Apocalyptic performance art

I try not to devote too much time to claims that are simply crazy.  After all, wacko claims are a dime a dozen, and some of the delusional folks who make them are more to be pitied than censured.

But every once in a while, along will come a claim that is so bizarre, so inspired, that it rises above the background noise to the point that it almost seems like a work of performance art.  And thus, I think, is the mélange of mishegoss that calls itself Unveiling Them, which was brought to my attention by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia two days ago because one of the predictions of the site is that Jesus's Second Coming is currently scheduled for December 22, 2020, which is exactly one year from yesterday.  (So evidently the quote in Matthew 24 will have to be amended to, "No one knoweth the hour, except this one guy, who hath figured it out somehow.")

At first glance, it seems to be nothing more than an End Times/Book of Revelation site, but it's much more than that.  They only start there, and afterwards, go off into reaches of weirdness the likes of which I haven't seen in a long time.

Viktor Vasnetsov, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1887) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Besides the usual Number Of The Beast stuff, we find out that:

• A mass population die-off is "set to commence now."  Consider yourselves forewarned.
• Iron is a nutritional toxin; we need copper instead.
• AB negative is the original human blood type; all of the others arose from mutations within the past five hundred years.
• The Ebola virus only affects people who are suffering from iron poisoning.  Since all human blood contains hemoglobin, which contains iron, that's kind of... everyone.
• Contrary to what the census bureau would have you believe, the population of the United States peaked in 1980 and is currently decreasing.
• There are 14,270,410 Evil Satanic Operatives in the United States right now.  Why is this number relevant?  It's 6.66% of the whole population.  Get it?  666?  (Okay, I know it's only 6.66% if you think the population is way smaller than it actually is.  Just play along, all right?)
• Baby Boomers are being exterminated in Secret Death Camps.
• What Jesus actually meant to say was "Do unto others before they have a chance to do unto you."
• Radiation, including wi-fi, "vibrates your blood proteins" and accelerates aging.
• Barack Obama lied about his birth certificate, but not in the way the "Truthers" claim.  He wasn't born in Hawaii, but neither was he born in Kenya.  He was born in Alabama in 1916.  So he's 98 years old.
• Because he's smart enough to consume copper instead of iron, and stays away from wi-fi.

See? I told you this'd be fun.

Of course, there's the warning posted on the website, threatening supernatural vengeance against scoffers like myself, which I reproduce here in toto:

Any attack on the words of these pages (and links) herein, whether it be directly or indirectly, by those whom these words speak of or by their agents or any instrument of theirs, will receive a thousand times what they gave to others, and the plagues and miseries they unleashed upon others, will abound in them.

So I consider myself forewarned as well.  Of course, given that the author of this website has a serious grudge against... well, pretty much everyone, it remains to be seen who would be left un-plagued after all was said and done.  He says that the bad guys who are doomed to destruction include anyone involved in "universities, colleges, foundations, research, corporations, legal system, intelligence organizations/contractors, the churches, media, medicine, police departments, military, all government agencies, school districts, water departments, energy & communications, financial institutions, music/movie industries, sports/entertainment, television/radio, funeral homes/cemeteries, insurance and real estate."  If you exclude all of the aforementioned, who do you have left to Inherit The Kingdom Of God?

The author of the website.  And maybe a handful of scattered peasant-sheepherder types in random locations.  The Lord Of Hosts will more be The Lord Of A Few Guys Who Are Wandering Around Wondering Where Everyone Went.

And there's lots more, which I invite you to peruse.  We apparently will know who the Elect are by their DNA, which is the same as Christ's DNA, which was secretly isolated from the Shroud of Turin.  We are told that the main goal is to "Put an end to violence and bloodshed," but that we are to accomplish this by "Rounding up every man, woman, and child for the abyss prepared for them," which seems a little counterproductive to me if ending violence is your goal.  (I suppose, of course, that if by the end of all of this, there's only seventeen people left on Earth, then it's gonna be de facto a more peaceful planet than it has been for a very long time.)

Anyhow, I'm about done with this, so I'll just leave you to cogitate on all of it.  Me, I 'm going off to prepare myself to be Smitten A Thousandfold By Plagues And Miseries.  You'd think one plague would do it, wouldn't you?  A thousand seems like overkill.

Literally.

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As technology has improved, so has our ability to bring that technology to bear on scientific questions, sometimes in unexpected ways.

In the fascinating new book Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past, archaeologist Sarah Parcak gives a fascinating look at how satellite photography has revolutionized her field.  Using detailed photographs from space, including thousands of recently declassified military surveillance photos, Parcak and her colleagues have located hundreds of exciting new sites that before were completely unknown -- roads, burial sites, fortresses, palaces, tombs, even pyramids.

These advances are giving us a lens into our own distant past, and allowing investigation of inaccessible or dangerous sites from a safe distance -- and at a phenomenal level of detail.  This book is a must-read for any students of history -- or if you'd just like to find out how far we've come from the days of Heinrich Schliemann and the excavation of Troy.

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

The meaning of love

There's no denying that as careful as we try to be, language can be ambiguous.  One of the first things I used to do with my Critical Thinking classes was to get them to think about how terms are defined, and how that can change the meaning of what someone says or writes -- sometimes causing serious misunderstandings.  They start with a list of words -- love, evil, truth, beauty, loyalty, jealousy, and so on -- and first try to define them on their own, then for each one, come up with a word that's a synonym but has a differing emotional weight.  Then they compare their answers to their classmates'.

The results are eye-opening.  Not only do the definitions differ wildly, when they try to come up with synonyms, there is a huge variety of suggestions, many of which don't carry the same connotations at all.  For evil I've had students with bad, wrong, hateful, destructive, wicked, immoral, sinister, and despicable -- which themselves carry drastically different meanings.

And that's for just one word.  By the time we're done with the whole exercise, they have a pretty good idea why misunderstandings are so common.

A study that came out yesterday in Science adds a new layer of complication to the situation.  Apparently the connotations of emotionally-laden words differ greatly between languages.  So if you look up how to translate the word love into Latvian, you'll certainly find a corresponding word -- but the associations that a native speaker of Latvian has with the word might differ greatly from yours.

The paper was entitled, "Emotion Semantics Show Both Cultural Variation and Universal Structure," and was the work of a team of linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and mathematicians led by Joshua Conrad Jackson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  What they did was to use a statistical model to create networks of words that had associations with each other, for no less than 2,474 languages from twenty different language families.

The results were fascinating.  The authors write:

[W]e take a new quantitative approach to estimate variability and structure in emotion semantics.  Our approach examines cases of colexification, instances in which multiple concepts are coexpressed by the same word form within a language.  Colexifications are useful for addressing questions about semantic structure because they often arise when two concepts are perceived as conceptually similar.  Persian, for instance, uses the word-form ænduh to express both the concepts of “grief” and “regret,” whereas the Sirkhi dialect of Dargwa uses the word-form dard to express both the concepts of “grief” and “anxiety.”  Persian speakers may therefore understand “grief” as an emotion more similar to “regret,” whereas Dargwa speakers may understand “grief” as more similar to “anxiety.”

It takes long enough to become fluent in a second language; how much longer would it take to understand all of the subtle connotations of words?  Even if you're using the "right word" -- the one a native speaker would use -- you might still misjudge the context unless you had a deep understanding of the culture.

Here are four examples of their linguistic networks:

The most interesting thing I noticed about these maps was the placement of the word anger.  In Austronesian languages, anger connects most strongly to hate; in Austroasiatic languages, to envy; and in Indo-European languages, to anxiety.  I can only imagine the misunderstandings that would occur if a speaker of a language from one of those families was speaking to a speaker of a language from another, and said something as simple as, "I am angry with you."

Another curious example is the familiar Hawaiian word aloha, which is usually translated into English as love.  The researchers found that to a native speaker of Hawaiian, aloha does mean love, but it is strongly connected with a word that is surprising to English speakers; pity.  The meaning of love, which is supposed to transcend all cultural barriers somehow, is apparently not as uniform across languages as one might expect.

The authors conclude thus;

Questions about the meaning of human emotions are age-old, and debate about the nature of emotion persists in scientific literature...  Analyzing these networks sheds light on the cultural and biological evolutionary mechanisms underlying how emotions are ascribed meaning in languages around the world.  Although debates about the relationship between language and conscious experience are notoriously difficult to resolve, our findings also raise the intriguing possibility that emotion experiences vary systematically across cultural groups...  Analyzing the diverse ways that people use language promises to yield insights into human cognition on an unprecedented scale.

And considering how interlinked our societies are across the globe, anything we can do to foster deeper understanding is worth doing.

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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!]

Run to the museum

Two recent studies suggest the popular wisdom that if you want to improve your health, mood, and sense of well-being, get out and do stuff, is substantially correct.

The first is (to me) the more impressive study, because it actually looked at the electrical output of the test subjects' brains, so we're seeing at least a hint of the underlying mechanism.  In "Play Sports for a Quieter Brain: Evidence From Division I Collegiate Athletes," which appeared in the journal Sports Health last Monday, a team of neuroscientists at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) found that the FFR (frequency-following response, a measure of neural crosstalk between the parts of the brain responsible for interpreting complex sensory stimuli) was substantially higher in athletes than non-athletes, and increased in both groups after strenuous exercise.

The authors suggest that the higher FFR in athletes occurs because sports in general require focused attention, thus a diminishment of the "neural background noise" all our brains engage in.  The ability to turn down this chatter and devote more energy and brain activity to sensory interpretation could certainly explain how athletes develop their preternaturally fast and accurate reflexes.

It also explains something that I've witnessed more than once, as a fan of Cornell University hockey.  The Cornell students are notorious for their jeers -- um, cheers -- that make fun of the opposing team in any way that is convenient.  In particular, the opposing goalie is ridiculed incessantly (starting, but not ending, with referring to him as a "sieve"), but almost always the goalie is capable of somehow shutting out the roar of insults coming from the student section.  I've always wondered how they did that so effectively -- almost never do the goalies even react, much less try to interact, with the students.  They seem entirely undistracted by it.

But the Sports Health study suggests that a laser-like focus is a neural feature of a lot of athletes, so well-developed that it shows up on an electroencephalogram.  I still wonder, of course, if we're not mistaking correlation for causation -- it could just as easily be that people are attracted to sports because they already have the ability to focus and ignore neural background noise, rather than playing sports causing that ability to develop.

Either way, it's an interesting study, deserving of more research -- especially if it could be demonstrated that engagement in sports improved neural focus, which would give some hope to ordinary mortals like myself who like to run but get distracted if a squirrel farts.

The other study I present with the same qualifier; the convenient conclusion could well be a correlation/causation error.  Still, it's an interesting finding.  In "The Art of Life and Death: 14 Year Follow-Up Analyses of Associations Between Arts Engagement and Mortality in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing," which appeared this week in the British Medical Journal, researchers at University College of London found that engagement with the arts -- even something like regular museum visits -- was correlated with a lower risk of mortality from all causes, even when they controlled for age, prior health conditions, and socioeconomic status.

The study followed six thousand British citizens, all aged fifty or over, for fifteen years, and the differences in survival rate were not small.  Individuals who were occupied in some way with the arts had a 31% lower mortality rate than those who did not.  The mechanism is uncertain, although there have been other studies that correlated brain activity of all kinds (even doing crossword puzzles or sudoku) with a lower rate of dementia.  The naysayer in my mind, however, feels compelled to point out that it could be that people with conditions that will ultimately prove fatal -- even before they're diagnosed -- might be less compelled to go out and take sketching classes than those who are (unbeknownst to them) facing long-term good health.  Just as in the crossword puzzle studies; there is some indication that horrifying disorders like Alzheimer's start to show in measurable ways far earlier than anyone thought, so it's understandable that someone who is starting the slide into losing his/her cognitive faculties wouldn't be inclined to do a crossword puzzle even if they're not consciously aware yet that the decline has begun.

But still.  It could be the other way around, which is certainly how the popular media is portraying it.  And there's nothing to be lost in buying a year's worth of museum passes, or signing up for that sculpture class you've been considering; just as with the other study I referenced, there's nothing but benefit to joining an intramural soccer league or a running club.  Keeping physically and mentally active certainly improves your quality of life, and even if you won't end up with the focused attention of a Cornell hockey goalie or living to age 103, it's still worth doing.

So I suppose that means that I should get my ass up out of this chair, turn the computer off, and go for a run.  Or work on the clay mask I've been making for the last couple of days.  Either is probably preferable than sitting here immersing myself in the news, which has been my fallback, and is not good for either my mood or my blood pressure lately.

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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!]

Chewing gum and talking about talking

Earlier this week I looked at three cool archaeological discoveries -- cave art in Indonesia, and two finds in Egypt, one of a bone from someone killed in the battle recorded on the Rosetta stone, and the other about a researcher who found that the practice of tattooing has been around for a very long time.

But we're not done with mind-blowing archaeological stories, apparently, because there are two more that I just found out about, and which (if anything) are even cooler than the ones I wrote about Monday.

I learned of the first one from my friend, novelist and blogger Andrew Butters, whose blog Potato Chip Math is a must-read.  In this one, we find out that a team of geneticists have sequenced the DNA of a girl who lived in Denmark 5,700 years ago...

... from a wad of chewing gum.

Well, technically, it was birch sap, but same idea.  They were able to extract her DNA from the gum and sequence her entire genome, which allowed them not only to figure out what ethnic group she was from, but to make a good shot at her appearance.  She had dark skin and hair, they found, and blue eyes.  Here's an artist's reconstruction of what she might have looked like:

[Reconstruction by Tom Björklund]

The authors write:

Analysis of the human reads revealed that the individual whose genome we recovered was female and that she likely had dark skin, dark brown hair and blue eyes.  This combination of physical traits has been previously noted in other European hunter-gatherers, suggesting that this phenotype was widespread in Mesolithic Europe and that the adaptive spread of light skin pigmentation in European populations only occurred later in prehistory.  We also find that she had the alleles associated with lactase non-persistence, which fits with the notion that lactase persistence in adults only evolved fairly recently in Europe, after the introduction of dairy farming with the Neolithic revolution.

The period she lived in was when northern Europe was taken over by people known as the "Funnel Beaker Culture," so named because of their characteristic narrow-based, highly-ornamented pottery:

The 5,200 year old Skarpsalling vessel [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Nationalmuseet, Skarpsallingkarret DO-9665 original, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"It is amazing to have gotten a complete ancient human genome from anything other than bone,'' said study lead author, evolutionary geneticist Hannes Schroeder, of the University of Copenhagen, in an interview with Science Alert.  "The DNA is so exceptionally well preserved that we were able to recover a complete ancient human genome from the sample… which is particularly significant since, so far, no human remains have been recovered from the site."

The second story goes back a great deal further in time than the little Neolithic Danish girl, though.  In fact, it kind of crosses the line from archaeology into paleontology, because in a paper in Science Advances we find out that the ability to speak might have been around in primates for twenty million years.

The study, led by Louis-Jean Boë of the University of Grenoble, analyzes the mechanics of human speech, in particular how the morphology of the mouth, trachea, and larynx allow for the production of meaningful sound.  It's been thought for years that the advent of speech occurred when our ancestors' larynxes (voice boxes) gradually moved downward, pulling the back of the tongue backward and downward as well and giving the tongue more mobility to shape sounds.  But what Boë's team found was that even if you accept that as the hallmark of speech, it goes a long way further back than we'd realized.

"First, even among primates, laryngeal descent is not uniquely human," Boë and his team write.  "Second, laryngeal descent is not required to produce contrasting patterns in vocalizations.  Third, living non-human primates produce vocalizations with contrasting patterns.  Thus, evidence now overwhelmingly refutes the long-standing laryngeal descent theory, which pushes back 'the dawn of speech' beyond ~200 ka ago to over ~20 Ma ago, a difference of two orders of magnitude."

So that means that at least from a mechanical standpoint, our distant ancestors had the capacity for speech.  Whether their brains were developed enough to say anything particularly interesting is still a matter of conjecture.  But evolution is all about minuscule gains.  Once the upper respiratory tract becomes capable of modulating sounds in a meaningful way, this puts selective pressure on the brain to refine its ability to understand and convey meaning with those sounds -- which puts pressure on the vocal apparatus to become better at producing subtle differences in sounds, and so on and so forth.  Which, as comedian Paula Poundstone notes, may not be entirely a good thing:

Be that as it may, it's a pretty cool discovery.  As I pointed out in Monday's post, it's incredible how much we can infer about our distant ancestors' appearance, culture, and abilities from evidence that would have been a closed book only ten years ago.  Our techniques for carrying out this research are only going to improve, so keep watching the journals -- my sense is that the amazing discoveries in this field have only just begun.

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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!]

Searching for a lost hope

As a biologist, I know that extinction is the way of the world.  Well above 99% of the species that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct, and in fact (given the sparseness of the fossil record) chances are most of those we don't know about and will never know about.  Extinction is simply a fact of existence.

The soft-hearted side of me, though, finds it terribly sad.

As a dedicated birder, it's heartbreaking that I will never see a Great Auk, a Carolina Parakeet, a Passenger Pigeon, or a Dodo, all of which were driven to extinction in the past three hundred years by humans.  Even the pretty little Labrador Duck, which was already in decline before humans began overhunting them and destroying their habitat -- and so was probably doomed anyhow -- looks at me with its glass-bead eyes from the museum shelves with what I can only interpret as reproach.

"Extinction is forever" has gotten to be a cliché, but there's no denying its truth.  I'm not the only one who finds it tragic, which explains the ends people will go to in order to prove particular species live on.  My wife used to work for the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology as a sound archivist, and she was involved (in a tangential way, she'd tell you, but enough to merit a free t-shirt) with the efforts to relocate the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, widely thought to have been extinct since the mid-1940s.  The only evidence of its continued existence was a blurry ten-second bit of video that even the wishful thinkers couldn't swear was conclusive, but it was enough to mount an expedition to the swamps of Arkansas to look for it.  And several expert birders -- who are far too knowledgeable to mistake it for the related, but much smaller (and differently-patterned) Pileated Woodpecker -- swear they got good looks at what was known as "the Lord God bird" because that's what people would shout when what looked like a black, white, and red pterodactyl flew overhead.

So hope still exists, at least for some of the species currently considered extinct.  One of the most controversial -- the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf -- is currently the subject of a one-man relocation effort that hit the news just this week.

Australian Neil Waters is so invested in re-finding the thylacine that he purchased a huge tract of land in northern Tasmania, and plans on devoting the next two years to the search.  Waters claims to have seen thylacines himself twice before, and points out that there's not a lot you could mistake for them:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Known for their amazing "scissor" gape, the thylacine -- which, despite its two common names, is neither a wolf nor a tiger, but a marsupial like the kangaroo and the koala -- were persecuted for an alleged affinity for eating sheep, and the last known individual died in a zoo in Hobart in 1936.  Since then there has been no hard evidence of its continued existence, although if you compare the sightings reports, the thylacine beats the Ivory-billed Woodpecker hands down.  The number of alleged sightings of thylacines number in the hundreds, with dozens more coming in every year.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

"[T]he hundreds of people who have reported sightings cannot all be wrong," Waters said.  "This is a long-term project and I am prepared to give it a couple of years – or until my finances run out.  My dream is to prove the thylacine is alive and well and have a management plan put in place to ensure their continued survival."

Another argument in favor of optimism is that it's not like seeing them was an everyday occurrence even when there was still a sizable number of them -- they were known for being shy and nocturnal.  So if there's a small population still out there, Waters reasons, it's no wonder they're seldom seen.

He adds that he's not interested in hand-waving, my-brother's-best-friend-saw-it-for-sure kind of arguments, but wants hard evidence that the experts will find unassailable.  "I have nothing to gain from faking anything," he said.  "I don't want to prove a fallacy."

The "nothing to gain" part isn't really all that accurate -- after all, he's already been featured in news media worldwide, and there are probably reality-TV shows that would love to do an episode or two on his hunt.  Not meaning to cast aspersions against him, because he certainly sounds sincere, and I really want to think that the second part -- that he doesn't want to fake evidence for a falsehood -- is the truth.

So for now I'm 100% in Waters's camp, and wish him the best of luck.  He certainly seems to be going about it the right way.  If they're still out there, there's hard evidence somewhere, and he's determined enough to have a real shot at finding it.

But part of it is wishful thinking on my part, because I really want the thylacine to still be alive.  They're cool, weird, and unique as the largest recent carnivorous marsupial.  Plus, finding it alive would mean one fewer irreversible assaults on the natural world to lay at humanity's feet -- and heaven knows, we have enough of those.

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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!]

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!]

The interstellar lighthouse

It's funny the questions you don't think to ask.  You find out something, accept it without any objections, and only later -- sometimes much later -- you stop and go, "Wait a moment."

That happened to me just yesterday, about a topic most of us don't ponder much, and that's the peculiar astronomical object called a neutron star.  It was on my mind not by random chance -- even I don't just sit around and say, "Hmm, how about those neutron stars, anyway?" -- but because of some interesting new research (about which I'll tell you in a bit).

I first learned about these odd beasts when I took a class called Introduction to Astronomy at the University of Louisiana.  The professor, Dr. Whitmire, explained them basically as follows.

Stars are stable when there's a balance between two forces -- the outward pressure from the heat generated in the core, and the inward pull because of the gravity exerted by the star's mass.  During most of a star's life, those two are in equilibrium, but when the core exhausts its fuel, the first force diminishes and the star begins to collapse.  With small stars like the Sun, the collapse continues until the mutual repulsion of the atoms' electrons becomes a sufficient force to halt it from shrinking further.  This generates a white dwarf. 

In a star between 10 and 29 times the mass of the Sun, however, the mutual electric repulsion isn't strong enough to stop the collapse.  The matter of the star continues to fall inward until it's only about ten kilometers across -- a star shrunk to the diameter of a small city.  This causes some pretty strange conditions.  The matter in the star becomes unimaginably dense; a teaspoon of it would have about the same mass as a mountain.  The pressure forces the electrons into the nuclei of the atoms, crushing out all the space, so that what you have is a giant electrically-neutral ball -- effectively, an enormous atomic nucleus made of an unimaginably huge number of neutrons.

The first neutron star ever discovered, at the center of the Crab Nebula [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of NASA/JPL]

The immense gravitational pull means that the surface of a neutron star is the smoothest surface known; any irregularities would be flattened out of existence.  (It's worth mentioning that even the Earth is way smoother than most people realize.  The distance between the top of Mount Everest and the bottom of the Marianas Trench is less, as compared to its size, than the topographic relief in a typical scratch on a billiard ball.)

So far, so good.  But it was the next thing Dr. Whitmire told us that should have made me pull up short, and didn't until now -- forty years later.  He said that as a neutron star forms, the inward collapse makes its rotational speed increase, just like a spinning figure skater as she pulls in her arms.  Because of the Conservation of Angular Momentum, this bumps up the rotation of a neutron star to something on the order of making a complete rotation thirty times per second.  A point on the surface of a typical neutron star is moving at a linear speed of about one-third of the speed of light.

Further, because neutron stars have a phenomenally large magnetic field, this creates two magnetic "funnels" on opposite sides of the star that spew out jets of electromagnetic radiation.  And if these jets aren't aligned with the star's spin axis, they whirl around like the beams of a lighthouse.  A neutron star that does this, and appears to flash on and off like a strobe light, is called a pulsar.

This was the point when the red flags should have started waving, especially since I majored in physics and had taken a class called "Electromagnetism."  One of the first things we learned is that Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell discovered that magnetic fields are generated when charged particles move.  So how can a neutron star -- composed of electrically-neutral particles -- have any magnetic field at all, much less one so huge?  (The magnetic field of a typical neutron star is on the order of ten million Tesla; by comparison, one of the largest magnetic fields ever generated in the laboratory is a paltry sixteen Tesla, but was still enough to levitate a frog.)

The answer is a matter of conjecture.  One possibility is that even though a neutron star is neutral overall, there is some separation of charges within the star's interior, so the whirling of the star still creates a magnetic field.  Another possibility is that since neutrons themselves are composed of three quarks, and those quarks are charged, neutrons still have a magnetic moment, and the alignment of these magnetic moments coupled with the star's rotation is sufficient to give it an overall enormous magnetic field.  (If you want to read more about the answer to this curious question, the site Medium did a nice overview of it a while back.)

So it turns out that neutron stars aren't the simple things they appeared to be at first.  Not that this is much of a surprise -- seems like every time we answer one question in science, it generates three new ones.  What brought this up in the first place was yet another anomalous observation about neutron stars, described in a series of papers this past week in Astrophysical Journal Letters.  The conventional wisdom was that a neutron star's magnetic field would be oriented along an axis (which, as noted above, may not coincide perfectly with the star's spin axis).  This means that it would behave a bit like an ordinary magnet, with a north pole and a south pole on geometrically opposite sides.

That's what astronomers thought, until they found a pulsar with the euphonious name J0030+0451, 1,100 light years away in the constellation of Pisces.  Using the x-ray jets from the pulsar -- which should be aligned with its magnetic field -- they mapped the field itself, and found something extremely strange.

Instead of two jets, aligned with the poles of the magnetic field, J0030+0451 has three -- and they're all in the southern hemisphere.  One is (unsurprisingly) at the southern magnetic pole,  but the other two are elongated crescents at about sixty degrees south latitude.

To say this is surprising is an understatement, and the astronomers are still struggling to explain it.

"From its perch on the space station, NICER [the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer] is revolutionizing our understanding of pulsars," said Paul Hertz, astrophysics division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington.  "Pulsars were discovered more than fifty years ago as beacons of stars that have collapsed into dense cores, behaving unlike anything we see on Earth."

It appears that we still have a way to go to fully explain how they work.  But that's how it is with the entire universe, you know?  No matter where we look, we're confronted by mysteries.  Fortunately, we have a tool that has proven over and over to be the best way of finding answers -- the collection of protocols we call the scientific method.  I  have no doubt that the astrophysicists will eventually explain the odd magnetic properties of pulsars.  But the way things go, all that'll do is open up more fascinating questions -- which is why if you're interested in science, you'll never run out of things to learn.

*****************************

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!]