A light on bias

A woman walks into the kitchen to find her husband on all fours, crawling around peering at the floor.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"Looking for my contact lens."

"Oh, I'll help."  So the woman gets down on the floor, too, and they spend the next fifteen minutes fruitlessly searching for the missing lens.  Finally, she says, "I just don't see it.  Are you sure you dropped it in here?"

The husband responds, "Oh, no, I dropped it in the living room."

"Then why the hell are you looking for it in the kitchen?" she yells at him.

"Because the lighting is better in here."

While this is an old and much-retold joke, there's an object lesson here for scientists -- which was highlighted by a paper this week out of George Washington University that appeared in Nature Ecology & Evolution.  In it, paleobiologists Andrew Barr and Bernard Wood considered a systematic sampling bias in our study of fossils of ancestral hominid species -- and by extension, every other group of fossils out there.

A large share of what we know of our own early family tree comes from just three sites in Africa, most notably the East African Rift Valley and adjacent regions in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.  Clearly that's not the only place early hominids lived; it's just the place that (1) has late Cenozoic-age fossil-bearing strata exposed near the surface, and (2) isn't underneath a city or airport or swamp or rain forest or something.  In fact, the Rift Valley makes up only one percent of Africa's surface area, so searching only there is significantly biasing what we might find.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michal Huniewicz, Great Rift Valley - panoramio, CC BY 3.0]

"Because the evidence of early human evolution comes from a small range of sites, it's important to acknowledge that we don't have a complete picture of what happened across the entire continent," said study co-author Andrew Barr.  "If we can point to the ways in which the fossil record is systematically biased and not a perfect representation of everything, then we can adjust our interpretations by taking this into account."

You can only base your understanding on what evidence you actually have in your hands, of course; besides the areas that might bear fossils but are inaccessible to study for one reason or another, there are parts of Africa where the strata are from a different geological era, or simply don't contain fossils at all (for example, igneous rock).  But you still need to maintain an awareness that what you're seeing is an incomplete picture.

"We must avoid falling into the trap of coming up with what looks like a comprehensive reconstruction of the human story, when we know we don't have all of the relevant evidence," said study co-author Bernard Wood.  "Imagine trying to capture the social and economic complexity of Washington D.C. if you only had access to information from one neighborhood.  It helps if you can get a sense of how much information is missing."

Now, don't misunderstand me (or them); no one is saying what we have to date is likely to be all wrong.  I absolutely hate when some new fossil is discovered, and the headlines say, "New Find Rewrites Everything We Knew" or "The Textbooks Are Wrong Again" or, worst of all, "Scientists Are Forced Back To The Drawing Board."  For one thing, our models are now solid enough that it's unlikely that anything will force a complete undoing of the known science.  I suppose something like that could occur in newer fields like cosmology and quantum physics, but even there we have tons of evidence and excellent predictive models -- so while there might well be additions or revisions, a complete overturning is almost certainly not gonna happen.  

Second, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "As scientists, we're always at the drawing board.  If you're not at the drawing board, you're not doing science."  We are always exploring what he calls "the perimeter of our ignorance," testing and probing into the realms we have yet to explain fully.  What Barr and Wood are doing for the field of human paleobiology is to define that perimeter more clearly -- to identify where our inevitable sampling biases are, so that we can determine what direction to look next.  Not, like our hapless contact-lens-searchers, to continue to look in the same place just because the lighting happens to be better there.

Biases are unavoidable; everyone's got 'em.  The important thing is to be aware of them; they can't bite you on the ass if you keep your eye on them.  In science -- well, in everything, really -- it's good to remember the iconic line from physicist Richard Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself; and you are the easiest person to fool."

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A self-portrait drawn by others

As you might imagine, I get hate mail pretty frequently.

Most of it has to do with my targeting somebody's sacred cow, be it homeopathy, fundamentalist religion, ESP, homophobia, climate change denial, or actual sacred cows.  And it seems to fall into three general categories:

• Insults, some of which never get beyond the "you stupid poopyhead fuckface" level. These usually have the worst grammar and spelling.

• Arguments that are meant to be stinging rebuttals. They seldom are, at least not from the standpoint of adding anything of scientific merit to the conversation, although their authors inevitably think they've skewered me with the sharp rapier of their superior knowledge. (Sometimes I get honest, thoughtful comments or criticisms on what I've written; I have always, and will always, welcome those.)

• Diatribes that tell me what I actually believe, as if I'm somehow unaware of it.

It's the latter I want to address in this post, because they're the ones I find the most curious.  I've got a bit of a temper myself, so I can certainly understand the desire to strike back with an insult at someone who's angered you; and it's unsurprising that a person who is convinced of something will want to rebut anyone who says different.  But the idea that I'd tell someone I was arguing with what they believed, as if I knew it better than they did, is just plain weird.

Here are a handful of examples from my fan mail, to illustrate what I'm talking about:

• In response to a post I did on the vitriolic nonsense spouted by televangelist Kenneth Copeland: "Atheists make me want to puke. You have the nerve to attack a holy man like Brother Kenneth Copeland.  You want to tear down the foundation of this country, which is it's [sic] churches and pastors, and tell Christian Americans they have no right to be here."

• In response to my post on a group of alt-med wingnuts who are proposing drinking turpentine to cure damn near everything: "You like to make fun of people who believe nature knows best for curing us and promoting good health.  You pro-Monsanto, pro-chemical types think that the more processed something is, the better it is for you.  I bet you put weed killer on your cereal in the morning."

• In response to a post in which I described my frustration with how many of our elected officials are in the pockets of fossil fuel corporations: "Keep reading us your fairy tales about 'climate change' and 'rising sea levels.'  Your motives are clear, to destroy America's economy and hand over the reigns [sic] to the wacko vegetarian enviro nuts.  Now that at least the REPUBLICANS in government are actually looking out for AMERICAN interests, not to mention a good man running for president who will put our country first when he's re-elected, people like you are crapping your pants because you know your [sic] not going to be in control any more."

• And finally, in response to a post I did on the fact that the concept of race has little biological meaning: "You really don't get it do you?  From your picture you're as white as I am, and you're gonna stand there and tell me that you have no problem being overrun by people who have different customs and don't speak English?  Let's see how you feel when your kid's teacher requires them to learn Arabic."

So, let's see.  That makes me a white English-only wacko vegetarian enviro nut (with crap in my pants) who eats weed killer for breakfast while writing checks to Monsanto and plotting how to tear down churches and deport all Christians so I can destroy the United States.

Man, I've got a lot on my to-do list today.

I know it's a common tendency to want to attribute some set of horrible characteristics to the people we disagree with.  It engages all that tribal mentality stuff that's pretty deeply ingrained in our brains -- us = good, them = bad.  The problem is, reality is a hell of a lot more complex that that, and it's only seldom that you can find someone who is so bad that they have no admixture whatsoever of good, no justification for what they're doing, no explanation at all for how they got to be the way they are.  We're all mixed-up cauldrons of conflicting emotions.  It's hard to understand ourselves half the time; harder still to parse the motives of others.

So let me disabuse my detractors of a few notions.

While I'm not religious myself, I really have a live-and-let-live attitude toward religious folks, as long as they're not trying to impose their religion on others or using it as an excuse to deny others their rights as humans.  I have religious friends and non-religious friends and friends who don't care much about the topic one way or the other, and mostly we all get along pretty well.

I have to admit, though, that being a card-carrying atheist, I do have to indulge every so often in the dietary requirements as set forth in the official Atheist Code of Conduct.

Speaking of diet, I'm pretty far from a vegetarian, even when I'm not dining on babies.  In fact, I think that a medium-rare t-bone steak with a glass of good red wine is one of the most delicious things ever conceived by the human species.  But neither am I a chemical-lovin' pro-Monsanto corporate shill who drinks a nice steaming mug of RoundUp in the morning.  I'll stick with coffee, thanks.

Yes, I do accept climate change, because I am capable of reading and understanding a scientific paper and also do not think that because something is inconvenient to American economic expediency, it must not be true.  I'd rather that the US economy doesn't collapse, mainly because I live here, but I'd also like my grandchildren to be born on a planet that is habitable in the long term.

And finally: yes, I am white.  You got me there.  If I had any thought of denying it, it was put to rest when I did a 23 & Me test and found out that I'm... white.  My ancestry is nearly all from western Europe, unsurprising given that three of my grandparents were of French descent and one of Scottish descent.  But my being white doesn't mean that I always have to place the concerns of other white people first, or fear people who aren't white, or pass laws making sure that America stays white.  For one thing, it'd be a little hypocritical if I demanded that everyone in the US speak English, given that my mother and three of my grandparents spoke French as their first language; and trust me when I say that I would have loved my kids to learn Arabic in school.  The more other cultures you learn about in school, the better, largely because it's hard to hate people when you realize that they're human, just like you are.

So anyway.  Nice try telling me who I am, but you got a good many of the details wrong.  Inevitable, I suppose, when it's a self-portrait drawn by someone else.  Next time, maybe you should try engaging the people you disagree with in dialogue, rather than ridiculing, demeaning, dismissing, or condescending to them.  It's in general a nicer way to live, and who knows?  Maybe you'll learn something.

And if you want to know anything about me, just ask rather than making assumptions.  It's not like I'm shy about telling people what I think.  Kind of hiding in plain sight, here.

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Top of the heap

I don't understand why, amongst prehistoric animals, dinosaurs get all the attention.

Don't get me wrong, I like dinosaurs just fine, but there are so many others that are insanely cool.  

Many of which would be no fun to meet close-up.

Take, for example, the gorgonopsians, that had their heyday in the mid to late Permian Period.  These creatures were serious badasses -- apex predators that predated most of the dinosaurs, and which actually are a sister clade to the one containing mammals (Cynodontia), making them far more closely related to us than they are to a velociraptor.  The name means "looks like a Gorgon" -- referring, of course, to the terrifying monster from Greek mythology.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mario Lanzas, Inostrancevia reconstruction, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The above shows a size comparison between Inostrancevia, one of the largest gorgonopsians, and a human.  You have to wonder why this guy is willing to walk right behind it like that, hands in his jacket pockets, whistling a tune.  Of course, I'm reminded of observing human behavior around bison, elk, and even once a juvenile grizzly bear, when I was in Yellowstone National Park, where many people seemed to think the place was an enormous petting zoo.  We talked to an exasperated ranger, who told us that his main job in the park was "keeping stupid tourists from committing suicide by wild animal."

But I digress.

Anyhow, the selective pressures on carnivores triggered something like convergent evolution between the gorgonopsians and (much more recent) animals like saber-toothed cats.  Gorgonopsians had elongated canine teeth and serrated molars, perfect for killing and slicing up prey.  The jaw morphology indicated that they had something like a ninety-degree gape, allowing for an enormous bite force when they closed.

Inostrancevia latifrons, attacking what is about to be an ex-Scutosaurus [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Creator: Dmitry Bogdanov, Inostranc lati2DB, CC BY 3.0]

Gorgonopsian fossils have been found primarily in two places -- Russia and South Africa.  While they're pretty distant from each other now, keep in mind that in the Permian, they (and every other land mass on Earth) were a lot closer:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Massimo Bernardi, MUSE, Trento, Italy. Published by Michael J. Benton., Permian–Triassic paleoclimate, CC BY 4.0]

The gorgonopsians were the top-tier carnivores for over twenty million years -- which, to put it in perspective, is around a hundred times longer than anatomically-modern humans have been in existence.  And who knows how long that hegemony would have lasted, and what direction history (well, prehistory) would have taken, but catastrophe was on the horizon.  The powder keg had been filled to overflowing during the preceding period, the Carboniferous, when high temperatures and precipitation had fostered the formation of enormous swaths of rain forest and swamp, leading to the accumulation of vast coal beds.  The climate had been drying out through the entire Permian, but the fuse was lit with the eruption of the Siberian Traps, the biggest volcanic eruption ever recorded.  The outpouring of lava ripped through the coal seams, depleting oxygen and dumping gigantic amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and spiking the global average temperature by an estimated fourteen degrees Celsius.

The result: 95% of life on Earth became extinct, including the gorgonopsians.  The biggest, meanest, most badass predators of the Permian were one of the many groups that didn't survive the cataclysmic bottleneck between the Permian and Triassic Periods.

What did survive was the group that was to dominate everything for the next 180 million years -- the dinosaurs.  And, obviously, our own ancestors, the cynodonts, who at that point were pretty much small, scurrying, shrew-like beasts that a visitor to Earth wouldn't think could ever amount to much.  But as you know, the dinosaurs had their heyday come to a sudden, unexpected, and violent end as well, 66 million years ago.

Just shows that nothing stays on top forever -- something our policymakers might do well to heed, because we're the only animals on Earth that have the intelligence to recognize that what we're doing might endanger our own survival, and potentially do something about it.

We're not immune to the fates of other groups that, in their time, seemed like they'd be permanently on the top of the heap.  

Let's hope we can learn from our planet's past history.

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Size matters

Something odd happens when we consider scales much larger or smaller than our ordinary experience; our imagination fails.

It's why people seem not to comprehend the difference between millionaires and billionaires.  Millionaires are wealthy, yes.  But billionaires?  

If a person with a billion dollars gave away a million dollars a day, 365 days a year -- in other words, creating one new millionaire every day -- (s)he wouldn't run out for almost three years.  The fact that people lump together millionaires and billionaires as both simply "rich" indicates we don't have a good way to conceptualize how big a billion actually is.

The same thing happens when you look at anything that's very small.  In my biology classes, we did a lab where students learned how to estimate measurements using a microscope.  Knowing the magnification and the field diameter (the actual width of the bit of the slide you're looking at), it's a fairly simple calculation to estimate the size of (for example) a cell.

What I found the most interesting was that after performing the calculation, most students had no clue whether the answer they'd come up with was even within the ballpark.  Most of the time, if they did make an error, it was a simple computational goof; but the curious thing was that they couldn't tell if they were even in the right realm.  0.001 meters?  0.000001 meters?  0.000000000001 meters?  All looks pretty similar -- "small."

(Then there's the student who multiplied when she should have divided, and told me that a plant cell was 103 meters in diameter.  "Don't you think that's a bit... on the large size?" I asked her.  She responded, "Is it?"  I told her 103 meters was a little longer than a typical football field.  She responded, "Oh.")

This problem crops up in fields like subatomic physics (on one end) and, germane to today's topic, astrophysics (on the other).  What got me thinking about it was a paper this week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics about a distant quasar with the euphonious name VIK J2348-3054.  Quasars are extraordinarily luminous objects which were a puzzle for a long time -- viewed through earthly telescopes they appear as single dim, star-like spots, but based on their redshifts they are enormously far away (and thus, even to be visible at all from that distance their actual luminosity has to be crazy high).  The current models support quasars as being supermassive black holes at the centers of young galaxies, emitting high-energy radiation and particles as they swallow vast amounts of gas and dust in a wildly spinning whirlpool called an accretion disk.

[Image credit: M. Kornmesser/European Southern Observatory]

An energy output that high causes disruption in the entire region surrounding it.  It heats and/or blows away gas and dust nearby, which overcomes the gravitational collapse of clumps of material and thus suppresses star formation.  And this quasar is so powerful it has stopped the formation of new stars in a region with a radius of over sixteen million light years.

Stop and ponder that for a moment.

Sixteen million light years isn't just big, it's abso-fucking-lutely enormous.  It's six times the distance between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy.  Put into units that more of us are comfortable with, this is about 160,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers.

Of course, I'm not sure how much even that helps.  Once again, our imaginations simply fail us.  Perhaps this will frame it better; the fastest human-made vehicle, Voyager 1, is traveling at about 61,000 kilometers per hour.  At this rate, Voyager 1 will have covered one light year in about eighteen thousand years.  And that's not even the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri (if it was heading that direction, which it's not).

To travel the distance that has been cleared by this quasar, Voyager 1 would take a bit less than three hundred billion years -- about twenty times the age of the universe.

I don't even know how to wrap my brain around a number this big.  I may not have the difficulty with numbers my long-ago student had with her football-field-sized plant cell, but I have sat here all morning trying to understand what it means for something to work over this kind of size range, and I just can't manage it.

The inevitable result is that this kind of thing makes us feel pretty small.  I'm actually okay with that.  The universe is a grand, beautiful, and abso-fucking-lutely enormous place.  It's a good thing to look up into the night sky and feel awe, to realize that every star you see is (relatively speaking) close by, occupying a small spherical region in one arm of a completely ordinary galaxy, of which there are millions more scattered across the vastness of space.

We humans get a little big for our britches, sometimes.  A dose of humility is needed every so often.

And if it comes from the realm of science, so much the better.

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Underwater cherry-picking

Because my son has an odd sense of humor (Wonder where he got that from?  It's a puzzle), for my last birthday he got me a copy of Graham Hancock's 2002 book Underworld: The Mysterious Origin of Civilization.  Hancock is notorious in skeptical circles for his outlandish ideas about... well, damn near everything.

I use the word "outlandish" deliberately, because he not only propounds dozens of claims about the origins of earthly cultures, he also has an entire book on the "Face on Mars," which is supposedly evidence of an advanced civilization on the Red Planet that was later wiped out by a cataclysm, but which turns out to be a bigass pile of rocks that only looks like a face if you (1) aim your camera at it from one specific direction, (2) make sure the photograph is grainy and low-resolution, and (3) squint your eyes at it real hard.

Hancock is not above messing with the facts to make them fit his favorite pseudoarchaeological "theories."  RationalWiki, never ones to mince words, describe a tiff he got into over the Egyptian pyramids:

[H]e aligned the Giza complex to the constellation of Orion as it was some 10,000 years ago, although the BBC program Horizon thought otherwise.  They claimed that Hancock had fiddled with the locations of some of the temples to fit in with his own theories, and had even ignored the texts carved on the temples themselves, which explained quite clearly why and when they had been built.  Hancock cried foul to the Broadcasting Standards Commission, who politely told him to sod off.

So he's a little suspect right from the get-go.  Then add to this the fact that he's appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, which by itself reduces someone's credibility level to the dimensions of your typical subatomic particle.

Despite this, his books are international bestsellers, which makes a writer like myself grind my teeth down to nubs.

But all envy aside, I decided to read Underworld.  I figured at least it was worth the time from the standpoint of entertainment.  

There's no doubt he's got a compelling style, with a keen eye for description and detail, and does know a good deal about the places he visits.  You can see why unwary readers find him convincing.  But if you start looking at just about all of his claims with any care at all, you find that his foremost talent is cherry-picking.

Historian Garrett Fagan's 2006 book Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public gives dozens of examples of Hancock's selective use of evidence -- such as his claim that Antarctica was ice-free six thousand years ago (ignoring geological and ice core data showing that it's been completely glaciated for at least a hundred thousand years), and that the Bolivian archaeological site of Tiwanaku has been the subject of "minimal archaeology" and is "a mysterious site about which very little is known" (actually, it's been extensively studied, including radioisotope analysis strongly contradicting Hancock's assertion that it's over ten thousand years old).

So the approach appears to be "mention only the evidence that supports your claim, and cite only people who agree with you."

Hell, it worked for Erich von Däniken, right?

To take one example from Underworld, there's Yonaguni Monument, which I had never heard of before.  Yonaguni is an underwater rock formation in the Ryukyu Island chain.  There's no doubt it's peculiar:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Melkov, Yonaguni Monument Terraces midpart NWW, CC0 1.0]

The edges are dead-straight, some with corners at perfect right angles.  Here's what Hancock writes about it:

The first anomalous structure that was discovered at Yonaguni lies below glowering cliffs of the southern shore of the island.  Local divers call it Iseki Point ("Monument Point").  Into its south face, at a depth of about 18 meters, an area of terracing with conspicuous flat planes and right angles has been cut.  Two huge parallel blocks weighing about 30 tonnes each and separated by a gap of less than 10 centimeters have been placed upright side by side at its northwest corner.  In about five meters of water at the very top of the structure there is a kidney-shaped "pool" and nearby is a feature that many divers believe is a crude rock-carved image of a turtle.  At the base of the monument, in 27 meters of water, there is a clearly defined stone-paved path oriented toward the east...

Two kilometers west of Iseki Point is the "Palace."  Here an underwater passageway leads into the northern end of a spacious chamber with megalithic walls and ceiling.  At the southern end of the chamber a tall, lintelled doorway leads into a second smaller chamber beyond.  At the end of that chamber is a vertical, rock-hewn shaft that emerges outside on the roof of the "Palace."  Nearby a flat rock bears a pattern of strange, deep grooves.  A little further east there is a second megalithic passage roofed by a gigantic slab that fits snugly against the tops of the supporting walls.

What's remarkable -- and insidious -- about the way this is written is that without giving any actual evidence, he deliberately chooses verbs implying that Yonaguni is an artificial construct.   "Cut."  "Placed upright."  "Carved."  "Paved."  "Oriented."  "Hewn."  Even the nouns do this: "Passageway."  "Roof."  "Lintel."  "Ceiling."  "Terrace."  "Path."

Once he sets you up this way, the rest of his argument -- if I can dignify it by that name -- goes something like this:

• Is Yonaguni a manmade structure?  Sure looks like it to me.
• To cut and place enormous stones with that precision requires significantly advanced technology.
• But it's under twenty-some-odd meters of water!  So it must have been built when the sea level was lower.
• When was the sea level that low?  Tens of thousands of years ago.  So that must be when Yonaguni was built.
• So the Ryukyu Islands were inhabited by a highly technological culture twenty thousand years ago.  Q.E.D.

The trouble is, the scientific consensus (I can almost hear Hancock shouting "to hell with the scientific consensus!", but we'll soldier on anyhow) is that Yonaguni is a completely natural formation, formed from shale and sandstone of Lower Miocene age.  Archaeologist Carl Feagans has studied the formation extensively, and after an analysis of the features of the structure (which I encourage you to read in its entirety) has the following to say:

The first and primary claim made about the Yonaguni Formation, that it is an artificial, megalithic construction, is not upheld.  Not if you’re a rational person who cares about evidence...

[N]one of the “features” [described as artificial] are supported by evidence that corroborates the claim.  There’s a lot of talk about “tool marks” but no evidence of these is shown.  There’s talk about artifacts, but no discussion on why they could not have been lost a sea by other means.  There’s a lot of “looks like” analogies but no physical evidence to show why they are anything more than pareidolia or imagination.

[T]here’s no evidence that the YF is anything more than a naturally occurring formation of shale and sandstone originally deposited in the Miocene and uplifted and inundated in the Pleistocene.

Look, I understand how easy it is to be fooled.  Only fifteen kilometers from where I live is a lovely spot called Lucifer Falls.  The bedrock around here is similar to Yonaguni -- shale, slate, limestone, and sandstone -- albeit a great deal older (our rocks are Devonian in age).  

And all along the path to Lucifer Falls are rocks with squared-off corners, some so flat they look like they must have been cut by humans.  But no.  Other than a few obvious stairs, walls, and platforms, the area around the falls is completely natural.  The rocks simply fractured that way.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Andrea Pagani, Lucifer Falls (232560709), CC BY-SA 3.0]

But Hancock knows all too well that "it's cool, but it's a natural rock formation" doesn't sell near as well as stuff like Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria.  So don't expect the cherry-picking to stop any time soon.

As far as Underworld goes, I guess I'll persist with reading it a bit more.  I've gotta be able to tell my son that at least I gave it the ol' college try.

But if Hancock brings up Ancient Aliens, I'm fucking done.

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The wreck of the Seabird

One of the difficulties with accepting tales of the paranormal, or even ones where the paranormal isn't explicitly invoked but which fall into the "unsolved mysteries" category, is that humans just love to tell stories.

And embellish them.

Once a claim has gone through a few generations of handing down, it's often hard to tell what about it -- if anything -- is actually the truth.

Take, for example, the story of the Seabird, a sailing vessel that met a very odd fate, reminiscent of the better-documented case of the Mary Celeste.  Here's a typical version:

On a strip of land near Newport, Rhode Island, there was a little settlement known as Easton's Beach.  Only a few farmers and some fishermen and their families made their homes there.

One day in 1880, a fisherman working on his boat near shore suddenly sighted a full-rigged ship of very good size heading straight for land...  [I]t was coming steadily and directly for shore in the on-shore breeze.  He called to the other fishermen nearby and ran to the settlement above the beach to tell the rest of the people about the approaching vessel.

Soon everyone was on the beach, watching in helpless silence as the strange ship came on as though determined to wreck itself, its canvas straining and flags snapping at the mastheads.

With horror the spectators heard the grating of the hull upon the bottom as it struck.  Yet the ship still bore down, keeping straight on course as it cut a keel groove in the sandy ocean bottom.  When it finally came to rest, it was still on an even keel, with the bowsprit almost over their heads.

Then they recognized the ship.  It was the Seabird, under the able command of Captain John Husham.  It had been to Honduras, and was expected that very day in Newport.  Not a sound came from the decks.

At once the crowd went on board to explain the mystery -- but it only deepened.  Coffee still boiled on the galley stove, food for breakfast was on the table, all the navigation instruments and charts were in order.  Yet there was no trace of the crew, nor any indication of when, why, or where they had gone.  The only living thing aboard the Seabird was a mongrel dog shivering on the deck.

The sea had been calm, the breeze fine, and the Seabird had been almost exactly on course for Newport.  The crew must have left only shortly before the ship had appeared on the horizon.  But why should they have left the ship when they were so close to their home and families?  Only Heaven and a mongrel dog knew what had happened aboard the Seabird that sunny morning.

Creepy stuff, right?  And it seems like it should be easy to verify, given that "everyone" from the town witnessed the ship beach itself, and a whole "crowd" of them saw the empty decks for themselves, as well as the peculiar observation of the breakfast food laid out for the crew that indicated that whatever had caused them to vanish had just happened.  It's one of those stories that when you read it, the natural inclination is to say, "There's enough detail here that it has the ring of truth."  The name of the captain, the ship's origin and destination, all sound like stuff that would be simple to verify.  And, after all, there wasn't any wild explanation given; no explanation at all, really.  A ship shows up sans crew, with a dog as the lone survivor.

And thus, the tendency is to believe it must be true.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ronnie Robertson, Ghost Ship IMG 2744 (28440601905), CC BY-SA 2.0]

But the owner of the curious site EsoterX was not content to leave it there.  He started poking around to see what, if any, of the information in the story of the Seabird could be substantiated.  And he found that the version I related above is far from the only one, and that those details -- the same specifics that made the story sound so convincing -- vary greatly from version to version:

This is a fairly rudimentary set of facts, but as I poked into the various accounts of the Seabird, even the simplest plot points of the narrative were found to be in dispute.  The event is variously dated to 1750, 1760, and 1850...   The missing captain was one John Husham.  Or maybe not.  He might have been John Huxham, or perhaps even John Durham of Middletown, Connecticut.  The ship may have refloated itself overnight and sailed away, never to be seen again.  Or, as fairly detailed accounts have it, was salvaged and used commercially for many years after without incident.  Or, was parked in the Newport harbor, where it was later captured by the British and turned into an armed gunboat.

Even the non-human survivors vary; some versions say it was a dog and a cat, others a dog, a cat, and a parakeet.

By this time, whatever truth there may have been to the wreck of the Seabird is probably unrecoverable, tangled up in the inevitable Game of Telephone that occurs when people tell stories.  As EsoterX put it:

Much of human history is oral history, the tales we tell each other around the campfire or by the hearth, but for the past few thousand years we’ve tended to lionize the printed word, shuffling kings and their wars into history, and mysterious accounts passed from generation to generation by word of mouth into folklore.  We substantiate the reality of history by writing it down, but the further in time we creep from events, the less we understand the minds of the men that wrote them, gleaning the odd fact here and there, chuckling at their superstitions, and manipulating the warp and weave of their remembered histories to fill in those annoying plot holes that interrupt our remembered tales.

In other words, a claim like this is only as accurate as the person who tells it -- and the person who told it to them, and the one who told it to them, and on and on back into the mists of the past.  Sometimes we can learn enough from contemporaneous records to reconstruct what actually happened; but sometimes -- as in the case of the Seabird -- the truth is lost as completely as the ship's unfortunate crew members.

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The source of the Altar Stone

One of the frustrations of history and archaeology is that within those disciplines there are realms of inquiry which (unless someone invents a time machine) will never be answered, because the required information simply doesn't exist.  For societies that left few or no written records -- which, unfortunately, is most of them -- we have to rely upon inference from artifacts, which can be seriously thin ice.

The shakiness of these inferences was famously lampooned in Horace Mitchell Miner's scathing satire on anthropological papers called "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema," published in 1956, which looks at American culture ("Nacirema," of course, is "American" backwards) solely from our artifacts and a slim set of observations of our behaviors.  Here's a passage about what anthropologists might make of our medicine cabinets:

The focal point of the shrine is a box or chest which is built into the wall. In this chest are kept the many charms and magical potions without which no native believes he could live.  These preparations are secured from a variety of specialized practitioners.  The most powerful of these are the medicine men, whose assistance must be rewarded with substantial gifts.  However, the medicine men do not provide the curative potions for their clients, but decide what the ingredients should be and then write them down in an ancient and secret language.  This writing is understood only by the medicine men and by the herbalists who, for another gift, provide the required charm.

The charm is not disposed of after it has served its purpose, but is placed in the charm-box of the household shrine.  As these magical materials are specific for certain ills, and the real or imagined maladies of the people are many, the charm-box is usually full to overflowing.  The magical packets are so numerous that people forget what their purposes were and fear to use them again.  While the natives are very vague on this point, we can only assume that the idea in retaining all the old magical materials is that their presence in the charm-box, before which the body rituals are conducted, will in some way protect the worshiper.

Beneath the charm-box is a small font.  Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution.  The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure.

So we might well wonder why our ancestors did certain things, but Miner's essay reminds us to rein in our speculation hard.

I was reminded of this when I read a paper this week in Nature about the origin of one of the stones in Stonehenge, the so-called "Altar Stone" that is in the middle of the famous ring.  Geoscientist Anthony Clarke, of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, did a detailed chemical analysis of chips taken from the Altar Stone, trying to figure out where the builders had obtained it -- and found the nearest match was a rock formation called the Orcadian Basin, 750 kilometers away in northeastern Scotland.

While the outer ring stones match nearby rock formations, the Altar Stone is not the only one that was hauled in from a distant source.  The stones of the inner ring, for example, are dolerite bluestone, from the Preseli Hills of Wales.  

But the Altar Stone seems to have come from farther away still.

[Image credit: A. J. Clarke et. al., Nature, August 2024]

The obvious question is... why?  Why go to all the trouble to bring an enormous slab of rock a distance of 750 kilometers, when there was perfectly good building stone nearby?  While the common misapprehension ties Stonehenge to the Celtic druids, the truth is that by the time the Celts arrived, Stonehenge was already two thousand years old.  The people who built Stonehenge -- and such ring-shaped monuments all over western Europe -- belong to a Neolithic culture called the Megalith Builders, about whom we know next to nothing.  Probably not coincidentally, there are nearly a hundred such stone circles in Aberdeenshire, where the rock of the Altar Stone is thought to have originated.  

So did the builders of Stonehenge come south from Scotland, bringing the Altar Stone with them because that particular rock had some kind of ritual significance?

The truth is, we'll probably never know why they did it.  There's no doubt it's puzzling, though.  Just building Stonehenge is enough of a feat for people with no cranes and backhoes; the fact that they brought the Welsh bluestone in from 225 kilometers away, and the Altar Stone from nearly three times that, can't help but make us wonder.

But the ones who could explain it have been dead and buried for four thousand years, so this leaves us with another mystery that's unlikely ever to be answered.  We can only speculate -- while taking care not to make the same kind of mistake that we saw with the Nacireman magical charm-box.

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