Underwater cherry-picking

Because my son has an odd sense of humor (Wonder where he got that from?  It's a puzzle), for my last birthday he got me a copy of Graham Hancock's 2002 book Underworld: The Mysterious Origin of Civilization.  Hancock is notorious in skeptical circles for his outlandish ideas about... well, damn near everything.

I use the word "outlandish" deliberately, because he not only propounds dozens of claims about the origins of earthly cultures, he also has an entire book on the "Face on Mars," which is supposedly evidence of an advanced civilization on the Red Planet that was later wiped out by a cataclysm, but which turns out to be a bigass pile of rocks that only looks like a face if you (1) aim your camera at it from one specific direction, (2) make sure the photograph is grainy and low-resolution, and (3) squint your eyes at it real hard.

Hancock is not above messing with the facts to make them fit his favorite pseudoarchaeological "theories."  RationalWiki, never ones to mince words, describe a tiff he got into over the Egyptian pyramids:

[H]e aligned the Giza complex to the constellation of Orion as it was some 10,000 years ago, although the BBC program Horizon thought otherwise.  They claimed that Hancock had fiddled with the locations of some of the temples to fit in with his own theories, and had even ignored the texts carved on the temples themselves, which explained quite clearly why and when they had been built.  Hancock cried foul to the Broadcasting Standards Commission, who politely told him to sod off.

So he's a little suspect right from the get-go.  Then add to this the fact that he's appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, which by itself reduces someone's credibility level to the dimensions of your typical subatomic particle.

Despite this, his books are international bestsellers, which makes a writer like myself grind my teeth down to nubs.

But all envy aside, I decided to read Underworld.  I figured at least it was worth the time from the standpoint of entertainment.  

There's no doubt he's got a compelling style, with a keen eye for description and detail, and does know a good deal about the places he visits.  You can see why unwary readers find him convincing.  But if you start looking at just about all of his claims with any care at all, you find that his foremost talent is cherry-picking.

Historian Garrett Fagan's 2006 book Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public gives dozens of examples of Hancock's selective use of evidence -- such as his claim that Antarctica was ice-free six thousand years ago (ignoring geological and ice core data showing that it's been completely glaciated for at least a hundred thousand years), and that the Bolivian archaeological site of Tiwanaku has been the subject of "minimal archaeology" and is "a mysterious site about which very little is known" (actually, it's been extensively studied, including radioisotope analysis strongly contradicting Hancock's assertion that it's over ten thousand years old).

So the approach appears to be "mention only the evidence that supports your claim, and cite only people who agree with you."

Hell, it worked for Erich von Däniken, right?

To take one example from Underworld, there's Yonaguni Monument, which I had never heard of before.  Yonaguni is an underwater rock formation in the Ryukyu Island chain.  There's no doubt it's peculiar:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Melkov, Yonaguni Monument Terraces midpart NWW, CC0 1.0]

The edges are dead-straight, some with corners at perfect right angles.  Here's what Hancock writes about it:

The first anomalous structure that was discovered at Yonaguni lies below glowering cliffs of the southern shore of the island.  Local divers call it Iseki Point ("Monument Point").  Into its south face, at a depth of about 18 meters, an area of terracing with conspicuous flat planes and right angles has been cut.  Two huge parallel blocks weighing about 30 tonnes each and separated by a gap of less than 10 centimeters have been placed upright side by side at its northwest corner.  In about five meters of water at the very top of the structure there is a kidney-shaped "pool" and nearby is a feature that many divers believe is a crude rock-carved image of a turtle.  At the base of the monument, in 27 meters of water, there is a clearly defined stone-paved path oriented toward the east...

Two kilometers west of Iseki Point is the "Palace."  Here an underwater passageway leads into the northern end of a spacious chamber with megalithic walls and ceiling.  At the southern end of the chamber a tall, lintelled doorway leads into a second smaller chamber beyond.  At the end of that chamber is a vertical, rock-hewn shaft that emerges outside on the roof of the "Palace."  Nearby a flat rock bears a pattern of strange, deep grooves.  A little further east there is a second megalithic passage roofed by a gigantic slab that fits snugly against the tops of the supporting walls.

What's remarkable -- and insidious -- about the way this is written is that without giving any actual evidence, he deliberately chooses verbs implying that Yonaguni is an artificial construct.   "Cut."  "Placed upright."  "Carved."  "Paved."  "Oriented."  "Hewn."  Even the nouns do this: "Passageway."  "Roof."  "Lintel."  "Ceiling."  "Terrace."  "Path."

Once he sets you up this way, the rest of his argument -- if I can dignify it by that name -- goes something like this:

• Is Yonaguni a manmade structure?  Sure looks like it to me.
• To cut and place enormous stones with that precision requires significantly advanced technology.
• But it's under twenty-some-odd meters of water!  So it must have been built when the sea level was lower.
• When was the sea level that low?  Tens of thousands of years ago.  So that must be when Yonaguni was built.
• So the Ryukyu Islands were inhabited by a highly technological culture twenty thousand years ago.  Q.E.D.

The trouble is, the scientific consensus (I can almost hear Hancock shouting "to hell with the scientific consensus!", but we'll soldier on anyhow) is that Yonaguni is a completely natural formation, formed from shale and sandstone of Lower Miocene age.  Archaeologist Carl Feagans has studied the formation extensively, and after an analysis of the features of the structure (which I encourage you to read in its entirety) has the following to say:

The first and primary claim made about the Yonaguni Formation, that it is an artificial, megalithic construction, is not upheld.  Not if you’re a rational person who cares about evidence...

[N]one of the “features” [described as artificial] are supported by evidence that corroborates the claim.  There’s a lot of talk about “tool marks” but no evidence of these is shown.  There’s talk about artifacts, but no discussion on why they could not have been lost a sea by other means.  There’s a lot of “looks like” analogies but no physical evidence to show why they are anything more than pareidolia or imagination.

[T]here’s no evidence that the YF is anything more than a naturally occurring formation of shale and sandstone originally deposited in the Miocene and uplifted and inundated in the Pleistocene.

Look, I understand how easy it is to be fooled.  Only fifteen kilometers from where I live is a lovely spot called Lucifer Falls.  The bedrock around here is similar to Yonaguni -- shale, slate, limestone, and sandstone -- albeit a great deal older (our rocks are Devonian in age).  

And all along the path to Lucifer Falls are rocks with squared-off corners, some so flat they look like they must have been cut by humans.  But no.  Other than a few obvious stairs, walls, and platforms, the area around the falls is completely natural.  The rocks simply fractured that way.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Andrea Pagani, Lucifer Falls (232560709), CC BY-SA 3.0]

But Hancock knows all too well that "it's cool, but it's a natural rock formation" doesn't sell near as well as stuff like Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria.  So don't expect the cherry-picking to stop any time soon.

As far as Underworld goes, I guess I'll persist with reading it a bit more.  I've gotta be able to tell my son that at least I gave it the ol' college try.

But if Hancock brings up Ancient Aliens, I'm fucking done.

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Facepalms of the gods

While snooping around looking for topics for Skeptophilia, I stumbled upon a page over on Quora that made me utter a string of really bad words and then say, "that nonsense again?"

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that the aforementioned nonsense was the contention that mythological accounts of powerful deities living in the skies are evidence of visitations by aliens with advanced technology.  The original poster on Quora called it "the Ancient Alien Theory," which made me grind my teeth even harder, because the use of the word theory to mean "this crazy idea I just now pulled out of my ass" makes me absolutely livid.

But I shouldn't be surprised that they use it this way, because (1) they also misinterpret just about every piece of archaeological or anthropological evidence in existence, and (2) calling it a "theory" gives an undeserved sheen of seriousness to their claim.  What gets me, though, is that this stuff has been around for decades, has been debunked every which way from Sunday, and it's still got traction.

The whole goofy story starts with the book Chariots of the Gods, written by Erich von Däniken in 1968, but more's the pity, it doesn't end there.  Chariots of the Gods is the Creature That Won't Die.  Like the Hydra, it just keeps regrowing heads and coming back at you again.  In fact, Chariots of the Gods was only the first of a series of books by von Däniken, each ringing the changes on the Ancient Astronauts theme.  When Chariots of the Gods hit the bestseller list, he followed it up with: Gods from Outer Space; The Gold of the Gods; In Search of Ancient Gods; Miracles of the Gods; Signs of the Gods; Pathways to the Gods; and Enough About The Gods, Already, Let's Talk About Something Else.

Obviously, I made the last one up, because von Däniken at age 89 is still blathering on about The Gods.  His books have sold 62 million copies, have been translated into 32 languages, and his ideas formed the basis of a theme park in Switzerland, thus further reinforcing my belief that skepticism will never be the lucrative profession that woo-wooism is.

A statue from the late Jomon period of Japan (1000-400 B.C.E.), which Erich von Däniken thinks can only be explained as a space-suited alien, since humans obviously never include weird imaginary creatures in their mythological art. [Image is in the Public Domain]

You might ask what von Däniken's evidence is, other than the argument from incredulity ("wow! The pyramids are really big!  I can't imagine making a pyramid, myself.  Therefore they must have been designed and constructed by aliens!").  Here are a few pieces of evidence that von Däniken claims support the Ancient Astronaut hypothesis:

• The Antikythera mechanism.  This complex "mechanical computer," found in a shipwreck dated to about 150 BCE, contains a series of nested gears and was used to calculate astronomical positions.  Von Däniken says it's of alien manufacture, despite the fact that similar devices are mentioned in Greek and Roman literature, including Cicero's De Re Publica, in which its invention is credited to Archimedes.  (To be fair to von Däniken, I used Antikythera myself as the central MacGuffin in my novel Gears.  However, unlike von Däniken's work, Gears is clearly labeled "fiction.")
• The Piri Reis map.  This map, dating to 1513, "could only have been drawn using an aerial perspective," von Däniken claims.  In other words, it was drawn looking down from a spacecraft.  Unfortunately for von Däniken, the truth is that human sailors have been quite good at drawing maps for a very long time, because those who weren't quickly became fish bait.  The antecedents of the Piri Reis map have been identified, and include ten maps of Arab origin, four of Portuguese origin, and one map drawn by Christopher Columbus himself.
• The sarcophagus of Mayan ruler K'inich Janaab' Pakal, which allegedly shows him riding in a spacecraft.  The claim has been denounced loudly by every known expert in Mayan culture, language, and history.  The sarcophagus depicts the Mayan religious concept of the "world tree," not a rocket ship with a plume of exhaust, says archaeologist Sarah Kurnick -- von Däniken's claims to the contrary show that he can't be bothered to learn the first thing about Mayan culture before making pronouncements about what their art and inscriptions mean.  An objection which, of course, could be made about every other cultural artifact he mentions.
• The Moai, or Easter Island statues.  These are pretty cool, but in my mind only demonstrate what a lot of single-minded people working together can accomplish.
• A "non-rusting" iron pillar in India, that supposedly didn't rust because it was some kind of alien alloy.  When von Däniken's books became popular, naturally skeptics wanted to go to India to check out this story.  They found the pillar, and you'll never guess what it had on it?  Rust.  If you can imagine.  Being that this was kind of conclusive, von Däniken backed off from this claim, and said in an interview with Playboy, "We can forget about this iron thing."

The truth is, piece after piece of von Däniken's "evidence" falls apart if you analyze it, and try not to be swayed by his hyperdramatic statements that always seem to include phrases like "can only be explained by," "scientists are baffled by," and "a mystery beyond human ken."  Von Däniken's books were written because they make money, and are, simply put, pseudoscientific tripe.  The best debunking of his claims was Ronald Story's 1976 book The Space Gods Revealed, which is a page-by-page refutation of all of von Däniken's claims, and remains to this day one of the best skeptical analyses of pseudoscience ever written.

But the frustrating bottom line is that all of that hasn't made a dent in the popularity of von Däniken and his ideas.  Much of the blame lies with shows like Ancient Aliens, of course; the This Is No Longer Even Remotely Related To History Channel keeps pushing it because it's lucrative (it's now on its twentieth season and showing no signs of flagging).  So despite the rationalists and skeptics giving themselves facepalm-induced concussions, it looks like The Gods are still going to be around for a good long while yet.

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The non-mystery of the Dendera Light

One of the things that has always struck me about woo-woo types is how little it takes to get them going.  I suppose when you've already decided what you believe, the amount of evidence you require to support that belief can asymptotically approach zero without changing your stance one iota.

I ran into a particularly good example of that yesterday -- the Dendera Light.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Olaf Tausch, Dendera Krypta 48 (cropped), CC BY 3.0]

The Dendera Light is a motif found in the carvings in the Temple of Hathor in Dendera, Egypt.  The design is of a giant snake emerging from a lotus flower.  It appears in at least six different places, accompanied by texts that are all rather similar -- so its meaning is fairly well understood.  It is part of the creation myth, showing the god Harsomtus (an incarnation of Horus, in the form of a snake) being born and going out into the world.  This is supported by the inscriptions, one version of which reads:

Speaking the words of Harsomtus, the great God, who dwells in Dendera, who is in the arms of the first in the night-barge, sublime snake, whose Chentj-statue carries Heh [the personification of eternity], whose crew carries in holiness his perfection, whose Ba [spirit] caused Hathor to appear in the sky, whose figure is revered by his followers, who is unique, encircled by his forehead-snake, with countless names on the top of Chui-en-hesen, the symbol of power of Ra in the land of Atum, the father of the Gods, who created everything.

The Dendera Light motif almost always appears on lists with names like "Ten Unexplained Mysteries From Ancient Egypt" despite the fact that except insofar as we still have a fairly fragmentary understanding of Egyptian mythology, beliefs, and practices, it's not very mysterious at all.

Why?

First, someone noticed that the oval container (or halo) surrounding the snake was the same basic shape as a Crookes tube, an early version of the cathode-ray tube invented by British physicist William Crookes in 1870:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons D-Kuru, Crookes tube two views, CC BY-SA 3.0 AT]

The second thing was a passing comment by British astronomer and polymath Joseph Norman Lockyer, who had gone to Egypt to investigate the alignment of ancient temples and monuments with astronomical objects.  He and a colleague noticed the absence of soot deposits in the interior of some of the temples -- something you'd expect with the use of torches or oil lamps -- and the colleague jokingly said that this could be explained if the ancient Egyptians had electric lights.  Lockyer, clearly recognizing that it was a joke, mentioned it to a friend, and that was all it took.

In a classic example of adding two and two and getting 318, we have "vaguely oval shape in a religious motif" plus "humorous comment about the lack of soot in Egyptian temples" equaling "the ancient Egyptians had high technology, including electricity and who-the-hell-knows what else."

Therefore, of course, you-know-who had to be involved:

Needless to say, this claim has actual archaeologists tearing their hair out.  Kenneth Feder, professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University, who is a vocal debunker of ancient aliens claims and the like (he is the author of The Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology) points out correctly that if the ancient Egyptians had electricity and light bulbs, it's a little odd that we've never found a single trace of a wire, socket, filament, generator, or battery -- not so much as a glass shard from a broken bulb.

I get that the ancient Egyptian culture is fascinating and, in one sense, mysterious.  As I mentioned earlier, our understanding of how these people lived and what they believed is incomplete at best.  The monuments and temples and relics we still have today are beautiful and evocative.

But none of that is an excuse for making shit up.

So let's keep a sense of perspective, here.  The inscriptions and designs we don't yet understand do not imply that ancient aliens had anything to do with it.  "We don't yet understand" means only one thing; "we don't yet understand."

And as far as the Dendera Light, I'm afraid that's where we have to leave it.

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