Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
I've mentioned before how much I love a good mystery, and there's a hell of a good one underneath the town of Margate, Kent, England.
It's called the "Shell Grotto." It consists of a set of steps, framed by an arch, leading down into a serpentine passageway through the chalk bedrock. Then there's a room called the "Rotunda," with a circular arched dome over walls arranged in an equilateral triangle. This leads into a winding underground tunnel about two and a half meters high by twenty-one meters long ending in a five-by-six meter rectangular space that's been nicknamed the "Altar Chamber."
The entire thing is lined by mosaics made out of seashells.
4.6 million of them.
Looking up into the Rotunda [Image is in the Public Domain]
The mosaic designs are constructed from the shells of mussels, cockles, whelks, limpets, scallops, and oysters, all relatively common in nearby bays. They feature patterns appearing to be stylized suns and stars, floral motifs, and some purely geometric or abstract designs.
The Shell Grotto was discovered when the entrance was stumbled upon in 1835, and immediately became a sensation. The West Kent Advertiser newspaper wrote the following in 1838 (which also should have taken first place in the Run-On-Sentence of the Year Contest):
Belle Vue cottage, a detached residence, has been lately been purchased by a gentleman, who, having occasion for some alterations, directed the workmen to excavate some few feet, during which operation the work was impeded a large stone, the gentleman being immediately called to the spot, directed a minute examination, which led to the discovery of an extensive grotto, completely studded with shells in curious devices, most elaborately worked up, extending an immense distance in serpentine walks, alcoves, and lanes, the whole forming one of the most curious and interesting sights that can possibly conceived, and must have been executed by torch light; we understand the proprietor intends shortly to open the whole for exhibition, at small charge for admission.
No one in the area had any memory of who had built it and why, so this opened up the floodgates for speculation. Historian Algernon Robertson Goddard, writing in 1903, listed the possibilities as follows:
a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century rich person's "folly"
a prehistoric calendar
a meeting place for "sea witches" (whoever those might be)
This last one made me snort-laugh, because there's a general rule that if there's something mysterious and you want to make it more mysterious, throw in the Templars. Umberto Eco riffed on this theme in his brilliant, labyrinthine novel Foucault's Pendulum, when he had his character Jacopo Belbo explaining to the main character (Casaubon) the difference between cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics:
A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
Be that as it may, we still don't know who built the Shell Grotto. There are also extensive shell mosaics that were created by the Romans and the Phoenicians, but the archways in the Rotunda have impressed archaeologists as being more consistent with those used in twelfth-century Gothic cathedrals (although not nearly as large, obviously), and therefore not nearly old enough to be Roman or Phoenician in origin. It seems like the simplest thing to do would be to carbon date one of the shell fragments -- mollusk shells are largely calcium carbonate, so it should be possible -- but the site is under private ownership, and to my knowledge no one has done that yet.
So the Shell Grotto remains mysterious. It certainly represents an enormous amount of skill and dedication, whoever created it; just cutting a tunnel that long through chalk bedrock would take extensive and back-breaking labor, not to mention then hauling over four million shells there and somehow getting them to adhere to the walls in beautiful and flowing artistic patterns. It's open for visits from the public, and next time I'm in England I'd love to check it out. Just another reason to travel to a country I love -- as if I needed another one.
If there's one place and historical period I could choose to know more about, it would be England during, and immediately following, the withdrawal of the Romans in the fifth century C. E.
For one thing, this would settle once and for all the question of whether King Arthur was a real historical personage, a completely fabricated legend, or somewhere in that gray area in between. Whoever (or whatever) he was, I doubt our picture of him was anywhere near accurate:
This one, either:
Both of which are kind of a shame, for completely different reasons.
In any case, besides finding out more about the King of the Britons, I'd love to have more knowledge about what exactly was going on back then. There are very few written records from Britain following the withdrawal of Roman troops from the northern and western parts of the island by the (usurping) Emperor Magnus Maximus in 383. Things stabilized a little after Magnus was deposed and executed in 387, but Roman rule in the west was definitely crumbling. The final blow came in 410 when Roman settlers in what is now southern England -- many of whom had been born there -- pleaded for help from Rome against the "barbarian" Celts, who were not above taking advantage of the instability, and Emperor Honorius basically told them to bugger off and take care of their own problems because he had more pressing concerns, the biggest being that Rome had just been sacked by a shitload of Visigoths.
This meant that running England fell to whoever could manage to keep their head on their shoulders long enough to do so. In some places, these were the Romano-British magistrates who chose not to decamp when the powers-that-be back on the Italian peninsula left them to their own devices; in other places, Celtic or Pictish warlords. This period saw the beginning of the Saxon invasions from what is now Denmark and northern Germany, something that would historically and linguistically change the entire face of the country.
But the fact remains that we don't know much for certain. The earliest record we have of the era was written at least a century after the events it chronicles -- Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) -- but it contains as much hagiography and finger-wagging about pagan sinfulness as it does history. (For what it's worth, Gildas doesn't even mention King Arthur; the first time the Once and Future King appears in a written record is Nennius's Historia Brittonum, from around 900. If Arthur was real, this omission seems a little curious, to say the least.)
In any case, between the withdrawal of the Romans in 410 and the unification of England under King Æthelstan of Wessex in 927, we don't have a lot of reliable sources to go on. To be fair to the English, they had other fish to fry during those intervening centuries, what with the horrific Plague of Justinian ripping its way through Europe in the middle of the sixth century, repeated invasions by the Angles and Saxons, and then the depredations of the Vikings, starting with their destruction of the "Holy Island" of Lindisfarne in 793. Virtually the only people who could read and write back then were monks and clerics, and you have to figure that what they'd have been writing while they were being hacked to bits would have been gruesome reading anyhow. (Possibly, "Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaarrrrggh.")
The topic comes up because a new study out of the University of Cambridge that found something surprising -- at least in one region, the economy didn't tank completely when the Romans jumped ship. Pollution by heavy metals, as nasty as it can be, is a decent proxy record for the robustness of trade and industry; when things are really bad, chances are you're not going to be doing much smelting of silver, iron, and lead. The team, led by archaeologist Martin Millett, found that in sediment cores from the River Ure in Yorkshire, the levels of metal contamination stayed fairly constant throughout the period. This is evidence that the Roman settlement at Aldborough -- the Roman Isurium Brigantum -- continued to be a trading hub despite the chaos.
This, of course, doesn't tell you what was happening in other parts of the island. It could be that Aldborough just happened to hang on longer, for reasons we'll probably never know. Eventually, the plague and the repeated invasions caught up with them, too, and in the seventh and eighth centuries, there wasn't that much happening, at least not smelting-wise. The "Dark Ages" in England are "dark" not because they were necessarily any more barbaric than any other period, but because we know so little about them -- and this gives us at least a small piece of information about one town's fate after the fall of the Roman Empire.
I'm always attracted to a mystery, and there's something compelling about this period. Undoubtedly why there have been so many works of fiction that are set in pre-Norman England. It's nice to have one more bit of the puzzle, even if neither the worlds of Sexy King Arthur nor Silly King Arthur are likely to come anywhere near the reality of what life was like back then.
It's a point I've made before, but it's worth saying again: we queer folks are not "pushing our lifestyle in other people's faces" simply because we'd like (1) some acknowledgement that we exist, and (2) the same rights and respect that everyone else gets automatically.
In the current regime here in the United States there are places of employment where people in same-sex relationships aren't allowed to display photographs of their partners, or even mention them. "It's okay, I guess, as long as no one knows who you actually are," is the general gist. There seems to be a real fear that just being around openly queer people will cause straight men and women to switch teams. But really -- do you honestly think that's how all this works? I mean, think about it. Some one hundred percent straight guy finds out his coworker is gay, and suddenly gets this dazed look on his face and says, "I shall go out and kiss a man immediately"? Seriously?
After all, it's not like it works the other way, is it? As a teenager I was exposed to dozens, probably hundreds, of books, movies, and television shows depicting couples in straight relationships, and not a single one about queer people, and I turned out queer anyhow. Funny thing, that.
Almost like it's inborn and hardwired, or something.
The result of this mindset is that we not only have to deal with out-and-out homophobia, but a whole array of attitudes that don't wish us active harm, but just would prefer it if we were invisible. Take, for example, the article about a monument built by Alexander the Great for his lover Hephaestion I just stumbled on a couple of days ago.
There, I said it, didn't I? They were lovers. Alexander was either gay or bisexual, and he was deeply in love with Hephaestion. They were described as "one soul inhabiting two bodies" by Aristotle, who knew both men well. Their relationship was compared more than once to that of Achilles and Patroclus, which is not exactly a chaste allusion. Plutarch recounts that they paid a visit to the tombs of the two Greek heroes, where Alexander garlanded Achilles's tomb and Hephaestion Patroclus's -- then ran a race, naked, in their honor.
Totally straight behavior, that, right?
Of course right.
Then there's the incident -- also related by Plutarch -- where Alexander allowed Hephaestion to read something he'd written but wanted to remain secret, and to symbolize this touched his signet ring to Hephaestion's lips. The moment has been depicted many times in art:
Alexander Touches His Ring to Hephaestion's Mouth by Johann Heinrich Tischbein (1781) [Image is in the Public Domain]
When Hephaestion died suddenly of what was probably typhus in Ecbatana (now in Iran) in 324 B.C.E., Alexander was inconsolable. The historian Arrian says that upon seeing Hephaestion dead, Alexander "flung himself on the body of his friend and lay there nearly all day long in tears, and refused to be parted from him until he was dragged away by force by his companions."
Oh, what good friends they were.
Alexander commissioned a massive tomb in Hephaestion's honor at Amphipolis in Macedonia -- the Kastas Tomb -- which is the subject of the article I linked above. [Nota bene: Alexander didn't live to see it completed; he died himself the following year of uncertain causes.] The tomb is filled with symbolic representations of the spiritual and physical bonds of love, and the hope for being reunited in the afterlife.
Despite all this, when the two were depicted as lovers in the 2004 film Alexander, there was an outcry that "Oliver Stone turned Alexander the Great gay!" and how dare they depict this heroic figure as perhaps having same-sex attraction. It's apparently hard for some people to imagine that a guy could be a brilliant king and military leader, and still be queer.
What's striking, though, is that there's a much more subtle aspect of this, beyond the predictable snarling from the overt homophobes. What I noticed about the archaeology article was that never once was it explicitly mentioned that Alexander and Hephaestion might have had a sexual relationship. Throughout, they're referred to as "friends" or "confidants" or "companions;" the closest the writer comes is saying that they clearly had a "strong emotional bond" and that the tomb is a "tribute to love and loyalty."
Why the hell are they afraid of saying it? I mean, if you want to err on the side of caution, at least admit that it was possible.
Apparently even that is a bridge too far.
It's all part and parcel of the "don't ask, don't tell" mentality, isn't it? "We're fine as long as we can pretend you queer people don't exist and never have." Well, allow me to point out that this, too, is homophobia. I spent decades in the closet out of fear and shame from this kind of thinking. And, straight readers, if you don't think this is damaging, I want you to imagine what it would be like if your employer told you that you must never mention you are in an opposite-sex relationship. Oh, it's fine, as long as no one knows. Don't bring your spouse or significant other to the company picnic, don't be seen holding hands in public, don't have a photograph of you as a couple on your desk.
Now imagine if your government was saying the same thing.
Yes, I know that there are places in the world that have it much worse, where being openly queer can get you imprisoned, tortured, or executed. But we here in the west need to keep in mind that there are ways to oppress people that are subtler and more insidious. How is this sort of thing any different from putting Jews, Romani, and Blacks (just to name three of many groups this has happened to) in a position where they feel like they have to hide who they are in order to "pass?"
If you think that's wrong, then so is this.
I'm out publicly, so it's far too late for me to hide even if I wanted to. But honestly -- I wouldn't go back to being invisible even if I could. All those terrified years did a lot of damage to me emotionally, damage I doubt I'll ever completely heal from (and that's not even counting the regrets over the richer, more honest life I could have had). To make it clear, I'm not unhappy where I am today; despite all I've been through, I've arrived at a good place.
I just wish I'd had a happier past, is all.
And I will continue to speak out against this kind of straightwashing. Because it not only is an inaccurate view of history, but does damage to queer people right now. I've often wondered if there had been honest, positive depictions of LGBTQ+ people in the fiction and nonfiction I read as a teen, maybe I'd have come out as bi when I realized it (age fifteen or so) rather than hiding for another forty years. Maybe I still wouldn't have, I dunno; southern Louisiana in the seventies wasn't exactly a congenial place for people who were different, and I'm honestly not a very brave person.
But if by speaking out, I can help other people who are still in the closet -- well, don't expect me to shut up. It's the least I can do after maintaining my own personal silence for four very long decades.
Maybe it's because I'm fundamentally a home body, but I find it really hard to understand what could have driven our distant ancestors to head out into uncharted territory -- no GPS to guide them, no guarantee of safety, no knowledge of what they might meet along the way.
A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about the extraordinary island-hopping accomplished by the ancient Polynesians -- going from one tiny speck of land to another, crossing thousands of kilometers of trackless ocean in dugout canoes. We don't know what motivated them, whether it was lack of resources on their home islands, being driven away by warfare, or simple curiosity. But whatever it was, it took no small amount of skill, courage, and willingness to accept risk.
The wanderings of the ancestral Polynesians, though, are hardly the only example of ancient humans' capacity for launching out into the unknown. Two papers this week look at other examples of our forebears' wanderlust -- still, of course, leaving unanswered the questions about why they felt impelled to leave home and safety for an uncertain destination.
The first, which appeared in PLOS-One, looks at the similarity of culture between Bronze-Age Denmark and southwestern Norway, and considers whether the inhabitants of Denmark took a longer (but, presumably, safer) seven-hundred-kilometer route, crossing the Strait of Kattegat into southern Sweden and then hugging the coast until they reached Norway, or the much shorter (but riskier) hundred-kilometer crossing over open ocean to go there directly.
While the direct route was more dangerous, it seems likely that's what they did. If they'd skirted along the coastline, you'd expect there to be more similarity in archaeological sites along the way, in the seaside areas of southern Sweden. There's not. It appears that they really did launch off in paddle-driven boats across the stormy seas between Denmark and Norway, four thousand years ago.
"These new agent-based simulations, applied with boat performance data of a Scandinavian Bronze Age type boat," the authors write, "demonstrate regular open sea crossings of the Skagerrak, including some fifty kilometers of no visible land, likely commenced by 2300 B.C.E., as indicated by archaeological evidence."
Considering people twice as far back in time, a paper this week in Nature describes evidence that seafarers from what is now Italy crossed a hundred kilometers of ocean to reach the island of Malta. A cave in Latnija, in the northern Mellieħa region of Malta, has bones of animals that show distinct signs of butchering and cooking -- and have been dated to 8,500 years ago.
"We found abundant evidence for a range of wild animals, including Red Deer, long thought to have gone extinct by this point in time," said Eleanor Scerri, of the University of Malta, who was the paper's lead author. "They were hunting and cooking these deer alongside tortoises and birds, including some that were extremely large and extinct today... The results add a thousand years to Maltese prehistory and force a re-evaluation of the seafaring abilities of Europe's last hunter-gatherers, as well as their connections and ecosystem impacts."
What always strikes me about this sort of thing is wondering not only what fueled their wanderlust, but how they even knew there was an island out there to head to. I know that patterns of clouds can tell seafarers they're nearing land, but still -- to launch off into the open ocean, hoping for the best, and trusting that there's safe landing out there somewhere still seems to me to be somewhere between brave and utterly foolhardy.
I guess my ancestors were made of sterner stuff than me. I'm okay with that. Being a bit of a coward has its advantages. As Steven Wright put it, "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."
So if y'all want to, you can take off in your dugout canoes for parts unknown, but I'm gonna stay right here where it's (relatively) safe. I suppose it's a good thing our forebears had the courage they did, because it's how we got here. And I hope they wouldn't be too embarrassed by my preference for sitting on my ass drinking coffee with cream and sugar rather than spending weeks at sea nibbling on dried meat and hardtack and hoping like hell those clouds over there mean there's dry land ahead.
A year and a half or so ago I wrote a piece about some of the biblical apocrypha -- books and epistles and letters and whatnot that didn't make the cut to be part of the canonical Bible when the whole thing was hashed out at the Council of Rome (382 C.E.), the Synod of Hippo (393 C.E.), and the Synod of Carthage (397 C.E.), after which the Bible had something close to its current form. (As I mention in the post, the idea that canon was established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 is a commonly-held misconception; Nicaea had nothing to do with decisions about what was scripture and what wasn't, but was about the nature of the Trinity and how to determine the date for Easter.)
What's interesting is that even since all of the late-fourth-century wrangling by the church fathers, there hasn't been an end to what is Holy Writ and what should be written out, because new documents keep popping up. The most famous are the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank; those, although they were certainly a fantastic historical and archaeological discovery, didn't much affect religious belief, because they were mostly composed either of (1) canonical Old Testament books, (2) writings that we already knew about but had been declared non-canonical apocrypha (like the supremely weird Books of Enoch), or (3) descriptions of religious and secular law.
Sometimes, though, a document is discovered that leave both the historians and the devout scrambling for an explanation. And that brings us to the "Mystic Gospel of Mark."
You ready for a tangled tale?
Back in 1958, an American historian named Morton Smith was poring through some old manuscripts at the Monastery of Mar Saba, and found a handwritten Greek text appended to the end of a seventeenth-century printed edition of the writings of Ignatius of Antioch. Smith identified the text as an eighteenth-century copy of a letter from the theologian Clement of Alexandria (150 - 215 C.E.), which made reference to the Gospel of Mark -- not the standard version, but a longer, "secret" gospel (τοῦ Μάρκου τὸ μυστικὸν εὐαγγέλιον).
Smith hand-transcribed the document, then requested (and was approved) to take the original to the Greek Orthodox Library in Jerusalem. Despite Smith writing a paper on the discovery in 1960, little attention was given to the document; as far as we know, only three other scholars ever set eyes on it, the religious historians David Flusser, Shlomo Pines, and Guy Stroumsa. Stroumsa, who saw it in 1976, appears to be the last person who gave the manuscript a close look. Smith took photographs of the pages in question, but the document itself mysteriously disappeared some time between then and 1990 and hasn't been seen since.
One of Smith's photographs of the alleged "Mystic Gospel of Mark" document [Image is in the Public Domain]
The putative Clement of Alexandria letter included two passages that occur nowhere in the current Gospel of Mark, but were supposedly from the longer "Mystic Gospel." One passage is much lengthier than the other; and it's that one that caused a furor, especially given how Morton Smith translated and interpreted it. Here's Smith's translation:
And they come into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, "Son of David, have mercy on me." But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing only a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan.
So yeah. Smith interpreted the naked young man "remaining with Jesus that night" to mean that not only did Jesus condone homosexuality, he participated in it.
You can see why that turned some heads.
Whether this interpretation alone was the cause, historians immediately started claiming the whole thing was a forgery. Quentin Quesnell stopped just short of accusing Smith outright, but said that the "hypothetical forger matched Smith's apparent ability, opportunity, and motivation" (Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 71, no. 4, pp. 353–378). Stephen Carlson went even further, as you might surmise by the title of his book on the subject -- The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark -- and points out that a 1910 catalogue of the holdings of the Mar Saba Monastery Library doesn't list the book where Smith allegedly found the document, and from that (and the book's later mysterious disappearance) Carlson concludes that Smith forged the letter, then made sure the original vanished so that modern hoax-detection techniques such as ink analysis wouldn't reveal what he'd done. Jacob Neusner, a historian specializing in ancient Judaism, called it "the forgery of the century."
Not everyone is so sure, though. There are a good number of historians who point out that the photographs of the document (which still exist) demonstrate a sure hand at writing eighteenth-century Greek calligraphy, and further, that the writing style and word choice is completely consistent with known writings of Clement of Alexandria. Producing such a close match, they say, would have been beyond Morton Smith's knowledge, skill, and ability. New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, in his book Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, writes, "It is true that a modern forgery would be an amazing feat. For this to be forged, someone would have had to imitate an eighteenth-century Greek style of handwriting and to produce a document that is so much like Clement that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Clement, which quotes a previously lost passage from Mark that is so much like Mark that it fools experts who spend their lives analyzing Mark. If this is forged, it is one of the greatest works of scholarship of the twentieth century, by someone who put an uncanny amount of work into it."
And the historians are still arguing about this. One of those impossible questions to settle, as far as I can see, given that the original document is AWOL, whether by accident or design. Responses by scholars and interested laypeople vary from "it was a hoax from beginning to end, and Smith did it" to "the letter isn't authentic but was an earlier forgery, and Smith got fooled but was acting in good faith" to "the letter was an authentic transcription from Clement, but the passages weren't actually by the Evangelist Mark" to "okay, they're by Mark, but the gay Jesus passage is being mistranslated or misinterpreted" to "yay! Gay Jesus FTW!"
It's hard to escape the conclusion that everyone's taking this and finding ways to use it to support whatever it was they already believed.
The problem here is that the evidence we actually have is somewhere beyond thin -- a photograph of an eighteenth-century transcription (for which the original is lost) of a third-century letter (for which the original is even loster, if it ever existed in the first place) of some extra passages for a Gospel that a even lot of the devout think wasn't itself written until at least three decades after Jesus's death. So from that, you can conclude damn near anything you want.
I mean, I love archaeology and history, but really.
So that's our excursion into the labyrinth of biblical scholarship. Me, I think I'll move on to something I can be more sure about, like quantum physics. At least there, the whole concept of the Uncertainty Principle has a clear definition.
One of the most frustrating things about science, from the point of view of non-scientists, is that sometimes we have to say "we simply don't know the answer to that yet."
Of course, I'm sure it's frustrating enough to the scientists as well, but at least they should be used to it. Science is always pushing at the boundaries of what we know, and using evidence and logic to find explanations. It's inevitable that sometimes even a significant amount of evidence is insufficient to reach a conclusion. At that point, the only honest thing to say is "we don't know, and may never know."
This drives a lot of people nuts. The attitude is that because science has proven to be pretty damn good at finding answers, it should have a one hundred percent hit rate. Meteorologists can't always accurately predict the track or intensity of storms? Ha, I'd like to have a job where I could be wrong half the time and still get paid! The promising new cancer drug turns out not to work in vivo? Don't listen to the medical professionals, they'll say something is good for you today and then say the opposite tomorrow. This fault is at risk of an imminent earthquake? Okay, then tell me when, down to the hour and minute, so I can plan ahead.
Otherwise, what good are you scientists, anyhow?
It all comes from a fundamental misapprehension of the scientific process -- that it should provide certainty. It'd be nice, but the real world usually doesn't cooperate, and sometimes even with their best efforts, the scientists have to admit to being in a situation somewhere between incomplete understanding and complete befuddlement.
I ran into an especially good example of that a couple of days ago because of a dear friend, a history scholar and loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who asked me if I'd ever heard of Hueyatlaco and the Steen-McIntyre report. She sent me a link from the site Ancient Origins called "Controversy at Hueyatlaco: When Did Humans First Inhabit the Americas?" that (despite a subtle bent toward Ancient Astronauts explanations of things) gives the basics of the story -- and it's a pretty peculiar one, even when you don't credit any of the woo-woo trappings.
Now, keep in mind that until two days ago I'd never heard of this, so I still consider my own knowledge shallow and tentative, and I ask forgiveness for any mistakes or misapprehensions I have (and request a quick note if there's something in this post I can correct). But this is what I've gathered.
Hueyatlaco is an archaeological dig site in the state of Puebla in central Mexico. In the 1960s, an archaeologist named Cynthia Irwin-Williams was working at the site and uncovered stone tools and the bones of pre-glacial North American mammals (such as the woolly rhinoceros) that showed signs of having been butchered for meat. Irwin-Williams thought that such an early site deserved close attention, and she sent samples to the USGS for radioisotope dating.
The results were more than a little perplexing. The date returned by the USGS was on the order of 250,000 years ago. This predates modern Homo sapiens by a good fifty thousand years, so -- if the date was accurate -- the tools and the animal bones were associated not with modern humans, but with our predecessors, possibly the Neanderthals or Denisovans (neither of which, for the record, has ever been recorded in the Western Hemisphere). Also perplexing was that this would push back the earliest hominid occupation of North America not just by a little, but by a factor of sixteen!
It's understandable why the scientists found that hard to swallow. The idea that humans (or their near relatives) had been in the Americas for 230-odd-thousand years longer than we thought they had, and had left no traces whatsoever during that time except at this one site, was difficult to believe. So the natural conclusion was reached that the dating of the site was somehow askew.
Most archaeologists stuck to their guns, and said the most parsimonious explanation was still that somehow the dating protocol was being applied incorrectly. The samples were contaminated with older traces, perhaps, which would give a systematic overestimate for the site's age. Then, to muddy the waters further, there were allegations of a conspiracy to cover up the anomalous data. The official report from the USGS simply dropped one of the zeroes, reporting the site's age as 25,000, not 250,000, years. One of the archaeologists who'd been working on the site, Virginia Steen-McIntyre, was pressured to do her dissertation not on the perplexing Hueyatlaco data, but on more conventional research into volcanic ash strata. Steen-McIntyre decided, however, that she wouldn't be silenced, and came out with a report of her own, taking apart the critics a point at a time -- and included a claim that she was harassed for being unwilling to stay silent.
Other scientists have tried (and failed) to resolve the odd data. Biostratigrapher Sam Vanlandingham published two papers, in 2001 and 2004, first reconfirming the dating of the strata not to tens, but hundreds of thousands of years ago, and then (most startling of all) confirming this using microfossils of diatoms from contemporaneous sediments at the site -- and demonstrating that some of those diatom species had been extinct for at least eighty thousand years.
The upshot of it all is that we still don't have an answer. Most archaeologists still doubt the existence of hominids in the Americas prior to the arrival of the ancestors of the Native Americans on the order of (at the most) twenty thousand years ago, and assert that there is not a single grain of evidence that the Neanderthals and Denisovans (or any other hominids, for that matter) ever made it to the Western Hemisphere. But that leaves us with a puzzle -- multiple studies, cross-checked and confirmed, keep agreeing with the older date as found by Irwin-Williams, Steen-McIntyre, and others.
So if you've been waiting for an answer... well, that's it, folks. We don't know. It's one of the most curious archaeological puzzles I've ever run across, and at this point, the words I hear about it most often from reliable sources are "contentious" and "uncertain" and "controversial." A lot of experts have a lot of opinions about it, but no one has been able to do any of three things -- explain how the dates could be correct when there's no evidence of hominids in the Americas at any time during the following two hundred thousand years, explain how the dates could be incorrect when they've been independently corroborated multiple times, or demonstrate that the entire thing was some kind of elaborate hoax, along the lines of the Piltdown Man.
As frustrating as it is, that's where we have to leave it if we're going to be scrupulously honest about things. As good skeptics, we have to be willing to hold the question in abeyance, indefinitely if need be, for want of conclusive evidence to settle it. In science, the answer "We don't know yet" is always the fallback when the data is insufficient to merit a conclusion -- however that offends our deep desire to be a hundred percent sure about everything in the universe.
When you think about it, it's unsurprising that our ancestors invented "the gods" as an explanation for anything they didn't understand.
They were constantly bombarded by stuff that was outside of the science of their time. Diseases caused by the unseen action of either genes or microorganisms. Weather patterns, driven by forces that even in the twenty-first century we are only beginning to understand deeply, and which controlled the all-important supply of food and water. Earthquakes and volcanoes, whose root cause only began to come clear sixty years ago.
Back then, everything must have seemed as mysterious as it was precarious. For most of our history, we've been at the mercy of forces we didn't understand and couldn't control, where they were one bad harvest or failed rainy season or sudden plague from dying en masse.
No wonder they attributed it all to gods and sub-gods -- and devils and demons and witches and evil spirits.
As much as we raise an eyebrow at the superstition and seeming credulity of the ancients, it's important to recognize that they were no less intelligent, on average, than we are. They were trying to make sense of their world with the information they had at the time, just like we do. That we have a greater knowledge base to draw upon -- and most importantly, the scientific method as a protocol -- is why we've been more successful. But honestly, it's no wonder that they landed on supernatural, unscientific explanations; the natural and scientific ones were out of their reach.
The reason this comes up is a recent discovery that lies at the intersection of archaeology and geology, which (as regular readers of Skeptophilia know) are two enduring fascinations for me. Researchers excavating sites at Vasagård and Rispebjerg, on the island of Bornholm, Denmark, have uncovered hundreds of flat stone disks with intricate patterns of engraving, dating from something on the order of five thousand years ago. Because many of the disks have designs of circles with branching radial rays extending outward, they've been nicknamed "sun stones." Why, in around 2,900 B.C.E., people were suddenly motivated to create, and then bury, hundreds of these stones, has been a mystery.
Until now.
[Image credit: John Lee, Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen, Denmark]
Data from Greenland ice cores has shown a sudden spike in sulfates and in dust and ash from right around the time the sun stones were buried -- both hallmarks of a massive volcanic eruption. The location of the volcano has yet to be determined, but what is clear is that it would have had an enormous effect on the climate. "It was a major eruption of a great magnitude, comparable to the well-documented eruption of Alaska’s Okmok volcano in 43 B.C.E. that cooled the climate by about seven degrees Celsius," said study lead author Rune Iversen, of the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen. "The climate event must have been devastating for them."
The idea that the volcanic eruption in 2,900 B.C.E. altered the climate worldwide got a substantial boost with the analysis of tree rings from wood in Europe and North America. Right around the time of the sulfate spike in the Greenland ice cores, there's a series of narrow tree rings -- indicative of short growing seasons and cool temperatures. Wherever this eruption took place, it wrought havoc with the weather, with all of the results that has on human survival.
While the connection between the eruption and the sun stones is an inference, it certainly has some sense to it. How else would you expect a pre-technological culture to respond to a sudden, seemingly inexplicable dimming of the sun, cooler summers and bitter winters with resultant probable crop failures, and even the onset of wildly fiery sunrises and sunsets? It bears keeping in mind that our own usual fallback of "there must be a scientific explanation even if I don't know what it is" is a relatively recent development.
So while burying engraved rocks might seem like a strange response to a climatic change, it is understandable that the ancients looked to a supernatural solution for what must have been a mystifying natural disaster. And we're perhaps not so very much further along, ourselves, given the way a substantial fraction of people in the United States are responding to climate change even though the models have been predicting this for decades, and the evidence is right in front of our faces. We still have plenty of areas we don't understand, and are saddled with unavoidable cognitive biases even if we do our best to fight them. As the eminent science historian James Burke put it, in his brilliant and provocative essay "Worlds Without End":
Science produces a cosmogony as a general structure to explain the major questions of existence. So do the Edda and Gilgamesh epics, and the belief in Creation and the garden of Eden. Myths provide structures which give cause-and effect reasons for the existence of phenomena. So does science. Rituals use secret languages known only to the initiates who have passed ritual tests and who follow the strictest rules of procedure which are essential if the magic is to work. Science operates in the same way. Myths confer stability and certainty because they explain why things happen or fail to happen, as does science. The aim of the myth is to explain existence, to provide a means of control over nature, and to give to us all comfort and a sense of place in the apparent chaos of the universe. This is precisely the aim of science.
Science, therefore for all the reasons above, is not what it appears to be. It is not objectively impartial, since every observation it makes of nature is impregnated with theory. Nature is so complex, and sometimes so seemingly random, that it can only be approached with a systematic tool that presupposes certain facts about it. Without such a pattern it would be impossible to find an answer to questions even as simple as "What am I looking at?"
It's a little odd that someone as center-of-attention-phobic as I am has chosen something that is bound to garner close looks. I'm referring to my tattoos, which are obvious and colorful -- and include a full sleeve, so they're a little hard to hide.
Virtually everyone who comments on them, however, is complimentary. With good reason; my artist, James Spiers of Model Citizen Tattoos in Ithaca, New York, is -- in a word -- brilliant, and realized my vision of what I wanted just about perfectly.
Just after it was finished
Not everyone's a fan, of course. I was given the stink-eye by a sour-faced old lady in a local hardware store a while back, who informed me that having tattoos meant I was going to hell.
My response was, "Lady, that ship sailed years ago."
But if I do end up in hell because of my ink, I'll have a lot of company. Not only is tattooing pretty common these days -- since I got my first one, about twenty years ago, it's gone from being an infrequent sight to just about everywhere -- humans have been decorating their bodies for a long time. Ötzi "the Ice Man," a five-thousand-year-old body found frozen in glacial ice on the Austrian-Italian border, had 61 tattoos, mostly on his legs, arms, and back. (Their significance is unknown.) In historical times, tattooing has been observed in many cultures -- it was widespread in North and South American Indigenous people and throughout east Asia and Polynesia, which is probably how the tradition jumped to Europe in the eighteenth century (and explains its associations with sailors).
The role of self-expression in tattoos varies greatly from person to person. Ask a dozen people why they chose to get inked and you'll get a dozen wildly different answers. For me, it's in honor of my family and ethnic roots; the Celtic snake is for my wildlife-loving, half-Scottish father, the vines for my gardener mother. But the reasons for getting tattooed are as varied as the designs are.
The reason all this comes up is because of a discovery that was described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of a twelve-hundred-year-old mummified body from the pre-Columbian Peruvian Chancay Culture, which showed some of the most intricate ancient tattoo patterns ever seen. Virtually every square inch of the person's skin was covered with a fine latticework of black geometric designs -- the similarity was immediately noticed to the adornments on clay figurines from the same time and place.
This becomes even more amazing when you realize that the person was tattooed using the "stick-and-poke" method, which involved being jabbed over and over with implements like wooden needles, slivers of flint or obsidian, or sharpened bird bones. This sounds a hell of a lot more painful than what I underwent, which was bad enough.
But it was still worth it. After I stopped screaming.
In any case, I find it fascinating how old the drive to adorn our bodies is, and also that the chosen designs had (and have) such depth of meaning that people were willing to wear them permanently. For myself, I've never regretted them for a moment; I'm proud of my ink, whatever the sour-faced little old ladies of the world might think of it. And knowing that what I have is part of a tradition that goes back thousands of years gives me a connection to the rituals and culture of the past.
And for me, that's something to cherish. Even if I do end up in hell because of it.
We have an unfortunate tendency to idealize the past.
Well, unfortunate is probably the wrong word. I don't guess it does any real harm, and in fiction it can be quite entertaining. Unrealistic is probably a better choice. Except for the (very) select privileged few, our ancestors' lives were -- to quote Thomas Hobbes -- "solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short."
This idealization creates a picture in our minds that is almost certainly false. Consider, for example, Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series, which focuses on the meeting between some civilized, beautiful Cro-Magnon folks and some violent, nasty Neanderthals. Reminiscent of Tolkien's Orcs and Elves, the Neanderthals all have names like Thok and Ugg and Glop, and the Cro-Magnons mellifluous names like Sondamar and Alidor. (Before you start yelling at me, yes, I made those up because I don't own the book any more and I don't feel like looking it up. But my point stands.)
But it's not just the prehistorics. Contrast two different tales of medieval monastic life -- Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael series and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Don't get me wrong, I love Brother Cadfael; his logic, compassion, and love for botany are all endearing, and Peters was a great mystery writer. But the reality of life in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was undoubtedly closer to Eco's harsh, unwashed, rough-shod reality, with its starving peasants and superstitions and religious fanaticism, than it was to Peters's genteel knights and tradesmen and monks.
Like I said, I don't really object to fictional portrayals, even with their inevitable inaccuracies. I've written a few stories set in the past myself -- the English Midlands in the nineteenth century (Adam's Fall), pre-Civil-War Louisiana (The Communion of Shadows), eleventh century Iceland (Kári the Lucky), and Britain during the fourteenth century Black Death (We All Fall Down). I hope I've skirted the line between realism and romanticism deftly enough to make it believable without being too dark and depressing.
But the fact remains that our ancestors didn't have it easy. That we're here is a tribute to their tenacity, strength, and determination. Whenever I consider archaeological finds, I'm always struck by how cushy a lot of us have it now, with our indoor plumbing and heat in the winter and electric appliances and modern medicine, all of which our forebears somehow survived -- at least for a while -- without.
The reason this comes up is a study out of the University of Oxford that was published last week in the journal Antiquity, describing a rather horrific archaeological discovery in Merrie Old England. The remains of at least 37 people were found near Charterhouse Warren, Somerset, dating to the Early Bronze Age (preliminary dating puts them at around 2000 B.C.E.) that show signs not only of violent death -- but the bodies were butchered and eaten afterwards, and the remains thrown down a fifteen-meter-deep shaft.
"We actually find more evidence for injuries to skeletons dating to the Neolithic period in Britain than the Early Bronze Age, so Charterhouse Warren stands out as something very unusual," said Rick Schulting, who was the study's lead author. "It paints a considerably darker picture of the period than many would have expected."
[Image credit: Schulting et al., Antiquity]
And it doesn't appear to be a case of desperation, where starving people resorted to cannibalism because they had no other options. The same site yielded up plentiful cattle bones, so it's apparent the Bronze Age residents of Charterhouse Warren weren't hurting for chow.
Any explanation of this behavior is, of course, pure speculation, but one thought is that the victors ate their defeated enemies as a way either of dehumanizing them, or perhaps from some sort of belief that doing so would allow any courage or spirit the enemies had to pass into them.
"Charterhouse Warren is one of those rare archaeological sites that challenges the way we think about the past," Schulting said. "It is a stark reminder that people in prehistory could match more recent atrocities and shines a light on a dark side of human behavior. That it is unlikely to have been a one-off event makes it even more important that its story is told."
It certainly puts a clearer and harsher light on what life in the past was actually like. "If people think of the past as something peaceful and idealized," said archaeologist Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay, of Kalmar University, who was not involved in the current study, "that needs to be revised."
In any case, it's probably for the best that we do see our history through softer lenses. The rigors that 95% of humanity endured back then, that (fortunately) far fewer have to endure now, were seriously depressing stuff. And I suppose it's encouraging, really; for all the horrific stories in the news, we have come a long way as a species. Not that we don't still have a long way to go. But when asked when I would choose to live if I had a time machine that could take me into the past, my answer is always "right here and right now."
