[I know this is LONG, but I think it’s worth it.]
From DISCOVER Magazine February 2008, By Douglas Fox

One morning in late 1997, Stanley Miller [Ed. note Yes, THAT Stanley Miller, of the Miller/Urey Experiment] lifted a glass vial from a cold, bubbling vat. For 25 years he had tended the vial as though it were an exotic orchid, checking it daily, adding a few pellets of dry ice as needed to keep it at -108 degrees Fahrenheit. He had told hardly a soul about it. Now he set the frozen time capsule out to thaw, ending the experiment that had lasted more than one-third of his 68 years.

Miller had filled the vial in 1972 with a mixture of ammonia and cyanide, chemicals that scientists believe existed on early Earth and may have contributed to the rise of life. He had then cooled the mix to the temperature of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa–too cold, most scientists had assumed, for much of anything to happen. Miller disagreed. Examining the vial in his laboratory at the University of California at San Diego, he was about to see who was right.

As Miller and his former student Jeffrey Bada brushed the frost from the vial that morning, they could see that something had happened. The mixture of ammonia and cyanide, normally colorless, had deepened to amber, highlighting a web of cracks in the ice. Miller nodded calmly, but Bada exclaimed in shock. It was a color that both men knew well-the color of complex polymers made up of organic molecules. Tests later confirmed Miller’s and Bada’s hunch. Over a quarter-century, the frozen ammonia-cyanide blend had coalesced into the molecules of life: nucleobases, the building blocks of RNA and DNA, and amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The vial’s contents would support a new account of how life began on Earth and would arouse both surprise and skepticism around the world.
(snip)
There were people who found the results a little too remarkable. When Bada and Miller submitted their findings to a top-tier science journal, the article was rejected. A reviewer of the manuscript felt that those molecules must surely have formed while the samples were thawing, not while frozen at the ridiculously low temperature of -108 degrees F. So Miller, Bada, and Levy did more experiments to show that thawing played no role. They published their results in another journal, Icarus, in 2000.

The skepticism they faced was understandable. Chemical reactions do slow down as the temperature drops, and according to standard calculations, the reactions that assemble cyanide molecules into amino acids and nucleobases should run a hundred thousand times more slowly at -112 degrees F than at room temperature. By that reckoning, even if Miller had run his experiment for 250 years - let alone 25 - he should have seen nothing.

This is the main argument against Miller’s experiment, and against a cold origin of life in general. But strange things happen when you freeze chemicals in ice. Some reactions slow down, but others actually speed up-especially reactions that involve joining small molecules into larger ones. This seeming paradox is caused by a process called eutectic freezing. As an ice crystal forms, it stays pure: Only molecules of water join the growing crystal, while impurities like salt or cyanide are excluded. These impurities become crowded in microscopic pockets of liquid within the ice, and this crowding causes the molecules to collide more often. Chemically speaking, it transforms a tepid seventh-grade school dance into a raging molecular mosh pit.

“Usually as you cool things, the reaction rates go down,” concluded Leslie Orgel, who studied the origins of life at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, from the 1960s until his death last October. “But with eutectic freezing, the concentrations go up so fast that they more than make up” for the difference.

Cyanide is a good candidate as a precursor molecule in the life-in-a-freezer model for several reasons. First, planetary scientists suspect that cyanide was abundant on early Earth, deposited here by comets or created in the atmosphere by ultraviolet light or by lightning (once the atmosphere became oxygen rich, 2.5 billion years ago, the process would have stopped). Second, although cyanide is lethal to modern animals, it has a convenient tendency to self-assemble into larger molecules. Third, and perhaps most important, no matter how much cyanide rained down, it could become concentrated only in a cold environment-not in warm coastal lagoons-because it evaporates more quickly than water.

“The strong point of freezing,” according to Orgel, “is that you concentrate things very efficiently without evaporation. “Freezing also helps preserve fragile molecules like nucleobases, extending their lifetime from days to centuries and giving them time to accumulate and perhaps organize into something more interesting -like life.
(snip)

While Miller and Orgel followed their clues in the lab, other scientists pursued their obsession with life’s chilly origins to the ends of the earth.

In July 2002 a small skiff dropped Hauke Trinks on the beach of Nordaustland, a rocky island encased in glaciers and nearly devoid of plants. Trinks, then a physicist at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg in Germany, had come to Nordaustland - far north of the Arctic Circle - to peer 4 billion years back in time to an era shortly after the end of the bombardment of Earth by asteroids. According to some solar evolution models, the sun was some 30 percent dimmer at that time, providing less heat to Earth. So as soon as the hail of asteroids stopped, Earth may have cooled to an average surface temperature of -40 degrees F and a crust of ice as much as 1,000 feet thick may have covered the oceans. Many scientists have puzzled over how life could have arisen on a planet that was essentially a giant snowball. The answer, Trinks suspected, involved sea ice. (snip)

He built a makeshift lab table from planks of wood and discarded gasoline cans. He examined slices of sea ice under the microscope, his hood pulled tight around his eyes. Turning a knob with a gloved hand, he nudged a metal electrode nearly as fine as a red blood cell closer to an ice crystal. The needle on his voltmeter jerked sideways, registering a sharp drop in voltage on the crystal’s surface - evidence of a microscopic electric field that might arrange and orient molecules on the ice’s surface. (snip)

By the time Trinks returned to Hamburg in 2003, he had formulated a theory that ice was doing much more than just concentrating chemicals. The ice surface is a checkerboard of positive and negative charges; he imagined those charges grabbing individual nucleobases and stacking them like Pringles in a can, helping them coalesce into a chain of RNA. “The surface layer between ice and liquid is very complicated,” he says. “There is strong bonding between the surface of the ice and the liquid. Those bondings are important for producing long organic chains like RNA.”(snip)

Biebricher [a chemist Trinks convinced to work on his sea ice theory] sealed small amounts of RNA nucleobases - adenine, cytosine, guanine - with artificial seawater into thumb-size plastic tubes and froze them. After a year, he thawed the tubes and analyzed them for chains of RNA.

For decades researchers had tried to coax RNA chains to form under all sorts of conditions without using enzymes; the longest chain formed, which Orgel accomplished in 1982, consisted of about 40 nucleobases. So when Biebricher analyzed his own samples, he was amazed to see RNA molecules up to 400 bases long. In newer, unpublished experiments he says he has observed RNA molecules 700 bases long. Biebricher’s results are so fantastic that some colleagues have wondered whether accidental contamination played a role…(snip)

Biebricher had loaded the deck somewhat, because he wasn’t growing RNA chains from nothing. Before he froze his samples, he added an RNA template - a single-strand chain of RNA that guides the formation of a new strand of RNA. (snip)

Ice may prove the crucial ingredient here, too. Deamer and his former student Pierre-Alain Monnard (now at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico) have run experiments frozen at 0 degrees F for a month, without the aid of templates. In those relatively brief experiments they already see RNA molecules up to 30 bases long, at least as long as other researchers have seen in similar experiments without ice.

How do you get from tiny snippets of RNA to longer, well-crafted chains that could have acted as the first enzymes, doing fancy things like copying themselves?(snip)

A young scientist named Alexander Vlassov stumbled upon a possible answer. He was working at SomaGenics, a biotech company in Santa Cruz, California, to develop RNA enzymes that latch on to the hepatitis C virus. His RNA enzymes were behaving strangely: They normally consisted of a single segment of RNA, but every time he cooled them below freezing to purify them, the chain of RNA spontaneously joined its ends into a circle, like a snake biting its tail. As Vlassov worked to fix the technical glitch, he noticed that another RNA enzyme, called hairpin, also acted strangely. At room temperature, hairpin acts like scissors, snipping other RNA molecules into pieces. But when Vlassov froze it, it ran in reverse: It glued other RNA chains together end to end.

Vlassov and his coworkers, Sergei Kazakov and Brian Johnston, realized that the ice was driving both enzymes to work in reverse. Normally when an enzyme cuts an RNA chain in two, a water molecule is consumed in the process, and when two RNA chains are joined, a water molecule is expelled. By removing most of the liquid water, the ice creates conditions that allow the RNA enzyme to work in just one direction, joining RNA chains.
(snip)
These findings inspired a theory that the first, extremely inefficient RNA enzymes got help from ice, which created an environment that encouraged short segments of RNA to stick together and behave as a single, larger RNA molecule. “Freezing stabilizes the complexes formed from multiple pieces of RNA,” concludes Kazakov. “So small pieces of RNA could be enzymes, not just large 50-base molecules.”
(snip)

All these processes would occur in microscopic pockets of liquid within the ice. “You have billions and billions of different possibilities,” Trinks says, “because you have billions of these small channels,” each like a microscopic test tube containing a unique RNA experiment. On the young Earth, pockets of liquid could have expanded into a network of channels that mixed their contents during freeze-thaw cycles, like day-night temperature changes in summer. In winter, the liquid pores would have contracted and become isolated again, returning to their separate experiments. With all the mixing, something special might eventually have formed: an RNA molecule that made rough copies of itself. And as Earth warmed, these molecules might have found a home in newly thawed seas or ponds, where something even more complex might have emerged - such as a cell-like membrane. “You have something that is multiplying itself, and you have variation that is inherited,” says Antonio Lazcano, a biology researcher and professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Mexico City. “There you have the onset of Darwinian evolution. I’m willing to call that living.”

To read the entire 4 page article, see here.

Natural disaster could become catalyst to blow away injustice

Even at the best of times, the Irrawaddy delta is one of the least accessible areas of one of South-East Asia’s most closed and impenetrable countries. […] It is too soon to know the extent of the destruction, but there is no longer any doubt that a massive humanitarian catastrophe has struck Burma. Cyclone Nargis, with its 120mph winds, coincided with a 12ft-high storm surge. Even last night there was little hard information about the extent of the damage but it seems clear that fields, houses, roads, ditches, houses and entire communities have been blown and washed away. […] The numbers of injured, it can be assumed, are several multiples of the dead. The numbers of homeless are unknown — the best that Richard Horsey, a United Nations official in Thailand, could guess was several hundred thousand “but how many hundred thousand we just don’t know”. A World Food Programme official said that 90 per cent of houses in the worst-affected zone were destroyed. No one in Burma has seen a natural disaster like this in living memory. But this is a catastrophe whose consequences do not end with the dead and injured. Its ripples will be felt across the region and it has the potential, at least, to reshape the entire country. Apart from the loss of life, the injuries and the destruction of tens of thousands of homes, the disaster may have far-reaching secondary effects. The flooding and destruction of sanitation systems increase the risk of epidemics, including malaria and typhoid; the loss of livelihoods is crippling in communities where many people subsist on less than $1 a day.

Oh, yes, let’s kill the most knocked-down, oppressed, and downtrodden — and, further, let’s kill them in highly remote areas.

How unbelievably loving…

Further reading, for anyone interested…

As I read this at Pharyngula, one commenter brought up the Doctrine of Signatures.

Man, our ancestors sure had some wild imaginations.

The doctrine of signatures is an ancient European philosophy that held that plants bearing parts that resembled human body parts, animals, or other objects, had useful relevancy to those parts, animals or objects. It could also refer to the environments or specific sites in which plants grew. Many of the plants that were so regarded today still carry the word root “wort“, an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “plant” or “herb”, as part of their modern name.

I’ll bypass the inferred sexual innuendoes for the nonce. “You are what you eat” may very well be a holdover of this imaginary legacy.

Of course, Christianity immediately jumped on this bandwagon:

Christian European metaphysics expanded this philosophy in theology. According to the Christian version, the Creator had so set his mark upon Creation, that by careful observation one could find all right doctrine represented (see the detailed application to the Passionflower) and even learn the uses of a plant from some aspect of its form or place of growing.

So what was the herb they used for hemorrhoids, I wonder? Something that vaguely resembles an asshole?

For the late medieval viewer, the natural world was vibrant with the numinous images of the Deity: “as above, so below,” an expression of the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm; the principle is rendered sicut in terra. Michel Foucault expressed the wider usage of the doctrine of signatures, which rendered allegory more real and more cogent than it appears to a modern eye:

“Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.” (The Order of Things , p. 17)

Excuse me, but that sounds a great deal like animism, except that instead of everything having an individual ’soul’, there was one ’soul’ that permeated everything.

The radical visionary Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), a master shoemaker of Görlitz, had a profound mystical vision as a young man, in which he saw the relationship between God and man signaled in all things. Inspired, he wrote Signatura Rerum (1621), soon rendered in English as The Signature of all Things and the spiritual doctrine was applied even to the medicinal uses that plants’ forms advertised.

The shoemakers of the 16th-17th centuries must’ve been using some pretty severe chemicals, I think.

This is still a working principle in homeopathy, that pseudoscience that no medical doctor worth their salt prescribes for their patients.

So there it is: eating a passionflower will no more gift the eater with the skills of cunnilingus anymore than the cucumber is the cialis of the natural world.

Let the innuendoes commence.

Till the next post, then.

Recently, I had a visit by a 17-year-old snotty creationist high-school junior (she goes to a fundie school, of course and plans to go to fundie college) who came by my personal blog to tell me that I was “ridiculous” in my critique about the IDiotic film, Expelled. After 150 comments, and several educated atheists trying to convince Lauren to round up some real books on evolution, pointed her to some excellent evolution resources, and after we had asked Lauren some very direct questions that she was not able to answer, Lauren said she was far too busy to “waste time” responding to anything we asked her. (Even though she wasn’t too busy to keep coming back to tell us she loves gawd and to tell us we will find out for ourselves one day and it will be too late, yadda, yadda, yadda.) The reality is, Lauren has decided to remain willfully ignorant. This is quite sad, and it happens to millions of fundie kids.

Lauren feels that the Expelled film is brilliant. Lauren says she believes the world was created “with all her heart” by an invisible sky daddy. Lauren believes in this sky daddy “with all her heart”. Lauren believes in Intelligent Design. She wants it taught side by side with evolution. So, since Lauren and other IDers want creationism taught side by side with science, then I pointed out that it should be held to the same standards as science. I asked Lauren repeatedly these following questions:

What are ID’s scientific predictions?

What experiments have been done to support your ID theory? WITHOUT THE MYTHOLOGY BOOK.

I must have asked her a dozen times at my blog, and at her’s. No answer, of course.

I have asked these questions of several IDers in the past several days, and they evade the question, ignore it or just flat out get frustrated and pull out the “you’re persecuting me” card.

Try it yourself. In debates with fundies, ask them these three simple questions and see them get all pissy, frustrated, and even outright angry. They all end up leaving, choosing to remain willfully ignorant.

For those who might not have known…

A beautiful response…

It’s time to raise our voice in prayer,
And pray to–well, there’s no one there.
No god to urge to do our bidding;
Go on and pray–just know you’re kidding.

It’s time to all sit on our asses,
And pray forgiveness for trespasses
(Or is that to forgive our debtor?
Who cares, as long as we feel better.)

It’s time we all embrace god fully,
Feel all righteous, good, and holy–
Or be some atheistic jerk,
Roll up your god-damned sleeves, and work!

It’s time to say “I do not care
To join you in this day of prayer.”
Sure, a day off looks like fun,
But there is work that must be done.

Our problems will not fix themselves
There is no god to send in elves
To do the work of human ranks
So… join, today, in prayer? No thanks.

And another good response…

Women Seeking Abortions Must Have Ultrasounds Against Their Will

Under the guise of obtaining informed patient consent, this new law requires doctors to withhold pregnancy termination until an ultrasound is performed. The law states that either an abdominal or vaginal ultrasound, whichever gives the best image of the fetus, must be done. Neither the patient nor the doctor can decide which type of ultrasound to use, and the patient cannot opt out of the ultrasound and still have the procedure. In effect, then, the legislature has mandated that a woman have an instrument placed in her vagina for no medical benefit. The law makes no exception for victims of rape and incest. By existing law, women already must be told where to find information about fetal development and referred to locations for a free ultrasound before a termination can be scheduled. […] In a further reversal of standard medical practice, this bill defines failure to perform this unnecessary medical procedure as “unprofessional conduct” and suggests that the state medical board may remove the physician’s license. Failure to perform the ultrasound also leads to fines beginning at $10,000 and increasing to more than $100,000. By comparison, the highest fine for negligent homicide or driving under the influence in Oklahoma is $1,000.

“Whichever gives the best image of the fetus” — ah, yes, a woman now has to get more stuff shoved into her (against her will) to compound her decision to get an abortion. How nice.

Why not just cut to the chase? Let those goddam sexually active women have their abortions, and then we’ll just smack the shit out of them for ever having sex.

Last month, talking about the latest blowup in the Myers/Nisbet fight over framing, I wrote:

Now, when your opponent refuses to so much as engage in honest debate with you, you do have the option of explaining to the world once again why they’re wrong to do so, but a good “fuck you” really isn’t out of line.

Though I thought PZ was justified in what he said, I didn’t quite know first hand the hopeless anger he was feeling. Until today.

What triggered it? It was seeing this post by Chris Mooney. It starts off with a disingenuous “I merely report the facts” on the creationist documentary Expelled’s supposed success, and then follows up with a clearly editorializing “update” which says “Randy Olson, with whom I just went to see Expelled* here in LA, has more on why this film counts as a major success for the anti-evolution forces.” Follow the link to Olson’s post, and what do I see?:

To counter the blockbuster power of Expelled,* the National Science Foundation, NAS and AAAS are organizing a panel discussion about putting together a committee to look into the possibility of creating a brochure that tells the public how to make a website for a petition that says evolution is fun.

True, to my knowledge, the three mentioned organizations didn’t do much, but pro-science folks who specialize in fighting creationism have been doing everything they can to take on Expelled, first and foremost by creating and promoting a website that debunks the movies bogus claims (i.e. the site I’ve already linked three times in this post), but also posting independent criticisms of it. Olson’s post, along with the weird post script “Ben Stein says evolution is for losers, and nobody seems to be able to answer him,” mainly serve to denigrate what defenders of evolution have been doing. As with Nisbet, the main purpose seems to be self aggrandizement: Olson’s claim to fame is having made a movie about what bad communicators scientists are, and is clearly enjoying his “I told you so” moment.

Here’s some meta-constructive criticism for Olson: Go ahead, say you think more needs to be done to combat the lies peddled in Expelled. Go ahead, campaign to get the NSF, the NAS, and the AAAS to back what the NSCE is doing. Offer help to atheist student groups in organizing anti-Expelled events. Especially the Minnesota Group, they rock. [Though our rocking prowess doesn’t match theirs, the group I’m involved with has spent time discussing Expelled with Christians.] Hold an emergency brainstorming session for internet activists, with emphasis on the emergency. [GisF readers: feel free to use this comments thread to brainstorm.] Use your knowledge of film making to create a short parody for YouTube. [Same goes for anyone reading this who does YouTube stuff.] But don’t denigrate hard-working defenders of evolution trying to fight Expelled. Don’t let what should be constructive criticism degenerate into fratricide.

*Needless to say, these links did not appear in the original Mooney/Nisbet posts.

If you’re anything like myself, you probably like to research books prior to purchase. Money’s money, right?

So I stumbled upon this little gem, and it piqued my interest. Humanity being much older than the accepted 100,000 years? Hmmm…

So, I foraged. Data mined, what have you.

In 1979, researchers at the Laetoli, Tanzania, site in East Africa discovered footprints in volcanic ash deposits over 3.6 million years old. Mary Leakey and others said the prints were indistinguishable from those of modern humans. To these scientists, this meant only that the human ancestors of 3.6 million years ago had remarkably modern feet. But according to other scientists, such as physical anthropologist R. H. Tuttle of the University of Chicago, fossil bones of the known australopithecines of 3.6 million years ago show they had feet that were distinctly apelike. Hence they were incompatible with the Laetoli prints. In an article in the March 1990 issue of Natural History, Tuttle confessed that “we are left with somewhat of a mystery.” It seems permissible, therefore, to consider a possibility neither Tuttle nor Leakey mentioned–that creatures with anatomically modern human bodies to match their anatomically modern human feet existed some 3.6 million years ago in East Africa. Perhaps, as suggested in the illustration on the opposite page, they coexisted with more apelike creatures. As intriguing as this archeological possibility may be, current ideas about human evolution forbid it.

Gotta love that last bit, no? From much of my reading at Pharyngula, I gather that it’s not uncommon in evolution for anomalies in the fossil record to show some startlingly modernistic characteristics in ancient lineage. These tend to come and go, however. Besides which, this has been adequately explained here. The footprints are much smaller than modern humans, and besides which, are obviously contaminated by the environment.

Knowledgeable persons will warn against positing the existence of anatomically modern humans millions of years ago on the slim basis of the Laetoli footprints. But there is further evidence. Over the past few decades, scientists in Africa have uncovered fossil bones that look remarkably human. In 1965, Bryan Patterson and W. W. Howells found a surprisingly modern humerus (upper arm bone) at Kanapoi, Kenya. Scientists judged the humerus to be over 4 million years old. Henry M. McHenry and Robert S. Corruccini of the University of California said the Kanapoi humerus was “barely distinguishable from modern Homo.” Similarly, Richard Leakey said the ER 1481 femur (thighbone) from Lake Turkana, Kenya, found in 1972, was indistinguishable from that of modern humans. Scientists normally assign the ER 1481 femur, which is about 2 million years old, to prehuman Homo habilis. But since the ER 1481 femur was found by itself, one cannot rule out the possibility that the rest of the skeleton was also anatomically modern. Interestingly enough, in 1913 the German scientist Hans Reck found at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, a complete anatomically modern human skeleton in strata over 1 million years old, inspiring decades of controversy.

The Kanapoi humerus? See here. Oldoway Man? See here.

Here again, some will caution us not to set a few isolated and controversial examples against the overwhelming amount of noncontroversial evidence showing that anatomically modern humans evolved from more apelike creatures fairly recently–about 100,000 years ago, in Africa, and, in the view of some, in other parts of the world as well.

The current evidence points to yes, but this fellow is sideways hinting that he’s found evidence that says otherwise.

But it turns out we have not exhausted our resources with the Laetoli footprints, the Kanapoi humerus, and the ER 1481 femur. Over he past eight years, Richard Thompson and I, with the assistance of our researcher Stephen Bernath, have amassed an extensive body of evidence that calls into question current theories of human evolution. Some of this evidence, like the Laetoli footprints, is fairly recent. But much of it was reported by scientists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And as you can see, our discussion of this evidence fills up quite a large book.

As we are in the 21st CE, any assumptions/theories/hypotheses made by scientists in the earlier years deserves more the critical eye: the techniques used back then were cruder, the base of knowledge much smaller than now. And interpretations vary, usually changing as the knowledge base grows and the science refines.

I’m going to skip ahead here and there: it’s a lengthy intro to the book, and the reader is welcome to read the whole synopsis.

In the first chapter of Part I of Forbidden Archeology, we survey the history and current state of scientific ideas about human evolution. We also discuss some of the epistemological principles we employ in our study of this field. Principally, we are concerned with a double standard in the treatment of evidence.

We identify two main bodies of evidence. The first is a body of controversial evidence (A), which shows the existence of anatomically modern humans in the uncomfortably distant past. The second is a body of evidence (B), which can be interpreted as supporting the currently dominant views that anatomically modern humans evolved fairly recently, about 100,000 years ago in Africa, and perhaps elsewhere.

We also identify standards employed in the evaluation of paleoanthropological evidence. After detailed study, we found that if these standards are applied equally to A and B, then we must accept both A and B or reject both A and B. If we accept both A and B, then we have evidence placing anatomically modern humans millions of years ago, coexisting with more apelike hominids. If we reject both A and B, then we deprive ourselves of the evidential foundation for making any pronouncements whatsoever about human origins and antiquity.

Historically, a significant number of professional scientists once accepted the evidence in category A. But a more influential group of scientists, who applied standards of evidence more strictly to A than to B, later caused A to be rejected and B to be preserved. This differential application of standards for the acceptance and rejection of evidence constitutes a knowledge filter that obscures the real picture of human origins and antiquity.

So, the short version: “Listen to us, we have the actual evidence that humanity existed millions of years ago. We even have real scientists, influential ones, who agree with us!” Do they? Let’s see.

Chapter 2 deals with anomalously old bones and shells showing cut marks and signs of intentional breakage. To this day, scientists regard such bones and shells as an important category of evidence, and many archeological sites have been established on this kind of evidence alone.

In the decades after Darwin introduced his theory, numerous scientists discovered incised and broken animal bones and shells suggesting that tool-using humans or human precursors existed in the Pliocene (2-5 million years ago), the Miocene (5-25 million years ago), and even earlier. In analyzing cut and broken bones and shells, the discoverers carefully considered and ruled out alternative explanations–such as the action of animals or geological pressure–before concluding that humans were responsible. In some cases, stone tools were found along with the cut and broken bones or shells.

A particularly striking example in this category is a shell displaying a crude yet recognizably human face carved on its outer surface.

Reported by geologist H. Stopes to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1881, this shell, from the Pliocene Red Crag formation in England, is over 2 million years old. According to standard views, humans capable of this level of artistry did not arrive in Europe until about 30,000 or 40,000 years ago. Furthermore, they supposedly did not arise in their African homeland until about 100,000 years ago.

(Note to the intrepid, curious reader: this particular piece of ‘artwork’ is what you see on the upper right hand corner of this post. It could’ve fallen a few feet and gotten those markings just as easily)

Concerning evidence of the kind reported by Stopes, Armand de Quatrefages wrote in his book Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages (1884): “The objections made to the existence of man in the Pliocene and Miocene seem to habitually be more related to theoretical considerations than direct observation.”

1884? Are you kidding me?

The most rudimentary stone tools, the eoliths (”dawn stones”) are the subject of Chapter 3. These imlements, found in unexpectedly old geological contexts, inspired protracted debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

For some, eoliths were not always easily recognizable as tools. Eoliths were not shaped into symmetrical implemental forms. Instead, an edge of a natural stone flake was chipped to make it suitable for a particular task, such as scraping, cutting, or chopping. Often, the working edge bore signs of use.

As to eoliths, answers.com gave me this:

Obsolete term, formerly used for a naturally shaped or fractured stone fancifully considered to be created by humans. The origin of eoliths was once the subject of long-running debate connected to recognizing and accepting the great antiquity of the human species.

In Chapter 6, we review discoveries of anomalously old skeletal remains of the anatomically modern human type. Perhaps the most interesting case is that of Castenedolo, Italy, where in the 1880s, G. Ragazzoni, a geologist, found fossil bones of several Homo sapiens sapiens individuals in layers of Pliocene sediment 3 to 4 million years old. Critics typically respond that the bones must have been placed into these Pliocene layers fairly recently by human burial. But Ragazzoni was alert to this possibility and carefully inspected the overlying layers. He found them undisturbed, with absolutely no sign of burial.

This adequately explains Castendolo Man. Colin Groves (at the Talkorigins site) does a brief review of the book here.

Are you starting to glaze over? I was. So I skipped ahead.

Just as Groves points out, these fellows (Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson) are affiliated with the Bhaktivedanta Institute - Cremo is a Vedic creationist, no less. So he (and his erstwhile buddy) rail about presupposition, all the while approaching the ‘evidence’ in an effort to prove their…eccentric viewpoint.

A quote from the link above:

Professor Jonathan Marks, a biological anthropologist at the University of North Carolina who reviewed Cremo’s book in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, said Cremo relies on poorly documented 19th century archaeological finds.

“What Cremo does in `Forbidden Archaeology’ is he takes all this stuff that has been confined to the rubbish pile and says, `Look at all this evidence that archaeologists have ignored,”‘ Marks said. “It’s not evidence at all. He believes humans existed in the Precambrian era, but the world was a very different place then. There was no oxygen, there was no life; without multi-cellular organisms, there wouldn’t have been anything for them to eat.”

Caught between two extremes: the Young Earthers and the Vedic contortionists. Hard to tell, sometimes, which ones are crazier than the others. I mean, they all go rooting in the trashbins of science and holler “Eureka!” when they find something that might vaguely support a premise treading on thin ice.

All the while, fool’s gold.

Till the next post, then.