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"Giants" and Typologies of Race: The Example of Dinaric Skulls

6/9/2015

11 Comments

 
Many of those who are enamored with the idea of the existence of giants in the ancient past are also enthusiastic users (and misusers) of antiquated ideas about the existence and meaning of "race" among human populations. This follows a general pattern, I think, of 21st century "alternative" theorists uncritically embracing discredited concepts from the Victorian age.  Want to believe in a flat earth? A hollow earth? No problem. Everything old is new again in the age of the internet.

The fetish that giantologists have for recycling out-dated concepts of race would give the flat earth people a run for their money in a competition for attaching the most weight to the worst idea. If I wanted to argue for the existence of giants and I wanted to still sound like a reasonable person, I would avoid basing my arguments for giants on racial typologies that went out style along with slavery, eugenics, and World War II-era Nazism. But giantologists, for the most part, seem to be largely unfettered by the desire to sound reasonable.  Or the desire to understand the history, context, and implications of the racial concepts they are so quick to employ.  Or the desire to be correct in facts, citations, quotations . . . you get the idea.

There are a lot of examples of modern giant enthusiasts throwing around the term "race" in reference to their assertions about giants (Google "race of giants" and you'll see what I mean).  I don't think I've ever run across an example of a giant enthusiast actually defining what he means by "race," but I gather that the term is generally used to denote a population that is genetically different from other populations and has shared physical characteristics that can be reliably used to discriminate its members from those of other "races" (basically a 19th and early 20th century definition of "race").  Defining the shared physical characteristics for this "giant race" that we are supposed to believe existed has proven tricky for giant enthusiasts.  Other than being tall, what shared features does this "race of giants" have?  Double rows of teeth? No, not really (see this post, this one, this one, etc.).  Six fingers and six toes along with "double rows of teeth"?  Not so far (see this post). So what's left of our "giant" race once we kick those legs out from under the stool?

Not much. Some tall people here and there?

Ah, but wait: there's still all that bad 19th and earth 20th century scientific racism to mine for "evidence" in the quest to define a "race" of giants.  It's old and out-dated, so it's fair game.

Fritz Zimmerman is in love with what he terms a "giant race called the Dinaric."  His web pages contain many assertions about the giant "Dinaric people" of Europe and the Levant spreading into the New World, and it is to the "Dinaric race" that he attributes the construction of the Early and Middle Woodland earthen mounds of eastern North America. Here is his story from the Europe side:

"The Dinaric spread through conquest out of the Caucasus into central Germany to Northern France. From France, the Dinarics advanced into the British Isles. Another group of seafaring Dinarics is found throughout the Mediterranean. There is evidence that the Dinarics were in the Levant at the time of the Amorites. Several of the Dinaric skulls were found in Palestine and Israel, that at first were believed to be Peruvian skulls, however, identical skulls were found and it was realized that these unique head shapes represented a different type of people. One of these skull was found in Damascus, within the realm of the Amorites and Og."

There are several different issues to unwrap here.  What does "Dinaric" mean? How do you identify a "Dinaric skull"? How do we know these "Dinaric people" were giants?  I wasn't familiar with the concept of a "Dinaric race," so I put some effort into trying to understand what this was about.  Spoiler alert: there's no substance in the idea that "Dinaric" skulls can be used to identify a "race of giants."  That's predictable.  But the issue is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.  First, it's useful as an example of the strangely haphazard way that giantologists employ discredited racial classifications to support their belief systems about giants.  And second, it illustrates once again the shallowness of the scholarship that is uncovered when you scratch the surface of the "research" on giants.

The Origin and Development of the Concept of a "Dinaric Race"

The concept of a Dinaric race began with Joseph Deniker, back in the heyday of racial cartography in the late 1800s. In his book The Races of Man (1900), Deniker describes the Dinaric race as one of six principal races among the living peoples of Europe:
PictureDeniker's (1900) map of the races of Europe showing the distribution of the Dinaric race (modified to highlight the distribution in red). Base map source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Deniker%27s_Races_de_l%27Europe_%281899%29.jpg
"6. Dark, brachycephalic, tall race, called Adriatic or Dinaric, because its purest representatives are met with along the coast of the Northern Adriatic and especially in Bosnia, Dalmatia, and Croatia. They are also found in Rumania, Venetia, among the Slovenes, the Ladinos of the Tyrol, the Romansch of Switzerland, as well as in the populations of the tract of country which extends south to north from Lyons to Liège, at first between the Loire and the Saône, then on to the table-land of Langres, in the upper valleys of the Saône and the Moselle, and into the Ardennes. In all these parts the Adriatic race appears with its essential characters: lofty stature (1 m. 68 to 1 m. 72 on an average), extreme brachycephaly (ceph. ind. 85–86), brown or black wavy hair; dark eyes, straight eyebrows; elongated face, delicate straight or aquiline nose; slightly tawny skin. The same characters, somewhat softened, are met with among the populations of the lower valley of the Po, of the north-west of Bohemia, in Roman Switzerland, in Alsace, in the middle basin of the Loire, among the Polish and Ruthenian mountaineers of the Carpathians, and lastly among the Malorousses or Little Russians, and probably among the Albanians and the inhabitants of Servia." (pp. 333-334)

Brachycephaly refers to head shape:
a skull that is brachycephalic ("short-headed") is relatively short front-to-back.  Note the "lofty stature:"  about 5'8" tall. 

In his effort to classify the living peoples of the world based (in part) on their physical characteristics, Deniker wrestled with the same basic issues that confront any scientist trying to define discrete "types" among populations that vary continuously.  In the introduction to the volume, he recognized that variability in language, ethnicity, and culture were not isomorphic with biological variability, and that "races" did not form discrete units that could be reliably used to recognize populations.  The "Dinaric race," then, was defined as a hypothetical physical "type" that could be recognized most clearly among the living peoples of southern Europe. 


PictureExamples of people belonging to the Dinaric race, according to Hans F. K. Günther. Apparently, Fritz Zimmerman thinks these people are closely related to the builders of the Adena mounds.
The concept of a Dinaric race was expanded upon by Nazi eugenicist Hans F. K. Günther in his 1927 book The Racial Elements of European History. Günther's description of the physical characteristics of the Dinaric race echoes that of Deniker, emphasizing tall stature (about 5'8" for males), brachycephaly, brown skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. I've clipped some examples of Dinarics from Günther's book so you can see what he thought the "race" looked like.

To the physical descriptions of the races of Europe,
Günther added an assessment of their mental characteristics: 

"The Dinaric man is characterized by a warm feeling for nature, a strong love of the home, and a spirit of creativeness in fashioning the surroundings to be the ordered expression of himself in houses, implements, customs, and forms of speech. He does not, however, turn his gifts so much to the vaster undertakings, to leadership in the most varied spheres of life, or to restless progress and strenuous competition. He lives more in the present than does the provident, foreseeing Nordic. The boldness of the Dinaric is rather one of bodily achievements; a real spiritual urge to conquest, such as often characterizes Nordic men, seems to be rarer. Characteristic of the Dinaric is an inclination to sudden outbursts, to quick anger, and to combativeness -- characteristics, however, which but stand out from the general level of a disposition that is on the whole good-tempered, cheerful, and friendly. But it is not mere chance that the predominantly Dinaric south-east of the German-speaking area (like the East with its East Baltic strain) is marked by a particularly high percentage of convictions for dangerous bodily wounding, and in general by a relatively high percentage of criminal convictions.

The Dinaric nature has a range of development decidedly narrower in every direction than that of the Nordic. The signs are wanting of any great mental acumen, or of stern determination. The spiritual outlook is narrower, though the will may be as strong. On the whole the Dinaric race represents a stock which is not seldom somewhat uncouth, with a rough cheerfulness, or even wit, and is easily stirred to enthusiasm; it has a gift for coarse repartee and vivid description, showing a decided knowledge of mankind and histrionic powers as a racial endowment. Business capacity, too, seems to be not rare. The gift for music, above all for song, is particularly pronounced. The predominantly Dinaric Alpine district is where German folk-songs most flourish. The gift of tongues, too, would seem more frequent in the Dinaric race. The sociableness of this race is a rough and noisy one; as between man and man it is generally sincere and upright. For mental capacity I would put the Dinaric race second among the races of Europe."


So there you have it:  the Dinaric race has a lot going for it but, according to a future Nazi (
Günther didn't join the Nazi party until 1932), just doesn't quite stack up to the Nordics.  I'll bet you didn't see that one coming.

In his first chapter, Günther provided an explicit definition of race:

"A race shows itself in a human group which is marked off from every other human group through its own proper combination of bodily and mental characteristics, and in turn produces only its like."

He followed this definition with a clear statement that "Ethnology yields hardly any example of such a true-breeding human group." In reality,
Günther said, there is a lot of mixture between the races.  In the eyes of the Nazis, that obviously sets up a problem for the "best" of the races (the Nordic race), as any mixture with other, inferior races dilutes its qualities.

Anyway, another person worth mentioning on the Dinaric race issue is Carleton Coon, a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist perhaps most infamous for proclaiming as late as 1962 that the "five races" of humans had formed prior to the evolution of Homo sapiens.   In Chapter XII of his (1939) book The Races of Europe, Coon gave his conclusions on the Dinaric "race:"

"Dinaricism is not a quality pertaining to a single race, it is a condition. This condition is common in Europe; it is also common in western Asia. Furthermore, it is not confined to the white racial stock; the principle of hybrid inheritance which produces Dinarics in Europe has also produced Papuans in New Guinea, the Arii aristocrats in Polynesia, and many American Indians."

Look carefully at what Coon is saying in that passage:  even if you can identify a Dinaric "type" (based on skull morphology, for example), that type doesn't have any historical meaning.  "Dinaric" skulls are found in many parts of the world in populations that are not related to one another. 

My take on all of this is that the originator of the concept of a "Dinaric race" (Deniker), Nazi racial scientists (
Günther), and one of the last American physical anthropologists who openly embraced racial classification (Coon) all agree that the term "Dinaric race" doesn't really describe a single people, or even mark a population that has a single origin. This is in direct contradiction to Zimmerman's argument that Dinaric skulls are "unique" and therefore can be used as a marker of a distinct population (and a giant one, to boot).  I very seriously doubt Zimmerman knows something about the "Dinaric race" that Deniker, Günther, and Coon did not. 
Günther
So how do these brachycephalic, noisy, 5'8" peoples spread across southern Europe become both biblical giants and the constructors of earthen mounds in eastern North America?  How do the people of the Balkans become the Amorites, and how do the Amorites get to Kentucky and Ohio? 

A Dinaric Skull in the Near East?

Zimmerman attempts to connect the "Dinaric race" to biblical giants by saying that a Dinaric skull was found in Damascus, near where Og and the Amorites lived (see the quote above).  He doesn't provide a reference in the page I quoted, but elsewhere he says that a Dinaric skull "near the Damascus Gate at Jerusalem" was
"discovered by Prof. Retzius, who described it in the Proceeding of the Royal Academy of Science, 1902." 

There are a couple of errors here, and a bit of sleight of hand. 

First is the location: note that it's the Damascus Gate at Jerusalem, not Damascus as Zimmerman says above. 

Second, I found the original publication by searching on a sentence that Zimmerman quotes, and it's not a 1902 document.  The passage he quotes is originally from an 1879 book titled The North Americans of Antiquity by John Thomas Short.  In the section on "Head Flattening," that book describes a discussion of an artificially deformed skull from Austria described by "Prof. Retzius" in "The Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Stockholm in 1844" (that's a reference line within the work, not the reference of the work itself, and it's 1844, not 1902).  Here is an 1855 paper by Retzius describing that skull and other artificially deformed crania.

Third, the deformed skull from near the Damascus Gate, which seems to be key to Zimmerman's attempt to connect the "Dinaric race" to the Amorites, was discovered in 1856 by J. Hudson Barclay and described in an 1859 paper by J. A. Meigs titled "
Description of a deformed, fragmentary human skull : found in an ancient quarry-cave at Jerusalem : with an attempt to determine, by its configuration alone, the ethnical type to which it belongs."  That paper does not illustrate the skull, and if you search for the term "Dinaric" within it you'll come up empty (Deniker, the originator of the term, wasn't even born until 1852).  If you look at that paper, you'll see a lot of discussion trying to figure out the "ethnical type" to which the skull belongs.  It's fragmentary, undated, artificially deformed, and not a "Dinaric skull." So much for that.

Maybe there's some other component to Zimmerman's argument that the "Dinaric race" is related to the Amorite "giants" of the Near East.  As far as I can tell, however, the notion seems to be based primarily on a misreferenced, misunderstood paper about an artificially-deformed, fragmentary skull that was published decades before the concept of a "Dinaric race" was even formalized.  If so, it's nonsense. 

"Dinaric" Skulls in the Eastern Woodlands?

With the link between the "Dinaric race" and giants severed, identifying "Dinaric" skulls in the Eastern Woodlands becomes largely moot.  But it's an interesting part of the story and worth mentioning.

The crucial component of this part of Zimmerman's argument seems to be the
description of Adena skeletal remains as "brachycephalic."  As discussed above, brachycephaly was one of the defining characteristics of the Dinaric "type."  Adena skeletal remains were described as brachycephalic by Charles Snow in the 1940s and 1950s, when the definition and identification of physical "types" was still popular in physical anthropology in the United States.  Many of the Adena skulls that Snow looked at were artificially deformed, heightening the impression of extreme brachycephaly.  Some of the Adena were also described as relatively tall, even up to 7' or so.

What the Giantologists Got Wrong

The equation here just doesn't add up at all. The Adena skulls are brachycephalic (enhanced by artificial cranial deformation), brachycephaly is one of the characteristics of the "Dinaric race" in Europe, there was an artificially-deformed skull discovered in the Near East in 1856, ergo the earthen monuments of eastern North America were constructed by biblical giants?  Is that the whole story?

If you detect a few missing connections in that line of reasoning, I'm right there with you.  How a racial category constructed around the 5'8" people of southern Europe became the link between Og of the Old Testament and the Adena is beyond me. It's silly.

I think the main rabbit hole in this case is the uncritical acceptance of the racial typologizing and
classification that was a mainstay of anthropology in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  If you're going to embrace the same racial "science" as the Nazis, you're kind of setting yourself up for failure.  That's pretty obvious.  There's even a discussion on Stormfront (a white supremacist website) that complains that having writing about things like the "Dinaric race" on the forum "will make Stormfront a laughing stock."

The example of the "Dinaric race" should be a cautionary tale to anyone looking to use pre-World War II racial typologies to reconstruct population history, which is what Zimmerman attempts to do.  To anyone paying attention, the description of "Dinaricism" as "not a quality pertaining to a single race" by one of last prominent racist theorists in mainstream American anthropology (Coon) would seem to throw a bucket of cold water on the idea that a link between the populations of Europe and North America could be recognized based on the identification of "Dinaric" skulls. 

But I guess that's just another pesky detail (like the real story of the "Jerusalem skull)," and real giantologistis are not going let such trivia stand in the way of a good story.
  The "good story," of course, is one we've heard before: it's the Myth of the Moundbuilders all over again (i.e., the notion that white people, not Native Americans, were responsible for building the earthen monuments of eastern North America).  What's new here is the attempt to use discredited racial "science" to somehow bridge the gaps of space and time between the New World and the Old, and between a "race of giants" and normal human variation.   Haphazardly invoking antiquated racial typologies doesn't make the case stronger.

11 Comments

Lomekwi  3 and the Invention of Technology

6/5/2015

8 Comments

 
Last week I wrote a post about the 3.3-million-year-old pre-Oldowan stone tool assemblage reported from the Lomekwi 3 (LOM3) site in Kenya by Harmand et al. (2015).  As I was writing that, I remembered a 2004 paper by Sophie A. de Beaune titled "The Invention of Technology" (Current Anthropology 45(2):139-162) that I had read in grad school.  That paper takes a long-term view of the evolution of technology focusing on the development and proliferation of different kinds of percussion.  Now that we have direct evidence of what kinds of stone tool technologies preceded Oldowan, I wanted to take another look at de Beaune's work.

Her basic premise, if I understand it, is that one can create a "phylotechnical tree"  of actions associated with different kinds of percussion.  Following Leroi-Gourhan (1971), her use of the term "percussion" includes actions such as sawing, chopping, cutting, and puncturing.  All of these different actions would ultimately have had a common origin in what de Beanue calls "thrusting percussion" (using one object to forcefully strike another with the intent of cracking or smashing it). The primacy of thrusting percussion is supported by its ethnographically-observed use among chimpanzees: some chimps crack hard fruits by smashing them between a hammer and an anvil.  Thus, de Beaune argues, thrusting percussion would have been utilized by the earliest hominids and preceded the more formalized stone tool technologies we can recognize in Oldowan.

How, why, and when did thrusting percussion, perhaps first used solely as an action employed to crack animal or vegetable materials, begin to be used to used to crack stone?  Those are the questions that can potentially be addressed directly by the assemblage reported from LOM3 (and hopefully more to be found in the future). 

To the "when" question, LOM3 answers "by at least 3.3 million years ago."  It's hard to imagine that the earliest identified example of something actually marks its earliest occurrence, so it's probably safe to presume that the behaviors that created LOM3 were present sometime prior to 3.3 MYA.

The first publication on 149 pieces of worked stone from LOM3 also gives us some insight into the "how" question. 
According to the authors (pp. 311-312), the assemblage contains 83 cores (pieces of stone used for the removal of flakes) and 35 flakes.  The remainder of the stone pieces are interpreted as "potential anvils" (n=7), "percussors" (n=7), "worked cobbles" (n=3), "split cobbles" (n=2), and indeterminate fragments (n=12). You can see 3D digital models of some of the artifacts here.
 
PictureCore from the LOM3 site (image source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7552/full/521294a.html)
The LOM3 cores are not small.  The mean mass is 3.1 kg (6.8 pounds): that's heavier than a standard brick but lighter than your average bowling ball.  The flakes, anvils, and percussors are large, also, compared to those from later Oldowan sites and from those in assemblages produced by wild chimpanzees (p. 313). Although some artifacts have a series of flakes detached, patterns of fracture and flake removal suggest to the authors that the "precision of the percussive motion was also also occasionally poorly controlled" (p. 313):

"The dimensions and the percussive-related features visible on the artefacts suggest the LOM3 hominins were combining core reduction and battering activities and may have used artefacts variously: as anvils, cores to produce flakes, and/or as pounding tools. . . . The arm and hand motions entailed in the two main modes of knapping suggested for the LOM3 assemblage, passive hammer and bipolar, are arguably more similar to those involved in the hammer-on-anvil technique chimpanzees and other primates use when engaged in nut cracking than to the direct freehand percussion evident in Oldowan assemblages." (p. 313)

That sounds to me like a description that's pretty consistent with a manufacturing strategy based largely on chimp-like "thrusting percussion," and perhaps exactly what one would expect to precede Oldowan based on de Beaune's analysis.

What about the "why" question? What caused hominids to start using thrusting percussion to produce tools?  Answering that question is tougher than addressing the "when" and "how" questions. 

I don't think it has much to do with a change in physical anatomy -- specifically that of the hand -- for three inter-related reasons.  First, as I discussed before, I think there's a lot of evidence that suggests that hands with the capacity for human-like precision gripping were widespread among early hominids, including the australopithecines of around 3.3 MYA.  (See also this comment on australopithecine hands that just came out in Science today.)  Second, as discussed by de Beaune (p. 141-142), the physical actions required to smash one rock with another are not all that different than the actions required to smash a piece of fruit on an anvil: no new anatomy was even required to shift the "target" of the percussion to stone.  Third, even with the limitations imposed by their hand anatomy, chimpanzees can be taught to use freehand percussion to make stone tools (see this video of Kanzi, for example).

If the "invention of technology" (meaning, in this case, chipped stone technology) wasn't dependent upon a change in anatomy, what about a change in cognition?
Again following Leroi-Gourhan, de Beaune (2004:142) discusses the nature of the distinction between using a hammerstone to smash something to process food and hitting a stone with another stone to produce a cutting edge:

"While these activities involved related movements, that of intentionally splitting a cobble to produce a cutting tools, although "exceedingly simple," was in [Leroi-Gourhan's] view eminently human in that it "implied a real state of technical consciousness.""


Maybe there does have to be a cognitive change to explain the shift to producing and using stone tools.  But, as we know from the Kanzi example, there's nothing lacking in the chimp brain that prevents them from making and use simple chipped stone tools when they're taught.  But, as far as we know, they have to be taught (the last time I checked, though, humans also need to be taught to do it).

Surely an important thing to understand about the shift to using stone-on-stone percussion to make stone tools is what that shift gets you: a tool with a cutting edge unlike anything that exists in nature.  A sharp-edged flake can be used for what de Beaune calls "linear resting percussion"  (cutting and chopping).  You can do a lot of things with an edged tool that you can't do with a blunt one (and that you can't do with your teeth if, like australopithecines, you lack the large canines of chimps and many other non-human primates).  You can sharpen a stick. You can grate and slice plants. And you can cut meat from bones and disarticulate an animal carcass by severing ligaments.  We have some direct evidence of this last activity in the form of the 3.4-million-year-old cutmarked bones reported from Dikkika, Ethiopia, in 2010.  Maybe the battlefield of the hunter-scavenger debate, now several decades old, will be reinvigorated by a transplantation from the Pleistocene to the Pliocene.

Does the emergence of chipped stone technologies during the Pliocene signal an adaptive shift, a cognitive shift, or both?  With the publication of the LOM3 tools and the announcement last week of a new fossil australopithecine from about the same time period and neighborhood, East Africa 3.3 million-years-ago sounds like a pretty interesting place to be.  If, as suggested by ethnographic data from chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, the capacity to use tools is really a homology that extends deep into the Great Ape lineage, it's probably not fair to refer to the production of chipped stone tools as the "invention of technology."  But it is a watershed nonetheless.  The shift to using one set of tools (hammers and anvils) specifically to make other, qualitatively different tools (cutting implements) that potentially open up new subsistence niches and eventually (possibly) become involved in the feedbacks between biology, technology, and culture which are entangled in the emergence of our genus is something worth knowing about:  who did it?  why? what were the tools used for? what changed as a result? 

The assemblage from LOM3 opens up a tantalizing window on those questions.  In those 149 pieces of stone, we have evidence of a stone tool production strategy that used "passive hammer" techniques to produce cutting tools
, somewhere in time much closer to the dawn of stone tool production than anything called Oldowan.  Judging by the size of the cores and flakes, the technique appears to have been more dependent on brute force than finesse.  The results, however -- the creation of cutting tools from a natural setting that provided none -- may have been transformational.  I look forward to seeing how the data from the small LOM3 assemblage get incorporated into models of human evolution, and I hope that people working in East Africa are already busy finding more sites.  And I hope that people working outside of East Africa are actively searching for stone tools in Pliocene deposits.  It's a great time to be following paleoanthropology.


ResearchBlogging.org
de Beaune, S. (2004). The Invention of Technology: Prehistory and Cognition Current Anthropology, 45 (2), 139-162 DOI: 10.1086/381045
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
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1971). L'Homme et la Matiere. Paris: Albin Michel.
8 Comments

Research Hint: Writing “Minoan” on Photographs of Native American Remains Does Not Actually Prove They Are Minoan

6/3/2015

105 Comments

 
If you're a writer, you may have noticed a recent shortage in the supply of capital letters and exclamation points.  All good scientists know that correlation does not equal causation, but I would like to go out on a limb and propose an explanation:  J. Hutton Pulitzer (aka TreasureForce Commander) has used them all.

Okay, that's a bit of an overstatement. He didn't use them all, just more than his fair share.  The occasion was his announcement that he has proved that
"Minoans discovered America 4000 years BEFORE Columbus!" (emphasis in original).  Pulitzer's liberal use of all caps and exclamation points, apparently to indicate the importance of his claims and communicate his significant enthusiasm for them, has left the rest of us a little short.  This post will be necessarily conservative in its use of those two precious commodities. 

You should look at Pulitzer's post and decide if you think the monopolization of the supply of capital letters and exclamation points was justified.

As you might guess, I'm not impressed.

My first reaction as I skimmed through Pulitzer's post about his "audit archives research" on May 24th was "wtf?" (normally that would be in caps, but there's a shortage on you know).  He posts some pictures of some oxhide ingots from the Uluburun shipwreck (as his "comparative" sample) and then 16 photos of features and artifacts from archaeological sites in Tennessee and Kentucky, all now labeled "Minoan" by Pulitzer.  The photos appear to have come from the WPA Archaeological Photo Archives of the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Tennessee. Obviously, whoever decided to post all these photographs online really dropped the ball on keeping all this "forbidden history" hidden from the public.  Maybe there was a memo missed somewhere.

Too late now: the cat's out of the bag.  (I really feel like that statement would have popped more with some exclamation points, but somebody hogged them all.  At least there's still italics.)

PictureCopper artifact from Drake Mound, KY.
Pulitzer shows more photos of European oxhide ingots, then a bunch more photos from Tennessee: excavated wooden post structures, pit features, etc.  Then some unlabeled pictures of pottery, some other pictures copied out of books, more stuff, some other stuff . . . it just goes on and on.  He even reproduces the photograph that I took of a page from Betty Sodders' book for a post about the alleged oxide ingot of Lake Gogebic, Michigan.  Then he shows us the same "Minoan large ox hide ingot" that he's already showed us.  I guess he really likes that one. I'll go ahead and show it to you also.  There (here's the source).

The artifact from Drake Mound, as well as several of the other artifacts shown by Pulitzer, do have the same basic shape as some of the European oxhide ingots:  roughly rectangular with four concave sides.  But are they same size?  Do they weigh the same?  Are they made from pounded copper or are they cast? And why do some of them have pairs of holes drilled in them? Do any European oxhides have holes drilled in them?

Those are questions that someone who was actually doing research would attempt to address.  If it were me, I would start with size: how big are the copper reels that Pulitzer says are actually cast oxhide ingots, and how do those dimensions compare with those documented for European oxhide ingots?  For a moment I thought about doing that comparison myself, but then I decided I've got better things to do with my time and the person making the claim should do some work.  I'll help out by pointing him to this source: Copper Oxhide Ingot Marks: A Database and Comparative Analysis. It's an M.A. Thesis by Alaina M. Kaiser from 2013.  There are metric data in Appendix IV.  You're welcome.

What about dates from any of the features or structures that are claimed to be Minoan?  Any information on those?

PictureFeature from the Charles Lea Farm site, TN.
The features from the Charles Lea Farm site that Pulitzer labels "Minoan Ox Hide Ingot Mold" are unusual.  I'll reproduce one of those photos (source) also so you can see it: it appears to be some kind of basin-shaped feature with four incurvate sides and elongated corners.  Yes, it's shaped similarly to an ox hide ingot.  I honestly don't know what it is (or in what context it was found at the site) and I would be curious to hear from archaeologists who might know more about these.  Woodland or Mississippian?  It's unfortunate that there's no scale with the photo.  I don't know if there's any kind of written report that describes these features in more detail (there appear to have been at least two at the site).

Writing "Minoan" on a WPA photograph does not actually mean that one has proven that the remains are Minoan.  It only means that one has photo editing software, which is all that is required to make an assertion. If I were to write "idiot" on a photograph of a person, for example, I have only asserted that the person is an idiot: I would still have to demonstrate idiocy in order to prove my claim.  I think I would do that by paying more attention to the question marks (you'll notice there are still plenty of those to go around) than to the exclamation points.  With all the melodrama and hullabaloo surrounding the fantastic assertions of Pulitzer about "forbidden history" and his "smoking gun archaeological evidence," you would think there would be more indications of effort. 

At the end of the piece, Pulitzer is quoted as saying
“If there ever was a better open and shut archaeological case this discovery is it!”  I'm not sure what the case is supposed to "better" than, but I can list a lot of things it's worse than.  I wish I had a spare exclamation point to put there.


Addendum (6/4/2015): This post has been up since yesterday, and I have a couple of things to add to it.

First, on the initial reaction to the piece.  As soon as this was posted, I was told by some fans of "forbidden history" that I should be focusing on the substance of Pulitzer's "theory" rather than simply attacking his style.  If you read the piece carefully, you'll find that my major point is that there IS NO SUBSTANCE to attack (Hey look - the drought in capital letters has eased up! And so has the shortage of exclamation points!!).  You'll see I never actually said Pulitzer's "theory" is wrong: I said I wasn't impressed with what he presents.  He didn't even do the simplest things he could have done to actually make a case based on evidence, basically relying almost completely on assertions (bolstered by lots of exclamation points and capital letters - those seemed to comprise the main forms of support). I pointed out a couple of things that would be easy steps to take if one wanted to present a case that the Tennessee and Kentucky materials were actually made by Minoans. The photo of the alleged "Minoan Ox Hide Ingot" from the Drake Mound in Kentucky has a scale with it, for example, and measurements of that artifact could be compared with are metric data available for ox hides from Europe. Why not do a comparison? As I said in the piece, I thought about doing it myself, but it's really not my job:  it's the job of the person making the claim.  You want to claim something from Kentucky is an "exact match" to something from Europe? Prove it! My point is that he doesn't even try to prove it, he just proclaims it. The piece was about the silliness of making assertions without putting even a minimum amount of effort into trying to back them up. Pushing the "!" key is easy, doing the other stuff is a bit harder.

Second, interested archaeologists and others with more knowledge than me about these kinds of copper artifacts have started pointing out publications that are available online that contain useful information.  I thought I would provide links to those here so that anyone who's interested can go and see for themselves:

  • Powell, J. W. 1894.  Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office. [pp. 426-427 illustrate a hammered copper gorget that is the shape of an "ox hide" but measures only 3.5 x 3.75 inches and is 1/8 inch thick].

  • Trevalyn, Amelia M. 2004.  Miskwabik, Metal of Ritual: Metallurgy in Precontact Eastern North America.  Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

105 Comments

What's the Solutrean Hypothesis Worth?  About $10k per "Laurel Leaf"

6/2/2015

21 Comments

 
It may or may not surprise you to learn that two of the artifacts identified as Solutrean laurel leaf bifaces in a 2014 paper by Dennis Stanford and colleagues are currently being hawked for sale on the internet for $20,000.  A post on a Facebook page titled "Solutrean-American and Indian Arrowheads, Artifacts for Sale" makes the pitch:

"For sale--the only Solutrean-American continental bi-faces (2) available for sale in the world. Dating to approx 23,000BC, these blades were recovered from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay by scallop dredge.

Offered now for $20,000--the price will only go up as more evidence mounts.

My friend, the late Mark Small obtained these by trade and it wasn't until after his passing 8 years ago that we learned what these were. I talked the widow into showing the collection at the Gwynn's Island Museum a few years ago. Dr Stanford and his team from the Smithsonian were there to present a casting of the Cin-Mar blade to the folks who donated the original to the Smithsonian.

Upon seeing these, a request was made to loan them to the Smithsonian, which was done. The results are that the Solutrean Hypothesis rests upon these and other blades like them found in recent years on shore and off on the continental shelf--and they were made by peoples coming from France at the height of the ice age."


That post (dated September 25, 2014), was followed up by another (May 6, 2015) that gives more details of how the points came to be included in Stanford's Solutrean work:

"The [M]ark Small examples were discovered by Dr Stanford and his team at the Gwynn's Island Museum during his annual visit to ID and examine others' collections. I induced Mark's widow to bring the collection, then held by her son for safe keeping. The collection showed up, under his care, as piles of arrowheads laid upon sheets of foam, one atop the other. Her son had rifled every case open....but that's another story. Amidst the mess, Dr Stanford grasped the significance of these two pieces, his then fiance marveling over the smaller examples' evident resharpening trajectory, and the colors of the material isteld--both pieces are rhyolite. Casts made by Michael Frank were used at the Paleo conference in 2012, where thousands of archaeologists examined their displays. These are considered significant to the evidence supporting the Solutrean Hypothesis, and they reside in my hands for now--anyone wishing to examine them need but make arrangements with me to come here."

The sale of the purported Solutrean artifacts is apparently being handled by Trimble's Tavern Antiques in White Stone, Virginia. David Stone Sweet is listed as the contact person, and I'm guessing he's the one responsible for the Facebook postings and the posts (by "Stone") about the points on this forum. 

The points being offered for sale are shown as (a) and (e) in Figure 5.10 of Stanford et al. (2014:90; available here and here).  The discussion of the points in that paper is limited to the following: 

"A large knife (Fig. 5.10a) made of quartzite was dredged from the bottom of Mopjack Bay near Norfolk, Virginia. Use-wear studies suggest that it was not hafted, but rather it was hand-held. A heavily resharpened biface (Fig. 5.10e), was also dredged from Mopjack Bay. Like the Cinmar biface, this tool was made of  banded rhyolite and was used as a hafted knife."
(Stanford et al. 2014:90).

The "Mark Small's Artifacts" page on Facebook also has the points for sale.  The price is the same, but the provenience story is a little different:

"The Pair for $20,000 These are possibly the only known American Solutrean blades offered for sale in the world!

These are the real-deal, rare as hen's teeth and the identification of these is without question--note these two blades in the case of points directly under Dr's Stanford and Bradley's hands in the third pic. Dredged from the Chesapeake Bay near Haven Bar Bouy and the ancient Paleo-channel that outlets there from Milford Haven.

The bay is at it's deepest, 150ft--the deepest bay in the world.
Shown in Dr Stanford's Exhibit at the conference are these two blades along with detailed pen and ink sketches showing flaking patterns, and a map showing approximate find locations."


The story posted by "Stone" on this forum has a bit more detail:

"Mark Small found several on [Gwynn's Island] off that point, and Pleistocene fossils turn up on that stretch of now swiftly disappearing sand. leeward of that island is Milford Haven, an ancient drainage of the Piankatank and Queens Creek systems that carved a channel to some 6 miles out during times when the lands were dry. That paleo-channel reaches to the old banks of the Susquehanna River, then at some places only a mile wide and some less. The two blades in my hands now came from below the edge of the banks of that channel--they were recovered by scallop dredge."
Picture
Based on that description, it sounds like the find spots should be associated with a submerged channel stretching from Milford Haven to the submerged channel of the Susquehanna River. There's no mention of Mobjack Bay (that's the correct spelling, not "Mopjack").  I don't see a submerged channel from Milford Haven in bathymetry data for that section of the bay.  Stanford et al. (2014:Figure 5.9), show the locations of the artifacts in the central part of the channel, southeast of Mobjack Bay but miles from Milford Haven.  There is a deep submerged channel associated with the York River south of Mobjack Bay, and it is into that area that Queen's Creek actually empties.  I couldn't find a location for a "Haven Bar Buoy" mentioned by the seller of the artifacts.

PictureLocations relevant to the provenience of the "Mopjack laurel leaf" points indicated on bathymetric map of Chesapeake Bay. Bathymetry data source: http://www.virginiaplaces.org/chesbay/chesgeo.html
The hodge-podge of information that's out there about the "Mopjack laurel leafs" leads to a set of questions similar to those surrounding the Cinmar biface: where and when were these artifacts actually found?  who actually found them?  what, if anything, do they actually tell us about a "Solutrean" colonization of the New World? 

If the information provided by the seller of the points is accurate, Mark Small (deceased at the time the points were shown to Stanford) did not find the points himself but got them through trade.  I haven't located any other details about who originally found the points or how we know anything about where and when the points were found (other than "scallop dredge").  We are told that the collection containing the points was taken to the Gywnn's Island Museum specifically so that Stanford could look at it, and the seller's description makes it clear that Stanford's endorsement of the points
in the collection is an important part of the story now attached to them.  Stanford's interpretation and publication of the points as authentic New World Solutrean artifacts appears to be the sole criterion for attaching an extraordinary monetary value to them.

So what's the Solutrean hypothesis worth?  To people invested in the monetary value of authentic "Solutrean" artifacts from eastern North America, quite a bit. To the rest of us . . . you'll have to decide that for yourself. 

Also: Chesapeake Bay is not the deepest bay in the world.  That honor goes to the Bay of Bengal, which just squeaks out a win over Chesapeake Bay's 150' with a maximum depth of 3 miles. Pesky details.


References Cited: 

Stanford, Dennis, Darrin Lowery, Margaret Jodry, Bruce A. Bradley, Marvin Kay, Thomas W. Stafford and Robert J. Speakman.  2014.  New Evidence for a Possible Paleolithic Occupation of the Eastern North American Continental Shelf at the Last Glacial Maximum.  In Prehistoric Archaeology on the Continental Shelf, edited by Amanda Evans, Joe Flatman, and Nicholas Flemming, pp. 73-93.
New York: Springer-Verlag.
21 Comments

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