Meaningful ink

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.

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I feel pretty

The drive to adorn our bodies is pretty close to universal.

Clothing, for example, serves the triple purpose of protecting our skin, keeping us warm, and making us look good.  Well, some of us.  I'll admit up front that I have a fashion sense that, if you were to rank it on a scale of one to ten, would have to be expressed in imaginary numbers.  But for a lot of people, clothing choice is a means of self-expression, a confident assertion that they care to look their best.  

Then there are tattoos, about which I've written here before because I'm a serious fan (if you want to see photos of my ink, take a look at the link).  Tattooing goes back a long way -- Ötzi the "Ice Man," a five-thousand-year-old body discovered preserved in glacial ice in the Alps, had no fewer than 61 tattoos.  No one knows what Ötzi's ink signifies; my guess is that just like today, the meanings of tattoos back then were probably specific to the culture, perhaps even to the individual.  

Then there's jewelry.  We know from archaeological research that jewelry fashioned from gems and precious metals also has a long history; a 24-karat gold pendant found in Bulgaria is thought to have been made in around 4,300 B.C.E., which means that our distant ancestors used metal casting for more than just weapon-making.  So between decorative clothing, tattoos, and jewelry, we've been spending inordinate amounts of time and effort (and pain, in the case of tattooing, piercing, and scarification) altering our appearances.  

Why?  No way to be sure, but my guess is that there are a variety of reasons.  Enhancing sexual attractiveness certainly played, and plays, a role.  Some adornments were clearly signs of rank, power, or social role.  Others were personal means of self-expression.  Evolutionists talk about "highly conserved features" -- adaptations that are between common and universal within a species or a clade -- and the usual explanation is that anything that is so persistent must be highly selected, and therefore important for survival and reproduction.  It's thin ice to throw learned behaviors in this same category, but I think the same argument at least has some applicability here; given that adornment is common to just about all human groups studied, the likelihood is that it serves a pretty important purpose.  What's undeniable is that we spend a lot of time and resources on it that could be used for more directly beneficial activities.

What's most interesting is that we're the only species we know of that does this.  There are a few weak instances of this sort of behavior -- for example, the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea, in which the males collect brightly-colored objects like flower petals, shells, and bits of glass or stone to create a little garden to attract mates.  But we seem to be the only animals that regularly adorn their own bodies.

How far back does this impulse go?  We got at least a tentative answer to this in a paper this week in Science Advances, which was about an archaeological discovery in Morocco of shell beads that were used for jewelry...

... 150,000 years ago.

"They were probably part of the way people expressed their identity with their clothing," said study co-author Steven Kuhn, of the University of Arizona.  "They’re the tip of the iceberg for that kind of human trait.  They show that it was present even hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that humans were interested in communicating to bigger groups of people than their immediate friends and family."

A sampling of the Stone Age shell beads found in Morocco

Like with Ötzi's tattoos, we don't know what exactly the beads were intending to communicate.  Consider how culture-dependent those sorts of signals are; imagine, for example, taking someone from three thousand years ago, and trying to explain what the subtle and often complex significance of appearances and behaviors that we here in the present understand immediately.  "You think about how society works – somebody’s tailgating you in traffic, honking their horn and flashing their lights, and you think, ‘What’s your problem?'" Kuhn said.  "But if you see they’re wearing a blue uniform and a peaked cap, you realize it’s a police officer pulling you over."

Unfortunately, there's probably no way to know whether the shell beads were used purely for personal adornment, or if they had another religious or cultural significance.  "It’s one thing to know that people were capable of making them," Kuhn said, "but then the question becomes, 'OK, what stimulated them to do it?'...  We don’t know what they meant, but they’re clearly symbolic objects that were deployed in a way that other people could see them."

So think about that next time you put on a necklace or bracelet or earrings.  You are participating in a tradition that goes back at least 150,000 years.  Maybe our jewelry-making ability has improved beyond shell beads with a hole drilled through, but the impulse remains the same -- whatever its origins.

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Mathematics tends to sort people into two categories -- those who revel in it and those who detest it.  I lucked out in college to have a phenomenal calculus teacher who instilled in me a love for math that I still have today, and even though I'm far from an expert mathematician, I truly enjoy considering some of the abstruse corners of the theory of numbers.

One of the weirdest of all of the mathematical discoveries is Euler's Equation, which links five of the most important and well-known numbers -- π (the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter), e (the root of the natural logarithms), i (the square root of -1, and the foundation of the theory of imaginary and complex numbers), 1, and 0.  

They're related as follows:

Figuring this out took a genius like Leonhard Euler to figure out, and its implications are profound.  Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman called it "the most remarkable formula in mathematics;" nineteenth-century Harvard University professor of mathematics Benjamin Peirce said about Euler's Equation, "it is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth."

Since Peirce's time mathematicians have gone a long way into probing the depths of this bizarre equation, and that voyage is the subject of David Stipp's wonderful book A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics.  It's fascinating reading for anyone who, like me, is intrigued by the odd properties of numbers, and Stipp has made the intricacies of Euler's Equation accessible to the layperson.  When I first learned about this strange relationship between five well-known numbers when I was in calculus class, my first reaction was, "How the hell can that be true?"  If you'd like the answer to that question -- and a lot of others along the way -- you'll love Stipp's book.

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

Meaningful ink

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 Journal of Archaeological Science of the oldest-known tattoo tools, some sharpened turkey leg and wing bones found near Fernvale, Tennessee that predate Ötzi by over five hundred years.  The hollow pointed tips of the bone tools still contained residue of black and red pigments, and the microscopic wear on the tips and edges match that found on tattoo tools found at other sites around the world.

The ordeal of being jabbed over and over with a sharpened bird bone, though, sounds a lot more painful than what I underwent, which was bad enough.

But it was 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 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 at least six thousand 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.

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Saber-toothed tigers.  Giant ground sloths.  Mastodons and woolly mammoths.  Enormous birds like the elephant bird and the moa.  North American camels, hippos, and rhinos.  Glyptodons, an armadillo relative as big as a Volkswagen Beetle with an enormous spiked club on the end of their tail.

What do they all have in common?  Besides being huge and cool?

They all went extinct, and all around the same time -- around 14,000 years ago.  Remnant populations persisted a while longer in some cases (there was a small herd of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Aleutians only four thousand years ago, for example), but these animals went from being the major fauna of North America, South America, Eurasia, and Australia to being completely gone in an astonishingly short time.

What caused their demise?

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is The End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals, by Ross MacPhee, which considers the question, and looks at various scenarios -- human overhunting, introduced disease, climatic shifts, catastrophes like meteor strikes or nearby supernova explosions.  Seeing how fast things can change is sobering, especially given that we are currently in the Sixth Great Extinction -- a recent paper said that current extinction rates are about the same as they were during the height of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction 66 million years ago, which wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a great many other species at the same time.  

Along the way we get to see beautiful depictions of these bizarre animals by artist Peter Schouten, giving us a glimpse of what this continent's wildlife would have looked like only fifteen thousand years ago.  It's a fascinating glimpse into a lost world, and an object lesson to the people currently creating our global environmental policy -- we're no more immune to the consequences of environmental devastation as the ground sloths and glyptodons were.

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

A lens into the past

I have the unfortunate tendency to get fascinated by things that are impossible to research.

I was asked not too long ago about when and where -- if time travel into the past were possible -- I'd like to visit.  My immediate answer was Britain during the "Dark Ages," the period between the withdrawal of Roman forces in the 5th century C.E. and the Anglo-Saxon conquest in the 7th century.

My friend asked why I picked that time and place.  What was so interesting about it?

"I don't know if there's anything interesting about it," I responded.  "It's because no one really knows what happened during that time span.  There are almost no written records -- just about everything we know is from writings done three or four hundred years later.  It's the lack of information that fascinates me."

Fortunately, it's not always necessary to have written records to find out about a place's history.  That's why we have archaeology.  We can obtain a remarkably clear picture about a long-gone society simply from the debris it leaves behind.

There were three wonderful examples of this just in the last two weeks.

In the first, researchers in the Nile Delta found a skeleton and other artifacts in a place called Tell Timai (known as Thmouis in Ptolemaic times).  The skeleton was dated to about 180 B.C.E.  It showed numerous signs of trauma -- both healed and unhealed injuries to the bone, and evidence that its owner hadn't been buried so much as thrown on the ground and covered with a thin layer of dirt and sand.

Why the timing of this is interesting is that the man's death was during the same period as a revolt against Pharaoh Ptolemy V by native Egyptian rebels (the Ptolemies themselves were Greeks, and were widely regarded by their native subjects as usurpers).  Ptolemy successfully squashed the rebellion, an event that is recorded on one of the most famous written documents of all -- the Rosetta Stone.

The skeleton of the unfortunate Tell Timai man not only shows injuries typically suffered on the battlefield, but was surrounded by evidence of battle -- arrowheads and scorched "ballista balls" (a baseball-sized projectile fired from Greek and Roman catapults).  Also present were coins dating to no earlier than 205 B.C.E.  This is precisely the timing of the Thmouis Revolt -- the Rosetta Stone says it went on in a sporadic fashion starting around 206 B.C.E. and ending with the decisive battle twenty years later.

So it appears that the Tell Timai skeleton is a war casualty from a battle recorded on one of the world's most celebrated written records.


Archaeological findings can go back a hell of a lot longer ago than 2,200 years, however.  Another discovery that was reported last week is from Indonesia, and gives us a lens into a time when (as far as we know) writing had yet to be invented.  A cave painting on the island of Sulawesi, dated to 43,900 years ago, is a hunting scene -- by itself not that uncommon -- but the hunters depicted are what archaeologists call therianthropes, which are mythical human/animal hybrids.

A detail of the Sulawesi cave painting

What's exciting about this is that it shows the artist wasn't just depicting realism, (s)he was telling a story.  We've apparently been storytellers for a very long time, something that (as a novelist) makes me very happy.

"The human-animal figures in the Sulawesi hunting scene are quite small relative to the pig and anoa [a small native species of buffalo] images," said Nicholas Conard, archaeologist at the University of Tübingen.  "That may be because ancient artists depicted these therianthropes as flying.  In the stories and personal accounts of people from modern foraging groups, movements through spirit worlds are often via flight rather than walking or running."

So just like we do today, our very distant ancestors enjoyed telling fanciful stories about strange creatures -- and some of those stories made their way into art.


People who know me are aware of another of my strange obsessions, and that's with body art.  I have three tattoos, one of which is a full sleeve that extends onto my chest -- it's not like I exactly keep it secret, or anything.  So after finding the previous article, about our history as storytellers, it made me happy to jump to the next, which shows that we've also been decorating our own bodies for a long, long time.

Archaeologist Anne Austin, of the University of Missouri, was working with three thousand year old mummies from Deir el-Medina in Egypt, and upon analyzing x-rays found clear evidence of tattoos.  One woman, presumed to be a religious leader or practitioner of magic, had no fewer than thirty tattoos, including an intricate pattern of crosses on both of her arms.  Another had symmetrically-placed images of the Eye of Horus, and a third a seated baboon -- symbolizing knowledge and wisdom -- on the side of her neck.

"Only tattooed females have been identified at Deir el-Medina," Austin said.  "Discoveries there challenge an old idea that tattoos on women connoted fertility or sexuality in ancient Egypt.  Deir el-Medina tattoos appear to be more closely associated with women’s roles as healers or priestesses."

It's amazing what we can learn about human history without written records (or, in the case of the Tell Timai skeleton, how we can supplement what written records we have).  Everything the archaeologists uncover makes the picture clearer.  As my dear friend, the novelist Cly Boehs (author of the brilliant Back Then and The Most Intangible Thing) puts it, "We are made of the stories we tell."

And sometimes those stories resonate down through the ages, giving us a glimpse of societies that have been gone for thousands of years.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is pure fun, and a perfect holiday gift for anyone you know who (1) is a science buff, and (2) has a sense of humor.  What If?, by Randall Munroe (creator of the brilliant comic strip xkcd) gives scientifically-sound answers to some very interesting hypothetical questions.  What if everyone aimed a laser pointer simultaneously at the same spot on the Moon?  Could you make a jetpack using a bunch of downward-pointing machine guns?  What would happen if everyone on the Earth jumped simultaneously?

Munroe's answers make for fascinating, and often hilarious, reading.  His scientific acumen, which shines through in xkcd, is on full display here, as is his sharp-edged and absurd sense of humor.  It's great reading for anyone who has sat up at night wondering... "what if?"

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

Impulsive art

It's no surprise to the people who know me that I'm an enthusiast of body art.

Well, if it was a surprise, it isn't any more, because last month I had a tattoo completed that's a full sleeve, so a little hard to hide except when I'm wearing long sleeves.  Which, being that this is upstate New York, is something on the order of ten months of the year, so maybe people didn't find out till this summer.

In any case, the design has two parts -- a twining series of vines in honor of my gardener mother, and a snake in honor of my outdoorsman, animal-loving father.

Me being worked on by my artist, the incomparable James Spiers of Model Citizen Tattoos

This comes up because of a study done recently at Wilfred Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario) by a pair of social psychologists, Anne Wilson and Bradley Ruffle, to find out if there was any personality component to the choice of getting tattoos.  They sorted a thousand volunteers into three groups -- no ink at all, ink that can be easily hidden, and visible ink.  They then gave the volunteers personality assessments geared toward finding out how they scored on measures of short-sightedness and impulsivity.

What they found is that the visible-tattoo group considered the future the least, and were the most impulsive, and the non-tattooed people were the most future-oriented and least impulsive (with the non-visible tattooed people, of course, in the middle on both metrics).  This is, on first glance, not surprising; we've all seen cases of ink that was clearly an ill-thought-out spur of the moment decision (the guy who has "No Ragrets" scrawled on his upper chest being the classic example).  I'm kind of at the other end of the spectrum -- not only am I pretty cautious by nature, I also thought about the decision for all three of my tattoos for over a year, then once I made the decision to go for it, spent equally long planning the design.  As a result, I've never regretted (or ragretted, as the case may be) any of my ink for a moment.

My first tattoo (which I got about fifteen years ago)

So it's unsurprising that counterbalancing outliers like myself would be the fraction of people who either make impulsive jumps into getting inked, or else don't think through the consequences (such as trying to find employment with companies that have a no-visible-ink policy).

My second one, from about eight years ago -- a Celtic dragon in honor of my Scottish grandma.  [Nota bene: my leg usually isn't this hairless.  This photo was taken the day I got the tattoo done.]

The researchers determined short-sightedness by using a delayed-gratification scenario -- you can get a small payment now, or wait three weeks and get a larger payment.  In the Wilson and Ruffle study, the immediate payment was a dollar, and the delayed payment increased from a dollar to two-fifty (the idea was to see how much of an incentive it would take for people to wait).  The trend was that the non-tattooed people were willing to wait to get a larger payout much more readily than the tattooed people were.

What strikes me is that I'm not at all averse to waiting for a larger reward; I'm about as far from an instant-gratification type as you can get.  But the difference in my life between a dollar and two-fifty is so small that it doesn't seem to matter much, so I can't imagine that small a change influencing my decision any.  Now, if you went from ten to twenty-five dollars, that'd be a hell of a lot more of an incentive, even though it's the same percentage increase.  An extra fifteen bucks would make a difference to me.

So I wonder what would happen if you sliced the data a different way -- group the people according to wealth.  My guess is the poorer people would jump at a quicker (and smaller) reward, and the wealthier people would be more willing to wait -- regardless of their body art.

That's only a guess, of course, and even if I'm right the trend that Wilson and Ruffle found is pretty interesting.  I've had people comment on my tattoos from the standpoint that I don't "seem like the type who would get tattooed."  I don't know about that -- I've always loved body art (artistically done, and in moderation, it can be absolutely beautiful).  I guess being a shy introvert does make it kind of weird that I'd do something that makes me more noticeable.

Oh, well.  People are complex, which keeps social psychologists like Wilson and Ruffle in business.  Like Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then, I contradict myself.  (I am large; I contain multitudes.)"

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation made the cut more because I'd like to see what others think of it than because it bowled me over: Jacques Vallée's Passport to Magonia.

Vallée is an interesting fellow, and certainly comes with credentials; he has an M.S. in astrophysics from the University of Lille and a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University.  He's at various times been an astronomer, a computer scientist, and a venture capitalist, and apparently was quite successful at all three.  But if you know his name, it's probably because of his connection to something else -- UFOs.

Vallée became interested in UFOs early, when he was 16 and saw one in his home town of Pontoise, France.  After earning his degree in astrophysics, he veered off into the study of the paranormal, especially allegations of alien visitation, associating himself with some pretty reputable folks (J. Allen Hynek, for example) and some seriously questionable ones (like the fraudulent Israeli spoon-bender, Uri Geller).

Vallée didn't really get the proof he was looking for (of course, because if he had we'd probably all know about it), but his decades of research compiles literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of alleged sightings and abductions.  And that's what Passport to Magonia is about.  To Vallée's credit, he doesn't try to explain them -- he doesn't have a favorite hypothesis he's trying to convince you of -- he simply says that there are two things that are significant: (1) the number of claims from otherwise reliable and sane folks is too high for there not to be something to it; and (2) the similarity between the claims, going all the way back to medieval claims of abductions by spirits and "elementals," is great enough to be significant.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with him, but his book is lucid and fascinating, and the case studies he cites make for pretty interesting reading.  I'd be curious to see what other Skeptophiles think of his work.

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

Wearable art

I've always had a fascination for body art.  I got my first tattoo about 15 years ago, a pair of Celtic dogs on my back.  In Celtic mythology, dogs are shapeshifters and protector spirits, and I thought that was cool.  Plus, from a more prosaic angle, I have two dogs.

Next was a dragon on my calf, also in a Celtic-knotwork style, in honor of my Scottish grandma, with whom I was really close.  She died in 1986 and I still miss her.  (Nota bene: my leg is usually not this hairless.  This was right after it was done, and -- for those of my readers who haven't gotten any ink -- you get a close shave before the artist starts.)

My latest one, in honor of what would have been my dad's hundredth birthday, is a snake on my arm.  My dad loved snakes, and instilled in me an appreciation for creepy-crawlies (or, in this cases, slinky-slitheries) that I still have.

Here's my dad, age 17, with a friend:

The reason all this comes up is because of a discovery made by a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Washington State University, which resulted in a paper published last week in the Journal of Archaeological Science.  Andrew Gillreath-Brown was going through some artifacts at the university that had been boxed and shelved for over forty years, and happened upon this:

Well, Gillreath-Brown not only is an archaeologist, he also is into body art himself, with a full sleeve featuring a mastodon, a turtle-shell rattle, and a forest scene.  So he immediately recognized what it was.

It's a two-thousand-year-old tattoo instrument, made of a pair of cactus spines bound together by plant fibers, with a handle made of skunkbush wood.

This pushes back the earliest confirmed date of tattooing in western North American Native tribes by over a thousand years.  "Tattooing by prehistoric people in the Southwest is not talked about much because there has not ever been any direct evidence to substantiate it," Gillreath-Brown said, in an interview in Science Daily.  "This tattoo tool provides us information about past Southwestern culture we did not know before... [the tool] has a great significance for understanding how people managed relationships and how status may have been marked on people in the past during a time when population densities were increasing in the Southwest."

So that's just plain cool.  Gillreath-Brown's paper, co-authored with Aaron Deter-Wolf, Karen R. Adams, Valerie Lynch-Holm, Samantha Fulgham, Shannon Tushingham, William D. Lipe, and R. G. Matson, is titled "Redefining the Age of Tattooing in Western North America: A 2000 Year Old Artifact from Utah," and makes for interesting reading even if you (1) aren't an archaeologist, and (2) don't have any body art yourself.  The authors write:

How people decorate their bodies provides insight into cultural expressions of achievement, group allegiances, identity, and status.  Tattooing has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have tattooed mummies, which adds to the challenge of placing current body modification practices into a long-term global perspective.  The tattooing artifact dates to 79–130 CE during the Basketmaker II period (ca. 500 BCE – 500 CE), predating European arrival to North America by over 1400 years.  This unusual tool is the oldest Indigenous North American tattooing artifact in western North America and has implications for understanding archaeologically ephemeral body modification practices...  Events such as the Neolithic Demographic Transition—which occurs in many places around the globe—may link to an increase in body modification practices as social markers, as appears to be the case for the Basketmaker II people in the southwestern United States.

Whatever you think of tattoos, the practice has obviously been around for a very long time.  At its best, it's a form of self-expression and honoring important people and events, connecting with spiritual practices, and simply creating and wearing beautiful designs.  It connects us to our far-distant ancestors in ways we are only now beginning to understand.

All of which makes me glad I have the ink I have.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a tour-de-force for anyone who is interested in biology -- Richard Dawkins's The Ancestor's Tale.  Dawkins uses the metaphoric framework of The Canterbury Tales to take a walk back into the past, where various travelers meet up along the way and tell their stories.  He starts with humans -- although takes great pains to emphasize that this is an arbitrary and anthropocentric choice -- and shows how other lineages meet up with ours.  First the great apes, then the monkeys, then gibbons, then lemurs, then various other mammals -- and on and on back until we reach LUCA, the "last universal common ancestor" to all life on Earth.

Dawkins's signature lucid, conversational style makes this anything but a dry read, but you will come away with a far deeper understanding of the interrelationships of our fellow Earthlings, and a greater appreciation for how powerful the evolutionary model actually is.  If I had to recommend one and only one book on the subject of biology for any science-minded person to read, The Ancestor's Tale would be it.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Governmental facepalms

Because we evidently needed another reason to facepalm over a Trump appointee, today we consider: John Fleming, assistant secretary for health technology at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Fleming has some decidedly peculiar ideas.  In his book Preventing Addiction: What Parents Must Know to Immunize Their Kids Against Drug and Alcohol Addiction, Fleming states that opiates are proof of the existence of god:

Were it not for these drugs, many common and miraculous surgeries would be impossible to either undergo or perform.  In my opinion this is no coincidence at all.  Only a higher power and intellect could have created a world in which substances like opiates grow naturally.

Which brings up a couple of troubling questions:

1. Why do these miracle substances intelligently created by a deity so often lead to addiction and the potential for overdose?
2. If opiates are a blessed gift from god because they "grow naturally," why are people of Fleming's stripe virtually all against the legalization of marijuana?  Seems like an intelligent deity's creation of marijuana could be argued not only from the standpoint that it "grows naturally," but because its consumption is so beneficial to the tortilla chip industry.

 It's a bit like Dr. Pangloss said in Voltaire's masterpiece Candide:

It is clear, said he, that things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end.  Observe: noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles.  Legs, as anyone can plainly see, were made to be breeched, and so we have breeches...  Consequently, those who say everything is well are uttering mere stupidities; they should say everything is for the best.

When, of course, rather than giving us noses to support spectacles, god could just have given us all perfect eyesight rather than noses built to support spectacles.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This, however, is not the only bizarre thing in Fleming's book.  He says there's a correlation between tattoos and drug addiction:

Body art comes into play in drug addiction as well, although obviously, not all who have a tattoo are addicts.  A sailor who gets a single tattoo on his arm or an adult woman who has a small butterfly tattooed on her lower abdomen are not necessarily drug addicts or even rebellious — just dumb, at least temporarily!...  When you see that your child has become interested in body art or has a fascination with the Goth or other subculture, then be on alert, because your child is likely headed into rebellion and possible drug experimentation.

So this makes me wonder how my two rather large tattoos haven't resulted in my being addicted to cocaine or something.  Despite the size and elaborate nature of my own body art, maybe I'm still in the category of "temporarily dumb."

Last, it turns out that Fleming himself might not have much right to point fingers about temporary stupidity, because he is one of the people who fell for the story in The Onion that Planned Parenthood was building an "$8 billion abortionplex."  Then, not having learned the lesson "if you're not smart enough to recognize satire and fake news, at least be smart enough to check your sources," he delivered a speech on the floor of Congress in 2013 to communicate the alarming news that the Department of Defense was starting to round up and court martial Christians so as to "create an atheist military."

Where, you might ask, did Fleming get this "information" from?

From Breitbart, of course.

So come on, folks.  Is it too much to ask to have a few government appointees who are competent, intelligent, and sane?  Because the ones we have now, in my dad's trenchant phrase, couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.

Myself, I'm beginning to wonder if this is an elaborate experiment being run by alien scientists to see how long it takes us to figure out that the whole American government is some kind of huge put-on.  The question they're trying to answer is whether we'll just go along with it unquestioningly.  At some point, maybe they're expecting us to say, "Okay, ha-ha, very funny.  Game's up.  Come out of hiding, alien overlords, and give us back some semblance of normalcy."  I don't know how else you'd explain people like Fleming, not to mention Steve Bannon, who looks like he's spent the last ten years pouring Jack Daniels on his breakfast cereal.

Demonic ink

A friend of mine sent me a link yesterday with the sinister message, "Dude, you are so screwed."  When I clicked it, it brought me to a webpage called "TATTOO: The Cup of Devils," wherein I learned that anyone with tattoos is doomed to the fiery pit for all eternity.

I have two tattoos, one of them that I got some years back, and the other one done only last month.  Little did I know that when I went under the needle gun, I was sealing my fate.

My one-way ticket to hell

Other things I learned on this page:

Throughout history the tattoo bears the mark of paganism, demonism, Baal worship, shamanism, mysticism, heathenism, cannibalism and just about every other pagan belief known. The tattoo has NEVER been associated with Bible Believing Christians. And whenever and wherever, in history Christianity appears – tattoos disappear. The only exception -- 20th century, lukewarm, carnal, disobedient, Laodicean Christians.

Yup, that's me.  A Baal-worshiping cannibal.  Caught red-handed.

The problem, the author (Terry Watkins) says, is that tattoos are not just decorative, they're portals for demonic entities:

The tattooist, shaman or the occult priest many times uses the tattoo as a point of contact, or inlets into the spiritual world. The tattoo is much more than just a body decoration. It’s more than just a layer of ink cut into the skin. In fact, the tattoo in every culture, in every country, up until the 20th century, was a vehicle for pagan spiritual and religious invocations. Even today, in many countries (including the United States), the tattoo is believed to be a bridge into the supernatural world... Tribal tattoos are designs that bear serious symbolic mystical and occult meanings. Tribal tattoos, especially, are possible channels into spiritual and demonic possession.

My designs aren't "tribal," they're Celtic, in honor of my Scottish and Breton ancestry, and also because they're cool-looking.  So I wonder if that counts?  It'd be kind of a shame if I went to all of that trouble and pain, and could have gotten myself a Demonic Portal, but chose the wrong design, and now all of your better demons are possessing guys with Maori tribal tattoos on their shoulders.

And if once wasn't bad enough, I went and did it again.

Some of the source material that Watkins takes out of context is downright funny, especially the stuff from Ronald Scutt's book Art, Sex, and Symbol.  This book, which is a scholarly look at ritual art (including tattoos) through the ages, is neither pro nor anti-tattoo, but to read the quotes that Watkins lifts from Scutt, you'd think that it was composed of hundreds of pages of biblically-based warnings.  My favorite is the quote alleging that tattoos are associated with "megalithic building, ear-piercing, and serpent worship."  To which I can only respond that I have yet to build a megalith, I have no piercings of any kind, and I like and respect serpents, but "worship" is a bit of an overstatement.  The quotes from Steve Gilbert's book Tattoo History: A Source Book also provide for some entertaining examples of how you can lift quotes from anywhere to prove anything, as long as you cherry-pick carefully:

When Cortez and his conquistadors arrived on the coast of Mexico in 1519, they were horrified to discover that natives not only worshipped devils in the form of status and idols, but also had somehow managed to imprint indelible images of these idols on their skin. The Spaniards, who had never heard of tattooing, recognized it at once as the work of Satan.

Of course, the Spanish thought lots of things were the works of Satan, including most of the art work, historical artifacts, and writings of damn near every civilization they ran into, so I'm not sure they're all that reliable a source on the subject.

Watkins goes on and on about how evil it all is, concluding with:

Throughout history tattoos have symbolized rebellion. There’s nothing normal about a tattoo. A tattoo screams of unabashed rebellion and sexual deviancy...  Is there any doubt about who the "master tattooist" is???

Which reminds me of the Saturday Night Live "Church Lady" sketch, that always ended with, "Could it be... SATAN?"

So, anyway, that's today's jaunt through the world of bizarre superstition.  I find it kind of curious that Watkins is this concerned about body art, frankly; you'd think that as a bible-toting Christian, he'd spend more time talking about rather more pressing issues, such as the fact that "Love thy neighbor as thyself" hasn't really sunk in all that well for a lot of people.  And as far as me, I suppose I was headed to hell long before I got my first ink, given that at that point I was already an atheist.  But reading Watkins' webpage does make me realize how neglectful I've been, as a tattooed person.  I still have a long way to go in the cannibalism, unabashed rebellion, and sexual deviancy departments, and I've got to get right on that serpent-worshiping thing.  Oh, and I wonder where I'm going to put the megalith I'm supposed to build?  I'm thinking the front yard.  That would certainly make a statement.