The puppetmasters

Well, Tuesday came and went, and no one got Raptured.

Not that I was expecting to go myself.  If anything, it was more likely the ground would open up and swallow me, kind of like what happened in Numbers chapter 16, wherein three guys named Korah, Dathan, and Abiram told Moses they were sick and tired of wandering around in the desert, and where was the Land of Milk and Honey they'd been promised, and anyway, who the hell put Moses in charge?  So there was an earthquake or something and the ground swallowed up not only the three loudmouthed dudes but their wives and kids and friends and domestic animals, which seems like overkill.  Literally.  Not surprising, really, because the God of the Old Testament was pretty free with the "Smite" function.  By one estimate I saw, according to the Bible God killed over two million people to Satan's ten, so I'm thinking maybe we got the whole good vs. evil thing backwards.

In any case, even that didn't happen on Tuesday, because here I am, unswallowed, as well as my wife and three dogs.  I haven't heard from my sons in a couple of days, but I'm assuming they're okay, too.  So all in all, it was an uneventful Tuesday.

The batting-zero stats of Rapture predictions from the past didn't stop people from completely falling for it yet again.  One woman sold all her belongings because she was convinced she wouldn't need them any more.  Another gave away her house -- like, signed over the deed and everything -- and at the time of the article (immediately pre-Rapture) was looking for someone to give her car to.  Another one donated her life savings, quit her job, and confessed to her husband that she was having an affair with a member of her church so she could "get right with God" before the Rapture happened -- and now is devastated because she's broke, jobless, and her husband is divorcing her.

It's hard to work up a lot of sympathy for these people, but at the same time, I have to place some of the blame on the people who brainwashed them.  No one gets to this advanced stage of gullibility unaided, you know?  Somewhere along the line, they were convinced to cede their own understanding to others -- and after that happens, you are putty in the hands of the delusional, power-hungry, and unscrupulous.

Which brings us to Peter Thiel.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Peter Thiel by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0]

You probably know that Thiel is a wildly rich venture capitalist, the founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and was the first outside investor in Facebook.  His current net worth is over twenty billion dollars, but the current wealth inequity in the world is such that even so, he's still not in the top one hundred richest people.  But the fact remains that he's crazy wealthy, and has used that wealth to influence politics.

It will come as no shock that he's a big supporter of Donald Trump.  But what you might not know is that he is also a religious loony.

I'm not saying that just because Thiel is religious and I'm not.  I have lots of friends who belong to religions of various sorts, and we by and large respect each other and each other's beliefs.  Thiel, on the other hand, is in a different category altogether.  To give one example, just last week he gave a talk as part of his "ACTS 17 Collective" ("ACTS" stands for "Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society"), wherein he said that we can't regulate AI development and use because that's what Satan wants us to do -- "the Devil promises peace and safety by strangling technological progress with regulation."  Limiting AI, Thiel said, would "hasten the coming of the Antichrist."

Oh, and he's also said that environmental activist Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist.  Which is a little odd, because as far as I can tell she's already here, and has been for a while, and thus far hasn't done anything particularly Antichrist-ish.  But maybe there's some apocalyptic logic here that I'm not seeing.

Thiel is absolutely obsessed with one passage from the Bible, from 2 Thessalonians chapter 2:

Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction.  He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.

Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things?  And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time.  For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way.  And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.  The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works.  He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing.  They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.  For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.

So what is that mysterious force that "holds back" the evil one, what St. Paul called the "κατέχων"?

Well, Thiel is, of course.  He and the techo-nirvana he is trying to create.  "[When the] Antichrist system collapses into Armageddon," religious commentator Michael Christensen writes, "only the few survive.  A techno-libertarian, [Thiel] entertains a kind of secular rapture: off-grid bunkers, floating cities or even planetary colonies.  In his apocalyptic vision, these survivalist escape hatches offer a way out of both collapse and tyranny—but only for the wealthy and well-prepared."

What's kind of terrifying about all this is how influential people like Thiel are.  His ACTS 17 Collective gatherings play to sold-out audiences.  His message, and that of others like him, then filters down to people like Pastor Joshua Mhlakela (the one who got the whole Rapture-Is-On-Tuesday thing started), and they then pass along their "repent or else!" fear-mongering to their followers.  It's why my lack of sympathy for the folks who bankrupted themselves because they figured they'd be Sitting At The Feet Of Jesus by Wednesday morning is tempered by, "... but was it really their fault?"  Sure, they should have learned some critical thinking skills, and been taught to sift fact from fiction.

But they weren't, for whatever reason.  And afterward, they were immersed in scary apocalyptic terror-talk day in, day out.  Who can blame them for eventually swallowing it whole?

It's easy for me, outside the system, to say the people who fell for Mhlakela's nonsense are just a bunch of fools.  But the truth is more nuanced than that, and a hell of a lot scarier.  Because brainwashing doesn't happen in a vacuum.

The puppetmasters behind it are almost always the powerful and rich -- who all too often not only get away with it, but profit mightily from it.  A terrified, brainwashed populace is easier to manipulate and extort.

Which exactly where people like Peter Thiel want us.

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The letter and the labyrinth

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.

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Awaiting angelic intervention

As I write this, I'm waiting for the Rapture (it was supposed to happen on Tuesday, but evidently got postponed a few days), so I figured to while away the time until the holy are bodily assumed into heaven and the rest of us slobs get visited by the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons and the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and the Beast and various other special offers, I'd consider the question of how this stuff got included in the Bible in the first place.

The Book of Revelation is one of the parts of the Bible that some True Believers embrace enthusiastically, while if you ask others, they'll shift in their seats and laugh uncomfortably and mumble something about "symbolic... metaphors... not meant to be taken literally..." and then change the subject.  What's interesting, though, is that this is far from the weirdest piece of writing that was considered to be part of scripture.  Back in the fourth century, there were so many gospels and epistles and books and letters and assorted miscellany that church leaders finally had to hold a series of meetings to try to figure out what was canonical and what wasn't.

So they got together at the Council of Rome (382 C.E.), the Synod of Hippo (393 C.E.), and the Synod of Carthage (397 C.E.), and after that the Bible had something close to its current form.  (Interestingly, the idea that canon was established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 is a 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.)  In any case, what's fascinating here is that the church fathers had their work cut out for them, because there were tons of manuscripts to sift through.

And when you start looking through the ones that didn't make the cut -- the ones now labeled "apocrypha" -- you find out that by comparison to some of them, the Book of Revelation comes across as blander than Fun With Dick and Jane.

First, let's consider the Books of Enoch, of which there are three.  1 Enoch especially is a trip, and is also interesting because a lot of what angel enthusiasts chatter on about comes right from there.  You might not know that there are only five angels mentioned by name in the standard Bible -- three good guys, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, and two fallen angels, Lucifer and Abbadon.  That's it.  All the rest come from the apocrypha, or from People Making Shit Up, which even many religious people agree pretty much amounts to the same thing.

Another thing about 1 Enoch you might find entertaining is that this is also where most of the nonsense about the Nephilim comes from.  The Nephilim were created when angels came down to Earth and had lots of sex with human women, and the result was the women giving birth to babies who grew up into giant "men of renown."  The Nephilim get a passing, and rather vague, mention in Genesis 6 and Numbers 13, but 1 Enoch really gives details.  They were "three hundred ells tall" -- that'd be something on the order of two hundred meters -- and given to doing some seriously bad shit:

And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three hundred ells, [and] who consumed all the acquisitions of men.  And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.  And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood.

So that's kind of nasty.  Fortunately, God commanded the unfallen angels -- the ones who hadn't been canoodling with human women -- to do battle with the Nephilim, and the Nephilim lost big time.  They were all cast into the fiery abyss, where they dwelleth lo unto this very day.

Then there's a weird passage about farm animals doing stuff:

And that sheep whose eyes were opened saw that ram, which was amongst the sheep, till it forsook its glory and began to butt those sheep, and trampled upon them, and behaved itself unseemly.  And the Lord of the sheep sent the lamb to another lamb and raised it to being a ram and leader of the sheep instead of that ram which had forsaken its glory...  And I saw that a great sword was given to the sheep, and the sheep proceeded against all the beasts of the field to slay them, and all the beasts and the birds of the heaven fled before their face.

Ha-ha, yeah... *shifts uncomfortably*  Metaphor... um... symbols...

But if you think that's weird, what's even wilder is what ultimately happens to Enoch.  A passage in 3 Enoch tells us that he's brought up to heaven, and transformed into the angel Metatron, in a process that sounds really fucking uncomfortable:

At once my flesh turned to flame, my sinews to blazing fire, my bones to juniper coals, my eyelashes to lightning flashes, my eyeballs to fiery torches, the hairs of my head to hot flames, all my limbs to wings of burning fire, and the substance of my body to blazing fire. On my right— those who cleave flames of fire—on my left—burning brands—round about me swept wind, tempest, and storm; and the roar of earthquake upon earthquake was before and behind me.

So when you think of Metatron, if you picture the kind, avuncular Derek Jacobi in Good Omens or the snide, wry, world-weary Alan Rickman in Dogma, you might want to revise that image.

And this is just the Books of Enoch.  If you want some even wackier stuff, check out the Gospel of Thomas, which recounts the childhood of Jesus and depicts him as some sort of super-powerful spoiled brat.  (Reading it made me wonder if this is where the expression "holy terror" comes from.)  Amongst many other atrocities, at age one Baby Jesus curses another kid and makes him "wither into a corpse." Later he kills a neighbor kid for spilling water he'd drawn up from a well, and offs a different kid for bumping into him.

When the neighbors complain, he strikes them blind.

The general impression is more gangsta rap than it is "holy infant, so tender and mild."

Then there's the Apocalypse of Ezra, in which God has an argument with the prophet Ezra wherein Ezra says that since God created the Apple and the Serpent, he's responsible for humanity becoming sinful, so he can't rightfully punish people for doing bad shit.  Which seems like a legit objection to me.  But God shows Ezra the fiery tortures of hell, and says, basically, "What now, Ezra?  Any other questions?" and Ezra says, "Oh, okay, I see your point" and the book ends with a score of God 1, Ezra 0.

In any case, what strikes me about all this is that when it came time to sift through all the hundreds of manuscripts and decide what was canonical and what wasn't, the decision wasn't made by any kind of holy agency.  It was just a bunch of guys arguing about it and finally whittling the list down by about half to what we have today.  (And there are still disagreements -- that's why the various Orthodox sects, Catholicism, and Protestant denominations all have a slightly different set of books in their bibles.)

Of course, the apologists say the decision was made by people who were divinely motivated.  As the Christian site Got Questions puts it, "There are no 'lost books' of the Bible, or books that were taken out of the Bible, or books missing from the Bible.  Every book that God intended to be in the Bible is in the Bible.  There are many legends and rumors of lost books of the Bible, but the books were not, in fact, lost.  Rather, they were rejected...  These books were not inspired by God."

So that's convenient.  Me, I find the whole thing bizarre and a little mystifying, which I suppose is unsurprising.

Anyhow, here I sit, drinking my coffee and waiting for the Rapture.  By the time y'all read this, it'll either have happened or it won't, so if I get Raptured I won't be around to read your comments.  (Admittedly, this is unlikely given my history, and if there was any doubt in the minds of the Heavenly Judges, the fact that I just wrote this post probably sealed the deal.)  If I'm still here, we'll see what's going on in the world.  My guess is that regardless, there won't be any angelic intervention by Enoch-Metatron or Gangsta Baby Jesus or anyone else, and we'll all just have to keep plodding forward as usual.

But if sheep start running around swinging swords, or whatnot, I'll happily eat my words.

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The missing day

Can I make the not-very-earthshattering observation that if you are explaining evidence supporting a belief, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it?

Especially if that belief is that your own personal religion is not only superior morally, but one hundred percent true?

I'm referring to a story of dubious provenance that has been showing up all over the place lately, mostly on Christian apologetics sites, and then forwarded by people who (1) don't understand how science works, (2) don't know how to do a Google search to check for accuracy, or (3) would prefer something sound good than be correct.  Or all three.  I ran into it via the site Calvary Pilot ("Piloting Souls to the Cross"), but other versions I've seen are substantially similar.  Here are a few excerpts, edited only for length:

For all you scientists out there and for all the students who have had a hard time convincing these people regarding the truth of the Bible – here’s something that illustrates God’s awesome creation and shows He is still in control.

 
Did you know that NASA’s space programmes are busy proving that what has been called ‘myth’ in the Bible is true?  Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore, and a consultant in the space programmes, relates the following incident: "One of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland.  They were checking out the positions of the sun, moon and planets out in space where they would be 100, and 1000 years from now. We have to know this as we do not want a satellite to collide with any of these in its orbits."

So we're off to a flying start, with the claim that NASA has to be very careful to make sure that satellites in orbit around the Earth don't collide with the Sun or Neptune or anything.  You can see how that could happen.

Computer measurements and data were run back and forth over the centuries when suddenly it came to a halt, displaying a red signal, which meant that either there was something wrong with the information fed into it, or with the results as compared to the standards.  They called in the service department to check it out, and the technicians asked what was wrong.  The scientists had discovered that somewhere in space in elapsed time a day was missing.  Nobody seemed able to come up with a solution to the problem.

Which brings up the awkward question of how you'd discover that a day was missing.  Were the technicians sitting around, monitoring the satellite transmissions, and suddenly one of them got this horrified look on his face and said, "Wait... where the fuck did I put last Tuesday?"  Then all of the other technicians and engineers and physicists and so forth all start searching under desks and in storage closets and behind garbage cans and so on, but to no avail.  Last Tuesday is definitely AWOL.

Finally one of the team, a Christian, said: “You know, when I was still in Sunday School, they spoke about the sun standing still…”  While his colleagues didn’t believe him, they did not have an answer either, so they said: “Show us.”  He got a Bible and opened it at the book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anyone with ‘common sense’.  There they read about the Lord saying to Joshua: “Fear them not, I have delivered them into thy hand; there shall not be a man of them stand before thee.” (Joshua 10:8).  Joshua was concerned because the enemy had surrounded him, and if darkness fell, they would overpower him.  So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still!  That’s right – “And the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is this not written in the book of Ja’-sher?  So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole day.” (Joshua 10:13).

The astronauts and scientists said: "There is the missing day!"

So there was much rejoicing.  But then one of them pointed out that it wasn't a whole day that had been found -- it was only 23 hours and 20 minutes. Which left forty minutes unaccounted for, "which could mean trouble 1000 years from now."  Why it isn't trouble now, I have no idea, but concern for our distant descendants sent the NASA folks back on a search for the missing two-thirds of an hour.

And you'll never guess where they found it.

The Bible.  See, I told you you'd never guess.

As the Christian employee thought about it, he remembered somewhere in the Bible which said the sun went backwards.  The scientists told him he was out of his mind, but once again they opened the Book and read these words in 2 Kings.  Hezekiah, on his deathbed, was visited by the prophet, Isaiah, who told him he was not going to die.  Hezekiah asked for some sign as proof. Isaiah said: “Shall the sun go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?”  And Hezekiah answered: “It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; nay, but let the shadow return backwards ten degrees.”  Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” (2 Kings 20:9 -11).  Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes!  Twenty-three hours and twenty minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in 2 Kings accounted for the missing day in the universe!

Which would have been the cause for even more rejoicing, if the whole thing hadn't been made up.  I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (a real one,  I mean, like they have at NASA) to find the story eye-rollingly ridiculous, but it has been so widely circulated -- I've seen it three times on Facebook just in the last week -- that it actually has a Snopes page dedicated to it.  In it, we find out that Harold Hill was the president of Curtis Engine Company of Baltimore, but that's pretty much the only thing in the story that is true.  First off, Hill wasn't a NASA consultant.  It turns out that Hill was an evangelical Christian with a fairly loose interpretation of the word "true," because he'd read about the "lost day" legend in a book by Harold Rimmer entitled The Harmony of Science and Scripture and decided that the story would carry more punch if he claimed he'd witnessed the whole thing happening.  He embellished his account -- adding, of course, accolades such as "NASA consultant" for himself -- and repeated it many times in public speeches.  He even devoted a whole chapter to it in his 1974 book How to Live Like a King's Kid, apparently because by then, he'd told the tale so many times that he actually was beginning to believe it.

John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still over Gideon (1816) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And now with the amazing bullshit conduit that is the internet, the story has roared into life again.  What's funny, though, is that the claim is so ridiculous even Answers in Genesis is saying Christians shouldn't use it as an argument for the Bible having a scientific basis, and heaven knows AIG isn't exactly an exemplar of factual accuracy.  Snopes writer David Mikkelson says about it:

To those who've given over their hearts to God and the Holy Word, this is a deeply satisfying legend.  Faith is, after all, the firm belief in something which cannot necessarily be proved, a quality that can leave believers (especially those who find themselves in the midst of non-believers) feeling unsatisfied.  As steadfast as their certainty is, they cannot prove the rightness of the path they tread to those who jeer at their convictions.  And this is a heavy burden to shoulder.  A legend such as the "missing day explained" tale speaks straight to the hearts of those who yearn for a bit of vindication in this life.  Being right isn't always enough: sometimes what one most longs for is sweet recognition from others.

Which may well be the case, but doesn't take away from the problem of a devout follower of a religion that considers "Thou shalt not bear false witness" as one of its fundamental teachings passing along a story that is essentially one long lie.  It makes me wish that as a corollary of the ninth commandment, Yahweh had seen fit to add, "And this meaneth that thou shalt spend five minutes and do a Google search before thou postest this shit on Facebook."

So anyway.  No, NASA is not spending its woefully tiny budget paying scientists to verify the Old Testament.  There's no evidence whatsoever of a "lost day," because against what clock would you be able to verify that time had stopped three-thousand-odd years ago?  I'd be much obliged if the people who think that God is going to bless them if they pass along this nonsense would just stop already.  Thank you.

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The backfire

From the Spectacular Backfire department, today we have: the guy who sponsored a bill to crack down on "pornographic and inappropriate" materials in public school classrooms in Utah has stated that he needs to "revisit" the wording of the law when a school district used it to remove Bibles from elementary and junior high school libraries.

Representative Ken Ivory (R-West Jordan) was alarmed at the unintended consequences of his bill, and held a rally of "faith and conservative" groups at the State Capitol this week, where protestors held signs saying "God cannot be cancelled" and "Remove porn, not the Bible."

"Is there any artistic value to the Bible?" Ivory asked the crowd.  "Has anyone been to Rome and visited the Sistine Chapel?  Has anyone also been to Paris and in the Louvre, seen The Last Supper?  Or have you been to Florence and seen the sculpture of the David?"

Which is an interesting example to choose, because it was people of precisely the same mindset who, just three months ago, got a school principal in Tallahassee fired for showing fifth graders a photograph of Michelangelo's David.

But hypocrisy, however blatant, never seems to register with these people.  Apparently, material is inappropriate whenever they say it is, and might well be appropriate tomorrow if the context changes.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Amandajm, Bible Johns Gospel 3 16, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The deeper problem is, it doesn't take much searching to find parts of the Bible that are inappropriate for children.  I mean, really inappropriate.  One of the best-known examples is Ezekiel 23:20-21: "There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.  So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled."

Then there's Genesis 19, which is not just about sex, but about drunken incest:

Lot and his two daughters left Zoar and settled in the mountains—for he was afraid to stay in Zoar—where they lived in a cave.  One day the older daughter said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is no man in the land to sleep with us, as is the custom over all the earth.  Come, let us get our father drunk with wine so we can sleep with him and preserve his line.”

So that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the firstborn went in and slept with her father; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up.

The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Look, I slept with my father last night.  Let us get him drunk with wine again tonight so you can go in and sleep with him and we can preserve our father’s line.”

So again that night they got their father drunk with wine, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him; he was not aware when she lay down or when she got up.

Thus both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father.  The older daughter gave birth to a son and named him Moab.  He is the father of the Moabites of today.  The younger daughter also gave birth to a son, and she named him Ben-ammi.  He is the father of the Ammonites of today.

And don't even get me started about the Song of Solomon.

The trouble is, people like Ken Ivory want one standard for Christian texts and a different standard for everything else.  A kids' story about a child with gay parents?  Oh, no, can't have that, it's inappropriate.  But a text that features lots of sex (consensual and not), violence, torture, and genocide -- that's just fine, because "God cannot be cancelled."

If he, and the others like him, want to have an honest conversation about what is and is not appropriate to have available to schoolchildren, that's just fine.  I don't know of a single person -- liberal or conservative, religious or not -- who wants to expose children to material that is unsuited to their personal and emotional development, and no one argues that young children should read explicitly sexual or violent books.

But you can't just set a standard, then when it's applied to your favorite book, say, "No, wait, not like that."

So as usual, it's not the idea behind the law that's the problem, here; it's the hypocrisy of its supporters.

Something I don't suppose Ken Ivory will understand.  People who specialize in performative virtue seldom do.  But maybe another biblical quote, from Matthew chapter 6, will strike home with him more clearly, something Jesus said about making a show of being holy: "When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men… but when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray in secret, to your Father who is unseen."

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Jerusalem, in England's green and pleasant land

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia asked me, rather offhand, if I'd heard of "British Israelism."  I hadn't, and he went on to explain that it's the idea that the British (and therefore Americans of British ancestry) are the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

As soon as I heard that last bit, I said, "Uh-oh."  I did a piece a while back about the fact that there are so many groups claiming to be the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes that calling them "lost" is something of a misnomer.  In fact, if you do any reading on the topic, you'll come away with the impression that you can't throw a rock without hitting a Ten Lost Tribesman.

Delegation of the Northern Kingdom of Israel bringing gifts to Assyrian King Shalmaneser III [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), Black Obelisk side 4 Jewish delegation, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But even so, the British Israelists are in a class by themselves, given how thoroughly fleshed-out their ideas are.  I mean, the ideas are horseshit, but it's amazingly detailed horseshit.  Here are a few of their chief tenets:

• The Ten Lost Tribes were not Jews.  More on that in a moment.
• The Scythians were the ancestors of the Scottish people.  Because, y'know, both start with "Sc" and all.
• The Saxons were connected to Isaac, son of Abraham.  "Saxon" comes from "[I]saac's sons."
• All of the place names that have a syllable of the form "/d/-vowel-/n/" come from the Tribe of Dan.  So London, Dunkirk, Dundee, and... I shit you not... Danube, Denmark, and Macedonia.  Also, this has something to do with the Tuatha Dé Danann, "the children of Danu," who were a supernatural race revered in pre-Christian Ireland.
• The royal family of Britain descends from King David of Israel.  Because reasons, apparently.
• The English are from the Tribe of Ephraim, and Americans are from the Tribe of Manasseh.  Don't ask me how this works, because even after reading about it fairly extensively, I have no idea.

Well, the first thing that comes to mind about all of this is that the Israelists have broken a cardinal rule, to wit, "don't fuck with a linguist."  None of their supposed etymologies are even within hailing distance of the truth.  Just looking at the "Tribe of Dan" ones -- of which none have anything to do with the Tribe of Dan -- let's start with Dundee and Dunkirk, which both contain the Celtic word dun meaning "fort" (as do Dunblane, Duncannon, Dunearn, Dunfermline, and dozens of others).  London comes from the Latin Londinium (which was probably a latinization of a Celtic place name).  Danube comes from the Celtic Danu (the same gods referenced in the Tuatha Dé Danann, but the fact that they were right about that one thing brings to mind my dad's remark that "even a stopped clock is right twice a day").  Denmark comes from a Germanic tribe called the Dani.  Finally, Macedonia comes from the ancient Greek μακεδνόι, which means "tall people."

Put a different way, linguistics is not some kind of bastard child of free association and the Game of Telephone.

The bottom line is, it's mighty odd if the English are direct descendants of the Israelites, there is not a shred of evidence -- anthropological, genetic, linguistic, or archeological -- of that connection.  What the Israelists have is an amalgam of quasi-evidence (mostly in the form of folk legends and mythology), mixed well with misinterpretations and outright falsehoods.  Despite all that -- to my astonishment -- it still has its fervent adherents, including the leaders of the Church of God International and the members of the Christian Identity movement.

Where it gets uglier, though, is that the Israelists, especially after the idea took hold in the United States, devolved into sickening levels of antisemitism.  This initially puzzled me, because you'd think that any group so gung-ho about the Israelites would be equally chummy with the Jews, but no.  The leading proponents of the idea have taken great pains to distance themselves from modern-day Jews, whom they consider "usurpers" and "imposters."  Some go so far as to believe that modern Jews aren't the descendants of the Israelites at all, but come either from Adam having sex with the demonic Lilith, or the Serpent having sex with Eve, or possibly both.  Anthropologist Michael Phillips, commenting on this bizarre doctrine, said that the belief allowed an adherent to "maintain his anti-Semitism and at the same time revere a Bible cleansed of its Jewish taint."

All of which illustrates something we've seen here before, which is that bigoted assholes will latch on to any gossamer scrap of evidence they can find to support their abhorrent ideas, and failing that, will make some up.

Anyhow, to the reader who sent me the link, thanks for sending me down a several-hours-long rabbit hole that left me thinking if the Daleks ever invade the Earth, I might just tell 'em, "Exterminate away, little buddies, there's no intelligent life down here anyhow."  Every time I think I've plumbed the absolute depth of stupidity, I find that someone has found the bottom and started to dig.

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Clay magnets

One of the most wonderful things about science is the role creativity has in discovery.  Problems that have been considered somewhere between difficult and intractable have often been solved by someone who has a sudden creative insight -- how to bring together two previously disparate bodies of knowledge, or using a technique from one realm to study an entirely different one.

Take, for example, the study that was sent my way by a reader of Skeptophilia a couple of days ago.  It has to do with the technique of paleomagnetism -- the "geological clock" provided by the fact that the Earth's magnetic field flips, for (thus far) reasons unknown.  You're probably familiar with the most famous use of paleomagnetism; it was the technique that finally cinched down the plate tectonic model as accounting for continental drift.  When magma solidifies into solid rock, tiny ferromagnetic particles that were once free to move become locked into place.  When the rock was liquid, those particles could swivel around and line up with the magnetic field of the Earth at the time; once solid, that magnetic signature was frozen in place.  When geologists doing magnetometer readings of the ocean floor on either side of the Mid-Atlantic Rift Zone found parallel stripes of rocks with the same magnetic signature, and the rock as they neared the ridge had progressively younger radioisotope ages, they knew that there was only one explanation.  New rock was welling up at the ridge from deep in the mantle, and that was pushing the plates apart, creating strips of new ocean floor all along the ridge.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the USGS]

Now, a new study has applied paleomagnetic techniques to a completely different problem.  A team at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has looked at the magnetic signature left in fired clay bricks -- and used it to date archaeological strata in order to pinpoint the dates of famous battles described in the Biblical Books of Kings.

Clay retains a fossilized magnetic imprint for the same reason that magma does; when the clay is plastic, the particles are free to move, but once it's fired, they're stuck in place.  What's coolest about this study, though, is how sensitive the technique has become.  Back in the 1950s, when Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews used paleomagnetism to study the sea floor, it was pretty crude.  The best they could do was say that a particular sample of rock had a magnetic field like the one we have today (shown in white on the above image) or one that was reversed with comparison to the current orientation (shown in various shades of orange).  This wouldn't be much help in archaeological settings, as the last complete polar reversal was 780,000 years ago.  Now, the technique has improved to the point that the scientists can detect tiny fluctuations not only in direction but in strength -- and that has allowed them to date strata with an accuracy of ten to fifteen years.

This has allowed the team to pinpoint firm dates of offensives against the Kingdom of Judah by Shoshenq I of Egypt (1 Kings 14: 25-26), Hazael of Damascus (2 Kings 12:18), Tiglath-Pileser III (2 Kings 15:29) and Sennacherib (2 Kings 18-19) of Assyria, and Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (2 Kings 25:1-21).  And while some of the findings confirmed previous dates for sites, the more accurate technique has disproven other conjectures.  For example, the site of Tel Beit She'an, thought to have been razed by Hazael of Damascus, showed a paleomagnetic date between seventy and a hundred years earlier, meaning it had fallen not to Hazael but to the campaign of Shoshenq of Egypt.

It's not only the fineness of the technique I find impressive, but the fact that the team thought of using it at all.  Creativity hinges on divergent thinking -- the ability to see multiple solutions to a problem, and to apply out-of-the-box techniques in order to find those solutions.  This is an excellent example of just that -- using a technique first pioneered in studies of plate tectonics to establish a timeline of biblical archaeology more accurate than anything we've had.

Makes you wonder what crossovers scientists will come up with next.

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The odds of creation

In today's contribution from the Department of Specious Statistics, the owner of a biblical timeline business and self-proclaimed mathematician has stated that she has calculated the likelihood of the biblical creation story being wrong as "less than 1 in 479 million."

Margaret Hunter, who owns Bible Charts and Timelines of Duck, West Virginia, stated in an interview, "I realized the twelve items listed in the Genesis creation account are confirmed by scientists today as being in the correct order, starting with light being separated from darkness, plants coming before animals and ending with man.  Think of the problem like this.  Take a deck of cards.  Keep just one suit—let’s say hearts.  Toss out the ace.  Hand the remaining twelve cards to a one year old child.  Ask him/her to hand you the cards one at a time.  In order.  What are the chances said toddler will start with the two and give them all to you in order right up to the king?"

Not very high, Hunter correctly states.  "Being a mathematician, I like thinking about things like this," she says.  "Moses had less than one chance in 479 million of just correctly guessing [the sequence of the creation account].  To me, the simplest explanation is Moses got it straight from the Creator."

Righty-o.  This just brings up a few questions in my mind, to wit:

1. Are you serious?
2. Maybe you "like thinking about mathematics," but you seem to know fuck-all about science.
3. There's a town called "Duck, West Virginia?" 

I have to give her one thing; she got the odds of toddler-mediated correct card-ordering right.  For any twelve different objects, the number of possible combinations is 12!  (For non-mathematicians, this isn't just me saying the previous sentence excitedly.  12!, read as "twelve factorial," is 12*11*10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1, or 479,001,600.)

 

However, the major problem with this is that we can all take a look at the events in the biblical creation story, and see immediately that Moses didn't get them right.  Here, according to the site Christian Answers, is the order of creation:

1. the Earth
2. light
3. day & night
4. air
5. water
6. dry land
7. seed-bearing plants with fruit
8. the Sun, Moon, and stars
9. water creatures
10. birds
11. land animals (presumably birds don't count)
12. humans

One immediate problem I see is that there was day and night three days before the Sun was created, which seems problematic to me, as the following photograph illustrates:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But of course, the problems don't end there.  Birds before the rest of "land animals?"  Plants before the Sun and Moon?  The plants are actually the ones on the list that are the most wildly out of order -- seed-bearing plants didn't evolve until the late Devonian, a long time after "water creatures" (the Devonian is sometimes called "the Age of Fish," after all), and an even longer time (about 4.5 billion years, to be precise) after the formation of the Sun.  Humans do come in the correct place, right there at the end, but the rest of it seems like kind of a hash.

So even if we use Hunter's mathematics, we run up against the unfortunate snag that if putting the twelve events of creation in the right order has a 1 in 479,001,600 likelihood of happening by chance, then the likelihood of putting them in the wrong order by chance is 479,001,599 in 479,001,600.  Which is what happened.  Leading us to the inevitable conclusion, so well supported by the available hard evidence, that Moses was just making shit up.

You know, I really wish you creationists would stop even pretending that this nonsense is scientific.  Just stick with your "the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it" approach, because every time you dabble your toes in the Great Ocean of Science, you end up getting knocked over by a wave and eating a mouthful of sand.  And it's becoming kind of embarrassing to watch, frankly.  Thank you.

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One of the characteristics which is -- as far as we know -- unique to the human species is invention.

Given a problem, we will invent a tool to solve it.  We're not just tool users; lots of animal species, from crows to monkeys, do that.  We're tool innovators.  Not that all of these tools have been unequivocal successes -- the internal combustion engine comes to mind -- but our capacity for invention is still astonishing.

In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, author Ainissa Ramirez takes eight human inventions (clocks, steel rails, copper telegraph wires, photographic film, carbon filaments for light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips) and looks not only at how they were invented, but how those inventions changed the world.  (To take one example -- consider how clocks and artificial light changed our sleep and work schedules.)

Ramirez's book is a fascinating lens into how our capacity for innovation has reflected back and altered us in fundamental ways.  We are born inventors, and that ability has changed the world -- and, in the end, changed ourselves along with it.

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

The missing day

Can I make the not-very-earthshattering observation that if you are explaining evidence supporting a belief, your argument is not made stronger by lying about it?

Especially if that belief includes the idea that your own personal religion is not only superior morally, but 100% true?

I'm referring to a story of dubious provenance that has been showing up all over the place lately, mostly on Christian apologetics sites, and then forwarded by people who (1) don't understand how science works, (2) don't know how to do a Google search to check for accuracy, or (3) would prefer something sound good than be correct.  Or all three.  I ran into it via the site Command the Raven, but other versions I've seen are substantially similar.  Here are a few excerpts, edited only for length:

For all you scientists out there and for all the students who have had a hard time convincing these people regarding the truth of the Bible – here’s something that illustrates God’s awesome creation and shows He is still in control.  

Did you know that NASA’s space programmes are busy proving that what has been called ‘myth’ in the Bible is true?  Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore, and a consultant in the space programmes, relates the following incident: "One of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland.  They were checking out the positions of the sun, moon and planets out in space where they would be 100, and 1000 years from now.  We have to know this as we do not want a satellite to collide with any of these in its orbits."

So we're off to a flying start, with the claim that NASA has to be very careful to make sure that satellites in orbit around the Earth don't collide with the Sun or Neptune or anything.  You can see how that could happen.

Computer measurements and data were run back and forth over the centuries when suddenly it came to a halt, displaying a red signal, which meant that either there was something wrong with the information fed into it, or with the results as compared to the standards.  They called in the service department to check it out, and the technicians asked what was wrong.  The scientists had discovered that somewhere in space in elapsed time a day was missing. Nobody seemed able to come up with a solution to the problem.

Which brings up the awkward question of how you'd discover that a day was missing.  Or even what "there's a day missing" means.  Were the technicians sitting around, monitoring the satellite transmissions, and suddenly one of them got this horrified look on her face and said, "Wait... where the fuck did I put last Tuesday?"  Then all of the other technicians and engineers and physicists and so forth all start searching under desks and in storage closets and behind garbage cans and so on, but to no avail.  Last Tuesday is definitely AWOL.

Finally one of the team, a Christian, said: “You know, when I was still in Sunday School, they spoke about the sun standing still…”  While his colleagues didn’t believe him, they did not have an answer either, so they said: “Show us.”  He got a Bible and opened it at the book of Joshua where they found a pretty ridiculous statement for anyone with ‘common sense’.  There they read about the Lord saying to Joshua: “Fear them not, I have delivered them into thy hand; there shall not be a man of them stand before thee.” (Joshua 10:8).  Joshua was concerned because the enemy had surrounded him, and if darkness fell, they would overpower him.  So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still!  That’s right – “And the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.  Is this not written in the book of Ja’-sher?  So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole day.” (Joshua 10:13).

The astronauts and scientists said: "There is the missing day!"

So there was much rejoicing.  But then one of them pointed out that it wasn't a whole day that had been found -- it was only 23 hours and 20 minutes.  Which left 40 minutes unaccounted for, "which could mean trouble 1000 years from now."  Why it isn't trouble now, I have no idea, but concern for our distant descendants sent the NASA folks back on a search for the missing 2/3 of an hour.

And you'll never guess where they found it.

The Bible.  See, I told you you'd never guess.

As the Christian employee thought about it, he remembered somewhere in the Bible which said the sun went backwards.  The scientists told him he was out of his mind, but once again they opened the Book and read these words in 2 Kings.  Hezekiah, on his deathbed, was visited by the prophet, Isaiah, who told him he was not going to die.  Hezekiah asked for some sign as proof.  Isaiah said: “Shall the sun go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?”  And Hezekiah answered: “It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; nay, but let the shadow return backwards ten degrees.”  Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.”  (2 Kings 20:9 -11).  Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes!  Twenty-three hours and twenty minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in 2 Kings accounted for the missing day in the universe!

Which would have been the cause for even more rejoicing, if the whole thing hadn't been made up.  I mean, it doesn't take a rocket scientist (a real one, I mean, like they have at NASA) to find the story eye-rollingly ridiculous, but it has been so widely circulated -- I've seen it three times on Facebook just in the last week -- that it actually has a Snopes page dedicated to it.  In it, we find out that Harold Hill was the president of Curtis Engine Company of Baltimore, but that's pretty much the only thing in the story that is true.  First off, Hill wasn't a NASA consultant.  It turns out that Hill was an evangelical Christian with a fairly loose interpretation of the word "true," because he'd read about the "lost day" legend in a book by Harold Rimmer entitled The Harmony of Science and Scripture and decided that the story would carry more punch if he claimed he'd witnessed the whole thing happening.  He embellished his account -- adding, of course, accolades such as "NASA consultant" for himself -- and repeated it many times in public speeches.  He even devoted a whole chapter to it in his 1974 book How to Live Like a King's Kid, apparently because by then, he'd told the tale so many times that he actually was beginning to believe it.

John Martin, Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Over Gibeon (1816) [Image is in the Public Domain]

And now with the amazing bullshit conduit that is the internet, the story has roared into life again.  Snopes writer David Mikkelson says about it:

To those who've given over their hearts to God and the Holy Word, this is a deeply satisfying legend.  Faith is, after all, the firm belief in something which cannot necessarily be proved, a quality that can leave believers (especially those who find themselves in the midst of non-believers) feeling unsatisfied.  As steadfast as their certainty is, they cannot prove the rightness of the path they tread to those who jeer at their convictions.  And this is a heavy burden to shoulder.  A legend such as the "missing day explained" tale speaks straight to the hearts of those who yearn for a bit of vindication in this life.  Being right isn't always enough: sometimes what one most longs for is sweet recognition from others.

Which may well be the case, but doesn't take away from the problem of a devout follower of a religion that considers "Thou shalt not bear false witness" as one of its fundamental teachings passing along a story that is essentially one long lie.  It makes me wish that as a corollary of the ninth commandment, Yahweh had seen fit to add, "And this meaneth that thou shalt spend five fucking minutes and do a Google search before thou postest this shit on Facebook."

So anyway.  No, NASA is not spending its woefully tiny budget paying scientists to verify the Old Testament.  There's no evidence whatsoever of a "lost day," because against what clock would you be able to verify that time had stopped 3,000 odd years ago?  I'd be much obliged if the people who think that God is going to bless them if they pass along this nonsense would just stop already.  Thank you.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that has raised a controversy in the scientific world: Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human, by Madeleine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier.

It tells the story of a stupendous discovery -- twelve-million-year-old hominin fossils, of a new species christened Danuvius guggenmosi.  The astonishing thing about these fossils is where they were found.  Not in Africa, where previous models had confined all early hominins, but in Germany.

The discovery of Danuvius complicated our own ancestry, and raised a deep and difficult-to-answer question; when and how did we become human?  It's clear that the answer isn't as simple as we thought when the first hominin fossils were uncovered in Olduvai Gorge, and it was believed that if you took all of our millennia of migrations all over the globe and ran them backwards, they all converged on the East African Rift Valley.  That neat solution has come into serious question, and the truth seems to be that like most evolutionary lineages, hominins included multiple branches that moved around, interbred for a while, then went their separate ways, either to thrive or to die out.  The real story is considerably more complicated and fascinating than we'd thought at first, and Danuvius has added another layer to that complexity, bringing up as many questions as it answers.

Ancient Bones is a fascinating read for anyone interested in anthropology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology.  It is sure to be the basis of scientific discussion for the foreseeable future, and to spur more searches for our relatives -- including in places where we didn't think they'd gone.

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