Whoozagooboy?

It will come as no surprise to long-time readers of Skeptophilia that I am a dog person, given how often they come up in my posts.

Dogs, in general, like me way better than people do.  Years ago I went over to a friend's house for the first time, and she warned me about her neurotic, high-strung dog who -- direct quote -- "you should just ignore because otherwise she freaks out."  Within fifteen minutes, said high-strung dog was lying next to me on the couch, head in my lap, snoring.

My own dogs, Guinness and Lena, are a bit of an odd pair themselves.  Guinness is a pit bull/husky mix who is sweet and cuddly sometimes, and at other times seventy pounds of spring-loaded bounce. 

"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille."

Lena, on the other hand, is a redbone/bluetick coonhound cross who is beautiful, laid-back, and has the IQ of a PopTart.  We had a good laugh at her yesterday because we called to the dogs out of our second-floor window, Guinness immediately looked up, saw us, and started wagging, whereas Lena spent the next fifteen minutes looking behind trees and bushes, wondering where Mommy and Daddy were hiding.

She never did find us.  Mommy and Daddy are pretty damn intrepid.

"Hi!  I love you!  You look familiar!  Who are you, again?"

So it's no wonder that I'm fascinated with dog behavior, and also the history of the human/dog association.  Which is why I was really excited to read about some research done jointly by Historic Environment Scotland and the National Museum of Scotland to reconstruct an ancestral dog from a 4.500 year old skull found in the Orkney Islands.

This Neolithic pooch was one of 24 dog skulls found at Cuween Hill, a burial site dating from about 2,500 B.C.E.  Archaeologists have surmised that this sort of thing generally means that the animal in question was some sort of totem; other tombs in the Orkneys have had similar deposits, one of the bones of sea eagles, the other of red deer.

"Perhaps the people who lived in the [Cuween Hill] area at the time saw themselves as 'the dog people'," said Alison Sheridan, principal archaeological research curator in the department of Scottish history and archaeology at the National Museum.  Whether or not that's true, these people, she said, clearly had a "special association" with their dogs.

"When you look at a Neolithic dog, it somehow communicates human relationships, and I can relate to that," said Steve Farrar, interpretation manager at Historic Environment Scotland.  "I can empathize with the people whose ingenuity made Orkney such an enormously important place.  When this dog was around, northwest Europe looked to Orkney."

So without further ado, here's a photograph of the reconstruction:

I think we can all agree that this is definitely the face of a Good Boy.  [Image courtesy of Santiago Arribas/Historic Environment Scotland]

So the dog/human relationship has been around for a long, long time.  Doesn't surprise me, really, given how easily they find their way into our hearts.  But I'm going to have to wind this up, because Guinness wants to play ball, and y'know, priorities.

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Monday's post, about the institutionalized sexism in scientific research, prompted me to decide that this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is Evelyn Fox Keller's brilliant biography of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism.

McClintock worked for years to prove her claim that bits of genetic material that she called transposons or transposable elements could move around in the genome, with the result of switching on or switching off genes.  Her research was largely ignored, mostly because of the attitudes toward female scientists back in the 1940s and 1950s, the decades during which she discovered transposition.  Her male colleagues laughingly labeled her claim "jumping genes" and forthwith forgot all about it.

Undeterred, McClintock kept at it, finally amassing such a mountain of evidence that she couldn't be ignored.  Other scientists, some willingly and some begrudgingly, replicated her experiments, and support finally fell in line behind her.  She was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine -- and remains to this day the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel in that category.

Her biography is simultaneously infuriating and uplifting, but in the end, the uplift wins -- her work demonstrates the power of perseverance and the delightful outcome of the protagonist winning in the end.  Keller's look at McClintock's life and personal struggles, and ultimate triumph, is a must-read for anyone interested in science -- or the role that sexism has played in scientific research.

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

Aliens in Antarctica

In H. P. Lovecraft's seminal horror story, At the Mountains of Madness, explorers in Antarctica stumble upon an ancient city that was inhabited by an alien race eons ago.  High up in the frozen, windswept mountains are the ruins of colossal buildings hewn from stone, a holdover from when the Southern Continent was warm, tropical, and covered with plant life.  Beneath the crumbling masonry and ice-covered stonework is a maze of subterranean tunnels, where bizarre creatures once roamed...

... and, perhaps, still do.  *cue ominous music*

I won't tell you any more about it, because if you haven't read what (in my humble opinion) is one of Lovecraft's five best stories (my other four favorites are The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Colour Out of Space, and In the Walls of Eryx), then you should rectify that error immediately.

But the thing that sets Mountains of Madness apart, I think, is the novelty of setting it in Antarctica, a continent that is deeply imbued with mystery.  The ice shelves, the endless nights during the winter, the central dry valleys (a place Carl Sagan said was "about as close to Mars as we have here on Earth"), all seem hostile, inhospitable, alien, and utterly fascinating.  Which is why I immediately perked up when I saw a headline on Open Minds that said, "Did the Smithsonian Discover Alien Skulls in Antarctica?"

Of course, the problem here is twofold.  First, to judge by their content, the name of the site Open Minds apparently refers to leaving your mind so open that your brains fall out.  Other headlines on their site include, "Jaden Smith Says Obama Confirmed Aliens are Real" and "Teleporting Superhero Alien, or Video Game Character?"

Second, there is a general rule that whenever a headline of a story asks a question, the article that follows should state, in its entirety, "NO."

Despite all that, I looked at the article, which directed me to what apparently is the origin of the claim, a site called American Live Wire.  And here is what they have to say about it:

Smithsonian archaeologist Damian Waters and his team have uncovered three elongated skulls in the region of La Paille, Antarctica.  The discovery came as a total surprise to the world of archaeology as they are the first human remains uncovered from Antarctica, thought never to have been visited by humans until the modern age.  

"We just can’t believe it!  We didn’t just find human remains on Antarctica, we found elongated skulls!  I have to pinch myself every time I wake up, I just can’t believe it!  This will redefine our view of mankind’s history as a whole!" excitedly explains M. [sic] Waters. 

Elongated skulls have been found in Peru and in Egypt, proving past civilizations made contact long before history books want to acknowledge. 

But this discovery is plain incredible. It shows there was contact thousand of years ago between civilizations in Africa, South America and Antarctica.

Well, first, I have a hard time imagining a scientist in a press conference telling the world how he has to pinch himself when he wakes up because he's so "excited."  Secondly, there seems to be no region called "La Paille" in Antarctica.  "Paille" is French for "straw," something I haven't seen much of in photographs I've seen of Antarctica, so it's a little hard to see why someone would name a place down there "La Paille."

[image courtesy of photographer Andrew Mandemaker and the Wikimedia Commons]

Third, I haven't been able to find a single mention of a "Damian Waters" who works for the Smithsonian, other than in stories about the alien skulls.  So I suspect that he was made up, along with the skulls and La Paille and everything else about the story.  The whole thing just seems to be riffing on the "Starchild Skull" bullshit about the frontally-flattened skulls found in Peru, and trying to jump it back into the news by stating that some people had found similar skulls in a highly unlikely place.

[image of the Paracas skulls in the Museo Regional de Ica, Peru, courtesy of photographer Marcin Tlustochowicz and the Wikimedia Commons]

So, it's a lie.  It's a shame, really.  Given the cachet that Antarctica has, it would be cool if there was some kind of weird mystery down there, or at least something other than penguins and leopard seals and high winds and a crapload of ice.

But this ain't it.  I still don't really get why people start hoaxes; it's not like there aren't enough cool real things to talk about.  But whether this was written by some wingnut over at American Live Wire, or whether ALW just picked it up from another source, the whole thing seems to be cut from whole cloth.

On the other hand, it might be better in the long haul that it isn't true, you know?  Lovecraft's Antarctic explorers mostly came to bad ends.  It'd kind of suck if a bunch of scientists went down there, trying to find more skulls (all the while "excitedly pinching themselves"), and they all ended up getting eaten by shoggoths.  You can see how that'd be kind of a bummer.