I've occasionally been accused by those on the "fringe" side of being too hard on them and too easy on mainstream scholars and skeptics. I don't really think that's true. I think I call BS when I see it. I attribute the perception of unfairness to a couple of different factors.  First, I'm probably a little more careful about my choice of words when I'm discussing the work of those who are genuinely interested in answering a question or solving a problem (rather than just selling books). That's much more common among mainstream scholars.  Second, I think "fringe" theorists tend to be more sensitive to criticism because they're not used to having their ideas openly challenged on the basis of evidence.  Sometimes, unfortunately, scrutiny hurts their feelings. Third, some "fringe" theorists probably assume that I'm part of some wide-ranging conspiracy to suppress their ideas.

If I'm part of a conspiracy, I have yet to be told about it.  Maybe someday "they" will let me in on the secret and I can start writing blog posts on a laptop with a fully functional keyboard and a working battery, maybe even while not at home watching kids on evenings and weekends. Just think how effective I could be if I could work without also being responsible for wiping noses, stopping couch wrestling, and pretending to eat imaginary pasta.

​The fact is, professionals get things wrong also. Today's "whoops" comes from Paolo Viscardi, a natural history curator at the Grant Museum of Zoology in London.  This "Ask a Biologist" page includes Viscardi's answer to the question "Were there ever giant humans?, which includes the following:

​"Next I would say that there were Pleistocene apes called Gigantopithecus that stood about 10 feet tall. Their remains are very similar to those of humans, particularly when the skull is damaged. Mammoth and elephant skulls are also remarkably humanoid in appearance when they are damaged."

The appeal to the remains of Gigantopithecus is as unfortunate as it is wrong.

While there was a genus of ape (that we call Gigantopithecus) that existed in South and East Asia during the Pleistocene, we only know of these creatures through a few mandibles and teeth.  No-one has ever found a Gigantipthecus skull or any other part of the skeleton. Just teeth and mandibles. So how could we say the remains of a Gigantopithecus look like those of a giant human?  We can't, because we've never seen them.

The teeth and mandibles of Gigantopithecus are large.  Those teeth and mandibles form the sole basis of our estimates of body size. Big teeth and jaws mean a big primate, right?  Well, sort of. The problem is that there is a lot of variation among primates in the relationship between tooth size and body size (I touched on this subject in this post about why the original owner of the large Denisovan tooth wasn't necessarily a giant).  Tooth size alone doesn't necessarily tell us much because tooth size is related to diet. Relatively small-bodied australopithecines had large grinding teeth because they had a diet that included a lot of tough, low quality foods that needed to be heavily masticated.  The teeth and jaws of robust australopithecines (which were also small-bodied compared to modern humans) were even larger and were accompanied by a skull and chewing muscles that were clearly designed to produce and resist massive chewing forces.

So how do we estimate the body size of Gigantopithecus?  If you model the size relationship between teeth and body based on something like a gorilla (a primate with a relatively soft, fruit-based diet and small chewing teeth) you get a very large primate. If you use a model more like a robust australopithecine (a primate with a relatively tough diet and large chewing teeth), body size estimates are smaller.  Gigantopithecus was large, but I don't think we'll know how large until someone finds some postcranial bones. I'm sure they're out there somewhere. When I have the opportunity to talk about Gigantopithecus in my classes, I show pretty pictures of Liuzhou in China (image source) hoping they will inspire someone to go out and look.  Finding some Gigantopithecus bones other than teeth and jaws would be sweet.

Anyway, the figure of a 10' tall ape is repeated often. Maybe Gigantopithecus was that large, and maybe it wasn't. Bigfoot enthusiasts love a big Gigantopithecus, as do some advocates of the idea that humans have "degenerated" in size over time. There is zero evidence that Gigantopithecus is a human ancestor, and, in fact, we don't even know that it was a biped.  As with body size, ideas about whether Gigantopithecus walked upright on two legs are based on a few jaws and teeth. Anthropologist Grover Krantz's celebrated reconstruction of a Gigantopithecus skull, beloved by Bigfoot enthusiasts, was based on the same tooth and mandible fragments as all of our other interpretations. Krantz extrapolated a bipedal posture for Gigantopithecus based on the morphology of the mandible.  Not a lot to go on there, but I guess that doesn't matter much if you already know the answer. (See this post for more discussion.)

The academic imagineering was further amplified recently when Jeff Meldrum and Idaho State University produced a "full-size" skeleton of Bigfoot to help the History Channel create more schlock programming for its already crowded schedule of crap.  

"Meldrum borrowed from the physical looks of extinct animals such as the Gigantopithecus blacki — an ancient ape that was twice the size of apes today — and the Neanderthal — a species of human that is said to have became extinct 40,000 years ago."

So this "Bigfoot skeleton" is based partially on the "looks of extinct animals such as the Gigantopithethecus blacki"? Oh my.  If you've read this far, you know that we really don't know much about what those extinct animals actually did look like. We've got some teeth and mandibles - that's it. From those meager remains, wishful thinkers (including academics) have built up several real-looking reconstructions that will probably be cited for years to come as actual evidence. That's why Viscardi's statement ("Their remains are very similar to those of humans, particularly when the skull is damaged") is so unfortunate: he's reinforcing the incorrect notion that all of this business about the giant, bipedal Gigantopithecus is fact, established based on the existence of skeletons and skulls.

That's just not true.

Maybe Gigantopithecus was a 10' tall biped. But maybe it wasn't. What we don't know about Gigantopithecus far outweighs what we do know. That vacuum of knowledge is what allows all kinds of notions (not all of which can be correct) to survive. Some of those notions will be killed off when actual postcranial remains are found. In the meantime, I hope that academics will take care to convey to the public what we actually do and do not know about this creature.

As I was driving back to Columbia from Augusta last weekend, I heard part of a program on NPR discussing "disruptive leadership." One of the guests (Seth Godin) had some really interesting things to say about how the rise of the internet has broadened the segment of the population for which it is possible to develop a voice and a following. Godin argues that most people still don't "get" that there is nothing preventing them from becoming leaders (about 6:00 in):

"The fact that everyone has a platform, right this minute, means that the only reason you're not using it is because you don't want to, not because you're not allowed to."

I think he's right about that (and a lot of other things, also -- you should listen to the interview).

I've been developing my online presence since the Spring of 2014. There were a number of reasons why I committed to doing it.  At the top of the list is that I thought it would help me on the job market.  My career path has been somewhat non-traditional, with a long period of time between getting my Master's degree and going back to school for my Ph.D. While that "gap" was filled with archaeology (and starting a family), it put me into Michigan's doctoral program at a different point in my life than most of the other students. I had an incentive to finish quickly, so I designed my dissertation work around data from existing collections and computer modeling rather than as a more traditional, site-based project (that wouldn't have answered any questions I was really interested in and wouldn't have given me any excavation skills I didn't already have).  

Anyway, I felt that the professional path I had chosen was putting me at a disadvantage.  I was having success getting short list interviews, but the easy choice for many departments seemed to be a person who had a narrowly focused research agenda that involved continuing work at a single site. That's not me. I thought building a website would help even the playing field a little, allowing me to present my ideas in a way that would help people (especially people on search committee) understand them and see how the various components of my research agenda fit together. I've always tried to be who am, and I thought I would be better off working to present a more accurate picture of myself rather than trying to pretend I was someone else.

In reality, I don't think that my online activities actually helped me get a job in a direct way. I don't know that they played any role landing my Visiting Professor position at Grand Valley State, and I doubt they had much to do with getting my current position at South Carolina.  

But that doesn't mean they weren't worthwhile.  I think putting my website together and writing a blog, probably did help me in a number of indirect ways. Writing content for my various "Research Interest" sections was a good exercise in boiling down and making connections between the various things I'm interested in (my work is complicated and difficult to explain in the kinds of simple sound bytes you need to sell yourself during an interview).  So that was good. I put less effort into that part of my website (much of it remains "under construction to this day) as I discovered that I like blogging. That's where the real fun has been for me.

I think blogging has been beneficial in several ways: (1) it has helped me become a better writer (and a better communicator overall); (2) it has forced me to learn to think carefully about what I'm going to say before I say it, knowing that it can be read by anyone (including the people whose work I'm discussing); (3) it has let me make connections (both positive and negative ones) with a variety of people whose interests overlap with mine; and (4) it has given me an outlet to share my ideas about whatever I find interesting, whether related to archaeology or not (I've written about dragonflies, aircraft, and one of my large metal dinosaur sculptures, among other things).

Over the course of the last year, I've watched traffic on my website grow considerably. The only longitudinal data I have access to are those provided by the Weebly app on my phone (for some reason, I can't see stats for my traffic retrospectively in my regular browser).  I'm not sure how exactly Weebly calculates "unique visitors" and "page views," but I think the stats probably overestimate the real number of visitors to me site.

A screenshot of page views by day shows some pretty steady growth starting in December of 2014. The post that really started growing my readership was the first thing I wrote about "double rows of teeth" at the end of November 2014. I had been collecting data about accounts of giants for some time, and I thought I had the "double rows of teeth" mystery cracked. The ridiculousness of Search for the Lost Giants prompted me to use my blog (rather than an article) to try to communicate my results. That was a good move: I got a lot more positive feedback (a lot more quickly) than I ever would have using traditional print media.

Believe it or not, I was initially somewhat timid about naming names and directly engaging online with ideas and people. As I wrote more about giants and saw the results, however, I realized that I had something worthwhile to contribute and that I could not only participate in a conversation but affect it.  I've written a lot about giants over the last year, and I've been surprised by how few "giantologists" have been willing to engage with me. There are a few, to be sure, and I've enjoyed having conversations with them (even when we disagree).  Some of the people whose work I've called out, however, have ignored everything I've written while continuing to claim that "mainstream academics" (like me, I suppose) are too scared to deal with the phenomena they do (see my recent review of the chapter on "double rows of teeth" in Jim Vieira's new book). That's baloney. I continue to think that engaging with the "fringe" is useful, and I'm going to keep on doing it here and in other arenas.

I realized after a few months of writing about giants (during whatever time I could find while in the trenches of teaching a 4/4) that I was probably putting together the pieces for a book. "Research via blogging" is kind of a nice way to go, because what you write at any given time can be long and involved or short and simple. It really is possible to use blog posts as building blocks which can be assembled later into something larger and more complex. I find it much easier to keep track of my thoughts when I can just refer back to a titled blog post through a link rather than search through some long Word file or try to find some note that I scrawled on a scrap of paper somewhere. So there will be a book on giants that emerges some day from all this. I don't know when or what format it will be in (online or traditional), but it's coming.

​While writing about giants (which I find to be an intrinsically interesting topic for many reasons) has increased my readership, many of my more popular posts have been about other things. I can usually tell within a few minutes when I've written something that has legs, as I start getting rapid notifications from Facebook and Twitter. That happened with the first post I wrote about the Solutrean Hypothesis ("Shots Fired in the Battle Over the Cinmar Biface") and this post I wrote after the announcement of yet another new species of australopithecine ("What's a Species?). The species post was later quoted in an NPR science blog, which was cool.  The post on the Solutrean Hypothesis (the first of several I have written) got a lot of positive reaction.  It also got me some angry comments and emails from some archaeologists, including a researcher at the Smithsonian. I continue to think the Solutrean Hypothesis is interesting both because of the evidence that is used to support it and for several reasons that go beyond the archaeological data. I'll continue to write about it when I've got something to say. 

​During my first semester at South Carolina I've had less time to write than I would like, but I've still made an effort to feed the blog when I have the opportunity.  Some of my most popular posts this fall include one that I wrote about the excavation of a mammoth in Michigan ("Questions About the Michigan Mammoth") and one about the announcement from the Rising Star Expedition ("The First Rising Star Results: Totally @#!$&*% Badass"). I've been wanting to write more about the fallout from Rising Star, but I haven't found the time. The battle over "was this good science" (see, for example, this article, this post by John Hawks, and this piece) has been fascinating to watch. I think it's an incredibly important, multi-faceted discussion and at some point I'll probably have something to add and will (for better or worse) chime in again.

It's interesting to me that there is not a strong correspondence between the effort I put into writing something and how popular it seems to be.  I think other academics can relate to this, as it's definitely true in print media as well. When I decide to spend effort writing something, I don't tend to worry too much about how many people will read it. That's probably for the best, as it allows me to continue to write about whatever I want. I will admit that it's a bit of a bummer to feel like I've been ignored, though, when I think I've said something that should be broadly interesting. I wrote this post about Ben Carson's thoughts on evolution way before all the hubbub over his misinterpretation of the pyramids. In a fair world, it would have gone viral.  But it didn't: the pyramid post did. Why it surprises anyone that a Young Earth Creationist would say something silly about the human past is beyond me . . . you're all late to the party!

I have written quite a bit about how religion articulates with various "fringe" ideas about the past. Directly challenging religious notions, like directly challenging individuals, was something I was originally hesitant to do. I'm not anti-religion. As I learned more about why people believe in giants, however, it became apparent to me that understanding the religious component was important. If it's important, you kind of have to talk about it. I decided that, for me, the rules of engagement are satisfied when religion makes a claim about the past that falls within the purview of archaeology and anthropology.  So I've written a lot about creationism (and there's plenty more to come) and a little bit on the ideas and claims of Mormons regarding the prehistory of the New World. There's a bunch of really interesting stuff to be learned about how science has changed the world over the last few centuries and how religious traditions and ideas about the past are related to the place of "fringe" ideas in our world today. I'm not near as shy about discussing it as I used to be.

I recently launched The Argumentative Archaeologist, a separate site that organizes information about all kinds of "fringe" claims. The name came from J. Hutton Pulitzer, who apparently thinks that calling an archaeologist "argumentative" is a pretty good insult. It's not: it's a compliment.  I hope to keep The Argumentative Archaeologist growing over the next year as I prepare for and teach a class on "Forbidden Archaeology." 

As my readership has grown, I've gotten my share of both positive feedback and negative pushback.  I have to admit that I like both (I've worked too hard on too many academic papers that have gotten too little reaction not to appreciate when people take the time to react to what I say). My wife can tell you about how my face lights up when I know that I'm about to strike a match.  It's nice when people agree with you, but it's also pretty nice when they don't and you get to have a discussion about why.  

In the NPR interview that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Seth Godin notes that disruptive leadership can vary in its usefulness. The modern history of archaeology provides us with a great example of "useful" vs. "less useful" disruptive leadership in the Tale of Two Angry Archaeologists that is the lesson of Walter Taylor (1913-1997) and Lewis Binford (1931-2011).  While each leveled a similar set of pointed (and valid) criticisms at the archaeological status quo, one (Binford) was much more effective at bringing about change.  The difference (as I wrote in this essay) is that Binford's "disruptive leadership" provided a way forward while Taylor's critique was just a critique. 

My online experience with the both professionals and the fringe has reinforced the Taylor-Binford lesson to me many times over: disruption and criticism are much more effective if you provide an alternative.  If you say the answer is wrong, then what's a better answer and why is it better? Providing that alternative takes significantly more effort, of course, than simply launching a criticism.  I don't always get it right (and sometimes, honestly, it is really hard to want to try). But I think that my willingness to try has contributed significantly to the growth of my audience.

If you're an anthropologist (or any kind of scientist, really) and you've been thinking about developing your own website and becoming an active public voice, I encourage you to do it. You should definitely do it. And you should listen to the interview with Godin: much of what he said resonated with my experience, and his analysis may help you decide to take the plunge.  If you remain quiet, it's by your own choice and not by necessity.

For readers in search of further inspiration, I can only refer you to the song "The Hero" by Queen. Go!

As usual, I've got more things to write about than time to write about them. This week's energy got mostly sucked up by a book review for American Antiquity. Those kind of reviews (a limit of 750 words about a 360-page book) are not my favorite things to write. It was due today, and it has been submitted. So that's that. Now for some giants.

My recent explorations into the origins and development of ideas about giants and creationism suggest that modern Young Earth Creationism (YEC) has its roots in the Seventh-Day Adventist church (SDA) and the prophetic writings of Ellen G. White. The SDA was officially founded in 1863. The Millerite movement from which it developed dates back to the early 1840s. The Millerites do not appear to have been concerned with giants (they appear to have been more worried about the coming apocalypse than they were with details of creation). So there's something interesting to be understood about how/why the ideas of giants that were still around in the late 1800s became part of the doctrine of several indigenous American religious sects.

Ellen G. White's late 19th century writings about the Antediluvian Earth came after science had mostly discarded (through falsification) notions of a very young earth that had been affected by a catastrophic global flood just a few thousand years in the past.  The 1800s saw a dramatic shift in scientific thought as the results of empirical work replaced the Bible as sources of information about the past. Supporters of giants dwindled as our knowledge about the past (and about geology, paleontology, anatomy, etc.) increased in breadth, accuracy, and detail. 

I've come across a few "mistakes were made" accounts from the early 1800s that I wanted to share, mostly as a way to put them where I can find them again (and so I can close browser tabs on my phone).

The first example is a famous one: a skeleton of a pre-Flood human found in Tertiary slate. The correct identification of the bones as those of a large salamander, published in The Lancet in 1834 (page 625-626) by Robert E. Grant (M.D.) is scolding in its tone:

"I would impress you with the necessity of minutely examining those organizations which appear most different from each other, and of fixing clearly in the mind some one or more of the typical forms of the skeletons in each subordinate group. . . . In that case, if you had a previous exact knowledge of the typical forms which are common to whole groups of animals, particularly of the essential elementary parts of their skeleton, how readily you would be able to form an accurate judgment, even upon comparatively slender data, where another, with even more means of forming a judgment, but without the same previous scientific knowledge, would be guided by analogies the most superficial and absurd. The skeleton of the salamander . . . was mistaken for that of an antediluvian giant. It presents something like a human vertebral column; something like an expanded human occipital bone; but what knowledge of the principles osteology could compare this head, with large lateral openings, these expanded jaws and teeth, these scapular bones, these short, pointed ribs continued from the ends of the transverse processes of the vertebrae in this skeleton of a gigantic extinct aquatic salamander, or any one of its bones taken separately, with the corresponding parts of a human skeleton—the skeleton of a land animal organised to support the trunk in an erect position. Yet this is the supposed human skeleton, the famous homo diluvii testis of Scheuchzer . . . so long believed to be a remnant of our race, buried by the universal deluge." 

In a later lecture (also published in The Lancet in 1834 - I found it here and here) Grant discusses how fragments of tortoise shells have been mistaken for giant human skulls:

"From the flatness and arched form of these bones, and from the sutures which bind them anteriorly and posteriorly, they have been mistaken for parts of the human skull. And from the great magnitude of these bones, it was natural to imagine that such a skull must have belonged to a human being of enormous size—an antediluvian giant."

Anyone who has ever looked closely at animal bones knows how easy it is to mistake turtle shell for human cranial bone (unless you know what to look for).

Finally, a quote from from an 1826 article by the Reverend John Fleming (The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal XIV(28)):

"As science advanced, these theories of the deluge appeared in their true light; as unsupported by the statements in Scripture and as inconsistent with the phenomena of nature. The skeleton of the antediluvian man became that of an acknowledged reptile; while the grinders and thigh-bones of the giants were admitted to belong to elephants."

Those of you who would like to invoke a Smithsonian-Darwinian conspiracy to explain how evidence of giants "disappears" should note the early dates of these corrections (the Smithsonian wasn't founded until 1846 and On the Origin of Species wasn't published until 1859). As Reverend Fleming discusses, the melting away of a purely biblical understanding of the past -- which included recognizing fossil bones for what they were -- was a result of the cumulative, self-correcting power of science to replace bad interpretations with better ones.  It was not then a conspiracy to hide the truth, and it is not now.

The theory of evolution was a direct threat to the creationism inspired by Ellen G. White and espoused by George McCready Price, however, and continues to be seen as threat to fundamentalist creationism today.  In light of all that we know about the earth's past today, the evidence for giants is weaker than ever. Recyled claims of giants by "professionals" from the early 1800s is not impressive evidence, given their track record of making some pretty obvious mistakes (remember the 1845 giant from Tennessee?). If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe Robert Grant. I do.

Last January, I wrote this post about the story behind the sculpture of the 47" femur that is on display at the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum.  The image of Joe Taylor posing next to his giant femur sculpture is a popular one on the internet, as is the one shown here of some guy standing in a hole holding the femur sculpture as if he just dug it up in his backyard (he didn't dig it up: he bought it from the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum gift shop for $450).

The Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum website has changed since last January. Some of the links in my original post no longer work, and they've added a new section to address questions about the 47" femur.  Taylor writes:

"It is true that I sculpted a femur 47-1/2 (120 cm) based on a report in a newsletter where it was reported on by the construction engineer who found it and other skeletons the same height."

This is the first I can recall hearing about a "newsletter." On the page that reproduces the alleged letter, Taylor says

"Mr. Jack Wagner sent me the following article in 1996 and asked me to sculpt a human femur the size of the one found in the Middle East."

Then he presents the same text (beginning "Dear Christian Friends") that I posted previously. 

I don't know who Jack Wagner is.  And, as far as I can tell, neither Taylor nor anyone else has ever provided the original source for the story. You've got to think if the story comes from a "newsletter" or an "article" that the publication should have a name and date so that we could track it down and perhaps learn something else about the original source.  Maybe the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum website could provide us with that information.

The story of the 47" femur is interesting not because there is any truth to it, but because it persists on the internet despite being recognized as bunk over and over again (e.g., see here, here, here).  Taylor is onto something when he he says (in this interview) that the story has power because the sculpture helps people “see the truth.”  The reason the 47" femur story has legs is that the simple image of an incredibly large femur is unambiguous and easy to understand.  It's a recognizable bone. And it's big.  Not just kinda big, but really big.  

The 47" femur sculpture helps people to make real something they desperately want to be real. In that circumstance the backstory of the sculpture (or the fact that it is just a sculpture) probably doesn't matter much, and pointing out holes and inconsistencies in the backstory won't matter much either. Taylor is correct in pointing out that museums use reproductions all the time.  But those reproductions are usually based on an actual original that cannot be displayed for a variety of reasons.  When you've got to imagineer your evidence from a textual description of uncertain origin, that should tell you something about the strength of your case.

At least the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum felt compelled to address questions about the femur sculpture.  That means people are asking questions about it. That's a good thing.

​Maybe the specification of a "newsletter" as the source of the tale is a small point given all the other inconsistencies in the story, but I would still be interested to see the publication.