A few days ago, I made an open offer to "fringe" prehistorians to participate in a class I am planning on teaching next fall.  I'm happy to report that Scott Wolter contacted me to take me up on the opportunity:

Hi Andy,  

I’m one of those “Fringe” people you are talking about and would be happy to address your students if the offer still stands.  I’m serious if you’d like to set something up; I’m sure all would learn a great deal from the exchange.  

Regards,  
Scott F. Wolter P.G. 

That's a win.  Wolter was the host of the program American Unearthed (which ran for three seasons on H2) and has written multiple books about pre-Columbian connections between the Old World and the New World.  He is perhaps best known for his defense of the Kensington Rune Stone as an authentic ancient artifact and his ideas about the journeys and activities of the Knights Templar. He has recently written on his blog about a purported "Hooked X" symbol that he argues may link the biblical Jesus to the Freemasons and various North American rune stones. According to Jason Colavito, Wolter will appear in an upcoming program titled Pirate Treasure of the Knights Templar.

I've seen most episodes of America Unearthed but I haven't yet read any of Wolter's books. I will have his commitment to speak to my class in mind when I prepare my syllabus, however, and I'll be sure to have the students read up on his ideas before his presentation.  I don't yet know exactly what he'll talk about - that will be up to him but known ahead of time.

I'm glad that Wolter accepted my offer and contacted me, and I hope some others do the same. I'm just beginning the process of getting things organized (it will be a new course, so there are hoops to navigate to get it approved and on the books), so now would be a great time to step up to the plate.  I would love to have someone come in and make a case for pre-Ice Age civilization, ancient astronauts, giants, etc.  Send me an email: aawhite@mailbox.sc.edu.

There are a lot of people teaching these kinds of courses now, but I plan on doing it a little differently.  We're going to do it my way: we're going to engage, we're going to ask tough questions, and we're going to listen to the answers.  We're going to examine logic, evidence, and the histories and implications of ideas. We're going to kick the doors down, and we're going to have a lot of fun doing it. Stay tuned.

This morning's announcement of the first results from the Rising Star Expedition did not disappoint: a 35-page open access paper with 47 authors (Berger et al. 2015) describing fossil remains (Homo naledi) from at least 15 individuals recovered since 2013 from a cave in South Africa, and another paper by Dirks et al. (2015) describing the physical context of the fossils. I'm friends with several of the authors, and I am so happy for them both personally and professionally.  And I'm jealous. But we'll leave that aside for now.

There are so many things that are awesome about this project that it's hard to even know where to start.  If you don't follow paleoanthropology closely, you may not fully grasp how unusual this discovery is, how novel the approach to excavation and analysis was, and how @#!$&*% badass the results are. The story of the Rising Star Expedition is the Mad Max: Fury Road of paleoanthropology.  I hope we start seeing more movies like this.

This is the largest single hominin fossil assemblage yet discovered in Africa, it is remarkable well-preserved, and it was analyzed and reported upon in record time.  Two years from discovery to publication is blisteringly fast in the world of paleoanthropology (the publication of Ardipethecus ramidus, a 4.4 million-year-old putative hominin from Ethiopia, famously took over 15 years).  Speeding up initial analysis by inviting a crowd of young, hungry scholars to contribute to the work (hence the 47 authors on the first paper) was a masterful stroke by project leader Lee Berger.  The Rising Star Expedition has convincingly demonstrated the utility of a new paradigm that challenges traditional notions about how paleoanthropology should be done and what constitutes an appropriate pace for analysis and publication.  Bravo on that front: totally @#!$&*% badass.

The initial findings/interpretations/conclusions from Rising Star are also pretty @#!$&*% badass.  Here are a few that jump out to me as important during a first quick pass through the paper:

Mosaic of Primitive and Derived Features. According to the authors, the skeletons of Homo naledi preserve a mixture of human-like and australopithecine-like features unlike that seen in any other fossil remains:

H. naledi has humanlike manipulatory adaptations of the hand and wrist. It also exhibits a humanlike foot and lower limb.  These humanlike aspects are contrasted in the postcrania with a more primititive or australopith-like trunk, shoulder, pelvis and proximal femur (Berger et al. 2015:2).

The appearance of a different "mosaic" of primitive and derived features was also described by Lee Berger for the Australopithecus sediba fossils (a rather late gracile australopithecine from South Africa), highlighting the difficulty understanding extinct hominins based on single bones or very fragmentary skeletons.  The skeleton of sediba appeared to have such a strange mixture of features that some researchers suggested the remains were actually those of two different species mixed together. I think it will be pretty difficult to make that argument for the naledi remains because of the number of specimens and their apparent morphological homogeneity.  The implications of the mosaic aspects of the Rising Star fossils will have to be dealt with rather than dismissed. The features that we associate with being human apparently did not come together as a "package deal."

South, Not East?  Identifying naledi as a member of our genus means it is a potential human ancestor.  The center of gravity in the study of the emergence of the genus Homo has been in East Africa for many decades. But if naledi is ancestral to our lineage, what does that mean for the fossils of possible human ancestors found in East Africa?  Do they get pushed out of the lineage?  Do they have to leave the adult table at Thanksgiving and go sit with the little kids?  There is no possible fossil assemblage from East Africa of early Homo that compares with the one from Rising Star in terms of size and its potential to tell us about so many aspects of the skeleton. I think that means that, unless you want to just assume that East Africa is where everything important happened, naledi has to be dealt with in any serious discussion of the origins of Homo. And that brings us once again to the "species" issue.

What Does "Species" Mean?  I wrote a little bit about species concepts inthis post from May when a new species (Australopithecus  deyiremeda) was proposed for the fossil of another purported human ancestor. My point in that post was that if we're imagining that each "species" is a reproductively isolated population, naming a new species has a lot of implications that I think are tough to justify based on fragmentary fossils.  It's most problematic when species are named based on very little physical evidence.  There's a lot of material from Rising Star, however, and I would guess that many people are comfortable with creating a new taxon based on the amount of material that Berger et al. (2015) have analyzed. 

That's fine. But I'm still wondering what is meant by the term "species."  I didn't see a definition of "species" in the paper (it's possible I missed it), but I did see this passage in the National Geographic story about Rising Star that came out today:

"Berger himself thinks the right metaphor for human evolution, instead of a tree branching from a single root, is a braided stream: a river that divides into channels, only to merge again downstream. Similarly, the various hominin types that inhabited the landscapes of Africa must at some point have diverged from a common ancestor. But then farther down the river of time they may have coalesced again, so that we, at the river’s mouth, carry in us today a bit of East Africa, a bit of South Africa, and a whole lot of history we have no notion of whatsoever."

I like the metaphor of a braided stream, but it sounds a lot more like we're describing populations within a single biological species rather than species-level divergences.  Once the "species" streams diverge through reproductive isolation, how could they ever converge again?  Using a biological species concept, they can't.  We may need to give things names so we can talk about them and compare them, but it seems to me, again, that our taxonomic terminology and practices are ill-suited and maybe counter-productive for actually describing and understanding the patterns and processes that we're interested in.

But There's No Date! There are no dates associated with the Rising Star fossils. That means we really have no independent handle on where in time they go, which means it's hard to use them to test specific hypotheses about the patterns, processes, and history of human evolution. Without dates it will really tough to understand how they might fit in with the East African materials, or sediba, or the recently-announced 3.3 million-year-old stone tools from Kenya. Wherever these fossils "go" in time they'll make a splash, but we don't know right now where the ripples will be. I hope we get some information about that soon.

Was naledi Burying Its Dead?  Surely one of the most controversial interpretations of the Rising Star assemblage will be that it accumulated through intentional disposal of the dead.  That's the conclusion of this paper by Dirks et al. (2015):

"Preliminary evidence is consistent with deliberate body disposal in a single location, by a hominin species other than Homo sapiens, at an as-yet unknown date."

That lack of a date is especially painful here. The earliest claims that I know of for regularized treatment of the dead come from the site of Sima de los Huesos (Atapuerca), where the bodies of 28 individuals were thrown into a cave in Spain around 400-500 thousand years ago. Evidence for the patterned, ritualized treatment of the dead at Atapuerca fits well with other possible signs of a cognitive emergence about half a million years ago, including the shell of similar age announced last year that was apparently carved by Homo erectus and evidence of the removal of flesh from the Bodo cranium at about 600,000 years ago. 

If the Rising Star fossils date to the origins of Homo, as the researchers suggest, and if the assemblage accumulated through intentional cultural behavior, it will push ritual treatment of the dead much farther back in time than we have ever considered. Two million years ago?  I bet there are probably people out there who still don't even think Neanderthals were burying their dead. That's sure to spark some arguments. 

Jealousy aside, it's going to be great to watch what happens next. I'm sure there will be more results from Rising Star (hopefully soon), and I'm sure there will be a lot of reaction to what came out today.  It's a totally @#!$&*% badass project with totally @#!$&*% badass results.  This is a great time to be paying attention to human evolution - maybe the best ever.  Fingers crossed we get an announcement of australopithecine DNA soon.

If you're at all interested in human evolution and not currently living in a cave somewhere, you're probably aware that there's an announcement coming from the Rising Star Expedition tomorrow morning. Since its discovery in 2013, the Rising Star Cave has produced thousands of remains of fossil hominids.  A large team was assembled to excavate and analyze the remains, and many of us have been waiting for the last couple of years for publication of the results. Tomorrow could potentially be a very interesting day.

If a "couple of years" from discovery to publication sounds like a long time to you, you probably haven't been paying very close attention to paleoanthropology.  A couple of years is absolutely lightning fast, especially given the volume of materials that have come out of the cave. The Rising Star project has the potential to be remarkable because of both the information it will provide (whatever that is) and the way it was done. The approach that Lee Berger and colleagues took -- quick analysis and publication and the involvement of many early career scientists -- provides a model of a new way of doing things.  I hope that the results are spectacular and make plain the utility of fast-tracking fossil finds and making the process accessible.

Another "new" thing in anthropology that is generating buzz today is the announcement of the planned launch of SAPIENS in January of 2016.  According the website,

"SAPIENS is an editorially independent online publication of the Wenner-Gren Foundation dedicated to popularizing anthropological research to a worldwide audience. Through news coverage, features, commentaries, reviews, photo essays, and more, SAPIENS will share the field’s most exciting, relevant, thought-provoking, and unconventional ideas."

Anthropology needs more active engagement with the public, and I hope this turns out to be as good as it sounds.  I do not believe anthropologists are using nearly all of the available tools that we have to communicate to the public what it is that we do. I hope that this adds one.

On the "out with the old" side, National Geographic announced today that it is shifting to for-profit status. To me, this seems like a natural step in the ongoing degradation of the National Geographic brand.  Remember the hub-bub over the National Geographic program Diggers? And then yesterday I read this National Geographic piece titled "7 Ancient Mysteries Archaeologists Will Solve This Century."  Most of the "mysteries" involved things like finding lost cities, excavating the tombs of famous people, or figuring out the Nazca lines.  It's a piece that feeds into numerous misconceptions about what it is that most archaeologists actually do, celebrating the spectacular, headline-grabbing discovery rather than the actual systematic attempt to use material evidence to understand truly important questions about the human past. That's a bummer coming from National Geographic.  How long will it be until we see them producing sensational content so that they can compete with the fake documentaries about mermaids on Discovery and the ancient aliens on History?

The ways in which science is done and communicated to the public are changing. I've got my fingers crossed that we're going to start doing some things differently. And I can't wait to see what came out of the Rising Star Cave.

I've got an idea.

A common refrain among those claiming to be interested in discovering the "forbidden truths" about our prehistory is that mainstream archaeologists and academics are actively involved in a conspiracy to suppress information, hide evidence, censor ideas, and generally keep the world from knowing what really happened in the past.  The charge that mainstream archaeologists are hiding evidence to protect the status quo is not just incidental to theorists on the fringe: it is a central plank used over and over again to explain the absence of positive evidence for their claims.  The absence of positive material evidence for a claim, in fact, is sometimes used to support the contention that a conspiracy to hide the evidence exists, and that therefore the original claim must be true.  It's really bizarre.

The charge that ideas that conflict with "mainstream" interpretations of the past are actively censored is also central to the claims of fringe theorists.  Nevermind that Ancient Aliens is in its eighth season, Jim Vieria got an entire television series after TEDx took down a video of his talk, and fringe writers are selling books out the wazoo, the cry of "censorship" is common.  I think fringe theorists like to cry foul for several overlapping reasons: (1) it helps them promote the idea that the mainstream is involved in a conspiracy to keep us from knowing "the truth;" (2) it helps them explain the lack of positive evidence for the ideas they are promoting; and (3) it helps them promote themselves as mavericks who are bucking the system, fighting the power, crusading for justice, or whatever else.

The claims of censorship and suppression of evidence and ideas are as bogus as they are boring at this point.  I suggest we switch it up a little bit.

Here's my idea: why not bring the fringe into my classroom?

I'm hoping to teach a course next academic year at the University of South Carolina on pseudo-science in archaeology.  Nothing has been decided for sure yet, but it would probably be a 200-level course, hopefully taught in the Fall semester of 2016.  I'm only in the very early planning stages, but I've been thinking a little bit about how I will organize the course.  I can't think of a better way to help students understand the difference between science and pseudoscience than to have them actively engage "fringe" ideas (and the purveyors of those ideas) within a scientific framework.   

Is your specialty ancient aliens? Giants? Atlantis? Elongated skulls? OOPARTS? Mu? Phoenicians in the New World? Would you like to talk to a group of perhaps 40-50 college students and share your ideas and explain the logic and evidence behind them? Would you be willing to take questions from those same students, knowing that they will have previously made themselves familiar with your arguments and will be asking you questions? Would you be willing to have your engagement with my class videotaped and put online?

Science is built on the premise that good ideas can withstand scrutiny and challenges, while incorrect ideas can be shown to be incorrect.  Science is based on evidence.  Pseudoscience, conversely, is belief masquerading as science.  Scientists are not afraid of scrutiny: proving things wrong is what we do. Pseudoscientists hide from scrutiny, however, because being proven wrong is not good for business.

If I was an honest fringe theorist and I had an idea which I was confident I could present and defend to an audience in an open forum, I would jump at the chance to do so (just because an idea is not accepted by the mainstream doesn't mean it's wrong, of course).  Here, after all, would be a chance to leap over that wall and talk to people in the very settings from which I'm being excluded.  But if I was a huckster marketing ideas that I knew were baloney . . . perhaps in that case I would be somewhat reluctant to expose those ideas to a critique.  My impression is that many fringe theorists really like the protected spaces of radio shows, "interviews," television appearances, books, and "conferences" that insulate their ideas from the fundamental aspect of science (falsification) that makes scientific inquiry a cumulative, self-correcting endeavor.

So, while still tentative at this point, here's my offer:

• You'll get 15-20 minutes to talk to my class (either in person or via Skype) about whatever part of your work you choose;

• You'll let me know ahead of time (i.e., before the semester begins) what aspect of your work you'll be presenting;

• You'll take at least 15-20 minutes of questions from students in my class, who will have had time to become familiar with your ideas and evidence prior to your presentation;

• You'll agree that your presentation and the question/answer session will be recorded and made available to the public (via YouTube or something similar);

• There won't be any financial compensation involved.
  

I'm not yet sure how many of these kinds of interactions I will be able to fit in during the semester, but if any of you out there want to take me up on this I'd love to hear from you.  Leave a comment below, or email me at aawhite@mailbox.sc.edu.

Update (9/11/2015): Scott Wolter is in.

Update (2/15/2016): Jim Vieira is in.

Update (6/13/2016): I set up a Go Fund Me campaign to raise travel money to bring Wolter to Columbia.