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Shots Fired in the Battle Over the Cinmar Biface . . . But Does it Actually Matter to the Solutrean Hypothesis?

5/31/2015

The Cinmar biface featured on the cover of Stanford and Bradley's (2013) book. Image source: http://smithsonianscience.si.edu/2012/01/new-book-across-atlantic-ice-the-origin-of-americas-clovis-culture/

This week, Darrin Lowery responded to questions raised about the circumstances of the discovery of the Cinmar biface, a bi-pointed stone tool that resembles, at least superficially, artifacts made and used by the Solutrean peoples of Upper Paleolithic Europe. The point was reportedly dredged up in 1970 by a scallop boat named the Cinmar (hence the name) operating off the Atlantic coast of North America, and associated with mastodon bones that were radiocarbon dated to 22,760 +/- 90 RCYBP (UCIAMS-53545). The Cinmar biface has assumed a prominent place in the debate about the Solutrean hypothesis (the idea that Upper Paleolithic peoples from western Europe colonized eastern North America sometime between about 21,000 to 17,000 years ago), even gracing the cover of the 2013 book about the idea by Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley, its two main advocates.

The circumstances of the Cinmar discovery were called into question in a paper by Metin Eren, Matthew Boulanger, and Michael O'Brien titled "The Cinmar Discovery and the Proposed Pre-Late Glacial Maximum Occupation of North America," published in the Journal of Archaeological Science (JAS) in March of this year. Eren et al. questioned the history and details of the find, focusing particularly on inconsistencies and omissions in the various accounts of the discovery. The JAS is a high profile venue, and the paper by Metin et al. generated a significant amount of discussion among archaeologists interested in the peopling of the Americas.

Full disclosure: I consider Metin Eren a friend of mine. We have some overlapping research interests, and have occasionally exchanged emails and papers. I think we've even had beers together at one or two professional conferences.

I should also say that I'm very skeptical of the Solutrean hypothesis. The claim of a trans-Atlantic colonization of North America during the Last Glacial Maximum is an extraordinary one, and I have seen nothing so far that convinces me it is correct. I'm not alone. The Solutrean hypothesis does not enjoy widespread support among North American archaeologists for a number of reasons (see this 2014 exchange for some summary arguments). Unfortunately, it has captured the imaginations of some ugly elements outside of the professional community, serving as the basis for white supremacist and neo-Nazi fantasies about the importance of white people to North American prehistory. That's not the fault of the developers and proponents of the idea, but it's a social dimension to the Solutrean hypothesis that is nonetheless worth being aware of and keeping an eye on.

After reading through both the JAS paper and Lowery's self-published response, I can't say much has changed for me. The discussion about the circumstances of the Cinmar discovery is an interesting one (especially if you like to see an argument), but it's a debate about the details of a single discovery that, in my opinion, doesn't have the power to "prove" anything either way. Despite its appearance on the cover of a book and a charged exchange about the credibility of the artifact and those who are interested in it, the Cinmar biface doesn't really matter.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

On the one hand, what if the case for the Cinmar biface is materially flawed and you just have to throw it out? Eren et al. ask several pointed questions about the discovery, any one of which could potentially sink it as a reliable piece of evidence. Maybe we can't be sure it was in the same dredge load as the mastodon bones, or maybe we can't be sure the artifact was even recovered at sea. So maybe the Cinmar biface means nothing in archaeological terms because we just can't trust it.

But, on the other hand, what if everything about the Cinmar discovery is "best case scenario" for the Solutrean hypothesis? Let's the say we can be sure the point was dredged up in 1970 in the same immediate area as some mastodon remains - what does that actually get us? The "association" between the point and the fauna (on which the age estimate is based) is still incredibly weak, leaving us still with just a single stone point largely without context. Is that the kind of "site" that will change anyone's mind about something as significant as the first colonization of the Americas? I don't think so, and history agrees with me. Think about the sites that have been pivot points in our acceptance of alternative ideas about prehistory in the western hemisphere: L'Anse aux Meadows, Monte Verde, Folsom . . . those were all sites with clear evidence that falsified an existing model. Proponents and skeptics could stand there together and look at the deposits and have a meeting of the minds about what they meant. That's never going to be the case with something like the Cinmar biface. A point that "resembles" a Solutrean artifact with a provenience of "same dredge load as some mastodon bones" is not at the level of a site like Monte Verde - not even close. Under the most charitable reading it doesn't have the power to move the needle on acceptance of the Solutrean hypothesis. By itself it's just not a game changer.

What would be a game changer? Proponents of the Solutrean hypothesis are going to have to find, excavate, and document a real site: good artifacts in good contexts with good dates. Period. If the hypothesis is correct, those sites should be identifiable. The Cinmar biface was made from an inland raw material source, so there should be some sites on dry land with clear evidence of a Solutrean occupation. All you need is one. One good site trumps dozens of finds of purported Solutrean or Solutrean-like artifacts with poor or no context. Think about how many sites with "associations" between stone projectile points and extinct fauna were dismissed in North America prior to the acceptance of the antiquity of humans in the New World demonstrated by careful excavations at the Folsom site. The Solutrean hypothesis will ultimately need something similar.

The burden of proof in this situation pretty clearly has to be on the advocates of the Solutrean hypothesis: it is impossible to use material evidence to prove that Solutrean peoples did not make it to North America (just as we cannot prove they are not currently orbiting the sun in a teapot). The falsifiable hypothesis in this case is that there was no colonization of North America by Upper Paleolithic peoples from Europe. That's what would need to be proved wrong. Does the Cinmar biface, even under the best of circumstances, do that? I would say no. And I would also say that eliminating the Cinmar biface as a piece of evidence doesn't "disprove" the Solutrean hypothesis. Basically, I think that with or without the Cinmar biface the Solutrean hypothesis remains an idea based on an assemblage of circumstantial evidence, none of which at this point appears to be critical to whether the hypothesis is viable or not. I think the Cinmar biface would not change that equation for me even if I had plucked it from the dredge myself. It's just not enough.

Other than it's relevance to archaeology, the Cinmar discussion is interesting because of the speed and openness with which it's taking place. The JAS paper was published open access, so it's available to everyone. Lowery published his response less than two months later on Academia.edu (again, available to everyone). I'm not sure if there's a precedent for this sort of thing - we may be watching something new. It will be interesting to see if the discussion continues and, if so, at what pace and in what format.

Even though I don't think the Cinmar biface is as crtitical to the viability of the Solutrean hypothesis as it has been made out to be, I do welcome the vigorous questioning of evidence. I think it tells you something important about where the debate about the Solutrean hypothesis is at the moment: it's a lot of energy expended over the minutiae of an artifact that greatly diminishes in perceived importance if a single "good" site can be located. That's what I'll be watching for.

Eren, M., Boulanger, M., & O'Brien, M. (2015). The Cinmar discovery and the proposed pre-Late Glacial Maximum occupation of North America Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2015.03.001

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What's a "Species"?

5/29/2015

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The naming of a new species of hominid -- Australopithecus deyiremeda -- made a lot of news this week. The purpose of this post is not to worry over the details of the fossils that were used to construct this new taxon, but to ask for some clarification about what is actually meant by the term "species" as paleoanthropologists use it. I'm going to tell you what I think it means, then I'm going to complain about it a little bit, then I'm going to ask you to tell me what you think it means. (Full disclosure: I fall at the lumper end of the lumper-splitter spectrum, and I think there are too many named "species" in our family tree.)

In their paper, titled "New Species from Ethiopia Further Expands Middle Pliocene Hominin Diversity" (Nature 521:483-488), Yohannes Halie-Selassie and colleagues use the word "species" 17 times but provide no explicit definition of the term. What is a "species"? What are the implications of defining a "new species" of hominid?

Like so many other things, it depends. There exists a smorgasbord of different species concepts to choose from. A "typological species," for example, is a classification based on the co-occurrence of shared features, while an "evolutionary species" is defined based on the integrity of an ancestral lineage (without branching, there is no new species). A "biological species" is generally defined as a group of organisms that can breed with one another but not with other groups of organisms. In other words, a biological species is reproductively isolated from all other biological species. The biological species concept is perhaps the one most frequently applied in biology, especially to living populations of plants and animals.

I think a "biological species" is also what most people, paleoanthropologists included, mean when they talk about "species" of hominids.

The distinctions among the various species concepts are not just academic when they're applied to fossil hominids. They have implications for our notions about what variability means in the fossil record and how we interpret that variability in terms of the patterns and processes of human evolution. Because reproductive isolation is the entire basis of the biological species concept, individuals in a biological species (by definition) could not and did not interbreed with any of their contemporaries outside their own species. There cannot be multiple, co-existing species of human ancestors: a "new species" is either a human ancestor or somewhere off on a side-branch of our evolutionary family tree. The discovery of a human ancestor that pushes someone else off onto a side branch is much more exciting that the discovery of another non-contender. You can see that in the enthusiasm of headlines about Australopithecus deyiremeda such as "Doubt cast on Lucy's place in human evolution" and "New hominid discovery older than Lucy raises more questions on human ancestry." They might as well read "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on way out, Lucy."

I'm not an expert on paleoanthropology, and I've never directly analyzed or attempted to describe or classify the remains of a fossil hominid. But I am someone who regularly attempts to describe variability (mostly in lithic artifacts) and make sound interpretations about what that variability means. In any case, when you're looking at continuous variability, you can split all you want. There is easily detectable variability in just about everything not produced by a machine, so ultimately it's no great feat to break continuous variability down into as small of groups as you want (groups of one, if that makes you happy). But what do those groups mean? That's a hard question to answer without having a sample of a decent size that let's you investigate how the variability you're looking at is structured. That's why I'm a fan of trying to understand how variability is structured before trying to create groupings that have some analytical value.

The pitfall of aggressive splitting of the fossil record is that the groupings you produce (the biological species) are tied to important assumptions about the processes that produced those groupings. While I think the biological species concept is one that is clear and makes ecological and evolutionary sense, I also think its uncritical application to the fossil record is less than useful. First, I think it's impossible to operationalize consistently and objectively (how can you determine if the populations represented by fossil individuals were capable of inter-breeding?). So I don't trust that "species" that are equivalent in taxonomic terms reflect populations that are equivalent in evolutionary terms. Second, I think naming lots of "species" short-circuits our study of what variability in the fossil record means by erring on the side of attributing it to species-level differences. Under the biological species concept, species are non-overlapping, nominal categories, and speciation is a one-way street. By calling a fossil hominid a new biological species, you are making a statement about the nature of the relationship between that fossil and all other fossil hominids. Given the sparse nature of the fossil record, I don't think that we can really make those kinds of statements with much confidence. Using the scalpel of the biological species concept ties us to those assumptions, however.

So I'm very skeptical of the reality of the number of named species that currently inhabit the hominid family tree. How many are there now? Twenty? Thirty? More? I wonder what would happen if we started fresh and re-analyzed all the Pliocene and Pleistocene hominid fossils discovered over the last 120 years. What would the structure of variability look like, and how would we interpret that variability if we erased all the existing species names and the historical legacies of discovery that accompanied them and based our groupings on patterns of variability across time and space? Who knows. I also wonder how many "species" of domestic dogs paleoanthropologists would define given a sampling of their bones.

Anyway, splitters be splittin,' and there's not much I can do about it. When I taught my 200-level Human Origins class last year, I made the decision to focus not on the minutiae of "species" in the fossil record, but on what various lines of evidence could tell us about the timing, processes, causes, and effects of changes in human anatomy and behavior over evolutionary time. We talked about species concepts and why they matter, and I gave my class my opinion that we're too quick to name new species and perhaps too reluctant to first look at what variability might mean outside the constraints of a species-level classification. Is Homo antecessor a legitimate "biological species"? Is the Homo erectus/ergaster division useful? If we know that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens exchanged DNA, why are we still calling them separate species?

Maybe I've wrongly identified the dominant species concept that is active in the background of paleoanthropological thought. Maybe a new name isn't meant to assume reproductive isolation and all that that implies. If I've gotten it wrong, please correct me. Maybe I missed something somewhere. In my own published work, I've been asked to provide clarifying definitions for such controversial terms such as "household," "process," "model," and "projectile point." President Clinton famously debated the meaning of the word "is." Is it too much to ask for a clarifying definition of "species" when we define a new one?

Update (6/5/2015): This post was discussed in Barbara King's blog post for NPR titled "Declaring The Discovery Of A New Species Can Get Tricky."

Haile-Selassie Y, Gibert L, Melillo SM, Ryan TM, Alene M, Deino A, Levin NE, Scott G, & Saylor BZ (2015). New species from Ethiopia further expands Middle Pliocene hominin diversity. Nature, 521 (7553), 483-8 PMID: 26017448

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Six Fingers AND "Double Rows of Teeth"? Show me.

5/28/2015

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If I had a nickel for every time I've read online that accounts of "giants" describe them as having "six fingers and toes on each limb and a double row of teeth" I would be sleeping in a pile of Benjamins tonight. Do a Google search for "six fingers double row teeth" and you'll see what I mean. You can find the idea repeated time and time again, for example on this page and this one apparently put together by Kristan Harris, crappy pages like this one, UFO-related books like this one, Adam Schwartzbauer's paper, Nephilim fiction, and in the book that L. A. Marzulli will let you have for fifty bucks. Those are just a few examples.

Is there an association between polydactyly (having extra digits) and "double rows of teeth" in accounts of giants? Setting aside for a moment the issue of whether giants are actually real, let's just focus on whether this often-repeated association between extra fingers and extra teeth has any basis.

Until someone proves me wrong, my answer is "no:" there is no association between polydactyly and "double rows of teeth" in the accounts of giants.

I can't recall a single instance that I've seen of a report of a giant skeleton from North America (or anywhere else) that specifies that both a "double row of teeth" and "six fingers" were present. I think these two "traits" have gotten welded together by the uncritical imagination of giant enthusiasts. The "and" joining these two sets of traits should actually be an "or."

I've argued that the phrases "double rows of teeth" and "double teeth all around" weren't intended, in most cases, to actually indicate that multiple, layered rows of teeth were present. I think the use of those phrases is related to 19th century idioms used in American English.

Conversely, the "six fingers" reference apparently comes primarily from the biblical description of Goliath (1 Chronicles 20:6):

"And yet again there was war at Gath, where was a man of great stature, whose fingers and toes were four and twenty, six on each hand, and six on each foot: and he also was the son of the giant."

Did Goliath, the most famous six-fingered giant, have "double rows of teeth"? Well, let's ask T. M. Sparks in his book Giants: The Amazing Truth (chapter 1):

"Now these children were not part of God's creation, they were mutated forms of life. They were giants of our past; they would have six fingers and six toes on each limb. They also had double rows of teeth. Goliath came from this lineage having 6 fingers and 6 toes also. His teeth were not mentioned in Scripture, only the toes and fingers of his brothers were. But I am sure he had this distinction as well."

So there you have it: the Bible doesn't actually say it using actual words, but it's surely true . . . because everyone knows giants have six fingers, six toes, and double rows of teeth, right?

No, not really. That's a swing and a miss if you care about evidence.

I remember I heard once that there was a giant who had a goose that laid golden eggs. So maybe we should just throw that in there with Goliath also.

Let's make this a falsifiable hypothesis. I'll state there is no primary account of a giant (i.e., neither a description of a skeleton nor a historical text) that actually specifies the presence of both polydactyly and "double rows of teeth." Can any of you falsify that hypothesis and point me to a primary source that describes a giant with both polydactyly and "double rows of teeth"? If you can, then we can talk about how common the association is. But let's first just start with one.

Until then, I think this association between "double rows of teeth" and "six fingers" is another thing to throw into the category of a modern myth.

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Dragonflies

5/28/2015

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This post has nothing to do with archaeology, anthropology, or giants.

Well, that's probably not true. As a fan of complexity science, I have learned never to assume that different phenomena or domains of inquiry are not somehow related. So I can't explain exactly if and how I will eventually incorporate dragonflies into my work, but I shouldn't say that I won't. Because I probably will. Because they're awesome. Anyway, it's my blog and I'll write about whatever I want.

White-faced meadowhawk (Sympetrum obtrusum), adult male. Battle Creek, MI, August 2014.

Common whitetail (Plathemis lydia), adult male. Ann Arbor, MI, May 2015.

I have loved dragonflies since I was a little kid. I grew up on a farm that had a ditch running through it (I used to think it was a creek, but now I know it was a ditch), and I remember very clearly trying to catch dragonflies using whatever means possible. I would try to grab them. I would throw stuff at them. I would try to knock them out of the air with water. If you've ever spent any time watching them, you'll appreciate their agility - they can turn on a dime in flight and go from traveling at blurrying speed to a dead stop in what seems like an instant. They're remarkable to observe and very tough to catch. They were not in much danger from me. I only remember one time where I successfully got my hands on one. It quickly bit me and I quickly let it go.

Over the past year or so, I have re-kindled my love affair with dragonflies and have taken to trying to photograph them. Noticing the small pieces of the world comes naturally when you go for walks with little kids: the slowed pace gives you the opportunity to train your attention on details that you might otherwise gloss over. So the dragonflies have started popping out at me again, and I've started looking for them.

Dragonflies can be tough quarry. I have yet to photograph one in flight - they're just too fast and they move too frequently. When they stop flying, they don't tend to sit still for long and will often quickly zoom off when approached. I've attempted identifications from the few clear, close-up photos I've managed to get, but I'm not an insect person in the sense that I have any professional expertise or training, so it's more-or-less educated guesswork based on the information that's available online and in the book A Field Guide to Insects by Donald J. Borror and Richard E. White. That second author is my uncle, which may also have something to do with my childhood interest in the small world that has now carried over into my adult life.

Of the many fascinating things about dragonflies (did you know they live their lives as predators in two worlds, the first aquatic and the second aerial?), the one that I find the most interesting on a professional level is their variation in coloration. As a group, dragonflies exhibit a bewildering array of colors (produced by both pigments and structural coloration) and I wonder how that variability in color is structured and what explains it. I know that some of it is related to sex (male and female dragonflies of the same species are often different colors - this is most easily noticed while they're mating, which they do a lot), suggesting the colors play a role in identifying and attracting mates. There is also a lot of inter-species variability. Dragonflies have great eyesight and their brains (capable of rapidly calculating and adjusting flight trajectories to intercept their prey in mid-air) must be built to process a lot of information about color. The patterns of coloration exhibited by dragonflies remind me of those we can see in birds and imagine among at least some dinosaurs.

I'm guessing I'll probably use some data about dragonflies in my work someday (along with my data about aircraft and aircraft engines, information I've collected on the evolution of firearms and cameras, data on dinosaur speciations, and who knows what else), but for now I actually like being somewhat ignorant about most of the technical details and just wondering about them and their world. So I'm not planning on wading into the dragonfly literature anytime soon. For now I'll just enjoy watching them.

But if you're a dragonfly person and you see that I've misidentified something, please let me know.

Unidentified. Ann Arbor, MI, May 2015.

Common whitetail (Plathemis lydia), adult female. Ann Arbor, MI, May 2015.

Twelve-spotted skimmer (Libellula pulchella), adult female. I'm basing this ID on the continuous stripe on the sides of the abdomen (as opposed to the spots on the common whitetail). Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

A common whitetail (female) eating a swamp mosquito. Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015. I also took video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBlvYw8ELFU&feature=youtu.be

Common whitetail in the act of laying eggs (video below). Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

I think this is a painted skimmer (Libellula semifasciata), but it's the only one I've seen. The eyes are green, while in the photos of painted skimmers I've found they appear more brown. Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

Close-up of what I think is a painted skimmer. Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

Painted turtles and a common whitetail. Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

Widow skimmer (Libellula luctuosa), adult female. Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

I think this is an immature meadowhawk (Sympetrum sp.). I saw two of them, relatively small and flying weakly in the short grass. Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

Another immature meadowhawk (Sympetrum sp.). I came across a section of grass/brush today (6/10/2015) that had many of these little ones perching in it. Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

Pronghorn clubtail (Gomphus graslinellus)? Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

This is the best picture I've managed to get so far of the large green darners (Anax junius) that apparently never land. Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

Another widow skimmer (Libellula luctuosa), adult female. Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

Black saddlebags (Tramea lacerata). Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

Black saddlebags close up. Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

White-faced meadowhawk (Sympetrum obtrusum), adult male. Ann Arbor, MI, June 2015.

Four-spotted skimmer (Libellula quadrimaculata). DeTour Village, MI, June 2015.

Four-spotted skimmer (Libellula quadrimaculata), DeTour Village, MI, June 2015.

Unidentified. Is this also a four-spotted skimmer? It was in the same habitat, but had green eyes and looked like it was wearing a fur coat. DeTour Village, MI, June 2015.

Unidentified. I rescued this one from a spider web. DeTour Village, MI, June 2015.

Unidentified. DeTour Village, MI, June 2015.

White-faced meadowhawk (Sympetrum obtrusum), adult male. Ann Arbor, MI, July 2015.

Widow skimmer (Libellula luctuosa). Ann Arbor, MI, July 2015.

White-faced meadowhawk (Sympetrum obtrusum), adult male. He was tired from flying in a strong wind and let me pick him up. Ann Arbor, MI, July 2015.

White-faced meadowhawk (Sympetrum obtrusum), adult female. Ann Arbor, MI, July 2015.

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Human Evolution and the Stone Tool "Problem"

5/27/2015

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Photographs of some of the artifacts from LOM3 (Harmand et al. 2015:Figure 4).

The recent announcement of the discovery in stone tools in Kenya dating to 3.3 million years ago (MYA) has been greeted with a lot of fanfare. I first heard the story at some point earlier in the academic year, and I know there was a lot of buzz about it at the SAAs and Paleoanthropology meetings in San Francisco in April. The publication of a formal paper in Nature last week (“3.3-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools From Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya,” by Sonia Harmand and colleagues) led to a flurry of stories in the popular media. Many of those stories (for example this one in the L. A. Times) framed the discovery as one that "hints that anthropologists may have had the wrong idea about the evolution of humans and technology."

Spoiler alert: The stone tools from Lomekwi 3 are an important finding, but not a surprising one.

Hyping and over-simplification by the popular media of scientific findings are a fact of life, and I understand the need to find an "angle" for a summary story. I find the media's coverage of the Lomekwi paper particularly annoying, however, because of the general implication that the discovery of tools of that age somehow caught us all by surprise. It didn't. Anyone who has been paying attention to the field for the last few decades will not be surprised at all by the claims that: (1) there are stone tools that pre-date Oldowan; (2) those tools were probably not made by members of the genus Homo; and (3) the use of stone tools can be traced back to at least 3.3 MYA.

Let me be clear: this is a very important finding, just not a particularly surprising one. The tool assemblage from Lomekwi 3 (LOM3) fits very comfortably within an emerging picture of tool use pre-dating Oldowan and Homo. That picture has been coming into focus for decades now, thanks to a lot of hard work by many different scientists. The LOM3 tools make a significant contribution to that picture by providing a line of direct evidence that was previously absent. For the first time, we get some idea of what pre-Oldowan stone technologies might have been like. I think it was only a matter of time, however, and there will be a lot more coming down the road.

Why did we expect stone tools pre-dating Oldowan to be found?

First, as pointed out in the LOM3 paper, the 3.3-million-year-old age of the tools is consistent with the 3.4 MYA cutmarked bones from Dikika, Ethiopia that were reported several years ago. Not everyone accepts those cutmarks as legitimate (here is a John Hawks' post about the critique), however. I'm not a cutmark expert, so I don't really have a strong opinion. I'll just say that finding a stone tool assemblage in east Africa that dates to the same time period as the purported cutmarks mitigates the "but where are the tools?" question for me.

Second, the idea that only humans use tools (and therefore evidence of tool use should only be associated with the genus Homo) is an antiquated one that has been solidly falsified by studying living, non-human primates. The use of tools has been widely observed among wild chimpanzees, our closest living relative (and also among more distant relatives such as orangutans and gorillas). The most parsimonious explanation for the presence of tool-using behaviors in chimpanzees and humans is that those behaviors were also present in the Last Common Ancestor (LCA). If correct, that means that all hominids/hominins (as well as all members of the lineage leading to chimpanzees) had some capacity to make and use tools. If not correct, we need to explain the independent emergence of tool use in both lineages. I think the first possibility (that the capacity to use tools is a homology) is more likely, and makes it much easier to explain the widespread use of tools among great apes and some other primates. The LOM3 assemblage pushes our understanding of a particular kind of tool use (stone tool use) back in time, but it is by no means at odds with the general idea that all hominids had the capacity to use tools. It provides direct evidence, rather, to help evaluate hypotheses about the timing and nature of the evolution of tool-using behaviors that are peculiar to humans.

The presence of tool-using behaviors among several of our closest relatives suggests that the cognitive hardware required for tool use was present deep in the Great Ape lineage: it doesn't take a big, human-like brain to make and use simple tools. But what about other parts of our anatomy?

Comparison of human and chimpanzee hands.

Comparison of distal phalanges (bones at the end of the thumb) in chimps (Pan), gorillas, Orrorin, modern humans (Homo) and Homo habilis (OH 7) (source: Almécija et al. 2010).

Human hands and chimpanzee hands -- both of which are capable of making and using tools -- differ significantly in several ways. Walking on two legs has removed selection related to locomotion from affecting the human hand, allowing our hands to be more-or-less optimized for manipulating objects (e.g., making and using tools). As quadrupeds, chimpanzees operate under a different set of restraints. A chimpanzee's hand anatomy reflects compromises between an appendage that can be used to manipulate objects and one that has to function for both arboreal and terrestrial locomotion. Those demands of locomotion have produced a hand with long fingers and a stiff wrist: long fingers are useful for grasping branches while a chimpanzee is in the trees; a stiff wrist serves to accommodate the forces that are transferred through a chimp's hand while it is walking on its knuckles.

The features of a chimp's hand make it harder for a chimpanzee to exert precise control over objects. The long fingers make a human-like "precision grip" (where the pad of the thumb is opposed directly against the pad of the index finger, as when you hold a key) impossible. The stiff wrist places limitations on the range of mobility. Although chimps can be taught to make and use simple stone tools (e.g., Kanzi), their hand anatomy works against them.

One of the features of a human hand is the broad, flat distal phalanx of the thumb. Because of our precision grip (enabled by our relatively short fingers), we are able to exert a lot of force between our thumb and forefinger. The broad bones at the ends of our thumbs reflect those strong forces. The shape of the distal thumb bone of OH 7 was one of the criteria used to define Homo habilis in the original 1964 paper by Louis Leakey, Philip Tobias and J. R. Napier:

". . . the hand bones resemble those of Homo sapiens sapiens in the presence of broad, stout, terminal phalanges on fingers and thumb . . ." (Leakey et al. 1964:8).

As more fossil hands have been discovered in the decades that followed, it has become apparent that many hominids had "broad, stout, terminal phalanges" in their thumbs. The illustration above (from Almécija et al. 2010) shows the OH 7 thumb bone compared to the thumb of Orrorin tugenensis (a possible hominid from around 6 MYA), a modern human, a chimpanzee, and a gorilla. Orrorin had a broad thumb. What about robust australopithecines? Yep. Australopithecus sediba? Yep. It looks like there were a lot of hominids that may have had good features for tool-using hands. If Ardipithecus ramidus (4.4 MYA) was a hominid, it suggests that a chimpanzee's hand is in fact more derived from the ancestral condition than a human hand: the LCA's hand may have been "pre-adapted" for tool use with a pliable, mobile wrist. All that was needed to make the transition to a human-like hand was to shorten the long fingers (which could have happened in the process of shifting to a fully terrestrial adaptation) and broaden the thumb as a precision grip became possible. If tool use was at all important to our pre-Homo ancestors, the selective pressure to shorten the fingers would have been present all along, just less constrained once long fingers were no longer needed for a partially arboreal adaptation.

So it looks like the cognitive capacity for tool use among our ancestors was probably present by at least the end of the Miocene (in the LCA), and the changes to hand anatomy that allowed human-like grasping were well underway during the Pliocene (ca. 5.3-2.6 MYA). The discovery of stone tools dating to 3.3 MYA doesn't conflict with any lines of evidence that I know of suggesting when we could see the earliest stone tools. The interesting questions that we can start address with the publication of the information from Lomekwi, really, are the "who" and the "why" questions: Why did hominids start making and using stone tools? Which hominids were making these tools? And what did tool use have to do with other aspects of human and hominid evolution?

Harmand et al. (2015:314) find differences between the lithic materials from LOM3 and Oldowan, and propose that the technology be given a new name: Lomekwian.

"The LOM3 knapper's understanding of stone fracture mechanics and grammars of action is clearly less developed than that reflected in early Oldowan assemblages and neither were they predominantly using free-hand techniques. The LOM3 assemblage could represent a technological stage between a hypothetical pounding-oriented stone tool use by an earlier hominin and the flaking-oriented knapping behavior of later, Oldowan toolmakers."

The identification of "Lomekwian" tools is going to open up some new thinking about the roles of tool use in general (and stone tools in particular) in human and hominid evolution, not because stone tools at 3.3 MYA were unexpected, but because now we have some hard evidence of what those technologies might have been like. I don't work in Africa, but I'm probably not going too far out on a limb to suggest that there are plenty of places with mid- to late-Pliocene deposits that might be fertile ground for finding more direct evidence of these pre-Oldowan stone tool technologies. It's going to be great to watch that story emerge.

Harmand S, Lewis JE, Feibel CS, Lepre CJ, Prat S, Lenoble A, Boës X, Quinn RL, Brenet M, Arroyo A, Taylor N, Clément S, Daver G, Brugal JP, Leakey L, Mortlock RA, Wright JD, Lokorodi S, Kirwa C, Kent DV, & Roche H (2015). 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya. Nature, 521 (7552), 310-5 PMID: 25993961

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Confused About Giants-Based Christianity? Ask an 11th Grader

5/24/2015

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Is there such a thing as a brand of Christianity that revolves around the existence of giants? Yes . . . well . . . maybe kind of. The notion that evil giants are central to understanding the world, the human condition, and the future is out there for sure. While giants-based Christianity has some vocal proponents that are apparently making a living by selling it, however, I'm not sure how widespread the idea actually is. How many people believe this stuff? I have no idea. And I'm not sure how one would find out.

I looked at a lot of elephant car photos (mostly from Burning Man) and decided that this one best represents the thrown-together ridiculousness of giants-based Christianity (source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/susanafs98/2313166391/)

If you're not sure how someone could build a "Christian" religion around giants, you're not alone. It is a monstrosity constructed from all kinds of parts that don't initially seem to fit together. What do the stones at Baalbek and Stonehenge have to do with Jesus? How is Noah connected to Hitler? How are the pyramids of Egypt, genetic engineering, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the serpent gods of Mesoamerica related to one another? Giant enthusiasts weld all these elements together, but it is difficult to find a clear, concise treatise that explains how. I have arrived at my understanding of giants-based Christianity -- still far from complete, I'm sure -- in the same haphazard way that the blind men examined the elephant and that Johnny Cash built his '49-'59 automobile: one piece at a time.

If you want a path of less resistance to understanding this stuff, I recommend a paper titled "The Truth About Giants" written by Adam Schwartzbauer, an 11th grader (in 2010). I found it on the website of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association (TCCSA), a Minnesota organization whose mission is to "present evidence for creation and a young earth." Schwartzbauer's paper is a 24-page document (there is also a 10-page version) that lays out many elements of the modern, giants-based Christianity, including:

The assertion that giants and fallen angels were involved in genetic manipulation of plants, animals, and humans (pp. 3-5);

The assertion that giants and fallen angels brought about the Flood by corrupting the Earth (p. 4);
The assertion that giants were created by the devil to corrupt the human bloodline so that Jesus could not be born (p. 7);
The assertion that the Israelites committed genocide in Canaan to wipe out giants (pp. 9, 12);
Fascination with the nuts and bolts and angel-human reproduction (pp. 10-11), including:

            - angels having forcible sex with human women;
            - giant babies being cut out of women during childbirth;
            - speculation about what an angel's DNA would be like;

Specifying that giants had six fingers, six toes, and double rows of teeth (p. 11);

Confused arguments against evolution (p. 6);
A nod to Hitler (p. 12);
Blaming archaeologists for hiding evidence (p. 12);
The assertion that structures built with large rocks must have been built by giants (pp. 12-15);
The assertion that evil giants were homosexual (p. 19);
Supporting the existence of giants based on:
    - texts, including Genesis and a variety of extra-biblical religious sources (e.g., pp. 2-3);
    - tales of pre-1900s "giant skeletons" from the Old World and the New World (pp. 11, 16-19);
    - world mythology (p. 2);
    - accounts of purported giant human footprints in ancient rocks (pp. 19-20);

The alert reader will notice that many elements of this new strain of Christianity contradict mainstream Christian teachings. I'm no theologian, but here are few that jump out at me:

The doctrine of Original Sin (the idea that humanity has inherited the consequences of Adam's rebellion again God in the Garden of Eden), for example, is at least undermined, if not completely contradicted, by the idea that it was fallen angels and their evil offspring that caused wickedness in the world and brought about the Flood. Problems with being human? Blame the giants! A giants-based Christianity places responsibility for the troubles of humans squarely on the shoulders of giants.

The idea that angels could mate with humans and produce fertile offspring is also opposed to most mainstream Christian thinking. The Living Church of God website, for example, states that "To claim that angels had the ability to create flesh (the giants) from spirit is not only illogical—it is blasphemy." Angel DNA? What does angel DNA look like? And doesn't the idea that the mating of two different "kinds" (angels and humans) can produce something novel (giants) contradict a basic argument of Young Earth Creationists that different species can only be divinely created?

The mixture of biblical and extra-biblical sources used for creating this giants-based framework of belief is also different, I think, from what most Christians would accept. You won't hear quotes from the Book of Jasher in Sunday School, but the Church of Giants accepts as legitimate anything that seems to support the relevance of large, evil beings to the history of the world. The Nephilim whirlpool provides equal weight to biblical, New Age, occult, political, cultural, and historical currents. It's an idea in search of positive evidence, not the other way around.

Sure, the writing in Schwartzbauer's paper is a bit choppy, but the document is useful because it summarizes many of the basic elements of a giants-based Christianity that the "experts" dole out for money. As a free publication that is just 24 pages, your investment of time and money is much lower than if you actually read the books by Steve Quayle and L. A. Marzulli (which I have not read and cannot bring myself to purchase). The TCCSA website also includes an endorsement of the book by Joe Taylor, creator of the 47" femur sculpture. So there you go. It's not high prose, but it will save you some time groping the different parts of the elephant and understanding the emerging framework of giants-based Christianity.

Related (5/25/2015): Jason Colavito examines the claim in the paper that Nimrod built Baalbek.

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The "Giants of Olden Times" Stories in 19th Century America: A Progress Report

5/22/2015

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As anyone who knows me and/or follows this blog might have guessed, I am in the midst of assembling (yet another) database relevant to understanding the "giants" phenomenon that emerged in 19th century America. I'm currently collecting examples of printings of what I call "Giants of Olden Times" stories, a handful of similar stories that contain listings of accounts of various European giants. These stories were reprinted time and time again during the "giants" craze of the mid- to late-1800s, and I would like to understand if and how these stories were related to the reporting of "giant skeletons." I've spent the better part of the last two days compiling information about the printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories (you're welcome), and I've noticed a few interesting things that I'd like to pass on. There are still more data to collect and lots of analysis to do, so this is preliminary.

First, a quick recap. On May 10, Jason Colavito wrote this post about a mid-1700s address by Claude-Nicolas Le Cat to the Academy of Sciences at Rouen. I recognized many of the descriptions of "giants" in Le Cat's address from my stumblings through 19th century American newspapers: portions of his address, copied from somewhere, had been incorporated into stories that were circulated and re-circulated during the later half of the 1800s. As I wrote in this post, the earliest versions of the story that I could find dated to the mid-1840s and seemed to associate the listing of European giants with a lecture by Benjamin Silliman, Jr., a Yale chemistry professor. In this post, Jason worked on tracking down what may have been the origins of the story, showing how Silliman's name may have been attached (presumably by a reporter/editor somewhere) to a story with a listing of giants that was already in circulation in the 1840s. The original giants story probably originated with someone copying a portion of Le Cat's address out of an encyclopedia or other available source (the address was also printed in a Maryland newspaper in 1765 as well as other places). As the hybrid story was passed on and mutated, Silliman's name became welded to those of the giants. Many of the giants suffered great indignity as the accumulation of copying error transformed their original names into nonsense. The grand, 25' tall Theutobochus Rex, for example, had become known as Keutolochus Sex by the time the story was printed in Idaho in 1871. More on that later.

So, three days and many hours later, I've got enough data on these "Giants of Olden Times" stories to recognize some patterns. I've compiled about 220 printings of the stories so far (there are probably three of four "main" versions) dating from 1842 to 1905. I'm recording the date, the newspaper, the state, and the occurrence/spellings of several of the names in the stories as well as several key dates associated with the giants. The errors in the stories are interesting to me because they, along with information about space and time, will help track how the stories were spread through time and across space (like mutations in DNA). Understanding the mechanisms and patterns of spread will be relevant to understanding the "giants" phenomenon in general, I think. And it will also potentially shed light on how information flowed during a really interesting period of demographic, social, and technological change in the United States. For now, though, I just wanted to take a quick look at some temporal and spatial dimensions of the data I've collected so far.

Time

The top part of the figure to the right shows the counts of the printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories by decade. You can see that the distribution of the stories across the decades of the late 19th century is not uniform. After the first printings of the story in the 1840s (the first "peak") there is a lull in the 1850s followed by a large number of printings in the late 1860s and early 1870s. You can't see it in this view of the data, but there is a strong peak from October of 1868 to June of 1870. Note that the peak starts prior to the "discovery" of the Cardiff giant (and perhaps reflects the context of the interest in giants that spurred the creation of the hoax) and drops off soon after it was revealed as a fake (in December of 1869). There is an apparent lull in the printing of the stories in the 1880s, followed by a strong peak in the 1890s. I have found just a few re-printings of of the stories after 1900.

The bottom part of the figure shows the bars representing re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories placed within my data of the number of reports of "giant skeletons" in my current database. Note the general similarity in the shape of the upswing curves. And note also that the reports of giant skeletons drop precipitously after 1910-1919, a couple of decades after newspapers apparently stopped printing stories with listings of European giants.

Space

Printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories were not randomly distributed across the county. The map below shows the counts (in red) by state in the data I've accumulated so far. A histogram of the number of re-printings by state shows most states with less than six. Nine states have six or more (shaded in the map below). With the exception of California, those states form a kind of "Giant Stories" belt stretching from the east coast into the Great Plains. This is the region of the country where these stories were printed over and over again.

There are several possible reasons, of course, for the spatial distribution of the re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories that may have nothing to do with giants. The distribution may have something to do with the distribution of newspapers (there were more newspapers in California than in Wyoming, for example) and population. And it may have something to do with the sampling of newspapers I'm using. Those are things that can be checked. I don't think that they will fully explain the distribution, however - I think it is actually reflecting, at least in part, something to do with geographic interest in "giants." And it may be related to where the skeletons of "giants" were actually being reported. And those two things are presumably inter-connected somehow.

Giant Stories vs. Giant Skeletons

Are the "Giants of Olden Times" stories connected to reports of giant skeletons? I plotted the number of re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories vs. the number of reports of giants by state that I have in my current database. The top chart shows all the data I have so far. Two things are notable: first, the points on the left side of the chart appear to show a possible positive relationship between the number of story re-printings and the number of accounts of giant skeletons being unearthed; second, there are several outliers on the right side of the chart that don't appear to fit that relationship. I've located 43 re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories in Kansas newspapers, for example, but only five reports of giant skeletons from that state. North Carolina newspapers also loved the "Giants of Olden Times" story, but the state just didn't produce that many giant accounts (at least not that I've seen so far).

If I remove those outliers, a linear, positive relationship becomes easier to see (bottom chart). The R square is 0.69, with a p value of <0.0001. The strength of the result decreases to an R square of 0.40 if I remove Ohio (the point at the upper right), but is still statistically significant. With just these values, in other words, it doesn't look like this relationship is just by coincidence: places where the story ran more often are places where there were more reports of giant skeletons.

But the identification of this correlation doesn't tell us which way the causal arrow(s) point. Did re-printing these stories "cause" people to report giant skeletons? Or did the finding of "giant" skeletons stir up public interest and prompt newspaper editors to re-print the "Giants of Olden Times" stories? Or both? That's going to be a tricky thing to understand, but I think it may be possible to figure out it. The great thing about the newspaper accounts is that they are all dated, so it will eventually be possible to understand the temporal ordering of events. It will also be possible using GIS to factor both time and space into an analysis and frame it in terms of the changing technology of media communication. This is great problem and will take some time to deal with, but I think it is probably solvable. And I think it will ultimately be an important part of the puzzle of "giants" in 19th century America.

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Did a Yale Professor's Plagiarized Lecture Fuel the "Giant" Craze in 19th Century America?

5/19/2015

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Last week, Jason Colavito wrote a blog post about a mid-1700s address by Claude-Nicolas Le Cat to the Academy of Sciences at Rouen. The purpose of Le Cat's address was to argue for the existence of giants. Much of the address was a listing of purported accounts of giants and giant skeletons from various places in Europe. The address was reprinted in numerous places, including the 1810 Encyclopedia Britannica.

When I read through Le Cat's address, I immediately recognized many of his descriptions of "giants" from an article that appeared numerous times in American newspapers in the 1800s. Versions of the article, with headlines such as "Giants of Olden Times" and "There Were Giants In Those Days," were printed at least from the 1840s through the 1890s. I stumbled across versions of the story repeatedly as I was collecting accounts for my database.

Benjamin Silliman, Jr.

The earliest newspaper article I have found so far that is ultimately derived from Le Cat's address dates to 1844 (Sunbury American and Shamokin Journal, December 14, 1844, available here). That article, like many that follow, attributes the information it contains to a lecture by "Professor Silliman, Jr." or "Professor Silliman, the younger." Professor Silliman, Jr., appears to be Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (1816-1885), who served, like his father, as a professor of Chemistry at Yale University. According to this 1911 biography, Silliman, Jr., became an instructor at Yale in 1841. He is most well-known for his work on the distillation of petroleum. He was a charter member of the National Academy of Sciences and a co-editor of the American Journal of Science. In other words, he was a fairly serious scholar.

Before I talk about why Silliman, Jr., was reportedly lecturing about giants, I wanted to show you how closely the information attributed to him follows the content of Le Cat's address. Below I have transcribed an 1847 article in Scientific American (Vol. 2, Issue 30, pg. 238) (in purple) and provided some corresponding passages from the printing of Le Cat's address in the 1810 Encyclopedia Britannica (in green in brackets). I've bolded the passages of the Scientific American article that are direct copies or close paraphrases of Le Cat's address:

    "In one of his recent lectures, Professor Silliman, the younger, alluded to the discovery of the skeleton of an enormous lizard, measuring upwards of eighty feet. From this fact the Professor inferred, as no living specimen of such gigantic magnitude has been found, that the species of which it is the representative has greatly degenerated. The verity of position, he rather singularly endeavors to enforce by an allusion to the well known existence of giants in olden times. The following list furnishes the data on which this singular hypothesis is based:
    The giant exhibited at Rouen in 1336, the Professor says, measured over 18 feet.
    Gorapius saw a girl who was ten feet high.
    The body of Grostes was eleven and a half feet high. [Original reads: The body of Orestes, according to the Greeks, was eleven feet and a half.]
    The giant Galbara, brought from Arabia to Rome, under Claudius Caesar, was near ten feet high.
    Funnman [a Scotsman], who lived in the time of Eugene II, [king of Scotland,] measured eleven feet and a half.
    The Gavalier Scrog, in his voyage to the Peak of Teneriffe, found in one of the caverns of that mountain, the head of Gnnuch, which had eighty teeth, and it was supposed that his body was not less than fifteen feet long. [Original reads: The chevalier Scory, in his voyage to the peak of Teneriffe, says, that they found in one of the sepulchre caverns of that mountain the head of a Guanache which had 80 teeth, and that the body was not less than 15 feet long.]
    The giant Ferragus, slain by Orlando, nephew to Charlemagne, was 18 feet high.
    In 1814, near St Germain, was found the tomb of the giant Isorent, who was no less than twenty feet high.
    In 1590, near Rouen, was found a skeleton whose skull held a bushel of corn, and whose body must have been eighteen feet long. [Original reads: In Rouen, in 1509, in digging in the ditches near the Dominicans, they found a stone-tomb containing a skeleton whose skull held a bushel of corn, and whole shin bone reached up to the girdle of the tallest man there, being about four feet long, and consequently the body must have been 17 or 18 feet high.]
    Platorious saw at Lucerne, the human bones of a subject nineteen feet long. [Original reads: Platerus, a famous physician, declares, that he saw at Lucerne the true human bones of a subject which must have been at least 19 feet high.]
    The giant Bacart was twenty two and a half feet high; his thigh bones were found in 1703 near the banks of the river Moderi. [Original reads: Valence in Dauphine boasts of possessing the bones of the giant Bucart, tyrant of the Vivarais, who was slain by an arrow by the count De Cabillon his vassal. The Dominicans had a part of the shin-bone, with the articulation of the knee, and his figure painted in fresco, with the inscription, showing that his giant was 22 feet and a half high, and that his bones were found in 1705, near the banks of the Morderi . . .]
    In 1613, near a castle in Dauphine, a tomb was found thirty feet long, twenty wide, and eight feet high, on which was cut on a gray stone, the words "Keutolochus Rex." The skeleton was found entire twenty five and a half feet long, ten feet across the shoulders and five feet deep from the breast bone to the back. [Original reads: January 11, 1613, some masons digging near the ruins of a castle in Dauphine, in a field which (by tradition) had long been called the giant's field, at the depth of 18 feet discovered a brick tomb 30 feet long, 12 feet wide, and 8 feet high; on which was a grey stone, with the Theutobochus Rex cut thereon. When the tomb was opened, they found a human skeleton entire, 25 feet and half long, 10 feet wide across the shoulders, and five feet deep from the breastbone to the back. . . .]
    Near Mazarino, in Sicily, in 1516, was found the skeleton of a giant thirty feet high. His head was the size of a hogshead, and each of his teeth weighed five ounces.
    Near Palermo, in Sicily, in 1548, was found the skeleton of a giant thirty feet long, and another thirty three feet high, in 1550.
    We have no doubt that there were "giants in those days" and perhaps Nature was more prolifice in producing them that at present. But the history of giants, during the olden time, is not more remarkable than that of dwarfs. Large men and small are common now-a-days."

Aside from the obvious textual borrowing, one thing that is immediately noticeable is the number of typos in the Scientific American article: "Grostes" instead of "Orestes," "Scrog" instead of "Scory," several dates wrong, etc. Similar typos appear in much later versions of the story (in at least one version of the story from 1891, six years after Silliman's death, the story is attributed to a lecture by a Professor J. A. Williams). The persistence of some old typos reinforces the idea that, once the story entered the American media, it was simply echoed back and forth from newspaper to newspaper for decades. It would be a great "telephone game" study to collect the versions of the story and trace out how/where errors originated, persisted, changed, and multiplied through time and across space. It would also be great to have quantitative to data to see how the printing of the story correlates with the rise and fall of the "giant" craze and perhaps other events or trends in 19th century American history (e.g., the waxing and waning of religious movements, reactions to Darwinian evolution, the emergence of paleontology, etc.).

Tally of number of "giant" reports by decade in my database as it currently stands (n = 449). Some of the counts will decrease when I add a provision for not counting multiple stories associated with the same primary account.

The earliest printing of the story that I found (1844) coincides with the very beginning of the upswing in the reports of "giants" that I can see in my database. If I had to bet, I would bet this is not just a coincidence: I bet the repeated reprinting of this story is related to the nineteenth century giants phenomenon in one way or another. I don't think the story "caused" people to find giants, but I bet it didn't hurt, either. And I bet newspapers periodically reprinted it for decades because they thought their readers would like it. The typos and inaccuracies didn't matter: what mattered was an authoritative source (a professor) providing "proof" that giants had existed. The causal arrows probably go both ways.

That still doesn't address exactly where the original story came from. Was it really from a lecture by Benjamin Silliman, Jr.? Did this eminent scholar really just copy a section out of the Encyclopedia Britannica? I doubt it. I haven't yet been able to find another account of Silliman's original lecture, if indeed there ever was one. But I doubt he actually delivered all that information in a "lecture." The information on giants in the story seems to be presented as a warrant for the past existence of an eighty foot lizard (the skeleton of which presumably belonged to a dinosaur). In other words, evidence for the past existence of giant humans (which we "know" from both fossils and the Bible) is used to argue that giant animals also existed; the smaller size of both animals and humans today is the product of degeneration. (This is a fascinating reversal of the argument I often hear today from modern giant enthusiasts that "there were giant animals in the past, so why not giant humans?") I wonder if dinosaurs, rather than giants, was really the topic of Silliman's lecture.

If that's true, I think it more likely that a reporter was the plagiarist. Given all the typos in even early versions of the "Giants of Olden Times" story, I can imagine some reporter somewhere, rather than Silliman, hurriedly copying text from the Encyclopedia Britannica to fill up column inches. Maybe Silliman gave a lecture about a dinosaur skeleton and invoked the existence of human "giants" in the past, not a controversial position at the time, to convince a skeptical audience that giant animals could have existed in the past also. And maybe he even made reference to some version of Le Cat's address. And maybe a reporter thought the giants angle was more interesting to his audience than the dinosaur one (given the history of the article, he would have been correct). I really don't know.

It would be really interesting to find some more pieces to this puzzle and figure out how this original story got into circulation in the American press. Maybe there is more about Silliman out there - where he lectured, what he talked about. Or maybe there is an earlier version of the story that will provide more clarity. As far as shelf life, the "Giants of Olden Times" story had a long one (how many other newspaper stories get reprinted over the course of 50 years?). And that shelf life seems to have corresponded fairly closely to the heyday of the "giants" craze in North America. That's worth some more work to figure out.

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Jason Colavito's Recent Posts on European "Giants"

5/18/2015

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Claude-Nicholas Le Cat: where would modern giantology be without him? (image from Wikimedia Commons)

If you're interested in where the modern mythology of "giants" comes from, make sure you check out Jason Colavito's excellent blog posts from last week. He has done some great work researching accounts of "giants" from pre-1800s Europe, beginning with this post about a mid-1700s address by Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, versions of which became entrenched on both sides of the Atlantic. Information from that address was reprinted numerous times in U.S. newspapers during the boom in giant accounts of the mid- to late-1800s. It will take some analysis to try to figure out how those things might be connected, but being able to trace the source of what may be one of the foundations of the modern belief in giants is an important piece to the puzzle.

Jason's other posts on giants from last week:

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More Retractions from the 1885 Hoax of a Buried City Under Moberly, Missouri

5/16/2015

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The Westlake ACE Hardware near Moberly, Missouri. I'm sure they've got shovels and buckets and whatever else one might need to find an ancient buried city. Please remember to secure all necessary state, local, and federal permits before embarking on your quest.

Kristan Harris, latest resurrector and purveyor of the "buried city under Moberly, Missouri" story, is still not convinced that the 1885 account was a hoax. I wrote a short piece in April linking to a series put together for the Moberly Monitor-Index in 2014 by D. Craig Asbury, a local historian. Asbury's story contains a retraction attributed to the editor of the newspaper that originated the account of the "buried city." Apparently, however, the editor of the paper saying "we made it all up" wasn't sufficient evidence for Harris to conclude that the story was, in fact, made up. Harris emailed me to say "I came across the “April Fools” explanation and am not sold on it at all." So . . . Harris thinks the ancient city buried in coal under Moberly is still there, awaiting re-discovery and exploration.

Then what are we waiting for? There are several hardware stores in the area that I'm sure would be glad to outfit Harris on his expedition to the buried city. Maybe he could pitch a series to History and monetize the "search for truth." Dowsing, drilling, radar, nutty guests, finding nothing season after season . . . "The Curse of Oak Island" has provided a proven template. Harris would just need a buddy to act as co-pilot (I've got a suggestion for that role) and a willingness to back up his words with action. I'm surprised he's not out there already: we are talking, after all, about "stone benches, bronze and flint knives, stone and granite hammers, metal statues, metallic saws and a stone fountain that flowed with “perfectly pure water"” in addition to the usual giant skeletons. Forget the radio show, let's go change history!

Now, not to dampen anyone's enthusiasm for this important story and all of its promise for exposing the "forbidden history" of this country, but I wanted to pass on a few more retractions just for the record. Craig Asbury located these and graciously emailed me and gave me his blessing to include them here. I have bolded the most important lines just in case you're really busy putting your expedition team together.

From the Rockingham Register (April 30, 1885):

"A Base Fabrication.
In our last week's issue we published quite a lengthy article taken from the Saint Louis, Mo., Chronicle, giving what purported to be an account of a most marvelous discovery at Moberly, in that State, in the shape of a buried city, surpassing, the wonders of Pompeii. We published the article because the paper containing it was sent us by H. A. Paul, one of Harrisonburg's boys, now a resident of Moberly. We have since found out that it was a miserable fabrication, the only truth connected with it being that there is a hole in the ground at that point made by a shaft's having been sunk in search of coal, which is now filled with two hundred feet of water. It was interesting reading, however, if for no other reason than to show how thoroughly the art of lying has been mastered in these latter times. We will settle the matter with Al. the next time we see him."

From the Daily Evening Bulletin (April 13, 1885):

"ENTIRELY FICTITIOUS.
The True Story of Mr. Tim Collins' Coal Mine.

SEDALIA, MO., April 13.--Mr. Tim Collins, of Moberly, Mo., who was in the city, states that the sensational story of a buried city being discovered under his coal shaft is a sheer fabrication designed to do him great injury. No such discovery, or anything like it, he says, has been made. The names of parties as given are fictitious.
He has not himself been in Moberly this week. His shaft is not 360 feet, but only 265 feet deep, and terminates in a six-foot coal vein, which is being successfully worked. He has not, and never has had, any business connection with Britton A. Hill, or any other St. Louis party, and no Sedalia parties are assisting him financially. He expects to return home, and says he is going east in a few days to secure funds for enlarging his mining facilities, and claims his mine is the best ever opened in the state."

From the Chariton Courier (April 24, 1885):

"THE St. Louis Evening Chronicle published a sensational account last week concerning the finding of a lost city 360 feet underground in Moberly. In last Saturday's issue of the same paper is published an apology for the publication of the hoax, in which the editor would make its readers believe that he was the victim of a misplaced confidence in one J. W. Estes, his correspondent and who is also on the editorial staff of the Moderly Headlight, and that in order to atone to his readers and punish his untruthful correspondent had sent a special correspondent to Moberly, who proceeded to horsewhip the aforesaid Estes in the most approved style of the art. Query: Who told the biggest lie, Estes or the special reporter?"

Those last two are available through the Library of Congress website (where Harris was unable to find any evidence of any retractions). The Daily Evening Bulletin story is here; the Chariton Courier story is here.

Finally, a somewhat related non-update for the "see no evil" files: the story about the Helenwood Devil still appears on the Greater Ancestors World Museum website. In case you missed the news (here and here), the "giant with horns" was actually a clay statue made by a guy in a coal mine and hauled around the country as a pay-per-view curiosity. It's been almost two months since my original post on the subject, and still Cruise Sexton's handcrafted monster is put forward as "evidence" of something having to do with Creationism (I still haven't figured out what the connection is supposed to be). Isn't it time to set the Helenwood Devil free? It's making all the other purported horned giant skeletons look bad.

Update (5/18/2015): I made a few minor alterations to the original text of this post.

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