A linguistic resurrection

Earlier this month, I wrote a piece here at Skeptophilia on the reconstruction of an extinct language -- Timucuan, an indigenous language from northern Florida.  As I pointed out in the earlier piece, these sorts of efforts aren't just entertaining linguistic puzzles.  Each language encodes in its structure information about the culture, beliefs, and worldview of the people who spoke it, information which all too often is lost forever because of the effects of war, colonialism, and the simple but unfortunate effects of time on the written records.

As a linguist, I find this terribly sad.  When a language goes extinct, it's as if an entire culture's collective memory is wiped clean.  But astonishingly, sometimes artifacts will surface that allow us to reassemble an ancient language, bringing that long-extinguished knowledge back from the grave.

My eagle-eyed writer friend Gil Miller, always on the lookout for topics for Skeptophilia, sent me an article about such a miraculous resurrection this week.  It has to do with the Amorite language, spoken by a people who lived in southern Mesopotamia on the order of four thousand years ago.  While there's no doubt the people themselves were real enough -- they're mentioned in a number of records from the time, including the Bible -- the language is so poorly attested that some linguists questioned whether it even existed as a distinct language, suggesting that the Amorite people might have spoken a dialect of Akkadian.

The discovery of a remarkable artifact in Iraq has put that to rest.  It's a pair of clay tablets covered in cuneiform writing, describing everyday customs and religious practices in Akkadian, which is well understood by linguists -- with parallel text in Amorite.

One of he Akkadian/Amorite tablets [Image credit: David I. Owen]

The comparison to the Rosetta Stone is obvious.  With the Rosetta Stone, however, the reason for having the inscription in three scripts (Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphic, and Demotic) was clear.  It was an official decree from King Ptolemy V Epiphanes, so as an official document, it was important that it be readable to anyone in the region who was literate, regardless what script they knew.  Here, though, the text is about such mundane matters that it's an open question why anyone wanted it written in two different languages.  "The two tablets increase our knowledge of Amorite substantially, since they contain not only new words but also complete sentences, and so exhibit much new vocabulary and grammar," said Yoram Cohen, of Tel Aviv University, who co-authored the study.  "The writing on the tablets may have been done by an Akkadian-speaking Babylonian scribe or scribal apprentice, as an impromptu exercise born of intellectual curiosity...  Or it may be a sort of 'tourist guidebook' for Akkadian speakers who needed to learn Amorite."

Whatever its purpose, the tablets confirm that Amorite was a distinct language from the Western Semitic branch of the linguistic family tree (a branch it shares with Aramaic and modern Hebrew).  More than just increasing our knowledge of a single long-dead language, however, it provides an impetus to keep looking for traces of ancient cultures.  This amazing linguistic resurrection shows that lost doesn't necessarily mean forever -- and that with luck, perseverance, skill, and knowledge, we might still be able to gain a lens into what we thought was a long-gone culture.

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Analysis of a partnership

You probably recall from biology class the word symbiosis -- when two organisms share living space.  This sort of relationship can result in a fused life form where even so, the two participants retain a discernible separateness.  (Remember the Trill from Star Trek?)  The melding can go deeper, though; lichens, commonly seen growing on rocks and tree trunks in damp areas, are an example of such a composite, in this case between one or more types of fungus and photosynthetic cyanobacteria.  Deeper still are mitochondria -- the organelles in all eukaryotic cells that conduct cellular respiration and provide the majority of the energy required by the organism -- which are the descendants of single-celled aerobic bacteria that billions of years ago formed a partnership with their host cells so mutually beneficial that now, neither can live without the other.

Symbiosis is usually broken down into three broad classes.  The distinction is how the participating organisms fare.  That one of them benefits in some way is a given; if both were harmed, the relationship would be strongly selected against and probably wouldn't persist very long.  It's what happens to the other that determines what kind of symbiosis it is:

• parasitism -- one organism benefits, the other is harmed (an example is disease-causing bacteria)
• commensalism  -- one organism benefits, the other breaks even (such as the bacteria passively riding on our skin)
• mutualism -- both organisms benefit (such as a good many of the bacteria in our gut, which have increasingly been found to be absolutely essential for health)

The trouble is, nothing in biology is clear-cut.  Our commensal skin bacteria occupy niches that, if they were eradicated, might be taken over by pathogenic species.  (Thus the adjuration by doctors not to overuse topical antibiotics and hand sanitizers.)  So are they actually mutualistic?  Then there are the species that help in some ways and harm in others -- or, perhaps, help one species and harm another.

This, in fact, is why the whole topic comes up today.  Scientists in New Zealand have been working to preserve endangered species on the islands.  There are quite a few, owing to the country's geological (and thus biological) isolation -- it's developed a singular group of endemic species that are uniquely vulnerable to loss of habitat from agriculture and from the introduction of exotic species like cats, pigs, and the ubiquitous sheep.  One such species is the rare Cooper's black orchid (Gastrodia cooperae), which is nearly invisible for most of the year -- the only above-ground part is a long, creeping stem -- and puts on a flower stalk once during the growing season.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Kathy Warburton/INaturalist (CC BY 4.0)]

Orchids are notorious for being difficult to grow from seed.  The seeds are minute, and most orchid species are extreme specialists, able to survive only in a very narrow range of conditions.  The result is that conservation efforts are fraught with difficulty.  Trying to germinate the seeds in the lab requires knowing exactly what that particular species needs, which can mean a lot of trial-and-error, and the potential loss of batches of seeds when the efforts fail.

The Cooper's black orchid is no exception.  It's so rare it was only identified in 2016, and is known to live in only three sites in New Zealand.  Fortunately for this species, there is a related orchid species, Gastrodia sesamoides, that is quite common and appears to need many of the same conditions that the Cooper's black does, so scientists have been trying to identify what those conditions are so they can be replicated in the lab.

And it turns out that one of the conditions is the presence of a symbiotic fungus -- Resinicium bicolor.  The fungus infiltrates the roots of the orchid, creating a greater surface area for nutrient and water uptake, much like the mycorrhizae familiar to organic gardeners that can increase crop yields without the addition of inorganic fertilizers.

Where it gets interesting is that Resinicium bicolor was already known to botanists -- as a plant pathogen.  It's a deadly parasite on Douglas firs, an introduced tree in New Zealand that is much used for lumber, causing "white-rot disease."

So is Resinicium a mutualist or a parasite?  The question is, "with respect to what?"  It's lethal to Douglas firs, but essential to the Cooper's black orchid (and, presumably, other native orchid species).

Biology, as I mentioned before, isn't simple.

That, of course, is why it's so endlessly fascinating.  The more we look into the complexity of the natural world, the more it brings home the truth of the quote from Albert Einstein: "Life is a great tapestry.  The individual is only an insignificant thread in an immense and miraculous pattern."

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Fingerprint of a catastrophe

Ever heard of the Bruneau-Jarbridge event?

If not, it's unsurprising; neither had I.  Plus, it happened twelve million years ago, during the mid-Miocene Epoch.  It's a supervolcano eruption of the Yellowstone Hotspot, which was at the time under what is now southwestern Idaho.  Between then and now, the hotspot has stayed pretty much where it was, but the North American Plate has moved, resulting in its current location underneath northwestern Wyoming,

The Bruneau-Jarbridge event was enormous.  It created monstrous pyroclastic flows that traveled 150 kilometers from the caldera, incinerating everything in their path.  The winds at the time of the eruption were from the west; we know this because the ash produced by the eruption traveled at least 1,600 kilometers to the east, creating meters-thick layers including the ones at the amazing Ashfall Fossil Beds in northeastern Nebraska.

In fact, it's the Ashfall Fossil Beds -- now an official National Natural Landmark and State Historical Park -- that's why the topic comes up.  A friend and frequent contributor of topics for Skeptophilia sent me a photograph of the site, and asked me if I'd heard of it:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Carl Malamud, Ashfall fossil beds - Baby rhino "T. L.", CC BY 2.0]

I hadn't, so naturally I had to look into it.

The whole thing is staggering, if grim.  Ashfall contains the skeletons of thousands of animals killed, more or less simultaneously, by the Bruneau-Jarbridge ash cloud.  The remains of the rhinoceros species Teloceras are so common there that one part of the fossil bed has been nicknamed "the Rhino Barn."  But there are lots of other species represented as well; five different kinds of prehistoric horses, including both three-toed and one-toed; three species of camels; two canids, the fox-sized Leptocyon and the wolf-sized Cynarctus; a saber-toothed (!) deer species, Longirostromeryx; three species of turtles; and three species of birds -- a crane, a hawk, and a vulture.

Despite the size of the eruption and resulting ash cloud, everything in the area didn't die during the ashfall.  Some of the bones show signs of scavenging, and some have breaks and tooth marks consistent with the dentition of the hyena-like canid Aelurodon.  So even a horrific catastrophe like Bruneau-Jarbridge didn't extinguish life completely; there were still scavengers around to chow down on the victims.

When looking at this sort of event, the question inevitably comes up of whether it could happen again.  The facile answer is: of course it could.  The Earth is still very much tectonically active, and more specifically, the Yellowstone Hotspot is a live volcano, as the frequent earthquakes and boiling-hot geysers and lakes should indicate.  It's likely to erupt again -- whether a monumental cataclysm like Bruneau-Jarbridge, or something smaller, isn't certain.

But despite the prevalence of clickbait-y YouTube videos about how "Yellowstone is about to erupt!" and "Scientists fear the Earth will crack wide open!" (both direct quotes from video titles), there is no imminent danger from the Yellowstone Hotspot.  What the geologists are actually saying is that a major eruption is likely some time in the next hundred thousand years, which puts it well outside the realm of what most of us should be worried about.

However, there's no doubt the the Ashfall Fossil Beds are a sobering reminder of what the Earth is capable of.  They're the fingerprint of a twelve-million-year-old catastrophe that makes any recent eruption look like a wet firecracker.  But as horrible as it was for the Miocene animals in the path of the ash cloud, it's provided us with a snapshot of what life was like back then, when Nebraska had a climate more like modern Kenya -- and the Great Plains was home to rhinos, camels, horses, and wild dogs.

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Going up

Well, it's happened again; a reader has sent me a weird superstition (this one almost amounts to an urban legend) that I'd never heard of before.

You've all heard about the goofy children's game "Bloody Mary," wherein you're supposed to stare into a mirror at night and chant "Bloody Mary" a bunch of times (even those in the know vary the requirement greatly; I've seen everything from twenty to a hundred), and then nothing happens.

So it's a pretty exciting game, as you will no doubt agree.

What's supposed to happen is that the blood-drenched visage of a female ghost will appear in the mirror instead of your own face.  She's supposedly the restless spirit of a woman who killed children.  Which I can sort of sympathize with.  If I was yanked around and forced to appear in mirrors over and over all night long by kids at sleepovers chanting my name, I'd probably want to throttle the little brats, too.

Be that as it may, we have a tale out of South Korea that is similar in spirit (rimshot), if not in detail, to the Bloody Mary legend.  This one is called "Elevator to Another World," and gives you instructions for using an elevator to access some hitherto unreachable and mysterious place.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Joe Mabel, Hotel Vancouver elevators 01, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Here's what you're supposed to do:

1. Find a building that's at least ten stories tall.  (Nota bene: Through all of the remaining steps except the last one, you're supposed to stay in the elevator.)
2. Go to the tenth floor.
3. Go to the fourth floor.
4. Go to the sixth floor.
5. Go back to the tenth floor.  If you hear voices at this point, don't answer 'em.
6. Go to the fifth floor.  When the door opens, if a woman gets on, don't talk to her.  Which sounds like good advice re: people on elevators in most cases.
7. Press the button for the first floor.  If the elevator goes down, you did something wrong.  What should happen is that the elevator should go back up to the tenth floor.  The woman may shriek at you at this point, but you're supposed to ignore her, even if she shrieks what I would, which would be, "Will you stop playing with the fucking elevator and let me go to my floor?"
8. When the door opens on the tenth floor, get out.  You're in another world.  What you're supposed to do about the woman, I don't know.
9. So after having a nice look-see in the alternate universe, to get back, return to the elevator (it has to be the same one you used for steps #1-8), and do the steps again in that order.  When you press the button for the first floor in step #7 and the elevator begins to ascend, find the "stop" button and halt the elevator, then press the first floor button again.  You should return safely to the first floor, and must exit the building immediately.

What is this "Other World" like, you might be wondering?  From the account linked above, the two most common characteristics reported are that the Other World is (1) dark, and (2) empty.  Which makes it sound rather unappealing.  If I'm going to expend a lot of time and effort, I want to at least end up somewhere sunny, featuring drinks with little umbrellas.  But none of that, apparently.  Some people have mentioned seeing a "red cross" in the distance, but the author of the article says that "it may not be a cross."

Whatever that means.

This all puts me in mind of a wonderful book by Haruki Murakami called Dance Dance Dance, wherein a guy in a Japanese hotel takes an elevator and stumbles on a mysterious floor that is somehow sandwiched in between two other ordinary floors, and therein he meets a weird character called the Sheep Man.  It's weird, surreal fun, and is written with Murakami's signature lucid, simple style -- he has a way of making the oddest things seem as if they're absolutely normal.

I'm not sure if the Korean urban legend inspired Murakami's book, which would be nice because then it'd actually have accomplished something other than making gullible people waste time going up and down on an elevator.  On the other hand, if you want to give it a try, I encourage you to do so and post your results here.

Other than building security telling you to stop playing with the elevator.

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Clothes make the monster

In new developments in cryptozoology, today we consider: when Bigfoot wears clothes.

The reason this comes up is because of an article by the ever-entertaining Nick Redfern over at Mysterious Universe, which has the title "Further Accounts of Clothed Monsters."  My first reaction was, "Further?  I didn't know that was a thing in the first place."

But it turns out that this isn't the first time Redfern has considered the possibility, and he references an article he wrote a year and a half ago called "When Bigfoot Gets Stylish," which begins thusly:

Without doubt, one of the most bizarre aspects of the Bigfoot phenomenon is that relative to nothing less than clothed Bigfoot!  It’s one thing to encounter such a creature.  It’s quite another, however, to see it fashionably attired in pants and shirts...  Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman says: “In the 1960s and 1970s, reports from the American West would occasionally surface of hairy bipedal Bigfoot being seen with tattered plaid shirts and ragged shorts on their bodies.  In some research, there were intriguing attempts to relate these to files of paranormal encounters with sightings of upright entities said to be wearing ‘checkered shirts.’  (Within parapsychology, there is a subfield of study regarding ‘checkered shirted ghosts.’)  Investigators generally did not know what to make of these Sasquatch wearing plaid shirts, but dutifully catalogued and filed them away, nevertheless.”

I have three questions about this:

1. Where does Bigfoot get his clothes?  I mean, I can accept spotting Bigfoots wearing shirts and pants, but you very rarely ever see them in the clothing department at Macy's.  Maybe they order them online or something.
2. There's a "subfield" of paranormal studies specializing in ghosts in checkered shirts?  That seems like kind of a narrow field of study, as if a psychologist decided only to use test subjects who were wearing argyle socks.  You'd think it'd limit your access to data pretty considerably.
3. So Bigfoots like plaid, eh?  No pinstripes or paisley or hoodies or NFL jerseys or anything?  Someone really needs to work with them on their fashion sense.  Not that I have anything against plaid (or, honestly, have that much room to criticize), but if that's all you wear it becomes a little monotonous.

The more recent article, though, gives us some additional examples, such as a family in Colorado whose car was attacked by "a hairy man or hairy animal... (who) had on a blue-and-white checkered shirt and long pants," a woman in Barnstaple, England who saw a "large black dog... (that) walked on its hind legs... and was covered in a cloak and a monk's hood," and a woman in Kent, England who saw a "hulking figure... (who) had a loincloth around its waist and furred boots."

So that's kind of alarming.  Not that monsters are adopting clothes, but that given the choice, they're deciding to wear blue-and-white check, monk's hoods, loincloths, and furry boots.  I mean, it's not that I'm expecting them to wear Armani suits, but even by my own dubious standards of sartorial elegance, this seems a little odd.

It also occurs to me, apropos of the plaid-wearing Bigfoots, that we might be talking about... people.  I say this from personal experience, given that my mom's family comes from the bayou country of southeastern Louisiana.  You know those folks on the This No Longer Has Anything To Do With History Channel, on the show Swamp People?  Yeah, those folks are all cousins of mine.  Seriously.  I have a photograph of my great-grandfather, along with his wife and ten children, wherein he could easily be mistaken for a Sasquatch in overalls.  My family might be weird as fuck, but they definitely have no problem growing hair.

In any case, the whole thing throws us back into the realm of "the plural of anecdote is not data."  Unfortunately.  Because it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the field of cryptozoology.  It's also nice to think that in a harsh winter, the Sasquatches have some woolens to keep themselves warm, when their pelts, loincloths, cloaks, and furry boots aren't enough.

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The Silpho Moor mystery

Pieces of one of the most enduring mysteries in UFO lore have allegedly been discovered in the National Archives of London.

Called the "Silpho Moor Crash," the incident occurred in November of 1957, when two men who were hiking on Silpho Moor in North Yorkshire, England, saw "a red light falling from the sky" and went to investigate, despite the fact that every time someone does this in a science fiction movie, they end up being messily devoured by evil aliens.  Fortunately for the two men, this did not happen. Instead, they found a saucer-shaped object made of metal, eighteen inches in diameter, which upon opening was found to contain thin copper sheets covered with "unidentifiable hieroglyphics."

The Silpho Moor artifacts, including the "hieroglyphic sheets" (lower right)

The objects were much talked about, and eventually (sources indicate in 1963) they were sent to the London Science Museum for expert analysis.

After that, they were "lost to history."

It's kind of weird how often this happens.  Somebody gets amazing evidence of some hitherto-unproven and unexpected apparition -- UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, Ron DeSantis's conscience -- and then after a little bit of buzz and maybe a few blurry photographs, it mysteriously disappears.  The conspiracy theorists waggle their eyebrows suggestively about this, and say that of course the evidence disappears, because the powers-that-be don't want ordinary slobs like you and me to have proof of any of this stuff.

Why the powers-that-be would care if we proved the existence of alien intelligence (for example), I have no idea.  As far as I've seen, the powers-that-be are much more interested in destroying the evil, cunning environmental scientists' conspiracy to defeat a beleaguered but plucky band of heroic corporate billionaires.  I can't imagine they give a rat's ass whether UFOs exist, except insofar as these would really be undocumented aliens.

Be that as it may, the Silpho Moor artifacts were lost -- until now.  Maybe.  Because some people digging around in the London National Archives found, hiding in an old cigarette tin, some shards that are supposedly from the Silpho Moor Crash.

What seems odd to me is that every photograph from the actual crash shows an intact object that looks like an almost comically stereotypical flying saucer, and everything in this latest discovery is just a bunch of broken-up metal.  I suppose the scientists back in 1963 could have hacked the thing apart, but isn't it funny that there's no record of that?

Anyhow, the objects were discovered by an exhibit developer named Khalil Thirlaway, who brought them to the attention of Dr. David Clarke, a journalism professor at Sheffield Hallam University.

"He [Thirlaway] opened the tin box and took out the pieces, it was an amazing revelation -- it had just been sitting there for half a century," Clarke said.  "There must be a lot of it still out there, sitting in someone's attic, or maybe these are the last remaining pieces... I thought it was a prank, but the question remains -- who went to all that trouble at great expense and what did they gain from it?  It has been described several times as Britain's answer to Roswell, and I don't think that's too great an exaggeration."

Well, yes, in the sense that it's a sketchy set of evidence for an incident that no one is sure has anything to do with alien intelligence anyway.  But at least now the fragments are out in the light of day, and with luck some scientists will get involved and analyze them.

Still, I wonder what they'd find that could prove it one way or the other.  Metal fragments are metal fragments, whether they come from outer space or not.  Despite what Geordi LaForge would have you believe, an extraterrestrial spaceship would not be composed of the rare elements whatsisium and thingamajite, because the periodic table is kind of full-up with elements we already know well.  So I don't see any way to differentiate between an alloy from Earth and one from the Klingon Home World.

But that's something we can worry about later.  At least the objects were relocated.  Myself, I'm all for submitting hard evidence for study, whether or not it turns up anything significant.  Otherwise, you're back at the level of personal anecdote -- which is the worst form of evidence there is.

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Facing the impostor

I'll be honest with you. I've felt like an impostor for most of my life.

My job for over thirty years was teaching science in public schools, mostly biology (and other life-science-related classes).  However, I have neither a bachelors nor a master's degree in biology.  My bachelor's degree is in physics -- and I was a lackluster physics student at best -- and my master's degree is in linguistics, of all things.  Along the way I started a master's program in oceanography, but I was kind of lousy at that, too, and got out of research science entirely.  I've taken enough classes in biology for a teaching license (obviously), but frankly, I learned most of the biology I know by the seat of the pants.

Even in my two favorite avocations -- writing and music -- I didn't get where I am by any kind of legitimate, credentialed pathway.  I wasn't in band in school, having been told that I was no good at it by a 6th grade band director, and taught myself the flute and piano.  I was lucky enough to study flute with a wonderful teacher, Margaret Vitus, when I was in my twenties, but that is the sum total of my formal musical background.

I don't even have that in writing.  I took two creative writing classes, one in high school, one in college.  The end.

So I've got a striking lack of framed certificates in Latin to hang on my wall.  When I think about it rationally, it doesn't bother me.  I know I'm competent enough at what I do (in all three realms) that I don't have anything to apologize for.  But that visceral voice isn't so kind -- one of the reasons I feel uncomfortable and outclassed when I'm around academics, people who are in my mind "true intellectuals."

Impostor syndrome is all too common.  Way back in the 1970s, it was studied in women, when in interviews of 150 highly successful and professional women, the vast majority experienced no internal sense of accomplishment, and were constantly afraid that they'd be "found out" as having poorer abilities, knowledge, and qualifications than their bosses and coworkers thought.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mark J Sebastian, Jackie Martinez with a mask, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Recently a team of psychologists gave a closer look to this phenomenon -- and found it's more ubiquitous than anyone thought.  In "Are All Impostors Created Equal?  Exploring Gender Differences in the Impostor Phenomenon-Performance Link," by Rebecca L.Badawy, Brooke A.Gazdag, Jeffrey R. Bentley, and Robyn L. Brouer, of Youngstown State University, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, California State University, and Canisius College, respectively, the researchers found that males and females both experience impostor syndrome -- they just respond to it differently.

The research, which appeared in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, looked at over 250 people in professional careers, and found some interesting correlations.  First, they did not see a link between feeling like an impostor and actual work performance.  Put more simply; self-styled impostors and people who feel like they deserve to be where they are have about the same levels of competency at work.

What is even more interesting, however, is the difference in reaction between males and females.  In the first experiment, a group was given five problems from the GRE (Graduate Record Examination), used to determine admittance to graduate school.  After working on the problems, they're given feedback on how they did -- but some of the test subjects were told (incorrectly) that they'd gotten all five wrong.

Looking at the responses to this harsh feedback between male "impostors" and female "impostors," the males responded to subsequent tasks with higher anxiety, less effort, and poorer performance, while the females' emotional responses were nearly the opposite -- they were anxious regardless of whether the feedback was positive or negative, but they responded by improving their effort, and their performance went up, too.

In a second experiment, the subjects were told their answers would be shown to a college professor -- placing them in a high-stress, high-accountability context.  Once again, the men who scored high on impostor syndrome responded by an increase in anxiety, and a decrease in both effort and performance; but the women's results were unchanged from a low-stress, low-accountability situation.  The researchers suggested that the cause of the change in the men's responses may have been that exerting lower effort in high-stress situations might give them an "out" to explain poor performance -- but that's only speculation.

As the researchers put it, "Assuming that traditional gender norms hold, males [with impostor syndrome] may have exhibited stronger negative reactions because they believe that society at large values males who demonstrate high competence and at the same time, do not believe that they can fulfill this standard."

Whatever the reason for all this, it's kind of sad, don't you think?  The fact that so many of us can't take honest pleasure in our accomplishments, and feel the need to devalue what we do based on inaccurate standards of who we should be or how we attained our position in our workplace, is a tragedy.  The problem is, these feelings are not rational; I know from experience that all the logical arguments in the world haven't eliminated my sense that I've arrived where I am by illegitimate means.

But I wish -- both for myself and for my fellow impostors -- that it was that easy to eliminate.

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