Siding with the tribe

Springboarding off yesterday's post, about our unfortunate tendency to believe false claims if we hear them repeated often enough, today we have another kind of discouraging bit of psychological research; our behavior is strongly influenced by group membership -- even if we know from the start that the group we're in is arbitrary, randomly chosen, and entirely meaningless.

Psychologists Marcel Montrey and Thomas Shultz of McGill University set up a fascinating experiment in which volunteers were assigned at random to one of two groups, then instructed to play a simple computer game called "Where's the Rabbit?" in which a simulated rabbit is choosing between two different nest sites.  The participant gets five points if (s)he correctly guesses where the rabbit is going.  In each subsequent round, the rabbit has a 90% chance of picking the same nest again, and a 10% chance of switching to the other.

The twist comes when in mid-game, the participants are offered the option of seeing the guesses of three members from either group (or a mix of the two).  They can also pay two points to use a "rabbit-finding machine" which is set up to be unreliable -- it has a two-thirds chance of getting it right, and a one-third chance of getting it wrong (and the participants know this).  Given that this is (1) expensive, points-wise, and (2) already a lower likelihood of success than simply working on your own and basing your guess on what the rabbit did in the previous round, you'd think no one would choose this option, right?

Wrong.  It turns out that when you looked at how people chose, they were way more likely to do the same thing as the people who belonged to their own group.  Next in likelihood is the wonky, inaccurate rabbit-finding machine.  Dead last was copying what was done by members of the other group.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sara 506, Group people icon, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Remember what I started with -- these groups were entirely arbitrary.  Group affiliation was assigned at the beginning of the experiment by the researchers, and had nothing to do with the participants' intelligence, or even with their previous success at the game.  But the volunteers were still more likely to side with the members of their own tribe.  In fact, when choosing whose decisions to observe, the test subjects decided by a two-to-one margin to consult in-group members and not even consider the decisions made by the out-group.

How much more powerful would this effect be if the group membership wasn't arbitrary, but involved an identity that we're deeply invested in?

"Researchers have known for some time that people prefer to copy members of their own social group (e.g., political affiliation, race, religion, etc.), but have often assumed that this is because group members are more familiar with or similar to each other," said study co-author Marcel Montrey, in an interview in PsyPost.  "However, our research suggests that people are more likely to copy members of their own group even when they have nothing in common.  Simply belonging to the same random group seems to be enough.  Surprisingly, we found that even people who rated their own group as less competent still preferred to copy its members."

It's easy to see how this tendency can be exploited by advertisers and politicians.  "Human social learning is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, where many factors other than group membership play a role," Montrey said.  "For example, we know that people also prefer to copy successful, popular, or prestigious individuals, which is why companies advertise through endorsements.  How do people’s various learning biases interact, and which ones are most important?  Because these questions have only recently begun to be explored, the real-world relevance of our findings is still up in the air."

This also undoubtedly plays a role in the echo-chamber effect, about which I've written here more than once -- and which is routinely amplified by social media platforms.  "By offering such fine-grained control over whom users observe," Montrey said, "these platforms may spur the creation of homogeneous social networks, in which individuals are more inclined to copy others because they belong to the same social group."

We like to think of ourselves as modern and knowledgeable and savvy, but the truth is that we still retain a core of tribalism that it's awfully hard to overcome.  Consider how often you hear people say things like, "I'll only vote for a person if they belong to the _____ Party."  I've sometimes asked, in some bewilderment, "Even if the person in question is known to be dishonest and corrupt, and their opponent isn't?"  Appallingly, the response is often, "Yes.  I just don't trust people of the other party."

And of course, a great many of the politicians themselves encourage this kind of thinking.  If you can get a voter to eliminate out of hand half of the candidates for no other reason than party affiliation, it raises the likelihood you'll be the one who gets elected.  So the benefits are obvious.

Unfortunately, once you look at the Montrey and Shultz study, the downsides of this sort of thinking should also be frighteningly obvious.

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Truth by repetition

You probably have heard the quote attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: "If you tell a lie big enough and continue to repeat it, eventually people will come to believe it."  This has become a staple tactic in political rhetoric -- an obvious recent example being Donald Trump's oft-repeated declaration that he won the 2020 presidential election, despite bipartisan analysis across the United States demonstrating unequivocally that this is false.  (The tactic works; a huge number of Trump supporters still think the election was stolen.)

It turns out that the "illusory truth effect" or "truth-by-repetition effect," as the phenomenon is called, still works even if the claim is entirely implausible.  A study by psychologist Doris Lacassagne at the Université Catholique de Louvain (in Belgium) recently presented 232 test subjects with a variety of ridiculous statements, including "the Earth is a perfect cube," "smoking is good for the lungs," "elephants weigh less than ants," and "rugby is the sport associated with Wimbledon."  In the first phase of the experiment, they were asked to rate the statements not for plausibility, but for how "interesting" they were.  After this, the volunteers were given lists of statements to evaluate for plausibility, and were told ahead of time that some of the statements would be repeated, and that there would be statements from the first list included on the second along with completely new claims.

The results were a little alarming, and support Goebbels's approach to lying.  The false statements -- even some of the entirely ridiculous ones -- gained plausibility from repetition.  (To be fair, the ratings still had average scores on the "false" side of the rating spectrum; but they did shift toward increasing veracity.)

The ones that showed the greatest shift were the ones that required at least a vague familiarity with science or technical matters, such as "monsoons are caused by earthquakes."  It only took a few repetitions to generate movement toward the "true" end of the rating scale, which is scary.  Not all the news was bad, though; although 53% of the participants showed a positive illusory truth effect, 28% showed a negative effect -- repeating false statements triggered their plausibility assessments to decrease.  (I wonder if this was because people who actually know what they're talking about become increasingly pissed off by seeing the same idiotic statement over and over.  I suspect that's how I would react.)

Of course, recognizing that statements are false requires some background knowledge.  I'd be much more likely to fall for believing a false statement about (for example) economics, because I don't know much about the subject; presumably I'd be much harder to fool about biology.  It's very easy for us to see some claim about a subject we're not that familiar with and say, "Huh!  I didn't know that!" rather than checking its veracity -- especially if we see the same claim made over and over.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Zabou, Politics, CC BY 3.0]

I honestly have no idea what we could do about this.  The downside of the Freedom of Speech amendment in the Constitution of the United States means that with a limited number of exceptions -- slander, threats of violence, vulgarity, and hate speech come to mind -- people can pretty much say what they want on television.  The revocation of the FCC's Fairness Doctrine in 1987 meant that news media no longer were required to give a balanced presentation of all sides of the issues, and set us up for the morass of partisan editorializing that the nightly news has become in the last few years.  (And, as I've pointed out more than once, it's not just outright lying that is the problem; partisan media does as much damage by what they don't tell you as what they do.  If a particular news channel's favorite political figure does something godawful, and the powers-that-be at the channel simply decide not to mention it, the listeners will never find out about  it -- especially given that another very successful media tactic has been convincing the consumers that "everyone is lying to you except us.")

It's a quandary.  There's currently no way to compel news commentators to tell the truth, or to force them to tell their listeners parts of the news that won't sit well with them.  Unless what the commentator says causes demonstrable harm, the FCC pretty much has its hands tied.

So the Lacassagne study seems to suggest that as bad as partisan lies have gotten, we haven't nearly reached the bottom of the barrel yet.

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Sense, nonsense, and microwaves

One of the difficulties in detecting spurious claims occurs when the writer (or speaker) mixes fact, and real science, in with spurious bits and stirs the resulting hash so thoroughly that it's hard to tell which is which.  When a claim is made of unadulterated bullshit, our job is easier.  Mixtures of science and pseudoscience, though, are often hard to tease apart.

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a good example of this yesterday, a link to an article on the website NaturalSociety called "Microwave Dangers - Why You Should Not Use A Microwave."  

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mk2010, Microwave oven (interior), CC BY-SA 3.0]

In this piece, author Mike Barrett describes the terrible things that microwave ovens do to the people who use them and to the food that's cooked in them.  Amongst the claims Barrett makes:

1. Microwave ovens heat food by making water molecules move "at an incredible speed."  This differs from conventional ovens, which gradually transfer heat into the food "by convection."  Further, this energy transfer into the water molecules results in their being "torn apart and vigorously deformed."
2. Microwaves are radiation.  This radiation can "cause physical alterations" even though microwaves are classified as "non-ionizing."  This radiation "accumulates over time and never goes away."
3. Microwave exposure has a greater effect on your brain than on your other body parts, because "microwave frequencies are very similar to the frequencies of your brain," and this causes "resonance."
4. Exposure to microwaves causes all sorts of problems, from cancer to cataracts and everything in between.
5. Raw foods have "life energy" in the form of "biophotons," that came directly from the sun.  These "biophotons" contain "bio-information," which is why eating sun-ripened raw fruits makes you feel happy.  Microwaving food destroys the "biophotons" which makes it lose all of its nutritional value.
6. Microwaving foods causes the conversion of many organic molecules into carcinogens.
7. Microwave ovens were invented by the Nazis.

Okay, let's look at these claims one at a time.

1. First, all heating of food makes the molecules move faster.  That's what an increase in temperature means.  A piece of broccoli heated to 60 C in a microwave and a piece of broccoli heated to 60 C in a steamer have equal average molecular speeds.  Ordinary ovens don't heat most foods by convection; convection heating requires bits of the food itself to move -- so, for example, heating a pot of soup on the stove creates convection, where the bottom part of the soup, in contact with the base of the pot, gets heated first, then rises, carrying its heat energy with it.  Foods in conventional ovens are heated by a combination of radiation from the heating coils, and conduction of that heat energy into the food from the outside in.  Further, heating the water molecules doesn't "tear them apart," because then you'd have hydrogen and oxygen gas, not water.
2. Microwaves are radiation.  So is sunlight.  Sure, microwaves can cause physical alterations, which is why it's inadvisable to climb inside a microwave oven and turn it on.  But not all kinds of radiation accumulate; the microwaves themselves are gone within a millisecond (absorbed and converted into heat) of when the magneto shuts off, otherwise it wouldn't be safe to open the door.  Barrett seems to be making an unfortunately common error, which is to confuse radiation with radioactivity.  Radioactive substances, or at least some of them, do bioaccumulate, which is why strontium-90 showed up in cows' milk following the Chernobyl disaster.  But your microwaved bowl of clam chowder is not radioactive, it's just hot.
3. When oscillations of one body trigger oscillations of another body at the same frequency, this is called resonance.  However, your brain does not oscillate at the frequency as microwaves -- the frequency he quotes for microwaves inside a microwave oven is 2,450 megahertz (2.45 billion times per second), which is actually correct.  Brains, on the other hand, don't oscillate at all, unless you happen to be at a Metallica concert.
4. Agreed, exposure to microwaves isn't good for you.   Thus my suggestion in (2) above not to get inside a microwave oven and turn it on.
5. There is no such thing as a "biophoton."  You do not absorb useful energy in the form of photons in any case, for the very good reason that you are not a plant.  The only "bio-information" we have is our DNA.  Sun-ripened fruit may taste better, as it's ripened more slowly and has a longer time to develop sugars and esters (the compounds that give fruits their characteristic smell and taste), but microwaves don't destroy "life energy."  This bit is complete nonsense.
6. Microwaving food may cause some small-scale alterations of organic molecules into carcinogens, but so does all cooking.  In fact, the prize for the highest introduction of carcinogens into food has to be awarded to grilling -- the blackened bits on a charcoal-grilled t-bone steak contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are known carcinogens.  The problem is, they're also very tasty carcinogens, which is why I still like grilled steaks.
7. Microwave ovens weren't invented by the Nazis.  The first microwave oven was built by Percy Spencer, an engineer from Maine, in 1945.  The mention of the Nazis seemed only to be thrown in there to give the argument a nice sauce of evil ("anything the Nazis invented must be bad").  But it's false in any case, so there you are.

So, anyhow, that's my analysis of Barrett's anti-microwave screed.  He's pretty canny, the way he scatters in actual facts and correct science with poorly-understood science, pseudoscience, and outright nonsense; the difficulty is, you have to have a pretty good background in science to tell which is which.  All of which argues for better science education, and better education in critical thinking skills.  But any effort I make in that direction will have to wait, because my coffee's getting cold, and I need to go nuke it for a couple of seconds.

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King of the whales

For a long time, one of the biggest evolutionary mysteries was the evolution of whales and dolphins.

Even for someone steeped in the evolutionary model, it was hard to imagine how these aquatic creatures descended from terrestrial mammals.  That they did was undeniable; not only do some species have vestigial hip and hind leg bones, inside their flippers they have exactly the same number and arrangement of arm bones as you have -- one humerus, radius, and ulna; seven carpals; five metacarpals; and fourteen phalanges.  If whales were a "special creation," it's hard to imagine why a Creator would have given them 29 articulated arm bones and then completely encased them in a flat, muscular flipper.

Skeleton of a baleen whale (drawing from the Meyers Konversationslexikon (1888) [Image is in the Public Domain]

So their relationship to terrestrial mammals was obvious, but what wasn't obvious is how they got to where they are today.

Then in 1981 a fossil bed was uncovered in the Kuldana Formation of Pakistan, a sedimentary deposit from what was a shallow marine estuary back in the early Eocene Epoch (on the order of fifty million years ago), that contained a treasure trove of fossilized cetaceans.  This allowed researchers to piece together the evolution of whales and dolphins, placing them in Order Artiodactyla (their closest terrestrial relatives appear to be hippos).  

Skeleton of Ambulocetus, one of the amphibious species of cetaceans linking their terrestrial ancestors with today's aquatic whales [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Notafly, AmbulocetusNatansPisa, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Back in the Eocene, some of these proto-cetaceans were some badass apex predators.  Take Basilosaurus -- the name is Greek for "king lizard," a misnomer, at least the "lizard" part -- which lived in the Tethys Ocean, a body of water that has since been largely erased by plate tectonics.  (The Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas are about all that's left of it.)  Basilosaurus could get to twenty meters in length, and probably ate large fish like sharks and tuna.  It's Basilosaurus that got me to thinking about this topic in the first place; a couple of loyal readers of Skeptophilia sent me a link to an article about a new fossil discovery in Peru.  It's hard to imagine it, but the now bone-dry Ocucaje Desert of southern Peru was once the floor of a shallow sea, an embayment of the (at that point) rapidly shrinking Tethys.  It's provided huge numbers of Eocene fossils, but the one they just found is pretty spectacular; a complete, well-preserved skull of a Basilosaurus that when it was alive was on the order of seventeen meters from tip to tail.

"This is an extraordinary find because of its great state of preservation," said Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi, part of the team that found the fossil.  "This animal was one of the largest predators of its time.  At that time the Peruvian sea was warm.  Thanks to this type of fossil, we can reconstruct the history of the Peruvian sea."

It's fascinating that we're still piecing together the evolution, ecology, and geology of the ancient world -- in this case, a world with carnivorous proto-whales twice as long as a school bus, equipped with big nasty pointy teeth.  Life in the seas back then must have been risky business.  If ever time travel is invented, I'd love to go back and see it for myself -- preferably from a safe distance.  And as interested as I am, I doubt I'd be donning my scuba gear to get a closer look.

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The painted bones

It's fascinating how long into our past we've had rituals surrounding death.

There's decent evidence that our cousins the Neanderthals -- which went extinct on the order of forty thousand years ago -- buried their dead, and used ceremonial pigments like red and yellow ochre to decorate the bodies.  What I'm curious about is if those rituals were performed purely as fond remembrance of the the person who had died, or if it had a more religious significance.  Did they believe in an afterlife?  Was the reverence shown to a dead person's body because of belief that the person's soul still, in some sense, inhabited the remains?  Or some other reason entirely?  

It's all too easy to misinterpret the tangible evidence left behind, even from the relatively recent past.  Take, for example, the practice -- most common in Scotland and England -- of placing sturdy metal cages over grave sites.  The more fanciful-thinking believe it was because of a fear of vampires or zombies -- to protect the living from the dead.

A "mortsafe" in Cluny, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

The real reason -- which we know from the writings of the time -- was that it was actually to protect the dead from the living.  Grave robbing was common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only to steal any valuables the person might have been buried with, but to sell the corpse itself to medical or anatomical laboratories for dissection.  (Recall the early nineteenth century Burke and Hare murders, where a pair of enterprising young men decided it was more lucrative to kill people themselves and sell their bodies than to wait for them to die; Hare turned King's evidence in exchange for immunity if he testified against Burke, which he did.  Burke was hanged -- and in a grisly but ironic twist, his body was given to an anatomical laboratory for dissection.)

So it's harder than you'd think to ascertain the motives people had for certain ritual practices in the past.  As far as the decoration of bodies by the Neanderthals, of course, at this point it's impossible to know.  But it's fascinating that our (very) distant ancestors had burial rituals not so very different from our own.

A recent find in Turkey has shown that modern humans have been doing this sort of thing for a very long time as well.  Çatalhöyük, nicknamed the "oldest city in the world," has provided fascinating archaeological finds before; the "Mother Goddess of Çatalhöyük," a six-thousand-year-old ceramic statue probably associated with rituals of fertility (sex being the other thing people have been obsessed with for a long time) is probably the most famous artifact from the site.  (If you're wondering how Çatalhöyük is pronounced -- heaven knows I was -- I'll save you the trouble.  Near as I can get, it's something like "chot-al-hoik.")

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Nevit Dilmen, Museum of Anatolian Civilizations 1320259 nevit, CC BY-SA 3.0]

A new find at the site, though, is equally interesting.  A team from the University of Bern has uncovered nine-thousand-year-old bones -- so a full thousand years older than the Mother Goddess figurine -- that show evidence of having been painted.  Not only were they painted, they appear to have been unearthed more than once, and repainted.  Fascinatingly, they used different colors for different genders -- cinnabar/red for males, copper-bearing minerals/blue and green for females.  Not all the bones were so decorated; it may have been a mark of status, or membership in a ruling class or priestly class, but all that is speculation.  (The fact that there have been painted bones of children found suggests that it wasn't mere individual status that was the deciding factor.)

There's also an association between the number of painted burials in a building, and the amount of painted decoration on the walls.  "This means when they buried someone, they also painted on the walls of the house," said study senior author Marco Milella.  "Furthermore, at Çatalhöyük, some individuals stayed in the community: their skeletal elements were retrieved and circulated for some time, before they were buried again.  This second burial of skeletal elements was also accompanied by wall paintings."

I'd like to think that the painted bones were a sign of reverence and not fear of retaliation by an angry spirit, but that too is speculation.  All we have is the artifacts to judge by.  Even so, it's fascinating to get a glimpse into the distant past of our own species.

And you have to wonder what our distant descendants will make of the artifacts left from our own society.  What will they think of the marble and granite monuments we raised over the dead?  It puts me in mind of the eerie, atmospheric rhyme I saw on a gravestone in the cemetery in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania where my great- and great-great grandparents are buried:

Remember, traveler, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I;
As I am now, so you will be;
Prepare for death, and follow me.

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Dowsing for corpses

Back when I was teaching, I ran into students with a lot of fringe-y beliefs, or at least unscientific ones.  But if you had to pick which one students were the most reluctant to abandon, I bet you'd never guess.

Dowsing.

Dowsing, also called water-witching, is the belief that you can use a forked stick (more modern dowsers use a pair of metal rods on a swivel) to locate stuff.  It started out being used to find underground water for a well (thus the appellation "water-witching"), but has since progressed (or regressed?  Guess it depends upon your viewpoint) to being used to find all sorts of things, including -- I kid you not -- marijuana in kids' lockers in a high school.

"But it works!" students said, when I told them there was no scientific basis for it whatsoever.  "My dad hired a guy to come tell us where to dig our well, and we hit water at only thirty feet down!"

Yeah, okay.  But this is upstate New York, one of the cloudiest, rainiest climates in the United States.  Unless you're standing on an outcropping of bedrock, there's gonna be groundwater underneath you.  In fact, only about twenty miles from here, there's a hillside with a natural artesian spring -- someone put a pipe into it, and people stop and fill up water bottles from the clear water gushing out.  So it's entirely unsurprising that you hit water where the dowsing guy indicated.  You'll hit water pretty much anywhere around here if you dig down a ways.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

What's funniest are the quasi-scientific explanations the dowsers give as to why it (allegedly) works.  An example is that you should always make your dowsing rod from a willow branch, because willows grow near water, so the wood remains attracted to it.  Even though I'm yet to see how a dead branch could respond that way.  Or any way, honestly.

Given that it's dead.

Every scientifically-valid study of dowsing has resulted in zero evidence that it works.  This doesn't mean the dowsers are deliberately cheating; they may honestly think the stick is moving on its own.  This is called the ideomotor effect, where small movements made unconsciously by the practitioner convince him/her (and the audience) that something real, and supernatural, is going on.  (The same phenomenon almost certainly accounts for spiritualist claims like Ouija board divination and table-turning.)

But despite these sorts of arguments, I fear that I convinced few students to change their beliefs.  "I saw it happen!" is a remarkably powerful mindset, even once you accept that we're all prone to biases, and that we're all easily fooled when it comes to something we want to believe.

So this is why I was unsurprised but disheartened to read an article from Mother Jones sent to me by a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia.  In it, we read about one Arpad Vass, a guy who believes that you can use dowsing rods...

... to find dead bodies.

This would just be another goofy belief, and heaven knows those are a dime a dozen, but he has somehow convinced the people who run the National Forensic Academy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee that his technique is scientifically sound.  He has some kind of cockeyed explanation of how it works -- that the effect is due to piezoelectricity, a phenomenon where certain crystalline substances develop a charge when they're subjected to mechanical stress.  Piezoelectricity is real enough; it's the basis of quartz watches, inkjet printing, and electric guitar pickups.  But even if decomposing bone can generate some net static charge, it would leak away into the soil it's buried in -- there's no mechanism by which it could exert a pull on some bent wires several meters away.  (Actually, Vass claims he's successfully found corpses this way from a hundred meters away.  If the static charge is that high, you shouldn't need a dowsing rod to detect it -- a plain old boring volt meter would work.  Funny how that never happens.)

And, of course, there's the problem that it doesn't work for everyone.  Vass has an answer for that, too.  "If people don’t have the right voltage, it’s not going to work," he says.  "Everything in the universe vibrates at a very specific frequency.  Gold has a gold frequency, silver has a silver frequency, and your DNA has your frequency."

I guess bullshit has a specific frequency, too.

The problem is that Vass isn't just playing around, or doing something that isn't a huge deal if it doesn't work (like finding a well drilling site).  This is injecting pseudoscience into police investigation.  And recently, he's gone one step further; he has invented, he said, a "quantum oscillator" that supposedly picks up a person's "frequency" from something like a hair sample or fingernail clippings, and then beams that frequency out, and it will somehow interact with the person (or his/her corpse), and send back a signal to the device...

... from up to 120 kilometers away.

I was encouraged by the fact that the Mother Jones article came down fairly solidly on the side of the scientists, stating unequivocally that there is no evidence that any form of dowsing works.  They also highlighted the human side of this; Randy Shrewsberry, founder of the nonprofit Criminal Justice Training Reform Institute, was quoted as saying "Law enforcement regularly accepts the flaws of these practices despite the life-altering impacts that can occur when they’re wrong."  In one Virginia case, a man was convicted of murder even though no body of the victim was found -- in part, because of testimony from Vass that his device had found the victim's "frequency" in eight locations, indicating that her body had been dismembered.

Eric Bartelink, professor of anthropology at the University of California - Chico and former president of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, was unequivocal.  "Vass is operating these services that are not scientifically valid.  It’s very misleading to families and law enforcement."

So at least some prominent voices in the field are speaking up to support the findings of every scientific study ever done on the practice of dowsing.  I'm still appalled that a forensic training academy has somehow been convinced to take Vass and his nonsense seriously; I guess being highly educated isn't necessarily an immunization against confirmation bias.  As for me, I'm calling bullshit on the whole practice.

Beam that into your "quantum oscillator," buddy.

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The imaginary fireball

The subject of today's post isn't anything new; it was just new to me, and, I suspect, will be to a good many of my readers, as well.  I found out about it from a long-time loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link about it with a note saying, "Okay, this is interesting. What think you?"

The link was to a 2008 article that appeared in Phys.org entitled, "Cuneiform Clay Tablet Translated for the First Time."   The tablet in question is called the "Sumerian planisphere," and was discovered in the ruins of Nineveh by a British archaeologist named Henry Layard in the middle of the nineteenth century.  From where it was found, it was dated to around 700 B.C.E., and although it was recognized that part of what it contained was maps of constellations, no one was quite sure what it was about.

The Sumerian planisphere [Image is in the Public Domain]

The researchers were puzzled by the fact that the arrangements of the stars in the constellations were close to, but not exactly the same as, the configurations they would have had at the time it was made, but then they concluded that those would have been their positions 2,400 years earlier -- and they claimed the text and maps didn't just show the stars on any old night, but on a sequence of nights chronicling the approach of a comet or asteroid.

Which, ultimately, hit the Earth.

They claim the collision site was near Köfels, Austria, and triggered a five-kilometer-wide fireball.  Why no huge crater, then?  The answer, they say, is that the steep side of the mountain gave way because of the impact, and a landslide ensued.  Organic matter trapped in the debris flow gave an approximate date, but once deciphered, the Sumerian planisphere's detailed sky maps (including the position of the Sun, the timing of sunrise, and so on) supposedly pinpointed the exact day of the impact: the 29th of June, 3123 B.C.E.

Between the planisphere and the geometry of the collision site, the researchers claimed that the comet came in at a very shallow angle -- their estimate is about six degrees -- clipped the nearby peak of Gamskogel, and exploded, creating a five-kilometer-wide moving fireball that finally slammed into Kófels head-on.

You may be wondering why Sumerian astronomers had any particular interest about an impact that occurred almost four thousand kilometers away.  They have an answer for that, too; the shallow impact angle created a sheet of superheated debris that arced away from the impact site, and right toward what is now the Middle East.  A 2014 paper by Joachim Seifert and Frank Lemke concluded that the greatest amount of damage didn't occur right at the collision site, but where all that flaming debris eventually landed -- in Mesopotamia.

"The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt," said Mark Hempsell of the University of Bristol, who is the chief proponent of the Köfels collision hypothesis.  "The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material - including human hair and clothes.  It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast."

The dust and ash from the event caused a hundred-year-long "impact winter" that triggered droughts, leading to a several-centuries-long famine that ultimately caused the collapse of the Akkadian Empire.

Okay, so that's the claim.  There are, unfortunately, a host of problems with it, beginning with those pointed out by the scathing rebuttal by Jeff Medkeff in Blue Collar Scientist.  The first issue is that there is "impact glass" -- vitrified shards of debris partially melted by a collision -- in central Europe, but it dates to much longer ago (certainly more than eight thousand years ago).  There is no impact debris to be found between central Europe and the Middle East anywhere near 3,100 B.C.E., no scorched pottery shards or charred bones that would be indicative of a rain of fire.  An asteroid or comet "clipping" a mountain -- and then generating a plume of debris that was still superheated four thousand kilometers downstream -- would have sheared off the entire mountain top, and there'd be clear evidence of it today.  Last -- and most damning -- the Köfels formation has been studied by geologists and found to be not a single event, but a series of landslides, none of which show convincing evidence of having been triggered by an impact.

The scientists involved don't even seem sure of their own chronology; the Phys.org article says 3123 B.C.E. (the 29th of June, to be exact), while the Seifert and Lemke paper says the impact occurred almost a thousand years later (in 2193 B.C.E.).  The latter date at least is closer to the claimed civilization-destroying effects; the Akkadian Empire fell in around 2154.  It seems likely, though, that the collapse of the Akkadians (and various others, including the Indus Valley Civilization, the Egyptian Old Kingdom, and the Chinese Liangzhu Culture) was due to a drought called the "4.2 Kiloyear Event."  The cause of that is uncertain, but probably wasn't an impact (again, because of the lack of clear stratigraphic evidence).  The most likely culprit was a shift in cold-water currents in the North Atlantic changing patterns of rainfall, but even that is speculative.

As far as Hempsell's even more outlandish claim -- that the Köfels impact generated the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah -- I won't even go into details except to say that there is evidence of a much smaller airburst explosion where the cities were allegedly located, but once again, it's from a different date (around 1650 B.C.E.).  As for any other evidence of the biblical "Cities on the Plain," it's slim to nonexistent.  Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, of Tel Aviv University, called the tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah "an etiological story, that is, a legend that developed in order to explain a landmark.  In other words, people who lived in the later phase of the Iron Age, the later days of the kingdom of Judah, were familiar with the huge ruins of the Early Bronze cities and told a story of how such important places could be destroyed."

So given the (1) lack of any reasonably reliable evidence, (2) a chronology that even the researchers don't seem to be able to keep straight, and (3) plausible alternative explanations for the supposed societal aftereffects, I'm afraid I'm gonna be in the "don't think so" column on this one.  As dramatic as it would be if the astronomers of Sumer documented the approach and ultimate collision of a comet or asteroid, a collision that ultimately showered flaming debris over the entire Middle East, I think we have to set aside the drama of an imaginary fireball for the cold light of reason.

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