex study of our Earth.  I have gathered images to prove the existence of gods in our past.  Beings who left their prints and pieces of their once great kingdoms behind here on our earth. 

I assure you that the legends are true.

Sure they are.

And there are probably alien bases on Mars, too, and NASA has decided that we naive humans couldn't deal with it if they came clean and told us about it.  Because Matteo Ianneo says so.

And accepting anything Webre and Ianneo say as correct can't be an over-conclusion, right?

Of course, right.

Captain Odin of the spaceship Valhalla

Last night, I was working out at the gym, and one of the televisions was showing a program about a subject I know and love: Vikings.

My MA is in Scandinavian historical linguistics (yes, I know I teach biology.  It's a long story).  As part of my thesis research I read a good many of the sagas, some in the original Old Norse, the culmination of a passion for the subject I've had since I first found D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths when I was in elementary school.

"Odhin," by Johannes Gehrts (1901) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I was tickled when I saw the program being aired, even though I had a chill run up my spine when I noticed that it was on the History channel.  Given the name, you'd think that the History channel would show programs related to history.  You'd be wrong, although I guess the more accurate name of The Woo-Woo Bullshit channel wouldn't attract sponsors very well.

So I watched the program for a while.  And it turned out to be an episode of...

... Ancient Aliens.

I'm not making this up.  My first thought was that the contention of the show was that the Vikings were aliens, but it turns out that no, they're not saying that.  That would be ridiculous.

They're saying that the Vikings were helped by aliens.

The show featured a couple of legitimate scholars, Kirsten Wolf of the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Department of Scandinavian Studies (which, coincidentally, is where I took my courses in the Old Norse language) and Timothy Tangherlini of UCLA.  Both made coherent and academically relevant statements regarding the history and culture of the ancient Norse, which were (of course) immediately misinterpreted by the wackos who wrote the narrator's script.

"The Vikings were enormously sophisticated in terms of technology: ship-building, bridge-building, fortress-building," Wolf said, which is true, but then the narrator jumped in with, "But many researchers remain baffled at how the Vikings became so socially, politically and technologically advanced, especially while living in the cold, harsh environment of the North...  Just how were the Norse Vikings able to manage such technological and geographical feats?  Are their fortresses and journeys to unknown continents evidence that the Vikings had access to extraterrestrial knowledge?  Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and believe the proof can be found by examining the religious beliefs of this mysterious people."

Yup.  Those poor ol' scholars, always "baffled" at how "mysterious" everything is.  Good thing we have raving wingnuts like Phillip Coppens and David Hatcher Childress to weigh in on the situation and rescue us from our ignorance with conclusions such as Thor's hammer being a "kinetic weapon," Odin's ravens Huginn and Muninn being "spy drones," and Odin's seat up on Hlidskjalf being "the captain's seat on a spacecraft."

I wonder if it's aerobic exercise to pound your head repeatedly into the wall, because that's what I ended up doing, watching this show.

At least that's better than what Drs. Wolf and Tangherlini most likely felt like doing.  After realizing what idiocy their names had been associated with, publicly, I'm guessing they probably both wanted to commit seppuku.

I kept watching, though, in the fashion of a person witnessing a slow-motion train wreck.  A couple of times, I actually laughed out loud, so it's probably a good thing that the gym was otherwise empty.  One of the best points came when Phillip Coppens explained that the dwarves, mentioned many times in myth collections like the Eddas, were actually...

... the "Grays."  Yup, the same alien creatures we see in such historical documentaries as The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Here's what he said, verbatim, or near as I can recall:

Are they real dwarfs, or somehow more mythical, or whether the label “dwarf” actually stuck to them because they were somehow smaller?  And of course today, we often describe the gray alien archetype as dwarfish as well, simply because they are smaller.

Of course, Philip.  Whatever that means.  And along the same lines, I'm guessing that the trolls were the Vikings' way of describing the "Rancor" from Star Wars, and the elves were invented because J. R. R. Tolkien was a time traveling ultra-intelligent extraterrestrial being who went back to the 9th century and told the ancient Norse about Legolas et al.

But watching this show wouldn't have been the complete experience it was without a commentary from Giorgio Tsoukalos, he of the amazing hair, so I was positively tickled when he showed up.  Tsoukalos had this to say about Valhalla:

Valhalla was not a figment of our ancestors’ imaginations, but it might have been some type of an orbiting space station.  The reason why I’m saying this is because we have a description of Valhalla: it is an incredible description of a place that has weird attributes.

Which is such an amazing feat of logical deduction that I can hardly think of a response, other than to say that my classroom has some "weird attributes" and it is not, so far as I can tell, an "orbiting space station."

At that point, I kind of gave up, stopped staring at the television with my mouth hanging open, and went over to use the weight machines, figuring that even if my brain had been turned to cream-of-wheat, at least I could work on my biceps.

So this, my dear readers, is why I don't watch television, except for when I'm at the gym.  I should have changed the channel, really.  Next time I will -- I'll try to find something more sensible and intellectually stimulating than what the History channel has to offer.

Reruns of Gilligan's Island should fit the bill.