Weird Earth - Donald R. Prothero

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Hancock’s impact hypothesis comes from scientists who first proposed it in 2007 as an explanation for the North American megafaunal extinction around that time and has been the subject of vigorous scientific debate. It has not fared well. In addition to the lack of any impact craters dated to around that time anywhere in the world, the radiocarbon dates of the layer of carbon, soot, charcoal, nanodiamonds, microspherules, and iridium, asserted to have been the result of this catastrophic event, vary widely before and after the megafaunal extinction, anywhere from ten thousand to fourteen thousand years ago. Furthermore, although thirty-seven mammal species went extinct in North America (while most other species survived and flourished), at the same time fifty-two mammal genera went extinct in South America, presumably not caused by the impact. These extinctions, in fact, were timed with human arrival, thereby supporting the more widely accepted overhunting hypothesis.

      Third, Hancock grounds his case primarily in the argument from ignorance (since scientists cannot explain X, then Y is a legitimate theory) or the argument from personal incredulity (because I cannot explain X, then my Y theory is valid). These are “God of the Gaps”–type approaches that creationists employ, only in Hancock’s case the gods are the “Magicians” who brought us civilization. The problem here is twofold: (1) scientists do have good explanations for Hancock’s Xs (e.g., the pyramids, the Sphinx), even if they are not in total agreement, and (2) ultimately one’s theory must rest on positive evidence in favor of it, not just negative evidence against accepted theories.

      Hancock’s biggest X is Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, with its megalithic T-shaped seven- to ten-ton stone pillars cut and hauled from limestone quarries and dated to around eleven thousand years ago when humans lived as hunter-gatherers without, presumably, the know-how, skills, and labor to produce them. Ergo, Hancock concludes, “At the very least it would mean that some as yet unknown and unidentified people somewhere in the world had already mastered all the arts and attributes of a high civilization more than twelve thousand years ago in the depths of the last Ice Age and sent out emissaries around the world to spread the benefits of their knowledge.”2 This sounds romantic, but it is the bigotry of low expectations. Who’s to say what hunter-gatherers are or are not capable of doing? Plus, Göbekli Tepe was a ceremonial religious site, not a city, as there is no evidence that anyone lived there. Furthermore, there are no domesticated animal bones, no metal tools, no inscriptions or writing, and not even pottery—all products that much later “high civilizations” produced.

      Fourth, Hancock has spent decades in his vision quest to find the sages who brought us civilization. Yet, decades of searching have failed to produce enough evidence to convince archaeologists that the standard timeline of human history needs major revision. Hancock’s plaint is that mainstream science is stuck in a uniformitarianism model of slow, gradual change and so cannot accept a catastrophic explanation. Not true. From the origin of the universe (Big Bang), to the origin of the moon (big collision), to the origin of lunar craters (meteor strikes), to the demise of the dinosaurs (asteroid impact), to the numerous sudden downfalls of civilizations documented by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse, catastrophism is alive and well in mainstream science.

      The real magicians are the scientists who have worked this all out.

      On this final point about scientists as magicians: as someone with zero training in geology, when I read about the work that professional geologists like Donald Prothero have conducted to determine the age, nature, and processes of the earth, I feel exactly the same way I do as when I see the magicians Penn and Teller catch bullets in their teeth or when the magician David Copperfield makes the Statue of Liberty disappear. When you don’t know how the trick is done—or in this metaphor, how the science is conducted, understanding, say, how geologists determined that the earth is 4.6 billion years old—it feels like magic to me. But once geologists like the author of this book reveal how the secret of science is done, you understand that it’s not real magic, as in paranormal or supernatural forces at work. It’s scientific magic.

      Romancing the stone we call earth through all these alternative theories may appeal to our fantasies and imaginations, but ultimately we want to know what is true. So as you read Weird Earth, I hope the scales will fall from your eyes as they did mine when I read it, understanding fully why all those crazy ideas about our planet that people have concocted over the millennia are wrong and why science really is the best tool we have for understanding nature.

      MICHAEL SHERMER is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the Science Salon podcast, and a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University. For eighteen years he was a monthly columnist at Scientific American, and he is the author of a number of New York Times best-selling books, including Why People Believe Weird Things, The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due.

      1. Michael Shermer, “Romance of the Vanished Past,” Scientific American 317, no. 6 (2017): 75.

      2. G. Hancock, Magicians of the Gods (New York: Griffin, 2015), 32.

       PREFACE

      Having written a book debunking UFOs and aliens (UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens: What Science Says, 2017, with Timothy Callahan) and also a book about cryptozoology (Bigfoot, Nessie, the Yeti, etc.) titled Abominable Science (2013, with Daniel Loxton), it occurred to me that there needed to be another book about the huge number of weird, paranormal, and supernatural ideas people hold about the earth. They range from crank ideas about geology (hollow earth, flat earth, geocentrism, moon-landing hoaxes, expanding earth, myths about the earth’s magnetic field), to mystical and paranormal explanations of earth features (aliens at Mount Shasta, ley lines, Atlantis, Lemuria), to mystical and nonsensical ideas about natural objects and processes (crystal healing, dowsing). As a professional geologist with forty years of experience teaching college geology, I have a broad background in many topics in the earth sciences, so I can discuss the reasons why these weird ideas are not real.

      Since 2011, I have been writing almost-weekly blog posts on www.skepticblog.org about a wide variety of topics in science and skepticism, and I have often found myself addressing popular nonsense about the earth. I thought it would be a good idea to collect all these weird ideas into a book so that their common background and threads could be examined.

      Thus, this book covers most of the weird ideas that have been promoted concerning our planet, especially the major ones like flat-earth beliefs, geocentrism, expanding earth, hollow earth, and the myths propagated by the Young-Earth Creationists. In addition, it covers some of the minor ones that most people haven’t heard of but that are popular in the paranormal and New Age communities of believers, such as the aliens in Mount Shasta, ley lines, and crystal healing. In addition to these individual topics, the first chapter provides a background to how science works and how scientists think so that we can better understand why science rejects these weird ideas. And the last chapter looks at the psychology of why people believe these weird things and what it implies for our future.

      Of course, this book could be twice as long if I included nearly every topic that touches the earth in some way. There are lots of weird ideas about the weather (such as UFO clouds and chemtrails) that I have covered elsewhere, as well as auroras, ball lightning, the Tunguska explosion, and even conspiracies about humans controlling the weather, but these are largely outside the domain of geology. There are myths about aliens producing features on the landscape or creating crop circles, the Planet X/Nibiru idea, but those are largely covered in my book on UFOs and aliens.

      Then there is the entire domain of apocalyptic beliefs and legends, and wild ideas about the end of the world, but debunking these is largely the domain of deconstructing religious prophecies and mistranslations of ancient Mayan inscriptions (as in the supposed end of the world back in 2000). These are not really about geology. Whenever these end-of-the-world scenarios mention actual geologic events, it’s just a mishmash of all sorts of natural disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, floods, storms) thrown together as a mechanism to end the world, not a serious misunderstanding of how these processes work.

      In many of the chapters, I’ve

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