Mammoths in the news

In South Carolina, eight year old Olivia McConnell noticed that her state has a state grass doesn't have a state fossil. She set out to fix that. She wrote a letter to her state legislators, Rep. Robert Ridgeway and Sen. Kevin Johnson, laying out her reasons why the state need an official fossil and proposed the mammoth for the job. They were impressed and sponsored a bill for her.

The articles I've checked on all flip back and forth between Columbian mammoth and woolly mammoth and so does the bill. They are two different species. Columbian would be the correct one for South Carolina. Olivia probably knows the difference. She did her homework on this, but I can't find the text of her letter. One of the reasons she gave for choosing the mammoth was that it has an important tie to South Carolina. The first known mention mammoth remains in the Americas appeared in 1743 in Mark Catesby's in his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands he wrote "At a place in Carolina called Stono, was dug out of the Earth three or four Teeth of a large Animal, which, by the concurring Opinion of all the Negroes, native Africans, that saw them, were the Grinders of an Elephant...." Catesby probably heard about the teeth when he traveled in the southern states in 1725.

Olivia's bill should have sailed through both houses and been signed into law in no time. Rep. Ridgeway's version sailed through committee, was put to a vote and passed 94-3. Those three should be ashamed of themselves. Then the bill ran aground in the senate. Far right Sen. Kevin Bryant decided it needed to to be amended with an unconstitutional injection of religion. He wanted to add some verses from Genesis so every one would know just who created mammoths and fossils. Bryant's amendment was ruled out of order because it introduced a new subject. Bryant tried to shorten his amendment, but still wants to keep religion in the bill. Thus, it remains in limbo. In his defense, Bryant whines, "I think it's a good idea to designate the mammoth as the state fossil, I don't have a problem with that. I just felt like it'd be a good thing to acknowledge the creator of the fossils." Bryant has one ally in the state senate, Sen. Mike Fair, who has placed an objection on the bill. Fair, like Bryant is a creationist and climate change denier.

And so, it remains unclear if South Carolina will get a state fossil. Three other states have mammoths as their state fossils (and one has the mastodon), but duplication has never been a problem for state symbols (state flowers, for example). Changing the species won't help. Bryant and Fair will want to attach religion to any fossil. Most stories on this predictably end with the gag that perhaps Bryant and Fair should be the state fossils. The story shouldn't be about their obstructionism. It should be about Olivia McConnell, a smart, observant girl. I hope those two old poops don't discourage her. We need more girls like Olivia.

The ninety-foot plum tree, filling some gaps

Years before I started writing a book about mammoths, I invented a game I called "Find the Mammoth" with any new catastrophist author I came across. Frozen mammoths are found everywhere in catastrophist literature. It doesn't matter what the writer's preferred catastrophe is—the Biblical flood, Atlantis, Lemuria, rogue planets, or a sudden relocation of the poles—the discovery of frozen mammoth corpses in Siberia conclusively proves their theory. The logic behind the claim is simple: elephants are tropical animals, mammoths are elephants, therefore Siberia used to be tropical; intact, frozen mammoths prove the shift from tropical to Arctic happened in matter of hours. Once the mammoth has been established as evidence, the writers usually follow up by listing a few instances of tropical or temperate flora being discovered above the Arctic Circle.

Eight or ten years ago, while playing a round of Find the Mammoth, I came across one of these flora claims: the ninety-foot plum tree. I discovered the claim on the old Talk Origins site in a piece by E.T. Babibski. Babinski first ran into the claim that such a tree had been found above the Arctic Circle from the creationist "Dr." Kent Hovind. The ninety-foot plum tree was apparently a standard bit of evidence that Hovind tossed out in his presentations. Hovind described the tree as being frozen with green leaves and ripe fruit. The details fit nicely with the idea that Siberia was suddenly and catastrophically frozen. He credited the discovery to Baron von Toll who found the tree in the New Siberia Islands, six hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. Babibski did a very good job of debunking the claim by tracking it to its original source.

Unfortunately, most of Hovind's web presence disappeared after he went to jail for tax evasion, so I cannot find a good quote. Babinski was able to find out from Hovind that the tree anecdote was something he had read in a newsletter called "Bible-Science News" about ten years earlier. After some searching, Babinski was able to find the source, "The Mystery of the Frozen Giants" by Lee Grady (vol. 23, no. 4, April 1985). Grady credited the book The Waters Above (1981) by young-earth creationist Joseph Dillow. I haven't been able to lay my hands on a copy of Dillow's book for a price I'm willing to pay, but the exact quote can be found in dozens of creationist sites on the internet and I was able to find a Croatian translation of the entire chapter. This is the quote, which Babinski tells us appears on page 316: 

Baron Toll, the Arctic explorer, found remains of a saber-toothed tiger and a 90-foot plum tree with green leaves and ripe fruit on its branches over 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the New Siberian Islands. Today, the only vegetation that grows there is a one-inch high willow.

 Grady copied this almost word-for-word. Dillow cited as his sources, the book The Mammoth and Mammoth Hunting in North-East Siberia (1926) by Bassett Digby and the journal article "The Carcasses of the Mammoth and Rhinoceros Found in the Frozen Ground of Siberia" (1929) by I.P. Tolmachoff. I do have my own copies of both of these. Neither writer was a flake. Digby was a naturalist who had traveled extensively in Siberia and written several enjoyable books about his experiences there. Tolmachoff was a well-respected academic and curator of the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology at the Carnegie Museum. Tolmachoff cites four different works by Baron Toll in his article and mentions evidence of Pleistocene alder trees (Alnus fruticosa) on the New Siberia Islands four separate times without, however, specifically describing that one find. The description of the tree is in Digby. 

It was along the south coast [of Great Lyakhovski Island] that Toll found his extraordinary layers of what he called "fossil ice [permafrost]." They were as much as 70 ft. thick. On the top of them lay the post-Tertiary deposits in which were remains of wooly rhinoceros and mammoth, American stag, reindeer, a horse (apparently the Mongolian wild horse, which still exists), saiga, antelope, ovibos, and sabre-toothed tiger. There was lying among them, too, a 90 ft. alder-tree (Alnus fructicosa), with even its roots and seeds preserved. 

Digby with mammoth tusks in Siberia. source

Babinski's eagle eyes noticed something that I would have completely missed had he not pointed it out. The botanical name is misspelled in Digby's account. The correct name for that variety of alder, which Tolmachoff uses, is Alnus fruticosa. Digby wrote Alnus fructicosa with an extra "c" in the second word. Fruticosa means bushy; fructicosa means fruiting. There is no plant called Alnus fructicosa.

 Alnus fructicosa. This tree is not ninety feet tall. source

Since Digby has a description of that one find and Tolmachoff does not, it looks like Dillow based his paragraph just on Digby and not on Digby and Tolmachoff. I suspect Dillow footnoted Tolmachoff just to add authority to the story. Digby mentions the ninety-foot height, so Dillow can be forgiven that one detail. Digby and Tolmachoff both are specific on the point that the tree was an alder. Even if they had called it the non-existent fruiting alder, that would not have made it a plum tree. The genus for plum trees is Prunus, not Alnus. Digby describes "roots and seeds preserved," not "green leaves and ripe fruit." And plum trees do not grow to be ninety feet tall. At this point, it looks bad for Dillow.

Babinski thinks Digby made an honest mistake in saying Toll found a ninety-foot tree. I agree that the giant tree was the result of an honest mistake but, as I have discovered, the mistake was not Digby's. Let's go back to Baron Toll and what he really wrote. Baron Eduard Gustav von Toll (1858-1902) was a Baltic German geologist who conducted three expeditions into Siberia for the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. On his first expedition he investigated two mammoth sites. On the second, he mapped a large area west of the Lena River. On the third, he traveled out onto the ice of the Arctic Ocean and was never seen again. Toll's tree was found during the second expedition. I have not been able to lay my hands on the final report of the expedition; the nearest copy is apparently at Yale. Fortunately, Babinski was able to get a translation of the relevant passage (the original is in German). In it, Toll describes the exposed strata of a bluff on Great Lyakhovsky Island:

And the layers from top to bottom as follows: 

1. a peat covering composed of water mosses among other things.
 2. a frozen, sandy clay layer with Alnus fruticosa, Salix sp., a scapula of Lepus sp. [i.e., a shoulder bone of a saber-toothed tiger—Babinski’s note]
 3. similar layers with Pisidium sp. and Valvata sp. The reclining nature of this layer is covered here. In figure 1 these same layers 1 and 2 form the upper horizon, only the deposit of the sea basin with Pisidium and Alvata is missing there.
 The surprising thing in this instance is the discovery of Alnus fruticosa which is so wonderfully preserved that the leaves hold fast on the twigs of the boughs–indeed even whole clusters of blossom casings are preserved. The bark of the twigs and stems is fully intact, all the stems of the Alnus fruticosa along with the roots, in the length of 15-20 feet, jut out of the profile as can be seen in both figures of the table. With a magnifying glass, one can even recognize in figure 2 the blossom casings of the Alnus fruticosa.

 Babinski comes to a reasonable conclusion that Digby somehow added the twenty foot height of the tree to the seventy feet of the permafrost layer to come up with a total height of ninety feet. The sentence, he says, is not entirely clear in the original. Digby might have read that the tree jutted out and took the 15-20 feet to mean that much of the tree protruded from the ice while the rest of the tree extended the full length of the seventy-foot deep layer of permafrost.

This is where Babinski ends his search. I think Babinski did an excellent job at slapping down Dillow's plum tree. Digby's book was more in the tone of a popular travel narrative than an academic monograph and has no bibliography or source notes. Babinski had no reason to look for additional sources between Toll's formal report and Digby. However, in my own mammoth research over the years, I have come across a few more links in the chain from Toll to Digby and Digby to Dillow.

First, let's examine the gap between Toll and Digby. Look at what's missing from the excerpt of Toll that Babinski gives us. There is no mention of the seventy-foot thick permafrost layer. Maybe, it's mentioned in another part of the report. If it is, it's not in close enough proximity to the 15-20 foot figure to make the mistake that probable. Also missing is the long list of animals that Digby gave.

Toll, the Arctic explorer. source

Toll returned from his expedition in January 1894. The May issue of the journal of the (British) Royal Geographical Society published a brief summary of the expedition that mentioned "complete trees of Alnus fruticosa with leaves and cones." No thickness was given for the permafrost. This article was based on a brief report Toll sent to the Russian Academy right after his return. Toll gave a somewhat more detailed version of the discovery in a public lecture in St. Petersburg the following April, but no transcript of the talk was published until the end of the year, and then only in Russian. Finally, in April 1895, over a year after Toll's return, the Royal Geographical Society published an English translation of the talk for their readers.

 It is well known how widely spread mammoth tusks are over North Siberia, and how fabulously numerous they are in the New Siberia islands. And it is also well known that, besides the tusks and the bones of the mammoth, whole skeletons of this animal and of the rhinoceros, as well as of the Bison friecus and the Oviboa motchatus, are found.
 [...]
 The cliffs of the Great Liakhoff island also proved to be very instructive, as it appeared that the fresh-water sandy clay, which covers the underground layers of ice, contains, together with shells of molluscs (Cyclas and Valvata), remains of insects, and bones of Post-Tertiary mammals, which prove that this clay belongs to the mammoth bed; also whole trees of alder (Alnus fruticosa), willow, and birch, 15 feet high, and with perfectly well-preserved leaves, and even cones.

 Here we have four of the nine animals that Digby mentioned and the alder mentioned as one of three species of preserved trees fifteen feet high. Five animals are missing as is the seventy foot number for the permafrost layer. Later in 1895, Toll's full report was published by the Russian Academy. This is the source Babinski quoted above. The question remains, where did Digby get his information? It’s most likely that it came from the most famous anarchist in the world, Prince Peter Kropotkin.

Kropotkin was and is a fascinating figure. The anarchist prince was pacifist who rejected violent, revolutionary confrontation in favor of a philosophy based on cooperation and mutual aid. His philosophy did not come from a traumatic experience, such as Lenin's whose brother was executed as a radical; it was based his reading of Darwin and his scientific observations of insect and animal communities. As a political exile, Kropotkin, like so many others, often supported himself as a journalist. Unlike the other political exiles, Kropotkin was a popular science journalist as well as a revolutionary journalist. He was also an expert on the geology of Siberia.

 The Anarchist Prince. source

The July 1900 issue of the journal of the Royal Geographical Society carried an article by the Prince entitled "Baron Toll on New Siberia and Circumpolar Flora." The article was a review a new article by Toll that had been published in Russian the previous year. Kropotkin's review contains this passage: 

The glacial formations are represented on the southern coast of the Great Lyakhovski island by a lower bed, about 70 feet high, of ice, and an upper bed of clayey fresh-water deposits, always frozen, and containing tusks and pieces of the skin of the mammoth, as well as full frozen carcases of Ovibos and rhinoceros. Remains of horses, stags (the noble American stag), antelopes, saigas, and even of a tiger, were found in this bed. To prove that these animals lived and fed on the spot, a complete tree of Alnus fruticosa, 90 feet long, with all its roots, leaves, and fruits, was found.

 This is very close to Digby's description. The seventy-foot thick deposit of permafrost is mentioned, followed by the list of animals, and, most importantly, the ninety-foot alder. There are only slight differences. Kropotkin only lists eight animals, Digby has nine. Reindeer is the missing animal. Digby describes the tree as with "its roots and seeds preserved." Kropotkin gives a little more description by saying the tree was preserved "with all its roots, leaves, and fruits."

Is this the end of the line? Can we definitively say that Digby's source for the ninety-foot tree was Kropotkin's 1900 review article? Is it safe to say the last few differences between Digby and Kropotkin are small enough to ignore? We could do that, but we would be wrong.

Since 1883, Kropotkin had been earning a small income writing articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The most famous of these is his long entry on anarchism that appeared in the famous 1911 edition. In that edition he also wrote a number of smaller pieces relating to Siberia, including one for the New Siberian Archipelago. In it we find the now familiar passage: 

Along the southern coast of Bolshoy Baron Toll found immense layers of fossil ice, 70 ft. thick, evidently relics from the Ice Age, covered by an upper layer of Post-Tertiary deposits containing numbers of perfectly well preserved mammoth remains, rhinoceros, Ovibos, and bones of the horse, reindeer, American stag, antelope, saiga and even the tiger. The proof that these animals lived and fed in this latitude (73 20' N), at a time when the islands were not yet separated from the continent, is given by the relics of forest vegetation which are found in the same deposits. A stem of Alnus fruticosa, 90 ft. high, was found with all its roots and even fruits. 

Here it is, all three parts in the same order—permafrost, animals, tree—the reindeer has been added to the animal list, and the leaves of the tree are no longer mentioned. At this point, I do think we can say with confidence that Digby's source for the ninety-foot alder was Kropotkin's article in the 1911 Britannica.

There is now only one gap in the informational chain from Toll to Digby. That is Toll's 1899 article in the journal of the Russian Academy. I have been unable to lay my hands on a copy of that particular issue. It seems unlikely that Toll made an error reporting his own research, especially since he had made that particular point at least twice before in print venues. However, it seems equally unlikely that Kropotkin, a trained scientist, would have made such a mistake translating from his native language into a language that he was fully fluent in. If neither scientist was in error, who does that leave?

The words fifteen (пятнадцать) and ninety (девяносто) are as different in Russian as they are in English. However, the style in both Russian and English journals at the time was to print numbers as numerals, not words. Thus, it would only take a typesetting error of one character to change 20 into 90. This could have happened either at the Russian printers or at the English ones. Like Babinski's theory that Digby added seventy to twenty to get ninety, this is only speculation on my part. Predictably, I think my speculation is the more likely solution.

To my knowledge, in the quarter century after Kropotkin first published the error (whose ever it was), it was only repeated once—by Digby in 1926. I cannot find any additional mention of the tree until after WWII. In the post-war years, the first mentions I can find are not from creationist sources but from the godfathers of postwar, American, secular catastrophism, Immanuel Velikovsky and Charles Hapgood.

Velikovsky published first. In 1950, MacMillan published his book Worlds in Collision which postulated a revised chronology for ancient Egyptian history (he removed a couple centuries) and explained various Old Testament miracles as the effects of Venus and Mars pinballing around the solar system for a thousand years before settling into their current orbits. Due to a ham-handed reaction by the scientific community, Velikovsky became a fringe martyr and his books remained in print for the rest of life. Velikovsky touched on Toll's tree in his third book, Earth in Upheaval (1955). This book was intended to present the geological evidence for his theories. The tree appears in chapter two, the one about the frozen mammoths.

 Eduard von Toll repeatedly visited the New Siberian Islands from 1885 to 1902, when he perished in the Arctic Ocean. … On Maloi, one of the group of Liakhov Islands, Toll found the bones of mammoths and other animals together with the trunks of fossil trees with trunks and cones.

 This is an interesting version. Velikovsky does not mention any length for the tree. In fact, he mentions only "trees," not any specific tree. He also makes the curious mistake of putting the find on the wrong island. Maloi is Little Lyakhovsky, not Great Lyakhovsky as stated by Toll, Kropotkin, and Digby. Velikovsky is the first of our writers not to trace his information through Digby. Instead he gives as his source Rev. D. Gath Whitley, "The Ivory Island of the Arctic Ocean," in the Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute (1910), an organization founded to defend "the great truths revealed in Holy Scripture ... against the opposition of Science falsely so called." Velikovsky's description is faithful to Whitleys', including the island mistake.

 They first went to Maloi, which is one of the Liakoff Islands, and the second island that Liakoff discovered. In this island they discovered the bones of mammoths and other animals, and they also found the trunks of fossil trees, with leaves and cones.

 Did Whitley introduce this mistake into the chain of information? No, as it turns out. Whitley based his version on the first report published in The Geographical Journal in 1894, the short summary. In it they wrote:

 On May 1, MM. Toll and Shileiko, accompanied by one Cossack and three Lamutes, left the mainland and landed on the south coast of the Malyi Lyakhov island. Exploration was begun at once, and at the very start M. Toll came across the interesting fact that under the perpetual ice, in a sweet-water deposit, which contained pieces of willow and bones of post-tertiary mammals (the mammoth layer), were complete trees of Alnus fruticosa, 15 feet long, with leaves and cones.

 Why would I go on this long about the Velikovsky strain if he had nothing to do with the ninety-foot plum tree? He would, indeed, be nothing more than an interesting footnote except for the fact that he has had his own influence on creationist and Biblical catastrophist thought. Velikovsky had a certain appeal to Biblical literalists because he attacked mainstream geology and seemed to provide a scientific veneer to some of the greater miracles of the Old Testament. John Whitcomb’s 1961 book, The Genesis Flood, co-authored by Henry Morris, is one of the founding documents of modern creationist geology. Whitcomb's original version, considerable credit was given to Velikovsky, though this was almost eliminated by the time the book saw print. Donald Wesley Patten was more open and honest about his debt to Velikovsky. In his 1966 book The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, he gives a brief overview of Velikovsky as one of his predecessors. In private, he spent years unsuccessfully trying to cozy up to Velikovsky and be recognized as his peer. Velikovsky absolutely did not want to be associated with creationists and other Biblical literalists. He physically ran away from Patten once when they met at conference (he later apologized).

Patten had his own ideas on how the planets ricocheted around the solar system and, like Velikovsky and almost every catastrophist of the Twentieth Century, he presented frozen mammoths as proof of his version. But when he mentioned Toll's tree, he described it in a way that was different from Velikovsky, but familiar to us.

 Baron Edward Toll, the explorer, reported finding a fallen 90-foot fruit tree with ripe fruit and green leaves still on its branches, in the frozen ground of the New Siberian Islands. The only tree vegetation that grows there now is a one-inch high willow.

 Here are the most important elements of Dillow’s version—a ninety-foot fruit tree with ripe fruit, and green leaves. There is no mystery about Patten’s source. It’s a direct quote and he cites the author. It is Charles Hapgood, Velikovsky’s only equal among post-war secular catastrophists. Hapgood was a New England based professor of history whose main contribution to catastrophism was to popularize an idea he called Earth Crustal Displacement (he borrowed the idea from a privately published book by Hugh Auchincloss Brown). The idea that he put forth was a variation on the much older idea that the Earth’s axial tilt had abruptly changed in the past. In the original version, The Earth’s axis had once been perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun. This gave the Earth an Edenic temperate climate from pole to pole. Some cosmic catastrophe in ancient times had tipped the Earth’s axis to its present 23.4° off perpendicular. Naturally, the catastrophe was recorded in the usual ancient legends of floods, fire from the sky, and days when the sun refused to rise and frozen mammoths are proof of this. For both Velikovsky and Patten, this was a centerpiece of their catastrophic narratives.

In the variation the Hapgood promoted, the Earth itself was not knocked off its axis; it had always had more or less the same axial tilt. Instead, it was only the crust that moved. Rather than some passing rogue planet whacking the entire Earth out of line, it was some Earth-born imbalance that caused the crust to suddenly slip in relation to the mantle and core, which kept the same alignment. One moment, the mammoths were calmly munching on giant alders and the next, both mammoths and trees had been thrown into the Arctic where they instantaneously froze. Hapgood published his theory as a book in 1958, Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science. Patten took his quote from a magazine abridgment of the mammoth chapter published two years later. The book version is a little more detailed than the magazine version.

 Baron Toll, the Arctic explorer, found remains of a sabertooth tiger, and a fruit tree that had been ninety feet tall when it was standing. The tree was well preserved in the permafrost, with its roots and seeds. Toll claimed that green leaves and ripe fruit still clung to its branches. Yet, at the present time, the only representative of tree vegetation on the islands is a willow that grows one inch high.

 Hapgood cited Digby as his source. If he had stopped after his first two sentences, he would have been faithful to Digby. Digby only mentioned roots and seeds; he did not mention leaves or fruit. The words "leaves" and "fruit" do appear in some of the accounts before Digby. In chronological order they are:

• The original 1894 short notice of Toll's return in The Geographical Journal read: "complete trees of Alnus fruticosa with leaves and cones."
• The 1895 translation of his lecture published a year later read: "perfectly well-preserved leaves, and even cones."
• Toll's 1895 formal report read: "the stems of the Alnus fruticosa along with the roots… one can even recognize… the blossom casings."
• Kropotkin's 1900 review of Toll’s later article read: "roots, leaves, and fruits."
• Kropotkin's 1911 Britannica entry read: "roots and even fruits."

Nowhere does Toll claim that that green leaves and ripe fruit still clung to the tree’s branches. Leaves are mentioned in Toll’s notice of return, in his lecture, and in Kropotkin's review article. Toll refers to the alder's seed clusters as cones the first two times he mentions them and as blossoms the third. Kropotkin refers to them as fruit in both of his pieces. The only place both leaves and fruits are both mentioned are in Kropotkin's review article. I don't believe Hapgood read any of those sources. Hapgood was a trained historian. If he had read any of the first four on the list—three journal articles and a scholarly monograph—he would have preferred to cite them over Digby's popular travel narrative. As a source, Digby only outranks the encyclopedia article, which does not mention leaves. Did Hapgood make those details up? Unless some other mention of fruit and leaves comes to light, it appears he did. Even if he did read one or more of the earlier sources and simply forgot to cite them, he is guilty of exaggeration for making the leaves and fruit green and ripe. At this point, it also appears that it was Hapgood who seized on Digby's misspelled fructicosa to make the tree a fruit tree rather than an alder as Digby clearly stated.

This finally brings us back to Dillow. I can say with certainty that Dillow took his version of the tree directly from Hapgood with no middle-men involved. I’ll go farther and say he took it from the second, revised edition of Hapgood's book published in 1968 under the title The Path of the Pole. I can be this certain because Dillow cites that edition of Hapgood several times in the same chapter as Toll’s tree, he places the details in the same order as Hapgood, and the first fourteen words of his passage are exactly the same as in Hapgood's passage. As to why Dillow would cite different sources than those he really used, I think the answer is simple; he relied on tricks known to every lazy student since the invention of the term paper. Dillow copied Hapgood's source notes to make it look like he did more research than he really did. Adding Tolmachoff to the note, even though he was of questionable relevance, made the note more substantial and impressive. Having a series of source notes that move from author to author is more substantial and impressive than repeating the same source over and over.

In the final measure, it appears that Dillow's only crime, with regards to Toll's tree, was lazy scholarship and making it a plum tree. That’s not to say he isn’t guilty of other intellectual crimes. The parts of Dillow's book that I've been able to read are filled with embellishment, exaggeration, misrepresentation, and outright dishonesty. One example will suffice to demonstrate. This "fact" has been widely distributed on the internet, usually side-by-side with the ninety-foot plum tree.

 Dr. Jack A. Wolfe in a U. S. Geological Survey Report (1978) told that Alaska once teemed with tropical plants. He found evidence of mangroves, palm trees, Burmese lacquer trees, and groups of trees that now produce nutmeg and Macassar oil. 

Dr. Wolfe did indeed say that tropical plants once grew in Alaska... during the Eocene 34-50 million years ago. This compressing of the prehistoric past into one event is not uncommon among catastrophists. Some catastrophist writers, at least on the internet, might genuinely have trouble grasping geological timescales. I don't think Dillow is one of them.

Even though Babinski wrote his debunking almost twenty years ago, the myth of the ninety-foot fruit tree is still alive and well. As a plum tree, Toll's tree continues to appear in creationist literature usually as evidence of the Noachian Deluge. Among secular catastrophists, the tree usually appears among supporters of Hapgood's crustal displacement, such as Graham Hancock and Rand Flem-Ath (yes, that's his real name). Babinski's debunking gets linked to and copy/pasted into online fora again and again to no avail. Cut the tree down in one place and it pops up in another. Recycling is an essential part of fringe writing. The writers comb through each other's works for anecdotes to use as evidence for their pet theories. Many writers never leave the echo chamber nor look for any new information that might challenge their anecdotes or even add a couple of interesting new details. Leaving the echo chamber would expose them to actual authorities and those are to be avoided at all costs; they're out to suppress the truth. For fringe writers, other fringe writers, even those with competing theories are better sources than actual experts. For that reason, we can expect to see Baron von Toll's giant fruit tree again and again into the future.

Tennessee rep. lies about Einstein

Tennessee is one of the dozen or so states where Republican legislatures have proposed bills this year to force creationism into public school science curricula. Some of these bills have already failed while others are on their way to almost certainly pass. Tennessee is one of the latter.

The Tennessee bill, which also takes aim at climate change, is of the "teach the controversy" variety. The bill passed their House last week in a three to one vote. During the debate, Rep. Frank Nicely (R-Strawberry Plains), made the ridiculous argument that Einstein would have supported teaching creationism.

I think that if there’s one thing that everyone in this room could agree on, and that would be that Albert Einstein was a critical thinker. He was a scientist. I think that we probably could agree that Albert Einstein was smarter than any of our science teachers in our high schools or colleges. And Albert Einstein said that a little knowledge would turn your head toward atheism, while a broader knowledge would turn your head toward Christianity.

This would Albert Einstein, the Jewish agnostic who frequently stated that he did not believe in a personal God, one of the prime tenets of Christianity. The quote that Nicely attributes to Einstein is, in fact, a paraphrase of something Francis Bacon wrote in the sixteenth century: "a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion." You will note that even Bacon, who was a Christian, didn't specify Christianity as the place that knowledge would lead one, only religion in general. I haven't been able to find out where Nicely picked up the idea that Einstein ever said such a thing. If anyone does know, I'd love to hear from you.

Nicely's confusion is, by itself, entertaining. It's something better informed people can laugh and point at. However, the far more important point in mentioning Nicely's statement is that he makes clear the real motive for pushing this "teach the controversy" bill. Nicely says "knowledge [will] turn your head toward Christianity." The bill has nothing to do with giving kids a better knowledge of science so that they might be more competitive in the job market, so that might produce advances that would benefit America and the world. For Nicely, that purpose of the bill is to turn kids toward Christianity. He wants to use the taxpayers' money and government institutions, in the form of public schools, for the purely sectarian religious purpose of converting kids to his religion. Nothing could be more unconstitutional than that.

Mammoth on ice

This is too fun not to share. While looking for some pictures to use in another post, I came across this.


Yvette Gayrard-Valy and Herbert Thomas, Les fossiles, empreinte des mondes disparus (Fossils, imprint of vanished worlds) 1987
According to the back cover (and Google Translate), it's a short history of paleontology. The current edition (2000) has a non-frivolous photo of an Ammonite on the cover. This is, apparently, what the publisher's art director thought was an appropriate representation of the science of paleontology in 1987. He was probably recycling the artwork from an out-of-print adolescent adventure story.* Gayrard-Valy and Thomas must have been thrilled by the choice.

This got me thinking about the old mammoth in an ice cube motif.** It's an old staple of boy's adventure stories. Usually, the mammoth is seen deep in an surprisingly transparent glacier--real glaciers are not at all clear--standing upright while looking both life-like and sinister.

Samuel Scoville's "The Boy Scouts of the North; or, The Blue Pearl," was serialized in issues of St. Nicholas Magazine, in 1919-20. In the story, three plucky scouts and a token grown-up/side-kick head into the Arctic looking for the legendary blue pearl. Along the way they are tested by sporting and hunting competitions, are adopted by blond Eskimos, and fend off attacks by bears, walruses, killer otters, cougars (the feline variety not the feminine one), and a giant squid. Chapter 10 (August 1920) brings them face to face Mahmut, the monster.

As the boy looked up at the wall of transparent ice which towered above them a strangled cry of alarm broke from his parted lips. There, frozen in a solid block of clear ice, towered a monster such as had not walked this earth for ten times ten thousand years. Unburied from the grave where it had rested, untouched by time, and intact as when some unknown fate had overtaken it when the last Ice Age overwhelmed the earth, the monstrous creature, standing erect, seemed ready to step forth out of an age-long sleep. ... There was something sinister and menacing in the great beast's appearance. The wicked little pig eyes were set much farther back than those of an elephant; and they were wide open, seeming to threaten the boy as he looked at them. Almost he expected to see the huge trunk upraise and to face the terrible charge of those curved tusks, as when the mammoth fought the hairy rhinoceros on those northern plains...

Mahmut, the monster. "The Boy Scouts of the North; or, The Blue Pearl," was serialized in issues of St. Nicholas Magazine, August 1920, p. 897.
H. Rider Haggard, in one of the last of his Allan Quatermain stories gave us his frozen mammoth in Allan and the Ice Gods, published posthumously in 1927.

Deep in the face of the ice, the length of three paces away, only to be seen in certain lights, was one of the gods who for generations had been known to the tribe as the Sleeper because he never moved. Wi could not make out much about him, save that he seemed to have a long nose as thick as a tree at its root and growing smaller toward the end. On each side of this nose projected a huge curling tusk that came out of a vast head, black in colour and covered with red hair, behind which swelled an enormous body...

The SciFi channel gave us one of the most memorable contributions to the genre in the movie Mammoth. In which a zombie mammoth escapes from crystal-clear block of ice to prowl the Louisiana bayous is search of blood. How that block of ice came to be Louisiana is never explained, but fortunately, Summer Glau and Tom Skerit are there to re-freeze the zombie mammoth.


Dr. Frank Abernathy (Vincent Ventresca) checks out the zombie mammoth
Those stories and a hundred others like them are fiction. None of you will be surprised to hear the mammoth in an ice cube motif is common in pseudoscience and forbidden history circles--the next best thing to fiction. In an essay on crypotozoology, J. Rainsnow chose to remain neutral on whether or not their were still mammoths in the world--real ones, not zombies like in the movie--by saying:

Regardless of whether or not living mammoths still roam the earth, Siberia has produced numerous examples of frozen mammoth carcasses, which are periodically yielded by the ice of melting glaciers, disinterred by the sun and returned to the world of the present.

In the internet age, the glacial mammoth has made its way into various chat rooms and fora. In its most recent incarnations the motif is used a a straw man argument about the dumb things orthodox scientists, or "scientists," believe. This one comes from a 2004 thread about the Beresovka Mammoth on the conspiracy and UFO site Above Top Secret. In the first post, BlackJackal writes:

Here is how scientists have attempted to explain the amazing freezing mammoth.

Theory # 1

Huge herds of mammoths used t [sic] roam the tundra feeding off the grasses, reeds, and other plants that still cover the land in summer. Every now and then one of them would get trapped in ice or would fall to its death down a crevasse in a glacier, there the carcass would freeze and be preserved almost unchanged forever.

BlackJackal wastes no time in demolishing that straw man. His victory was so impressive that SpicyGirl decided to repeat it at 4Forums.com Political Debates and Polls in a 2008 thread on "Fluid Mechanics, The Fossil Record and the Flood" (you knew creationists were going to get into this, didn't you?):

Now lets get into some of the quoted claims that others have made.

1. We have the claim that huge herds of mammoths would roam in the tundra feeding off of the grass, reeds and other plants that cover the land in the summer. And every now and then one of them would fall to its death down a crevasse in a glacier, there the carcases would freeze and be preserved.

SpicyGirl takes more time than BlackJackal to kill the straw man, but her victory is just as complete. Unfortunately, this particular straw man is like the villain of a slasher movie; just when you think he's finally, really dead, he gets up one more time. Project Avalon Forum, a site dedicated to defending against Illuminati type conspiracies, including the plot by environmentalists to covertly kill off most of the human race. On a climate change denial thread, this was posted by Jack:

Theory # 1

Huge herds of mammoths used t [sic, again] roam the tundra feeding off the grasses, reeds, and other plants that still cover the land in summer. Every now and then one of them would get trapped in ice or would fall to its death down a crevasse in a glacier, there the carcass would freeze and be preserved almost unchanged forever.

I'm going to assume that Jack is the same person as BlackJackal and not a plagiarist like SpicyGirl. Apparently, he wasn't satisfied by the response he got at Above Top Secret and decided to try it again. The Project Avalon crowd didn't have any more to say about than the Above Top Secret crowd, so we will probably see this assault on Mr. Strawman show up again.

SpicyGirl wasn't the first creationist or flood geologist to call the frozen mammoths to her aid. She probably won't be the last. Dr. Walt Brown, the founder and director of the Center for Scientific Creation in Phoenix, is an old school Young Earth creationist. He's fond of issuing debate challenges accompanied by elaborate lists of conditions. He explains his version of flood geology in his online book, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood (you can order a nice hardbound copy of the book from his ministry). Naturally, frozen mammoths are evidence for his theory. The mammoth in the glacier, however, shows up in the straw man role to show what silly scientists believe. He believes the mammoths were killed and frozen by a forty day and forty night hailstorm. He lists nine theories which include Hapgood's pole shift theory and the flood geology idea preferred by Kan Ham's group, Answers in Genesis.

Lake Drowning Theory. No catastrophe occurred. The well-preserved mammoths, with food in their stomachs and between their teeth, died suddenly, probably from asphyxiation resulting from drowning in a partially frozen lake, river, or bog. Such burials can preserve animal—and even human—tissue for thousands of years.

Crevasse Theory. Some mammoths fell into ice crevasses or deep snowdrifts. This protected them from predators, while ice preserved them for thousands of years.

The list of competing theories is followed by a table showing how real science--meaning his science--proves each theory wrong.

My personal favorite pseudoscience/forbidden history idea has always been the hollow earth. For those not familiar with the idea, the hollow-earthers believed that the Earth and other planets are hollow balls with giant openings at the poles lit by their own tiny suns in the center. The inner surface has gravity similar to the outer surface and is inhabited. A pedigree for the idea can be constructed that goes back to the underworld found in most mythologies. The direct lineage of the idea as a supposedly scientific concept springs from an attempt by Edmund Halley to explain variations in the Earth's magnetic field by visualizing the interior of the Earth as a series of onion-like, rigid concentric shells that each rotates at a slightly different speed.

Marshall Gardner's 1913 self-published hollow earth book Journey to the Earth's Interior, or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered? placed the mammoths in drifting icebergs, which were, of course, proof positive for Gardner's theories.

We further claim that the fresh remains of their bodies which have been found in Siberia are those of mammoths which in their wanderings came a little further south than usual-for the climate around the polar openings would be quite warm enough for them, and that these animals fell in to ice crevasses in places from which they were carried to the present situations by the movements of the ice-by those great glaciers which have from time to time been referred to in accounts of Greenland.

Gardner's idea about the mammoths was that, first of all, they were tropical animals just like elephants. They came to Siberia by wandering too close to the North Polar hole, where they were flash frozen into ice bergs and drifted out to the Siberian coast. Gardner's idea was adopted by most later hollow-earthers.


Gardner's Hollow Earth. Mammoths in icebergs drift out through the North Polar opening. From Gardner's Journey to the Earth's Interior, or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered?, p. 324.
The best selling hollow earth book is Dr. Raymond Bernard's (real name Walter Siegmeister) The Hollow Earth which came out in 1964 and has been reprinted by a half-dozen different publishers since. Bernard's consists largely of enormous block quotes from Gardner, William Reed (Phantom of the Poles, 1906), and Ray Palmer's various UFO magazines. Bernard makes explicit the iceberg theory and uses a straw man version of what orthodox scientists believe:

Inside the icebergs, the mammoth and other huge tropical animals, believed to be of prehistoric origin because never seen on the Earth's surface, have been found in a perfect state of preservation. ... The usual explanation is that these are prehistoric animals which lived in the Arctic region at the time when it had a tropical climate, and that the coming of the Ice Age, suddenly converted the Arctic from a tropical to a frigid zone and froze them before they had time to flee southward.

An Arctic explorer is amazed to discover a mammoth in an iceberg. From Gardner's Journey to the Earth's Interior, or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered?, p. 222.
As an actual case study of a mammoth in an iceberg, Gardner cites the Adams Mammoth, the first complete mammoth carcass recovered and one of the most famous mammoths of all time. For most of the story, Gardner uses a block quote from an 1884 book The World's Wonders As Seen by the Great Tropical and Polar Explorers... by James William Buel***. Here's what Buel had to say:

In 1799 a fisherman of Tongoose, named Schumachoff, discovered a tremendous elephant—perfect as when, a thousand years before,death had arrested its breath—encased in a huge block of ice, clear as crystal. This man, like his neighbors, was accustomed, at the end of the fishing season, to employ his time in hunting for elephant tusks along the banks of the Lena River, for the sake of the bounty offered by the government... [S]uddenly there appeared before his wondering eyes the miraculous sight above alluded to. But this man was ignorant and superstitious, and instead of hastening to announce his wonderful discovery for the benefit of science, he stupidly gazed upon it in wonder and awe, not daring to approach it. ... At last he found the imprisoned carcass stranded on a convenient sand-bank, and boldly attacked it, broke the glittering casing, and roughly despoiling the great beast of its splendid tusks, hurried home and sold them for fifty roubles.

Buel never uses the word "iceberg," but his description of a "huge block of ice" that becomes "stranded on a convenient sand-bank" can't be mistaken for anything else.

The imperial nineteenth century didn't treat the memory of Ossip Schumachoff very well. Besides the gratuitous insults heaped on him by Buel, he was almost completely deprived of credit for his discovery. History and paleontology know the mammoth as the Adams Mammoth, after the man who bought the mammoth remains from Schumachoff and took them to St. Petersburg. We only know Schumachoff's name because Adams was gracious enough to give his full name and quote Schumachoff's version of the story of the discovery in his (Adams') report on recovering the remains. An English language version of his report was published in The Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal in 1807 soon after he filed the French original with the St. Petersburg Academy. In reading Adams' report, we can see that Buel's purple prose introduced some incorrect details into the story including the iceberg image. Adams makes clear that the block of ice that encased the mammoth had broken off from a ridge at the center of an isthmus several versts (kilometers) wide. Adams also mentions seeing other mammoth bones "frozen between fissures of the rocks." While Adams' terminology isn't always clear, what is clear is that he was not describing a drifting iceberg.

None of the hundred or so frozen mammoths discovered in the last three centuries was found in a glacier or iceberg. They were found in frozen soil, indicating that they were covered with mud soon after death. If no mammoth was found in that condition, what is the source of, what can only be called, the urban legend of the mammoth in an ice cube. I can identify a couple of possible suspects.

Adams' report might share a large part of the blame for the myth. As I said, his language isn't always completely clear. Adams describes the block in which the mammoth was found and the ridge from which the block fell as "rock ice." Later in the century, after the concept of ice ages caught on, "rock ice" (or stone ice or dead ice) was the term used to describe stagnant parts of glaciers that had become buried by wind-blown soil. The insulating qualities of the soil preserve the ice for centuries, even millenia, after the rest of the glacier has melted away. Explorers like Fridtjof Nansen and Baron Toll, as well as textbook authors like Sir Archibald Geikie, all described that specific section of the Siberian coast as being underlain by rock ice and specifically mention that rock ice as containing mammoth remains. The problem is, that part of Siberia wasn't glaciated during the ice ages. The wind that carried the moisture to form the ice sheets was completely snowed out by the time it reached that part of Siberia and the Siberian mammoth steppe was actually drier than at present. What Adams may have been trying to describe was a large ice lens. An ice lens is an layer of solid ice that forms on the border between true permafrost and the surface soil that seasonally thaws. An ice lens, while still cloudy, is much clearer than the surrounding frozen soil. Whatever it was that he was trying to describe, the Schumachoff/Adams Mammoth was the best known mammoth for the entire nineteenth century and impressions gleaned from his report decisively influenced the formation of popular images of frozen mammoths.

Another, and probably quite important influence on the persistence of the legend, is public's general unfamiliarity with the Arctic. While most people do know what permafrost is--frozen earth--they're missing an understanding of what permafrost does to the surface of the far north. If the ground is frozen a few feet beneath the surface is means the water from melting snow can't soak in. It stays on the surface. All lowlands are muddy bogs and in the Springtime the rivers flow all over the place, carving new channels and burying things in mud which freezes and gets added to the permafrost. Cartoon stereotypes of a land of snow and ice don't involve any soil at all. For most people, the first image that comes to mind when they hear the word "frozen" is ice. Therefore, "frozen mammoth" means "mammoth in ice." In the nineteenth century, explorers and scientists were just beginning to understand the nature of the Arctic and the processes that had created it. Even they would have occasionally made that association.

A third suspect, is the Benkendorf Mammoth. Gardner and Brown both call on this infamous mammoth to support their theories. The story of the Benkendorf Mammoth is that it was discovered standing upright and bobbing up and down in a river by an engineering survey team. Although the mammoth wasn't described as being in block of clear ice, the image of a life-like frozen mammoth, standing upright, and bobbing up and down in the water, just like a block of ice would, fits very nicely into the mammoth in an ice cube myth. The punchline to the Benkendorf Mammoth is, that although it has been cited by various writers both fringe and reputable (Donald Prothero for one), it never existed. The engineer Benkendorf and his mammoth came out of a German children's book.

Walt Brown, while demolishing the Creavasse Theory straw man, placed blame for the idea on Charles Lyell, one of the most important geologists of the nineteenth century. This attribution serves a double purpose for Brown, he makes his straw man more credible by attaching a specific name to it and he discredits orthodox geology by going after one of its founders. Brown accuses Lyell in two places.

Charles Lyell, the most influential founder of modern geology, advocated this theory to explain some frozen mammoths.

[...]

Mammoths are encased in ice. Their preservation is complete. Charles Lyell popularized this myth by writing that mammoth remains are found in icebergs and frozen gravel.

I'd like to say Brown is making this up, but he isn't. His reference is to the first edition (1830) of Lyell's Principles of Geology:

That the mammoth, however, continued for a long time to exist in Siberia after the winters had become extremely cold, is demonstrable, since their bones are found in icebergs, and in the frozen gravel, in such abundance as could only have been supplied by many successive generations.

[...]

When valleys have become filled with ice, as those of Spitzbergen, the contraction of the mass causes innumerable deep rents, such as are seen in the mer de glace on Mont Blanc. These deep crevices usually become filled with loose snow, but sometimes a thin covering is drifted across the mouth of the chasm, capable of sustaining a certain weight. Such treacherous bridges are liable to give way when heavy animals are crossing, which are then precipitated at once into the body of a glacier, which slowly descends to the sea, and becomes a floating iceberg. As bears, foxes, and deer now abound in Spitzbergen, we may confidently assume that the imbedding of animal remains in the glaciers of that island must be an event of almost annual occurrence.

If Lyell really did mention mammoths falling glacial crevasses, is it fair to call Brown's dismissal of the theory a straw man? I'm going to say it is fair. Brown is making an effort make his flood geology the last man standing, by eliminating all of its competitors. For Crevasse Theory to be a competitor, he would need to give some evidence that someone still believes it. Lyell only offered the theory as a possibility; he doesn't push the idea beyond this suggestion. By the third edition of Principles (1834), both mentions of icebergs had been dropped. In the fourth edition (1835), the crevasses of Spitzbergen were dropped. In most of the later editions, Lyell put forth a scenario in which mammoths lived in a warmer climate further south and that their bodies were washed to the Arctic coast by flooding rivers. He went on to say that the coast itself was further south in those days and that the general climate was warmer. It was the change in the coastline that made Siberia as cold as it is today. He added that if it was true that some mammoths were found in solid ice they could have gotten in that condition by getting frozen trapped in while crossing in the fall, or by becoming buried in snow, as in an avalanche, which later hardened into ice. These possibilities were extraordinary circumstances and not the source of most of the frozen mammoths.


What a real frozen mammoth looks like. The Berezovka Mammoth during recovery, 1901.
In the end, the mammoth in an ice cube motif probably doesn't spring from any one source. It was brewed from a combination of nineteenth century elements. Scientists in new fields struggled to assemble a basic framework within which they could even begin to define the problems they would tackle. The word "geology," as the name for various earth sciences was first used in 1778. Paleontology, as a science separate from geology, didn't have a name until 1834. Many basic concepts of the fields, deep time, organic origin of fossils, evolution, extinction, slow geologic change, ice ages, came into existence during a century or so ending in the 1840s. Adams, Lyell and their contemporaries were inventing a language for their fields. Naturally, there were communication problems. Even today, people who have never been to the Arctic have a hard time grasping the nature of the seasons, soil, climate, and sheer scale of it. In the nineteenth century, vast swaths of the north were unexplored and even the experts were still figuring the place out.

Like most bad ideas and urban legends, mammoth in an ice cube motif is impossible to stamp out. Even the people who most should know better, science journalists and educators, still fall back on it as a shorthand more complex ideas.

This is from a USA Today story that was run last year:

Anthropologist David Overstreet helped excavate the fossils from cornfields in southeastern Wisconsin. He discounts the idea that the mammoth may have become frozen in a glacier and had its meat scraped off after it thawed 1,000 years later.

This is from the class notes a 100 level Geology class taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater last semester.

Review questions for April
6. Which one of the following is NOT a fossil?
a. an insect trapped in amber 20 million years ago
b. a frozen mammoth preserved in a glacier in Siberia that died in the last ice age 1 million years ago
c. dinosaur footprints in a sandstone layer
d. an Egyptian death mask dating back to 4000 years
e. all of the above are fossils by definition

I'm sure there's a bus load of object lessons for the science communication crowd, but I'm not going to join that particular holy war. I'm an intellectual history guy. The mammoth in an ice cube motif is only a tiny part of how frozen mammoths have been used by catastrophists, creationists, and popular culture. I have lots more to say about this topic.

* It's not an uncommon practice. I remember working in a bookstore in the mid-eighties and being puzzled by a new edition of Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich that used the cover art from a mid-seventies edition of Frank Herbert's Dune.

** Remember "motif"? That's what we old people said before "meme". Does anyone except English and Art History majors still say "motif"?

*** Bernard blockquotes Gardner blockquoting Buel. These guys were natural-born bloggers.

Quist, Antarctica, and all that

I left a few things out of the previous piece because A) the piece was too long already and something had to be cut, B) I didn't want to digress too much, or C) I forgot.

I only touched on the geographic aspect of the ancient maps concept. Quist's version of it is even loonier if you look at the geologic aspect. For example, if the world was warm enough two thousand years ago for Antarctica to be ice free, sea level would have been a few hundred feet higher. Rome, Athens, Carthage, Alexandria and all of the other homes of his mighty ancient mariners would have been under water.

Antarctica would have looked completely different. Simply removing the ice, without changing sea level puts vast areas of Antarctica under water. If you add the rise in sea level caused by melting all of the ice back into the ocean, Antarctica becomes a chain of islands. If you allow for isostatic rebound, the rise in land when you remove the weight of all of that ice, a lot of the continent rises back above the waves, but the coastline would change into something completely different than today's Antarctica. Finally, a lot of the coastline that Quist points to is ice; if the ice goes away, the coastline goes away.

Though Hapgood only suggested the possibility, there is a whole school of hidden history buffs that believe that the iceless Antarctica was Atlantis. It's the Antarctica as Atlantis school of thought that keeps the ancient map idea alive. Some of the better selling authors who push this idea are Barbara Hand Clow, Rand Flem-Ath (yes, that's his real name), and Graham Hancock. Google around and you'll find thousands of pages on Antarctica as Atlantis.

Quist believes in dragons. No, really. He believes in dragons. This is something that comes out of the Ken Ham, of Creation Museum fame, school of creationism. Ham tells people that dragons are the dinosaurs that Noah took on the ark. They've been lurking around in the forests and other remote places ever since, though most of them are probably extinct by now. If anyone is going to the museum, take some pictures and blog it. Quist teaches this in one of home-schooling "Curriculum Modules."

I only looked at a couple of the modules, I'm sure there are lots of goodies hidden in there for any bloggers with the stomach to read through it all.

As a history guy, one of the things that really offends me about this kind of thing is that it postulates one super race that benevolently handed out knowledge and that all of the rest of our ancestors were too stupid to figure anything out for themselves. It doesn't matter whether the fountainhead of all knowledge was ancient astronauts, Atlanteans, Roman super-mariners, or Yetis with PhDs, it insults and diminishes all other human achievement as nothing more than imitation or plagiarism. Sailing techniques of Classical antiquity were impressive enough without this nonsense. The cartography of the Renaissance involved developing new mathematical tools, new navigational tools, and organizing enormous amounts of paradigm-challenging data the grew and changed with every returning ship. The Spanish and Portuguese sailors who sailed into the unknown were amazingly brave and innovative, to say they couldn't have done it with out a how-to manual is slanderous.

I'll have a couple of other posts someday that touch on various aspects of this. For now, we can argue with the Quists and Hams of the world, but the best tool for resisting them is mockery. It will be hard for others to take these types of ideas seriously if we can make the speakers look silly.

The intellectual dishonesty of Allan Quist

Ever since the recent outbreak of sanity in Kansas, Texas has been virtually unchallenged in its position as the state with the most embarrassing people in charge of its education system. To maintain their dominance, they have taken to poaching fringe ideologues from other states. One of the most recent attempts was an unsuccessful effort to recruit Minnesota's Allen Quist for a board tasked with doing to history what they had already done to science.

At first glance, Quist would seem a natural for the Texas education system. He has impeccable conservative bona fides. During three terms in the Minnesota state house in the eighties, he was famous for his anti-gay, anti-abortion, and anti-pornography rants. His platform when running for governor in 1994 included the usual planks of tax cuts, abortion restrictions, and states' rights. His wife runs a group called EdWatch--which publishes his books and posts his essays--dedicated to fighting liberal curricula and promoting home schooling. He says all the right things about the Judeo-Christian origins of the United States, young earth creationism, and the "hoax" of global warming. But for some reason, the other board members couldn't bring themselves to support his candidacy and his nomination was dropped.

Those last three positions might be what got him into trouble. While Christian nationalism, creationism, and climate change denialism are almost articles of faith for the modern conservative movement, all three involve a certain amount of conspiratorialism. Too often, a little conspiratorial thinking is a thin wedge that opens the door to a lot of conspiratorial thinking.

Michael Barkun wrote about this phenomenon in his 2003 book, A Culture of Conspiracy. Barkun has written several books about American apocalyptic sects and the religious beliefs of racist groups like Aryan Nations. In researching these groups he was surprised to find that believers in one form of fringe thought often embraced other, unrelated, forms of fringe thought. Timothy McVeigh was a UFO buff. Militia groups often push natural foods and alternative medicine. Occultists become anti-vaccination crusaders. The key, he explains, is that all of these groups trade in something he calls "stigmatized knowledge." The basic concepts of each group's beliefs have been rejected by mainstream intellectual authorities. These authorities, as perceived from the fringe, constitute monolithic blocks that wield their power to suppress the truth as perceived by the fringe. Once fringe believers take the first step of rejecting conventional authority in one area, it becomes easier to reject it in other areas and, eventually, in all areas. Once they have made the adjustment to seeing hidden forces working to suppress the truth in one area, it's easy to accept the claims of other fringe believers that hidden forces are at work suppressing their truth. The final step is to determine that all of these hidden forces are actually one all embracing conspiracy.

In Quist's case, it's clear that he has made the jump from believing in conventional conservative bogeymen (secularist, liberals, environmentalists) into a more broadly conspiratorial worldview. His latest essay, available on the EdWatch site, uses a staple of pole shift theory in an effort to discredit the idea of climate change driven by human activities (global warming).

A recently discovered and publicized ancient map of the globe disproves the theory of man-made global warming. The enormous significance of the map has only now become apparent as Congress considers sweeping legislation intended to combat global warming supposedly caused by human activity.

The map was discovered in the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in 1960 by Charles Hapgood. It was drawn by well-known French cartographer, Oronteus Finaeus, in 1531. There is no serious question about the authenticity of the map. Finaeus was a well-known scholar and was an expert in cartography, astronomy, mathematics and military weaponry. The map is based on numerous source maps, some of them going back to the time of Alexander the Great (335 BC).

One section of the map pictures the globe from the perspective of the South Pole. Antarctica is clearly shown on this map and is pictured as being largely ice-free with flowing rivers and a clean coastline. Some of the mountain ranges pictured on the map have only been recently discovered.

A section of one of the Curriculum Modules, written by Quist and offered by EdWatch, is dedicated to the "ancient maps" idea made famous by Hapgood in his 1966 book, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. This book was an expansion of one line of evidence that he used for his earlier work on polar shift theory.

Polar shift theory is an idea that the earth's crust occasionally slips with reference to its spinning core and mantle. The part of the surface that used to be over the pole moves to a lower latitude and a new part of the surface slips over the pole and begins to freeze. The driving mechanism, according to Hapgood is ice. As polar ice builds up, it creates a great weight at the poles that destabilizes the crust. For the Earth's spin to be stable, the greatest weight should move out to the equator. Thus, when enough ice gathers at the poles, the entire crust of the Earth begins to slip toward the equator. When the ice caps reached a warmer latitude, the ice all melts, flooding everything and destroying civilization. Naturally, this explains Atlantis, Noah's flood, and frozen mammoths. Hapgood was neither the first to propose polar shifting nor the first to propose that mechanism, but his exposition is the best known and the one quoted by later pole shift writers.


The source of our trouble, the Oronteus Finaeus map of 1531.
The ancient maps enter the story as evidence of advanced pre-slip civilizations. Hapgood pointed out that, although the coast of Antarctica wasn't sighted until 1818, Renaissance mapmakers had portrayed a southern continent in considerable detail three centuries earlier. This could only have been possible if sixteenth century mapmakers had access to earlier maps by mariners who were intimately familiar with the coastline of Antarctica. Hapgood went on to say, that, since the Renaissance maps do not mention an ice cap, Antarctica must have been ice free when those ancient mariners visited it. According to Hapgood, the 1531 Oronteus Finaeus (Oronce Finé) map is the most accurate Renaissance map of all. Quist's statement that the Finaeus map is "based on numerous source maps, some of them going back to the time of Alexander the Great" is founded on Hapgood's speculation and nothing else.

Before going into what the Finaeus map does or does not portray, it's worth fisking Quist's version of how the map came to light. Quist says:

A recently discovered and publicized ancient map of the globe disproves the theory of man-made global warming. ... The map was discovered in the Library of Congress, Washington DC, in 1960 by Charles Hapgood.

To his credit, Hapgood never claims to have discovered the Finaeus map except in the sense that it was new to him. In Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings he tells how he came to know of the map.

In the course of this investigation I arranged to spend some time in the library of Congress during the Christmas recess of 1959-1960. I wrote ahead to the Chief of the Map Division asking if all of the old maps of the periods in question could be brought out and made ready for my investigation, especially those that might show the Antarctic. Dr. Arch C. Gerlach, and his assistant, Richard W. Stephanson, and other members of the Map Division were most co-operative, and i found, somewhat to my consternation, that they had laid out several hundred maps on the tables of the reference room.

By arriving at the Library the moment it opened in the morning and staying there until it close in the evening, I slowly made a dent in the enormous mass of material. ... Then, one day, I turned a page and sat transfixed. As my eyes fell upon the southern hemisphere of a map drawn by Oronteus Finaeus in 1531, I had the instant conviction that I had found here a truly authentic map of the real Antarctica.

From his narrative, it's clear that the map was not something in a dusty back corner of the library, forgotten for centuries. The LOC staff were familiar enough with it to know that it met the requirements of Hapgood's request. Furthermore, their treatment of it, laid out on a table and left there for days, shows that it was not a rare item requiring special treatment or care. The Finaeus map was not a drawn map, it was a printed map and dozens, possibly hundreds, of copies still exist. A glance at the Bernard Quaritch auction catalogs from the 1880s and 1890s (viewable through Google Books) show copies of the map for sale almost every year, and multiple copies in some years. The Finaeus map was well known in historical, art, and cartography circle long before Hapgood ever laid eyes on it.

The map itself, is quite beautiful (if you like maps, and I do). The projection, called double-cordiform, looks strange to our eyes, but was quite advanced for the time. The right hand side of the map is dominated by a southern continent called Terra Australis, which Finaeus describes as "recently discovered but not yet explored." The aspect of the southern continent that most excited Hapgood and other lost world writers is its two lobed shape which they find suspiciously similar to the shape of Antarctica as we know it.


Robert Argod lost world alignment of Terra Australis and Antarctica.
The above map from Out of Antarctica by Robert Argod is a fairly typical example of how lost world writers line up Finaeus' Terra Australis and our Antarctica to maximize the similarities. However, even in this portrayal, the lack of the Palmer Peninsula on Finaeus' map is a glaring problem. That great hook reaching toward South America is arguably the single most distinctive feature on Antarctica. How could the ancient mariners have missed it? Hapgood handles the problem by pointing to one of the bumps on the smaller lobe of Terra Australis, and identifying it as the base of the peninsula. He then points out that the rest of the peninsula would actually be an island without an ice sheet to connect it to the mainland. His unspoken conclusion is that someone then forgot to draw the island.

The superimposition of the two southern continents involves some trickery without which the dissimilarities between the two would be much more glaring. To make the two continents line up, Hapgood and his followers needed to ignore the position of the south pole on the Finaeus map. I've marked Finaeus' pole with a green dot. The Hapgood alignment also depends on changing the orientation of Terra Australis. On the Finaeus map, Terra Australis is rotated (on its pole) 70 degrees counter-clockwise. Even if the Palmer Peninsula was on Finaeus' continent, it wouldn't point at South America; it would point at Hawaii and South America would point at the blue spot that I've placed in the sea at a little past eleven o'clock.

Finally, and most significantly, Terra Australis is several times larger than Antarctica. Antarctica, for the most part, lies within the Antarctic Circle. The curve of East Antarctica follows very closely to the circle and the two great embayments, the Ross and Weddell Seas, push deeply south of the circle. The Antarctic Circle is entirely enclosed by Terra Australis whose coasts almost reach the Tropic of Capricorn. South America is separated from the continent by the Straits of Magellan and nothing else. Diego Cuoghi, an Italian writer, prepared a more accurate comparison of the two southern continents (below).


The correct alignment of Terra Australis and Antarctica and as shown by Diego Cuoghi.
The pole slip explanation for the amazing concordances that Hapgood and his followers see in Renaissance maps of the world is not the theory preferred by Quist. Quist dates the mighty mariners who mapped an ice-free Antarctica a mere twenty centuries ago rather than the ten to twenty thousand years ago preferred by the pole slip believers. Rather than Atlanteans, Quist prefers Romans.

How can the accuracy of this map be explained? One of the earliest authorities on map-making was Claudius Ptolemaeus (referred to in the West as "Ptolemy") who lived from about AD 85-168. Ptolemy was a cartographer, mathematician, astronomer and geographer. He lived in Alexandria under the Roman Empire.

Ptolemy wrote a monumental work on map-making, Guide to Geography, also known as Geographia, in about 150 AD. Geographia was lost to most of the civilized world for more than a thousand years until it was re-discovered around 1300 AD.

By "lost to most of the civilized world" Quist means the text was well known to the Muslim world. The Kitab surat al-ard ([Book of the Description of the Earth) composed by Al-Khwarizmi around 820 incorporated Ptolemy's geography. Al-Mas'udi, writing around 956 described a colored map of the world based on Ptolemy. Al-Idrisi studied Ptolemy to create his influential map of the world completed in 1154.

The book demonstrates that Mediterranean people of 2,000 years ago had the knowledge and expertise to sail far and wide and to make accurate maps of their travels.

Ptolemy's book describes longitudinal and latitudinal lines and how they are drawn. The book identifies the location of numerous geographical sites by means of those lines. The book additionally specifies how important locations can be accurately placed on maps by means of celestial observations. ... When Ptolemy's Geographia was translated from Greek into Latin in Western Europe in 1406 its global coordinate and navigational system revolutionized European sailing and mapmaking abilities-putting them on a previously unknown scientific basis. The knowledge Europeans gained from Ptolemy enabled them to engage in their own explosion of exploration and cartography beginning in the 15th Century.

That's some pretty powerful exaggeration. Ptolemy's Geographia arrived in Europe just as Europeans were attempting long distance sea travel. For a thousand years or so, European maps came in three types: fairly accurate local maps used for delineating property; navigation maps, which showed important landmarks along a coast or road, but rather indifferently depicted the shape of that coast or road; and mappamundis, illustrations that showed the entire world as a religious allegory. What the new explorers needed were accurate large scale maps. The practical map making tips in the Geographia seemed to be the perfect answer. But there were problems.

While his advice was good, Ptolemy's facts were of mixed quality. The idea of using lines of longitude and latitude to identify locations was almost four hundred years old when Ptolemy wrote the Geographia. Ptolemy's contribution was to attempt to unify various earlier measurements into a single coordinate system. While measuring latitude was a fairly straight forward task in his day, Ptolemy had no method for measuring longitude except for making rough approximations based on reports of travel time between various points. Such a method was useless for maritime navigators. Realistic longitude measurements wouldn't become possible until the development of clocks that could work on a pitching ship, without losing more than a few seconds per day. Ptolemy's Mediterranean was several degrees of longitude too wide. However, Ptolemy's prestige was so great that Renaissance map-makers had difficulty rejecting any part of the Geographia.

Ptolemy's Geographia was a summation of the best geographical and cartographic knowledge the Mediterranean world had to offer. In many respects, it was superior to anything Europe had to offer at the start of the Renaissance. By the time Finaeus set out to compose a map of the entire world, the most important advice he could gather from reading Ptolemy, was the discussion of map projections. Finaeus' cordiform projection was one possible solution to depicting the surface of a sphere on a two dimensional surface. His contemporary, Gerardus Mercator, used the projection eight years after Finaeus and before developing the projection that now bears his name. Mercator's cordiform map makes changes to the northern hemisphere, but copies Finaeus' southern hemisphere in almost every detail, especially Terra Australis.


A later copy of Mercator's cordiform map of 1538.
The Terra Australis of Finaeus and Mercator not a map of Antarctica based on lost Roman sources. Ptolemy, the Romans, and the other peoples of the Mediterranean were good, but not that good. Terra Australis is a big blob that only superficially resembles Antarctica, and only if you turn your head sideways and squint. By that same logic, if I stand far very away, in deep shadows, and don't speak, I look just like Antonio Banderas.

But Finaeus and Mercator's blob was not a figment of their imagination. They were not fantasists. Both were serious scholars trying to solve a difficult problem. Finding the best projection to represent the whole world was only one part of the problem. The other part was trying to make sense of the new and disjointed information that came in every day from sailors, priests, and spies. Finaeus and others tried to connect and faithfully represent these fragments of information using what seemed to be reasonable conjecture to fill in the blank spots.

In 1569, over thirty years after his cordiform map, Mecator published a new map of the world incorporating additional information. This map still featured an enormous southern continent beginning in Tierra del Fuego, but this Terra Australis featured some place names along the coast. From Tierra del Fuego, the coast tends straight east before jutting north to form a headland named Promontorium Terrae Australis in the South Atlantic near the Tristan da Cunha island group. Further east, it forms a second headland. near a group of islands called Los Romeros. The coast then loops south before turning almost due north the tropic of Capricorn where it almost touches Java. This land has the names Beach, Lucach, and Maletur. East of Beach the coast dips below the tropic again before heading gradually southeast across the South Pacific. Directly east of Beach is an island called Java Minor and beyond that is the enormous island of Nova Guinea. from Nova Guinea, the coast runs gradually southeast until it meets Tierra del Fuego. This stretch of coast is called Magellanica Regio (Magellan's Land). A dozen or more other map-makers published maps in the last part of the century showing a southern continent with the same outline and place-names as on Mercator's (e.g. Abraham Ortelius 1570 and Sebastian Munster 1588). From these-maps, it is possible to get a glimpse of the process by which these map makers created the outlines of Terra Australis.


A 1587 map by Rumold Mercator based on his father's 1569 map.
Each of the named places along the coast is based on land visited or sighted by European sailors. Tierra del Fuego on the south side of the Straits of Magellan has the same name today. At the time, no one knew that Tierra del Fuego was an island. That fact would not be learned until 1616 when Willem Schouten sailed around the south side of the island and named Cape Horn. Promontorium Terrae Australis is probably Gough Island, 230 miles southeast of tristan da Cunha. The island was discovered in 1506 by Gonçalo Álvarez, but misplaced, discovered again by Anthony de la Roché in 1675 and misplaced again, and, finally, permanently discovered by Charles Gough in 1731. Los Romeros is most likely Amsterdam Island in the southern Indian Ocean, discovered, but not named, by Juan Sebastián Elcano and the survivors of Magellan's expedition on their way back to Spain. Beach, Lucach, and Maletur are the northwest coast of Australia. The names are those of rich southern kingdoms mentioned in Marco Polo's Travels,. The first, officially reported European visit to Australia was made by Willem Janszoon in 1606, a merchant for the Dutch East India Company. However, Portuguese merchants knew about the continent for a century before Janszoon arrived. Abel Tasman, in 1642, was the first European to sail around The southern side of Australia, proving it was not attached to a polar continent. Java Minor is most likely Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentraria, though it could be any of a number of larger islands in Indonesia. The names Java Major and Java Minor, or variations on that theme, moved around the East Indies and Australia for about a century before being combined into one Java, the one we know today. Nova Guinea is, of course, New Guinea drawn too large and placed too far to the east.

Since each of the named places on Terra Australis turned out to be an island, the question arises, why did generations of Renaissance map-makers insist on constructing a southern continent out of reports of isolated islands? The answer is that they "knew" there had to be a very large continent in the south. It was the logical conclusion of an intelligently designed world.

Almost as soon as Classical Greek scholars figured out that the Earth was a sphere, they decided that it must have a land mass in the south large enough to balance out the known lands in the north. In part, this was a scientific opinion based on their lack of knowledge about how gravity and celestial mechanics functioned. At least equally important in coming to that conclusion was the belief that the gods would not allow the world to be asymmetrical. Symmetry and aesthetics demanded that a perfect creator would design the world that way. The idea that an intelligently designed universe must use perfect, that is symmetrical forms was later adopted by the Church, to the detriment of scientific progress. In particular, the insistence that the orbits of the planets must be perfect circles hampered astronomy and navigation for twenty centuries before Kepler finally did away with the idea. Ptolemy wrote about the southern, Antipodean continent, and the Renaissance map-makers accepted his judgment on the matter.

Mark Twain wrote "God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor" (he stole the line from Rousseau). That is the problem of intelligent design. The only way ID can produce usable scientific predictions, is through a clear understanding of how the designer works. The The only way to do that is by saying, "we know how the designer thinks; we know the innermost thoughts of God." Unfortunately, that inevitably means putting ourselves in the place of God and and believing God would do thinks the same way we do, or wish we could. The Classical Greeks, the Medieval Church, and Renaissance map-makers all believed that God's designs must be based on perfect geometric forms and symmetry for the simple reason that they found those design elements the most pleasing. Modern creationists exalt their own minds as equal to the mind of God while at the same time denouncing secularists and atheists, whom they imagine being guilty of exactly that form of hubris.


The symmetrical world as envisioned by Macrobius, a fifth century Neoplatonist philosopher.
This is the level of Allen Quist's intellectual honesty and his understanding of geography, geology, and history. He's willing to push a fringe theory of science, for the sole reason that he imagines it supports his political position on climate change. Everything else is expendable in the pursuit of that agenda. If he was a lone loony barking in the wilderness, his opinions wouldn't matter. But he was being considered for a seat on board tasked with writing a social studies curriculum for Texas. Because textbooks are authorized at the state level in Texas, the state has an out-sized influence on the content of textbooks everywhere in this country. Texas, and our public schools, may have missed that particular bullet, but thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of home schooled kids will not. Quist has dedicated a section of one of his curriculum modules at EdWatch to the ancient maps idea. Home schooling parents who don't know better will read his curriculum and use it to teach their kids. At the very least, those kids will grow up to become ignorant citizens. More individually tragic, those kids will be held back by their warped understanding of science when they try to go to college or compete in the job market.

Hapgood and other believers in pole shift and ancient civilizations with advanced navigational skills are mostly harmless. For the most part, they are grown-ups who are entitled to believe whatever they want, even if it is stigmatized knowledge. The problem with such belief comes when someone like Quist comes along with a political agenda who is willing to throw his weight behind the idea. Quist should be ashamed of himself, but somehow, I don't think he is.


Update: Jon H in the comments pointed out that I said Australia in a few places where I meant Antarctica. I think I've fixed them all. That's what I get for writing late at night. Sorry if that caused any confusion.