I finally found the sermon that I mentioned in yesterday's blog post about the "giant" 5'10" Neanderthals of the Near East. It is a 1976 sermon by Harold E. Shull titled "Giants in the Earth," archived here in Ministry. Ministry describes itself as an international journal for pastors, the content of which is mostly produced and read by Seventh-day Adventist pastors and ministers.  

This post is mostly to bookmark the sermon so I don't lose track of it again.

Shull's sermon is a mash-up of references from the Bible and quotes from Ellen G. White, the main founding visionary of the Seventh-day Adventist church. Shull hits the main points of White's vision of the antediluvian world and its population of gigantic, long-lived, and incredibly smart people, asking what this would have meant for the state of human society and technology before the Flood:

"Could illustrious scholars of our time be placed in contrast with men of the same age who lived before the Flood, they would appear as greatly inferior in mental as in physical strength. As the years of man have decreased, and his physical strength has diminished, so his mental capacities have lessened. There are men who now apply themselves to study during a period of from twenty to fifty years, and the world is filled with admiration of their attainments. But how limited are these acquirements in comparison with those of men whose mental and physical powers were developing for centuries." —Patriarchs and Prophets, pp. 82, 83. What about the level of technology before the Flood? "There perished in the Flood greater inventions of art and human skill than the world knows of to day"--The SDA Bible Commentary, Ellen G. White Comments, on Gen. 6:4, p. 1089. The servant of God adds, "More was lost in the Flood, in many ways, than men today know.""

Despite a complete lack of evidence, the idea that humans today are "degenerated" from our "bigger, better, and smarter" forbears is promoted today among Seventh-day Adventists such as Dr. Ben Carson and Young Earth Creationists like Joe Taylor and Kent Hovind. It shows up in 1950's creationism and early 20th century Baptist ideas about Flood geology and the antediluvian world. It has its roots prior to Ellen G. White's writings of the late 1800's. This 1976 sermon is another data point linking the transfer of these ideas through time. The "bigger, better, smarter" version of Christian thinking on giants stands in stark contrast to the evil currents of the Nephilim whirlpool.

If there is one thing I have conclusively demonstrated to myself over the course of my life, it is my ability to lose track of things even in the presence of an immense set of tools to do exactly the opposite. Go me. This is one of the main reasons why I often write about things as I come across them: saving something for later often means it goes to the bottom of some stack somewhere, never to re-surface.

I ran across the topic of this post while I was searching (unsuccessfully, so far) for a 1960's sermon about giants by a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher. I came across that sermon months ago but never wrote about, and I haven't yet been able to relocate it despite being sure I saved it more than once. I can't recall the name of the preacher, the publication, or the sermon. I'll keep searching for that sermon. In the meantime, I give you this account about of a "giant skeleton" from the Holy Land, described in a paragraph from the January 7, 1933, edition of The Gospel Messenger: 

"The mounds and caves of the Near East continue to yield archaeological items of interest. Thus there was recently reported the finding of the skeleton of a giant in a cave at Athlit, Palestine. The find is said to resemble that of Paleanthropus Palestinus found a year ago at Mt. Carmel. These prehistoric men differed from all others in their long limbs, jutting chins, and awninglike ridges over their eyes. Maybe it was the descendants of some of these that the spies saw when they went up to look over the promised land."

The Gospel Messenger (1883-1965) was the official paper of the Church of the Brethren, a Christian denomination that traces its roots to early 1700's Germany.

Several things in the paragraph from The Gospel Messenger caught my attention. First was the use of "Paleanthropus Palestinus," a taxonomic construct that I don't remember seeing before.  Second was, of course, the phrase "skeleton of a giant." Third was the connection made between fossil evidence and biblical stories.

Spoiler alert: the "giant skeletons" recovered from the cave were none other than the Neandertals of Skhul Cave, one of the most well-known Paleolithic sites in the Near East. The remains were described in a detail in a 1937 report. The "giants" of Skhul Cave were not giants in all, ranging in estimated stature from about 5'7" to a staggering 5'10."  In addition to the formal report ( available online for anyone to see), numerous accounts of the discoveries in the popular media discuss the remains without describing them as those of "giants" That hasn't stopped today's giant "researchers" from uncritically embracing a 1932 article in The Milwaukee Journal that added the word "giant" to the text and headline.

The early 1930's was a time of rapid discovery in the Near East.  In 1932, work in the caves of Palestine revealed the first relatively complete remains of Neanderthals outside of Europe (the "Galilee skull," more commonly known to paleoanthropologists today as Zuttiyeh and classified as Homo heidelbergensis was discovered in 1925; the burial of an infant Neanderthal had been reported from Skhul cave in 1931). These discoveries were widely reported in newspapers and magazines: I found nine separate stories about the discoveries printed in The New York Times between May of 1932 and January of 1933. An Associated Press story also made the rounds in the summer of 1932, and an illustrated feature appeared in Every Week Magazine (a Sunday supplement) appeared in the fall. 

The New York Times articles I located trace the discoveries from three skeletons announced in May of 1932, to the announcement of the discovery of four more in June, to the shipment of eight skeletons to London in January of 1933. In on June 26 of 1932, the New York Times ran a piece by Dorothy Garrod that provided a physical description of the remains Garrod, a professor at Cambridge who was involved in the Skhul fieldwork, described the remains as having "powerfully developed" supraorbital ridges (the ridges of bone over the eyes), high cranial vaults, prognathic faces, and "well-marked" chins.  Garrod contrasts these features with those of European Neanderthals, explaining why Sir Arthur Keith proposed that the new taxon of Paleanthropus Palestinus (sic). Garrod says only one thing relevant to the stature of these individuals:

"The limb bones are massive but are markedly longer than those of the dwarfish Neanderthaler."

Theodore McCown, the excavator of the skeletons, was directly quoted in a New York Times piece from August 6, 1932:

"Although they were a tall people, they probably stopped and walked with a shambling gait."

The word "giant" does not appear in the New York Times coverage until a January 11 story (attributed simply to "Wireless") that describes the Skhul remains as "skeletons of eight prehistoric giants" that were shipped "embedded in huge blocks of stone." That story post-dates both the (January 7, 1933) account in The Gospel Messenger that I quoted above and a similar story from The Milwaukee Journal (December 16, 1932) that is reproduced on the websites of several giant enthusiasts (e.g., here, here, and here).  Here is a transcript of the Milwaukee Journal article:

"FIND GIANT SKELETON IN CAVE IN PALESTINE

Another Mousterian skeleton, resembling those of the so-called Mount Carmel men discovered last year, has been found in the caves at Athlit, Palestine. The remains of the Mt. Carmel men were first found by Theodore McCown, a young American archaeologist. The men were a race of giants who were contemporary with the Neanderthal men of Europe. They differed from all other prehistoric men in their long limbs, jutting chins, and in the enormous ridges over their eyes."

The Milwaukee Journal story, the earliest I have seen so far to refer to the Skhul skeletons as "giants," is credited to "Special Cable."  The Milwaukee Journal story is not the ultimate source of the nonsense claim that the Skhul skeletons were giants -- that honor goes to a story that was apparently written for Christian consumption as a supplemented version of another story that I have yet to locate. The earliest version I have found so far is dated January 5, so there must be an earlier one out there that pre-dates the Milwaukee Journal story. Here is a quote from a story titled "There Were Giants" printed in the January 5, 1933, edition of The Harrisburg Telegraph:

" . . . After the manner of many modern demonstrations of the accuracy of Biblical accounts formerly questioned by doubting Thomases among the "higher critics," it is now reported that there really "were giants in those days."
   News has been received that another Mousterian skeleton, resembling those of the so-called "Mt. Carmel men" discovered last year, has been found in the caves of Athlit, Palestine.
   These men were a race of giants contemporary with the Neadnerthal [sic] men of Europe, but differing in that they had exceptionally long limbs and enormous, awning-like ridges over their eyes.
    Here in America we occasionally hear of the finding of the bones of a giant, but except for the admittedly large stature of our own Susquehannock Indians, there is no evidence that giants inhabited this continent."

Based on the use of the distinctive phrase "awning-like ridges," I'm guessing the account in The Gospel Messenger was drawn from a story similar to the one in the Harrisburg Telegraph. "Awning-like" is also used in the later story in the New York Times story with "giants" in the headline. My guess is that sometime in early-to-mid December, someone, somewhere wrote a story about one of the final skeletons uncovered at Skhul and decided to spice it up a little bit by taking these "taller than Neanderthal" people and turning them into giants. Whether or not that original story was packaged intentionally to interest Christians seeking confirmation of the Bible I don't know, but it seems to have been used that way at the time and continues to be used that way today.  Then as now, in the absence of giants you just make hem up.

​So, getting back to reality, you can read the full report of the Skhul remains online if you want to wade through all the nitty gritty and/or don't want to take my word for it that the Milwaukee Journal didn't somehow know something about the remains from Skhul that the original excavators (and The New York Times) did not. If you don't want to read it all yourself, here are some highlights relevant to the size of the skeletons:

"The Skhul men, like the male Cromagnons, were tall; their stature ranged from 5 ft. 6.7 in. (1,700 mm.) to 5 ft. 10.3 in. (1,787 mm)." (pp. 16-17)

"The length of the foot in these fossil people is in no way remarkable." (pg. 20)

"There the longest of the Palestinian tibiae, that of Skhul IV, is set side by side with three others . . . The maximum length in Skhul IV is 430 mm. for the right bone and 434 mm. for the left. If we apply the formula of Pearson (1898) . . . we obtain a mean tibial stature of 1,813 mm. (71.3 in.); using Manouvrier's tables . . . the result is still more, namely 1,875 mm. (73.8 in.)." (pg. 41).

​"It is at once apparent that we are dealing with a tall race of men, with a body conformation very different from the Neanderthaliens of Europe -- short and stout men. . . . The statures of the four men run from 1,709 mm. (5 ft. 7.2 in.) to 1,787 mm. (5 ft. 10 in.)." (pg. 58)

That the "giant skeletons" from Palestine were nothing of the sort is plain to see with a little bit of investigation. They weren't giants, and information about them was not suppressed. I will bet that none of the websites using this case as an example, however, will change: the uncritical embrace of any old piece of paper with the word "giant" printed on it is a staple among today's cut-and-paste giant enthusiasts. ​Systematic scrutiny and culling of nonsense "giant" accounts would leave little if any ammunition available for the "how can all of these accounts be wrong?" baloney cannon. Dumb. What else can you really say about a world where manufactured clay statues are accepted as evidence.

An ongoing conversation on an old blog post about the Humboldt skull somehow led me to this story about the claim of Mitchell Townsend that stacks of gnawed animal bones in the Cascade Mountains provide definitive physical evidence for the existence of Bigfoot. I had flashes of "Roman sword white paper" as I read this paragraph:

"Townsend’s information will be published in a research paper, and he challenges the scientific community to discredit his information. He said the four-year project helped solve the mystery because the focus was based on forensic evidence. The information used was also heavily based on comparison proof from the top scientists in the world."

Just as I was settling in to wait for the paper, I was happy to find that I had misread the publication date of the news article: it was from May of 2015 rather than May of 2016.  The paper ("Using Biotic Taphonomy Signature Analysis and Neoichnology Profiling to determine the identity of the carnivore taxa responsible for the deposition and mechanical mastication of three independent prey bone assemblages in the Mount St. Helen’s ecosystem of the Cascade mountain range" by Aaron Mills, Gerald Mills, and M. N. Townsend) came out last June and is available here.  It doesn't appear that the paper generated much discussion, which I find curious given the amount of detail it contains. I don't know if the lack of attention means that the Bigfoot community just didn't buy it (?) or just didn't read it: the paper weighs in at 94 pages and is densely packed with jargon.

I was intrigued, so I waded through it.

The paper describes three "bone stacks" located and documented by the authors in the Mt. St. Helens area in 2013 and 2014. The authors attribute the formation of these bone assemblages to Bigfoot, arguing that (1) the stacks of bones could not have been created by any other known carnivore in the area and (2) the bones preserve evidence of consumption by a creature with very large but very human-like teeth.  Here is a quote from Townsend's "discovery narrative" about the first bone stack (pg. 6):​

". . . ​I did a physical examination of the site contents and discovered at least two sets of deer remains based upon the deer skulls found in direct proximity to the main assemblage of bones. The skulls had their noses/snouts crushed by what looked like blunt force trauma and had been placed in the same general nose downhill orientation. This seemed odd at first glance. What really caught my eye was a pile of bones next to a small log. My first impression was that something or someone had sat down and consumed these animals and just dropped the bones between their legs as they finished them. I further confirmed this by looking closely at the stack and noted some very interesting observations. The bones seemed to be mostly rib bones that showed evidence of teeth marks and mechanical manipulation to varying degrees. Some areas had seemingly been bitten out and discernable dental impressions left behind. These dental impressions looked measurably different from the other known species that inhabit this ecosystem." 

Townsend later (pg. 7) reiterates his vision of the behavior that created the record he was looking at: 

"What resident animal species would kill deer with blunt force trauma on the head, position them in the same directional orientation, eat the animals and drop the bones in a pile? How come scavengers were avoiding this site even though some of the bones still had flesh attached? These were just some of the questions now rushing through my thoughts." 

The first thing that struck me about the assemblages described by the authors is the representation of body parts: heads, feet, ribs, and spines (with a few other bones also present). The "kill sites" do not include all parts of animals, or even random pieces of the animals. Here is a listing of what the authors report they collected:
​

• Bone Stack #1 (BP1): 4 ribs, 8 lower foot bones, 2 wrist/ankle bones, a toe bone, and 2 partial hooves from black tail deer (a "partial shoulder assembly" was observed but not collected, and two damaged skulls were present);

• Bone Stack #2 (EK#1): 4 ribs, 1 vertebra, and 4 lower leg bones from an elk. (in the discovery narrative, the authors report that the skull was also observed in the general area but "The odd thing was we found no leg bones in the area, as if they had been carried off later");

• Bone Stack #3 (EK#2): "The lower spinal column, some ribs, and one rear leg were located in this location among elk hair tufts" (pg. 30).

​Students of anthropological archaeology will have anticipated where I'm going with this based on the title of the post: the bone stacks described by the authors appear to be examples of "low utility" assemblages, composed of the skeletal remains of those parts of the animals that contain relatively little meat.  All hunters know that different parts of a large animal have different "values" in terms of their protein and fat content. For cervids like deer and elk, the highest utility parts of the animal (those with the greatest concentration of edible tissue relative to bone) are the upper limbs. Heads, feet, lower limbs, ribs, and the spine -- the kinds of bones described in the bone stacks -- contain relatively less meat per unit of volume (and hence per weight).  When hunter-gatherers on foot (i.e., lacking ATVs, snowmobiles, pick-up trucks, and other mechanized transport technologies utilized by many sport hunters) must choose which parts of the animal to transport back to camp after a kill, they generally (and logically) pick the highest-utility pieces. As a general theoretical expectation, they will butcher the animal and preferentially transport the upper limbs back to camp, leaving behind the feet, heads, spine, etc. Thus we can generally expect that kill/butchery sites will have high proportions of low-utility parts while the camp/consumption sites will have high proportions of high-utility parts.

Again, I'm no expert on bears and cougar, so it seems reasonable to give some weight to the opinion of someone who is. It is logical to me that a person who was trying to use carcass parts to lure in carnivores would use collections of low utility parts (heads, feet, spines) to do the job rather than prime cuts of meat. The presence of parts of at least two different deer (based on the presence of two deer heads) at the first site described by Townsend suggests to me that the deer parts were transported to the site rather than killed there. Maybe the ribs were carried in a bag and dumped out into a pile by whoever was prepping the bait, if that's indeed what happened. Perhaps the skulls were damaged on purpose in an attempt to enhance the scent of the rotting brains -- hell, I don't know. 

And what of the reported tooth marks?  This is a part of the report I have not yet considered in detail. I would be surprised to find that the tooth marks could not be reasonably attributed to non-human carnivores (perhaps more than one kind). But I'll reserve comment on that until I read through their analysis carefully. 

In summary, we're told that the bone stacks are the results of single events: a Bigfoot killing a deer (or two), sitting down and depositing ribs in a pile, one after the other as he/she eats. But it's easy to imagine an alternative hypothesis (the selective use of leftover, low utility parts in bait piles for illegal hunting) that also appears to account for many of the facts presented by the authors. If those alternative hypotheses were fleshed out, it would be possible to develop critical test expectations that could falsify one or the other. I don't think we're given enough information to judge where in the sequence of butchery and deposition the bones were chewed -- before being "stacked"? after? Did the biting occur around the time of death or later? Are there any cutmarks on any of the bones that demonstrate that tools were used to disarticulate the carcasses? Are there bite marks on any bones that are not in the "stack"?  As shown by the "discovery narrative" I quoted above, the assumption that the killing, biting, and stacking all happened at about the same time seems to have been embedded in Townsend's thinking about these sites since the moment of discovery. Discarding that assumption and considering the formation of the sites as a set of analytical questions (which, admittedly, it may not be possible to address satisfactorily with the information they report) may result in a simpler answer than "Bigfoot."

I'm curious as to why the Bigfoot community did not seem to get excited about this work. Anyone care to chime in?  ​

My plans for the Forbidden Archaeology course I'll be teaching in the fall continue to take shape. I wanted to take a few minutes today to write a quick update.

Course Organization

The course will be organized into four sections. We'll spend the first couple of weeks on background, discussing the characteristics of science and pseudo-science, the status of archaeology as a science, and why "getting it right" matters. Because this is a 200-level course with no prerequisites, it's going to be important to make sure the students have some general understanding of the tools we use to learn about the past and to discriminate credible from non-credible explanations. We'll explore the various motivations for creating narratives about the past and discuss the ways that pseudo-science attempts to masquerade as science while simultaneously trying to shelter it's ideas and "evidence" from the scrutiny that is fundamental to the scientific endeavor. Finally, we'll talk about how ideas and arguments are effectively communicated on the internet.

In Section 2 of the course, we'll be talking Giants. Readers of this blog know that this is one of my favorite topics. We'll start with some deep background, tracing the origins of western giant mythology through the Bible, Greek and Roman writings, and early European sources. We'll examine the origin and development of the fascination with giants in 19th century America and try to understand how the re-emergence of belief in the existence of "giants" fits into our world today. 

The topic of Section 3 will be Ice Age Civilization.  We'll trace the origin of ideas about an ancient, lost "mother culture" from Plato's description of Atlantis up to today, critically examining the idea that some high-tech civilization that was destroyed in a global cataclysm. We'll be looking at various pieces of "evidence" that are put forward to support this claim, and we'll be reading and reviewing portions of the book Species with Amnesia.  

The final section of the course will look at claims for Transoceanic Pre-Columbian Contact, focusing heavily on proposed interactions between peoples in Europe and North America. We'll review the main claims for the presence of Europeans in the New World before Columbus and tie the origin and history of those claims to their current manifestations. How do we separate real pieces of evidence from hoaxes and misinterpretations? Why do some ideas persist despite a complete lack of objectively credible evidence? Why does it matter that we get this right?

Guest Participants

My plans to bring in some guest participants are moving forward. Jim Vieira will be visiting in September to talk about his experience investigating "giants." Scott Wolter will (hopefully) be coming in November to participate in the pre-Columbian contact section. I'm trying to raise money to offset the costs of flying both of these people down to Columbia: they are coming at my invitation to participate in a class that I'm setting up, so it is the courteous thing to do. Neither Wolter's nor Vieira's appearance constitutes an endorsement of their ideas on my part, and they both know that. Neither will be getting paid for his appearance. They are participating in, literally, an academic exercise: it's about showing students how to weigh the credibility of ideas by putting them into an arena where they can be challenged on the basis of logic and evidence. How do you phrase an idea in terms of a falsifiable hypothesis? What kind of information is required to prove something wrong? That's what we'll be asking all through the semester, and that's what we'll be asking of Wolter and Vieira.

I just started a Go Fund Me Campaign for Vieira's travel expenses this morning. The fund I set up to cover Wolter's travel expenses has been active for over a week now, but seems to have stalled out after a few donations. Thanks to those who donated! If you're excited about this class and what may come out of it, please consider contributing something (if you're able) to make this happen. 

Finally, I'm happy to announce that Jason Colavito has agreed to participate in the course. I've asked him to talk to the class about his long history of online engagement with "fringe" ideas and explain how he gathers evidence and crafts an argument. I'm also going to ask him to discuss the history of ideas about Atlantis, as he has far more expertise there than I do.  Thanks for agreeing to participate, Jason!

No, You Can't Visit -- Sorry!

Several people have asked (online and in person) about sitting in on the class during the guest appearances and/or me streaming them live somehow. Sorry, but my answer to that question has to be "no:" the course has to be geared to serving the students who are enrolled in it.  Letting in spectators would be a slippery slope.  I do hope, however, that the wider public will benefit significantly from the material that comes out of the class. The students will be writing blog posts that we'll put on a new website, and I anticipate that we'll be able to post some video content related to the guest appearances (those details will have to be worked out and agreed to by all parties).  

At the end of yesterday's blog post about Ancient American and the non-sword article in the latest issue, I wondered aloud if the magazine would publish a piece by me about the swords. This morning I emailed Wayne May (publisher) to ask him that very question and got a speedy response:

"Yes, definitely, submit your article, we will publish it." 

With some quick correspondence, I established that it should be no longer than about 2000-3000 words and that I would be allowed to publish my article on my own website 30 days after the issue is released. The deadline to make the September issue is August 1.  I'm hoping to make that deadline even given everything that's going on -- I've already written who-in-the-hell-knows-how-many words about the swords, so it shouldn't be that tough. I'll keep you posted.

I'll break the suspense and answer the question right away with a quote from page five of the latest issue:

"The purpose of Ancient American is to describe the true prehistory of the American continent, regardless of presently fashionable belief systems, and provide a public forum for certified experts and non-professionals alike to freely express their views without fear or favor."

My experience with Ancient American has been limited. My wife bought me an issue about a year and a half ago that had a cover story about a "giant skeleton" from New York (I wrote about it here), and I bought another issue last spring while I was trying to track down the story of the "oxhide ingot" from Michigan. 

I bought the latest issue (111) this morning because it has the "Roman sword" on the cover and an article titled "The Cursed Oak Island Artifacts" by J. Hutton Pulitzer. I skimmed through the article and didn't see anything about the sword. If you can't get enough of Pulitzer's sour grapes "tech-mogul-turned-explorer-turned-warrior-for-truth" puffery, then by all means you should spend your own $4.95 to read about the latitudes and longitudes of where he takes phone calls from important people who think he's awesome. Otherwise, save your money.

As I flipped through the rest of the pdf, I couldn't help but wonder about the audience for this publication. The first "news" piece in this issue ("Traces Of A 9,000-Year-Old Lost Unknown Civilization Discovered in Lake Huron, Michigan") is a word-for-word reprinting of a piece that has been available free online at the Message To Eagle website since August of 2014. Well, it's not quite word-for-word, as the printed copy that was cut-and-pasted into the magazine includes one of the photo captions out-of-place in the text and the phrase "Lake Huron lost civilization" (presumably a page header) inserted into the narrative twice.  My colleagues at Michigan who are doing this work may be surprised to learn that they're uncovering a "lost, unknown civilization" rather than the remains hunting blinds for driving caribou.

Reading on in this issue, you'll find a story about a rock from Michigan that was somehow determined by Wayne May (the publisher) to be an idol of a human head dating to the period 1000 BC - AD 400, Pulitzer's piece, an article about bison that was also reprinted straight from content that's freely accessible online, a review of the almost-forty-year-old Brad Steiger book Worlds Before Our Own by former Nazi Frank Joseph, a misleading article about the Kennewick Man controversy, some advertisements for books . . . finally there are a few pieces which may actually contain some content related to original scholarship.  Since I paid my $4.95, I'll actually read through those and see if there's anything I'm interested in writing about.

Ancient American has been in print since 1993. As far as I can tell, much of the content has been directed at promoting just about anything that fits within a hyper-diffusionist paradigm: everyone, everywhere, all the time. The great irony in how the magazine bills itself (quoted above) is that it's really impossible to both "describe the true prehistory" and allow all ideas equal weight "without fear or favor."  Not all ideas about prehistory can be "true," of course, so how do you separate the credible from the non-credible within some kind of "safe space" where we all pledge not to think critically?  You can't. An unwillingness to try to falsify anything means you have to accept everything and somehow fit it all into a narrative. When you're mired only on the induction side of the inductive-deductive process (trying to concoct a story to explain the "facts" that you've got in front you), you really run into a problem if you have no means or desire to winnow out good pieces of evidence from the garbage (see this post for an expanded discussion).  So paint me a picture of the "true prehistory" of North America that incorporates everyone's bad ideas, misinterpretations, and fraudulent artifacts. I'd like to see that.

The stated purpose of Ancient American makes me wonder if the magazine would be amenable to a Fake Hercules Sword article written by me?  Or perhaps a point-counterpoint where Pulitzer and I can discuss the key issues around the sword(s).  If you really want to get beyond "fashionable belief systems," you might want to try embracing the self-correcting nature of science. It tends to produce some pretty good results if you let it.

And you may also want to invest in some additional proofreading.

Swordgate afficionados will remember when, in the midst of the giant "Roman sword" bellyflop, J. Hutton Pulitzer removed or made inaccessible his websites for the books Solomon's Secret and Commodus's Secret (it was one of my top ten great moments in Swordgate history). Solomon's Secret had been available for pre-order (meaning you pay for the book but you don't get it right away) since at least November of 2014.  The goal posts for publishing the book(s) have been moved back several times since then. The only website I can find for Solomon's Secret now is this Facebook page, which claims the book will be coming out this July:

This is not the only time I've seen the "how do we get a refund" question posed but a customer who has run low on patience.  All along, Pulitzer has promised that refund requests will be honored. This is a quote from the now-invisible Solomon's Secret website:

"As far as orders, it is an automated process, and if you decide not to wait, it is an automated 100% guaranteed return process and, you can go back to order and cancel, and it will be process and then the one reserved for you, just becomes someone else’s gain."

Another unsatisfied Solomon's Secret pre-order customer recently posted a complaint on the Ripoff Report website:

"Pre-ordered Solomon's Secret book.  Book has been postponed and postponed while the "author" self-publishes all sorts of other stuff.  He won't respond or acknowledge inquires about status of book or refund."

There is a single rebuttal to the complaint, filed by someone claiming to be Pulitzer:

I cannot find any evidence that the sales of Solomon's Secret are being handled by Amazon.  When I go to the "Commander Pulitzer" author page, I get a list of 345 treasure hunting books, the most recent of which were published in March of 2014. Solomon's Secret is nowhere to be found.

I'd love to see a copy of a receipt for ordering this book, if you've got one. Email it to me at aawhite@mailbox.sc.edu. You can remain anonymous if you like.

Anyone want to gamble on whether not you'll get your copy of Solomon's Secret (and Commodus's Secret) in July? I know where I'd put my money.

Thanks to Mike Morgan for posting the link to the Ripoff Report on the Fake Hercules Swords group on Facebook.

This is a quick follow-up to a blog post from earlier today about the Faram Research Foundation's take on the Kensington Rune Stone (KRS). I was curious about the idea that the runes on the stone were carved by two different people. In the comments to that post, Joe Scales pointed me to this website which contains a link to a 1976 article in Minnesota History titled "The Case of the Gran Tapes" that sheds some light on that issue. 

The Minnesota History article transcribes a 1967 interview with Walter Gran, son of John P. Gran, and Walter Gran's sister (Anna Josephine) and nephew. John P. Gran was a neighbor of Olaf Ohman, the man who unearthed the KRS in 1898. As described in the article (pg. 153),

"The pertinent information as to the inscription derives from conversations in the late 1920s between Walter and his father, who was ill at the time and convinced that he was dying. The evidence thus has the quality of a deathbed statement."

Here is a bit of the interview relevant to the issue of right- and left-handed carvers of the KRS:

"Nephew. Well now, did Ohman ever admit that be did this?  

Walter. No, Ohman didn't. Well, you see, then as time went on. Papa was getting older and older, and I was in Canada. Then I got a telegram, I think it was Art [his brother, Arthur Gran] who sent me a telegram, if you want to see Dad alive, you better come right away. . . . Let me see, when 1 came back, what year was that now? I believe it was in 1926 or '27, I ain't so sure, one of them years. I come up and seen Dad then, and Dad was glad to see me. He was laying in bed but he was pretty weak. Well, then of course we talked about what I was doing. . . Yeah, well, then he got to talking. He brought up about the rune stone, then again. He said to me, you should go to see Ohman now, he said, and visit Ohman. And then he says, you find out how we made the rune stone, he says. He says, you know it is false, he says. You know, he said to me, just like it was important that it was so. And I says Yeah. . . .

Anna Josephine. You see Papa was left-handed . . . and Ohman was right-handed.

Walter. You know I seen that sculpture [rune stone] had been examined and it said it had been two men working on that stone and because one was a left-handed man and one a right-handed man. Well, that fitted in for Dad and Ohman, but then I thought, by God it is something isn't it? . . ."

That's the story from Walter Gran's side.  Needless to say, supporters of the KRS don't accept Gran's report of a 40-year-old confession. Here is the take from one website:

"1972-1975 - The “Deathbed Confession”

As strange as the events that had swirled around the rune stone till now had been, it got even stranger. Walter Gran was the son of John Gran who lived at Kensington. Walter claimed in an interview that his father, while dying, had told him that the rune stone was a fake and that he and Olof Ohman had carved the inscription. Even though no-one around Kensington believed Gran and everyone spoke of his tendency to “exaggerate,” the story caught on. A subsequent interview with Gran showed him to not have a coherent story. A jury would never have bought it, but there was no jury. The rune stone and Olof were convicted of fraud without a trial. The “deathbed confession” suited the anti-stone atmosphere of the times and fit the template of hoax that the hungry media had adopted."
​
Anyone know where I can find that "subsequent interview"?

A comment by Arthur Faram on my last post about the Kensington Rune Stone led me to the website of the Faram Research Foundation.  On his site, Faram provides a list of archaeological/historical "mysteries" that he claims to have solved through the application of "geoglyphology."  The Kensington Rune Stone (KRS) is one of them. Here is what Faram wrote on my blog: 

The KRS has it's own section on Faram's site. `The short version of Faram's claim is that the KRS is an encrypted survey document that describes a pre-Columbian European claim to North America. Faram keys in on the numbers in the stone's text, interpreting them in terms of distances and orientations to various important locations. I'm not sure if/how he attempts to justify his assumptions about what the numbers mean (in one stanza, for example, the phrase "10 men" is decoded as '10 miles,' and in another it's decoded as "a 110 degree radial"). 

Two parts of the claim interested me.  One was Faram's suggestion that the runes on the stone were carved by two different people:

My knowledge of the KRS and the main claims about it is not exhaustive, so I don't know if this is an original idea or not. Knowing if the stone was carved by two different people could be relevant to understanding the circumstances under which the stone was created. If the two parts of the text were created at two different times hundreds of years apart (as Faram claims), for example, one would expect the time difference would be detectable based on differences in the physical weathering of the carvings. If there were two carvers roughly contemporary, however, and the stone can be shown to be a nineteenth century creation, then we're looking for at least two hoaxers rather than one (Update 6/18/2016: this short post discusses the issue of right- and left-handed carvers discussed in a 1976 Minnesota History article about the Gran tapes).

Although I can't claim to follow Faram's logic in decoding the stone in terms of distance and orientation directions, it was simple enough to evaluate his central claim that the KRS describes "new boundaries for the North American Territory for which Inspiration Peak is the central survey marker." Faram states that the number "1362" on the stone, in addition to recording the year the stone was carved, indicates that "Inspiration Peak [Minnesota] was exactly 1362 miles from the three corners of what would later become the United States." 

Faram provides latitudes and longitudes for both Inspiration Peak and the "three corners," making it simple enough to perform distance calculations. Here are the results that I got using this online tool: ​

None of the distances between the pairs of coordinates he provides is "exactly" 1362 miles, and the distances to the NE and S points aren't even close in pre-1592 miles (i.e., when a mile was defined as 5,000 feet rather than 5,280 feet).  The claim that Inspiration Peak, MN, is an equidistant 1362 miles from those three boundaries of the United States is demonstrably false.

The issue of why the length of the mile was changed from 5,000 feet to 5,280 feet in the late 1500's is an interesting one (you can read one take on it here and another here). Faram asks if the change was made "to mask all the measurements done before" 1592, hinting at a mapping conspiracy that could be easily overcome by a change in division.

One of the strangest ideas embedded in Faram's treatment of the KRS is that the number "1362" stands for both the year the stone was created and the distance measurement to each of the three corners of of the territory. Peculiar on its own (in 1362 a party journeyed to a point 1362 miles equidistant from opposing coasts and carved on a rock?), it becomes bizarre when you factor in Faram's claim that the lower portion of the writing, including the number "1362," was an amendment to the stone that was actually added after 1519.  So the original stone was placed 1362 miles from the opposing coasts in 1362, but the number "1362" was not added until much later? And, coincidentally, the third (southern) point that was added to the claim was also 1362 miles from Inspiration Peak, even though it was an amendment?  What good would the original marker have been without the date/distance recorded on it? And how would the carvers in 1362 have known that they needed to place the stone in a location 1362 miles from a point on the southern boundary of the territory which had not yet been defined? You almost need to invoke time travel to make the claim reasonable.

But these gymnastics don't matter, of course, since Inspiration Peak is not actually 1362 miles from the points that Faram specifies.

As usual, let me know if I've gotten anything wrong. I'm happy to fix errors.

Yes, I know I've promised more content on the Kensington Rune Stone, giants, the Kirk Project, Swordgate, sea turtles, and Gigantopithecus, but it's summer and I finally have the magical combination of means, space, and discretionary time to devote some energy to my hobby.  So I'm taking it. And I'm blogging about it. Because I can.

I finally got the head attached to the body of the Tyrannosaurus yesterday. Getting the teeth the way I wanted them took some time, as I had to create a frame that would fit on the base of the upper jaw, cut and weld on sections of coil springs, and then grind those sections down to make them somewhat pointed. Then I could attach the teeth and the mandible to the head and get it all secured to the body. And then it starts to get more fun: once the main structure is all together, the "fleshing out" moves along quickly and I feel like I'm doing art rather than engineering.

It's hard to get a good photo in my garage because I can't get far enough back. As you can see from the picture, I'm back to supporting thing with a brace from the side: it's starting to lean as it gets heavier and I don't want to make the feet and ankles absorb all that strain.

I've mostly been working on the side you see in the photo (I'll push the thing out of the garage, turn it, and push it back in to work on the other side). It isn't done but it's getting there. I'm on my third iteration with the eye -- it's getting close but I'm still not satisfied. 

It's a nice feeling when you reach the point in a project where a lot of the hard (i.e., less fun) parts are done and you know you're going to enjoy the rest of the work and have an outcome that you're happy with. The air here right is so wet it's almost drinkable, but I'd spend all day outside working on this thing if I could. The only reason I stopped a little early today was because I ran out of welding wire.

I should give it a rest and go into the office tomorrow. Or not. I'll think about it.

And for those of you who consider me an enemy and want me fired, don't get too excited that I haven't been going into the office: I'm on a 9 month appointment so I don't get paid to do anything over the summer.