Monday, August 19, 2019
Index to Ashes, ashes, all fall down
The Rattlesnake Chronicles-slithery friends cast a wary eye
An enigma of the enigma of Amelia Earhart -Ever heard of Kapingamarangi? Earhart may be buried there.
The mystery of the missing Twinkie - Could there be a prehistorical Twinkie in the Jordanian desert?
Juice Newton and the Battle of the Little Bighorn - The mystery of missing history.
The case of the murdered mummy -5,000 year-old migration from east to west.
The case of the auspicious allegory -In Florida, allegory is what's left over when the gator gets you; out West it's sort of a metaphor.
B.T. Raven, ace detective - Nothing worse than solving a mystery, only to find your client has croaked.
Confessions of an historical stalker - One you get to know some dead folks, it's hard to stop.
Night Hawks West - A mural of Ed Hopper's famous painting was just too inviting. We joined these characters for coffee. Jerry Garcia makes an appearance.
Sunday, August 18, 2019
The Rattlesnake Chronicles
Schmitty, keeper of the Von Schmidt monument
by B. T. Raven
Greg, a sucker for roadside points of historical interest, saw no choice but to stop at the Von Schmidt monument high in the Mojave and in the dead of night.
The monument itself was not by the road but at the end of a pathway overgrown with greasewood and ocotillo. A flashlight would have been handy. Greg and Rolex T. Watchdog wandered the path to read the monument by matchlight.
The two were stopped cold in their tracks on the return trip along the trail, by the warning from a rattlesnake somewhere in the bush. They inched along and eventually reached the truck.
Greg put on the high beams to see what he could see, which turned out to be a giant Mojave Green rattlesnake only a few feet from the vehicle, coiled and suspicious of the two night visitors.
Schmitty was the self-appointed guardian of the Von Schmidt Monument, well fed apparently on the remains of the historically curious.
Allexey W. Von Schmidt was hired by California in the 1870s to establish a for-sure border between California and Nevada, so that folks would know whether it was legal to go whoring and gambling in any particular vicinity.
Pit Stop perils
by Marcia Kreutzmann
 | |
| Never take a rattlesnake for granite. |
He blended into the granite perfectly, I didn't even see him until it was almost too late.
Greg and I were canoeing Hell Hole reservoir to our destination, the boat-in campsite for a three-day adventure.
Halfway up the large lake, we landed on a rocky point. I needed to make a pit stop and chose a large jumble of granite boulders. I headed for a secluded spot behind the largest boulder.
I never made it.
There must be a deep memory in our DNA for survival, or I had watched enough old Wagon Train episodes on TV, for when I heard the rattle sound, there was no conscious thought needed. I had been over by the crevice and now I was suddenly next to Greg whimpering urgently, "there's a rattlesnake right there." I moved so fast, even my fear couldn't catch up,
His sunning rudely interrupted, Mr. Diamondback slithered into the crevice and disappeared. He was sorely pissed off at almost getting pissed on.
Had I hiked up my hiking skirt and squatted, I wouldn't be here today to tell you this exciting story.
Cute as a bug, deadly as a viper. by B. T. Raven
Somewhere in Arizona, west of Phoenix, north of Interstate 10, an old mining camp proved irresistible to Greg the desert rat.Most of the artifacts were bean cans, rusty cable and sheet tin, but Greg spotted something of interest on the desert floor.
It was rusty and round, about the size of a large bagel. Rolex the watchdog was circumspect, but Greg was curious, bending over the object to get a closer look.
That was when he realized he was looking at a coiled, baby rattlesnake, too young to have rattles but acting like he did.
Greg retired from the vicinity even quicker than that lady who likes to piddle on slithery type characters up at Hell Hole.
Sunday, April 7, 2019
Index to Ashes, ashes, all fall down
The Rattlesnake Chronicles
An enigma of the enigma of Amelia Earhart -Ever heard of Kapingamarangi? Earhart may be buried there.
The mystery of the missing Twinkie - Could there be a prehistorical Twinkie in the Jordanian desert?
Juice Newton and the Battle of the Little Bighorn - The mystery of missing history.
The case of the murdered mummy -5,000 year-old migration from east to west.
The case of the auspicious allegory -In Florida, allegory is what's left over when the gator gets you; out West it's sort of a metaphor.
B.T. Raven, ace detective - Nothing worse than solving a mystery, only to find your client has croaked.
Confessions of an historical stalker - One you get to know some dead folks, it's hard to stop.
Night Hawks West - A mural of Ed Hopper's famous painting was just too inviting. We joined these characters for coffee. Jerry Garcia makes an appearance.
Friday, April 5, 2019
An enigma of the enigma of Amelia Earhart
X marks the spot
If you were searching for Amelia Earhart, where would you begin?
The Bordeaux region of France, of course, because X marks the spot and it is also where a note in a bottle washed ashore in 1938 - 16 months after Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared in the northern Pacific ocean.
The woman who found the bottle (who may or may not have been selling sea shells by the sea shore) turned it over to the local gendarmes, who sent it to Paris.
The note was conveniently written in French, and tells the story of an unnamed sailor whose yacht, Veveo, sank in the Marshall Islands, and who was arrested as a spy by the Japanese when he made it Milli Attol, about 600 miles north of where Earhart intended to land.
The Japanese shipped him to a prison on Jailut Attol, also in the Marshalls and that is were he saw Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.
The sailor wrote that Earhart etc. had been rescued by seaplane and were kept as hostages. The sailor wrote that he had been forced to become a stoker on a Japanese freighter headed for Europe and that was why he was sneaking bottles overboard.
There you have it; the mystery is solved. Japan had a rational position: If you drop that pesky oil
embargo, we will will give back Lady Lindy. We need oil to sneak up on you to bomb Pearl Harbor at some future date. Cool Story.
The English-language translation is in the U.S national archives and was declassified in 1977.
The Bordeaux region of France, of course, because X marks the spot and it is also where a note in a bottle washed ashore in 1938 - 16 months after Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared in the northern Pacific ocean.
The woman who found the bottle (who may or may not have been selling sea shells by the sea shore) turned it over to the local gendarmes, who sent it to Paris.
The note was conveniently written in French, and tells the story of an unnamed sailor whose yacht, Veveo, sank in the Marshall Islands, and who was arrested as a spy by the Japanese when he made it Milli Attol, about 600 miles north of where Earhart intended to land.
The Japanese shipped him to a prison on Jailut Attol, also in the Marshalls and that is were he saw Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.
The sailor wrote that Earhart etc. had been rescued by seaplane and were kept as hostages. The sailor wrote that he had been forced to become a stoker on a Japanese freighter headed for Europe and that was why he was sneaking bottles overboard.
There you have it; the mystery is solved. Japan had a rational position: If you drop that pesky oil
embargo, we will will give back Lady Lindy. We need oil to sneak up on you to bomb Pearl Harbor at some future date. Cool Story.
The English-language translation is in the U.S national archives and was declassified in 1977.
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| Ominous photo-op, with a coffin-nose Cord and suicide doors. |
I have only been searching for Earhart for 50 years, so it is not like I am obsessive or anything.
The history of herstory
Amelia Earhart could not find Howland Island but she sure got around to all the others according to the lore: The Mariana and Marshall islands, the jungles of New Britain, and Gardner in the Phoenix islands. What we need is something like a unified Earhart theory that can put her in all those places insome kind of rational order.
From the beginning of her disappearance July 2, 1937, Gardner Island was suspected as a landing site in what was near her line-of-position although it was below the equator. The problem was there was no airplane on Gardner when three navy float planes circled the island on Friday, July 9, seven days after she disappeared and two days after she was last heard from.
This did not stop searchers 53 years later when The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery found evidence that a human skeleton, a castaway, had been found on Gardner sometime between 1938 and 1940.
The British established a colony on Gardner to relieve population pressures in
the Gilbert Islands. The Brits took great pleasure in abbreviating the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme. We may not know where Earhart was, but it does explain the comedy of Benny Hill. Like Earhart, the bones have disappeared so it is logical to assume they were hers. During 30 years of
searching, Tighar has come up no evidence whatsoever that Earhart had ever been on Gardner.
the Gilbert Islands. The Brits took great pleasure in abbreviating the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme. We may not know where Earhart was, but it does explain the comedy of Benny Hill. Like Earhart, the bones have disappeared so it is logical to assume they were hers. During 30 years of
searching, Tighar has come up no evidence whatsoever that Earhart had ever been on Gardner.
The hard truth of getting lost is, if you don’t know where you are, you do not know where you're going. The hard truth of historical mysteries is they are based on three elements: Assumption, conjecture and the occasional note in a bottle on the coast of France.
If the facts don’t support your theory, then manipulate the facts. If you don’t have any facts, create them.
So where did Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan end up? On an uncharted desert island below the equator and 1,300 miles to the east. This is far beyond the search pattern of the American navy, which searched no farther east than the Gilbert Islands and no farther west than the Phoenix Islands.
Betty's transcript
My favorite Earhart artifact is a transcript of a distress call set down by Helen Betty Klenck, aged 17. It is the only known transcript to exist. She heard this on her father’s shortwave radio sporadically between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. The date is uncertain.
Betty Klenck wrote down everything she could hear. It paints a dire picture. Fred Noonan suffers a brain concussion from the crash landing, and is speaking nonsensically. The transcript contains the only position report of the entire Earhart saga. Noonan appears to be adressing Earhart as Mary - her middle name- while Earhart appears to be addressing Noonan as Bud. Earhart repeats NYC several times, which may have been pronounced New York City and might be a reference to a wrecked freighter on Gardner Island, the Norwich City.
The position report is nowhere near Gardner. It is 165 degrees east longitude and 3 degrees, 9 minutes south of the equator.
In practical terms that is about 140 nautical miles east of Nauru Island and about 210 nautical miles south of the equator.
If you’re looking for the ghost of Amelia Earhart, that location would be worth looking at. If you are looking for sunken aircraft, you’d be in luck, because that is the general vicinity of the Guadalcanal Campaign of 1942-43. Even the future president, John Kennedy was marooned on an island there.
I’d go there myself on my 13-foot Guppy sloop but that boat has severe typhoon allergies.
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| Guppy 13 search vessel; she has typhoon allergies. |
Other distress calls were heard in North America as early as July 2, but not, apparently, by the battleship, aircraft carrier and coast guard cutter searching for Earhart. Betty Klenck's father, Kenneth did try to alert the U.S. Coast Guard.
Two earlier distress calls contained the Earhart plea for help in which she said she was down on a small island, uncharted, uninhabited. I searched for my atlas of uncharted islands but it too has mysteriously disappeared.
Fuelish assumptions
The charted position has always been considered impossible because Earhart was out or fuel or almost out of fuel as she approached Howland Island, the only presentable landing strip in all of Micronesia.
But was she out of gas? Earhart’s Electra could carry 1,250 gallons of fuel and could stay aloft for 24
hours if her fuel management was kept to 50 gallons per hour or less. She spent 20 hours trying to reach
Howland, so she may have had 4 hours of fuel left. That is a range of 500 additional nautical miles at cruising speed. Her average speed on her last flight was a little under 115 knots.
What if she got down to 30 gallons per hour? That’d give 18 more hours aloft. At 40 gallons per hour, that number drops to 11 hours of extra flight time. The reality is that no one knows. On her ill-fated flight to Hawaii, Earhart reported 10 gallons per hour when she had to slow to 120 knots to meet the dawn. She
had the aid of a tailwind during that period. Of the 947 gallons of fuel aboard she reported she still had a 4-hour reserve (600 miles). Oakland-to-Hawaii is almost the same distance as the Lae-to-Howland run, where she disappeared.
Amelia Earhart is said to have said to a friend (Gene Vidal), “If I can’t find Howland, I’ll just go back to the Gilbert Islands and land on a beach”.
If Amelia Earhart turned back whence she came, all of the island chains she passed on the way in were populated places. The position report cited above was almost the exact position occupied by the ocean-going tugboat, USS Ontario, which left the scene 1 hour after Earhart presumably passed by. Perhaps Earhart thought the Ontario was still in position. If it was, it could rescue the crew and the Electra.
Ontario was 185 feet long and burned coal. It returned to Samoa due to fuel and food needs.
One of the other people who heard Earhart on July 2 was Mabel Larremore. She contacted Tighar in 1990 and spoke from memory when she was 84 years old. Her story was remarkably similar to that written
by Klenck. Betty Klenck's notebook did not surface until 10 years later.
by Klenck. Betty Klenck's notebook did not surface until 10 years later.
Larremore added a twist to her tale: She awoke her family to listen to Earhart’s plea. Her eldest son, George Jr., then 16-years-old, spent a career in the Navy in the Pacific. Before he died, he told his mother he had seen Earhart’s grave on an unknown Pacific island, where he had taken shore leave.
His story was that the natives sailed to an uninhabited island to fish, where they found Earhart, her plane, and her deceased navigator. They took Earhart and some things from the aircraft back to their island, where she recovered from her injuries but later died.
The presumption is that George Jr. heard this story during the Second World War, but it could have occurred any time between 1941 and 1961, when he retired from the Navy.
George Larremore never claimed to have seen Earhart, merely that he was shown a grave and heard a story from the natives.
There is such an island in Micronesia that fits the description. It is Kapingamarangi (pay attention to the
spelling. It might show up on the geography quiz).
spelling. It might show up on the geography quiz).
Kapingamarangi Atoll’s main resource is fishing. It has a well-kept graveyard and has had limited
exposure to European, American or Japanese culture. It’s land area is too small for colonization.
exposure to European, American or Japanese culture. It’s land area is too small for colonization.
It is also in the vicinity to Betty Klenck’s position report. This atoll is about 157 degrees east and 1 degree north of the equator (again, Betty Klenck’s position report was: 165 degrees east longitude and 3 degrees south).
Earhart's last position report to Harry Balfour at Lae, was 4 degrees 33 minutes south and 159 degrees, 9 minutes east. How ya' like them apples? There's something about that part of the ocean to which Earhart was drawn. In the last case, she flew into the dark at 6 p.m. local time, at least 800 miles from Lae and 1200 miles from Howland. Even more convenient to George Larremore's story are the Nukumanu Islands at about 160 degrees east and 4.5 degrees below the line. These islands are a remote outpost of Papua, New Guinea. Earhart had seen these islands in daylight, and were the last land Earhart saw on the way to Howland Island. The question remains is if there is another little island 5 degrees farther toward the western hemisphere.
“On coral southwest of unknown island. Don’t know how long we will ... We are cut a little,” is said to be
a copy of a U.S. Naval transcript picked up in Hawaii on July 7, 1937. The alleged copy came into the possession of Fred Goerner who spent 6 years tracking down the fate of Earhart and Noonan. He acquired the transcript from Elmer Dimity, a parachute maker and unofficial promoter of Earhart.
a copy of a U.S. Naval transcript picked up in Hawaii on July 7, 1937. The alleged copy came into the possession of Fred Goerner who spent 6 years tracking down the fate of Earhart and Noonan. He acquired the transcript from Elmer Dimity, a parachute maker and unofficial promoter of Earhart.
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| Amelia Earhart showing off her fuel-switching thingamajig. |
The tale of two Freds
Until his death in 1994, Fred Goerner served as the source of the predominate theory that Earhart and Noonan were captured and killed by the Japanese military on Saipan in the Mariana(s) Islands.
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| Headline that got the whole Earhart mystery rolling in 1960. |
Fred Goerner worked as a newsman for KCBS radio in San Francisco and began his search for Earhart after reading the tale Mrs. Josephine Blanco Akiyama told in the San Mateo Times May 27, 1960. The story
gained national prominence through the CBS radio and television network.
Many people noted that he looked a lot like Fred Noonan, which came in handy when he sought permission from Noonan’s widow and Earhart’s sister to disinter a grave in Saipan where the two were thought to be buried.
Goerner’s book, The Search for Amelia Earhart, is an intriguing and believable book. This is where I began my interest about the fate of Amelia Earhart: Goerner's belief that she was a spy.
The quest to establish Earhart and Noonan died in the custody of the Japanese military remains unresolved but Goerner uncovered quite a bit of skulduggery. Most of the principal characters were then alive and but have since gone to grave.
Goerner ultimately came up with no proof of his theory that Earhart deviated from her equatorial flight to take a look at the Marshall Islands well north of the equator, to see if the Japanese were building military defenses on the Japanese mandate islands.
The mandates were so-called because of a League of Nations agreement to give the islands to Japan after they were seized from Germany after World War l. Before that they were in Spanish possession.
The key part of Goerner’s theory was the Earhart mistook her position and was still in the Marshall island group when she thought she was near Howland Island.
Earhart’s terse radio messages did not include any position reports after she flew out of radio range of
Lae, New Guinea, which may have been as far as 850 miles from her takeoff point.
The spy theory is exotic but unlikely. Flight plan deviation across thousands of miles of blue water
would be very dangerous and included the threat of sparking a war with Japan that the United States was not prepared for.
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| Illustration of islands for the lost flight. Note the east-west meridians. |
It is possible Earhart had the fastest plane in the world at that time and could have outrun any Japanese pursuit. Goerner thought two of her radio messages significant to his theory. Earhart radioed she was 200 miles out and radioed again a half-hour later saying she was 100 miles out. That is an airspeed
of 200 miles-per-hour, near her top speed of 220 miles-per-hour. Three years later, the famous Japanese Zero fighter aircraft had about the same performance and range as the Electra 10E
Now The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery is equally glued to the Gardner Island theory.
The distress calls alluded to above were picked up by the navy on Diamond Head, Hawaii: July 2, a carrier wave was picked up. July 4, A male
voice could be heard but was garbled. July 7, Earhart’s voice was heard including her radio call sign KHAQQ.
She was trying to reach NRU1, which is said to be the call letters of the Coast Guard cutter, Itasca, but I have been unable to verify that.
The crux of the mystery is not what went wrong, but what did Earhart do when she was confronted with a deadly game of aerial poker. You and I now have the chance to be the pilot and make a choice that we must make.
Here’s how I play my hand. North was troubled by weather, perhaps a monsoon. A PBY flying boat sent from Hawaii to aid in the search July 2 was turned back by weather.
South was unknown territory but would lead to the uninhabited Phoenix Island group. Gardner Island was closest to her line of position. Again a group of three navy float planes flew over Gardner Island on July 9, and saw no evidence of a crash-landed aircraft.
West was blue water with no known land forms for thousands of miles.
East was from whence she came. The Gilbert Islands and the northern tip of the Solomon Islands, not to mention Nauru and Ocean Island were on her pathway.
I’m going to play the eastern card, but we already know the game was rigged. The pair did not survive. At some point she had to fold her hand anyway because night was coming.
All gamblers make mistakes. If Earhart did, I suspect she was trying to find a safe place to land so that the Lockheed 10E could fly again. Earhart’s best fuel management occurred at 10,000 feet (the logical ceiling without supplemental oxygen) and slow, to 120 knots. That is probably what she did.
Earhart apparently judged her fuel supply by watching the fuel-flow meters for each engine.
The unified Earhart theory
If the Japanese did pick Earhart up, it may have been at Kapingamarangi. Japan claimed this atoll as part of the mandate islands, and used it as a seaplane base. Earhart could have appeared in Saipan or even the Marshall Islands. Hell, in more recent times, the CIA admitted to having a secret prison in Poland.
Go figure.
.
If the last, lost flight was not so tragic, It would make an exotic video game. Just watch your airspeed and fuel consumption and stay out of the mandates.
Gilligan’s Island had a happier outcome, but that was only a 3-hour tour.
The survivors
Earhart’s husband, George Palmer Putnam and Noonan’s wife, Mary Bea Noonan, encamped at Oakland airport, awaiting news of the lost flight and shared hope and grief until the navy search was abandoned July 18.
Putnam remarried twice after Earhart was declared dead in 1939. He moved to Inyo County, Whitney Portal and then to own and operate the Stovepipe Wells resort in Death Valley and died in 1950 of kidney failure.
Bea Noonan- she used Bea as her first name - ran a beauty shop in the San Francisco Bay region but later met a wealthy widower aboard a steamship returning from Hawaii. She became known in Santa Barbara as an expert of growing and cross-breeding orchids. Her mansion is where she received Goerner to give permission to disinter a grave in Saipan. Goerner attended the University of California, Santa Barbara and knew about the orchid lady, but did not know her significance. Fred Noonan was declared dead in 1938.
Fred Goerner retired from CBS news and died in 1994.
Betty Klenck, developed a close relationship with Tighar researchers and lived until 2014.
Mabel Larremore died in Vermont in 2008.
Her son , George, died in Idaho in 1985.
Source notes:
Books: Last Flight, Amelia Earhart, published 1937, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. Arranged by Earhart’s husband, George Palmer Putnam. Earhart’s voice shows through clearly. She sent letters, and telegrams to Putnam during her adventure. It does not have an ending.
Japan’s Islands of Mystery, Willard Price. Published 1944, John Day and Company, New York. Price was a notable childrens' book author of exotic adventure stories. He lived in Tokyo for several years before the war with Japan.
He also finagled a year-long stay in the Japanese mandate Islands around 1935.
Daughter of the Sky, Paul Briand Jr. published 1960 by Duel, Sloan and Pearce, New York. This is a serviceable biography of Amelia Earhart. He speculated that Earhart had been captured in Saipan, based entirely on Akiyama’s sighting. Briand was an English teacher at the West Point and U.S. Airforce academies. This book is weak on aerial navigation techniques.
The Search for Amelia Earhart, Fred Goerner, published 1966, Doubleday and Company, New York.
The bestselling narrative of the search into the fate of the expedition. A reviewer noted it reads like a regimental history and it does at times because it deals with hundreds of characters Goerner interviewed.
Index to all the stories on this blog
Thursday, August 23, 2018
The Mystery of the Missing Twinkie
I know it's out there somewhere in the ruins of Shubayqa 1 in The
middle of the Jordanian desert.
The first Twinkie, which is the only substance on earth that will
not petrify, even after 14,000 years. It's there I tell you, still
in its little cellophane wrapper and still edible.
The quest for the first Twinkie leapt forward with the publication
July 16, of evidence of the first documented breadmaking by a paleolithic
culture that predates both pottery and farming.
The publication is the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
which is basically the Smithsonian Institution. The article is titled,
Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 yearsago in northeastern Jordan
I know you're thinking that the Twinkie angle is pretty half-baked.
But consider that if I am right, the famous archaeologist Indiana
Jones will really have something to sink his teeth into.
The cultural site of Shubayqa 1 was once the real estate of the Natufian
people, who had the lucky habit of building villages and staying put,
instead of following around and pestering Mammoths and cave bears.
Paleolithic cultures are believed to have been migratory, stopping
only at rock shelters and caves and such.
Natufian sites abound in the Middle East, and these folks are even
thought to have been the first occupants of the biblical city of Jericho,
which has been continuously occupied for at least 10,000 years.
I could not pronounce Shubayqa if my life depended on it ,so I
have renamed Shubayqa 1 to Twinkie Town 1. There are in fact 6 Twinkie
towns in the Jordanian desert all on the shores of a giant dry lake
and all barely explored. Twinkie Town 1 was first noted in 1992, and
partially excavated in 1996.
It was not until 2012 that the site was fully excavated during 4 field
seasons and breadcrumbs were discovered and analyzed.
Natufian bread and Twinkies are not that far apart on the food chain.
The bread was mostly starch with cereal grains thrown in. The bio-archaeologists
speculate that this bread was fermented flat bread, like a DiGiorno
self-rising pizza, with a bit of San Francisco sourdough starter thrown
in.
The authors of the above paper suggest the Natufians may have even
made beer, once they got the fermentation thing going. Among the cereal
grains were millet, barley, oats and proto-wheat known as einkorn.
From the fire pits, the expedition deduced that the Natufian's favorite
victuals were gazelle burgers. What's the point of a burger without
a tasty bun?
Twinkie Town 1 sits on a little stone-covered hillock protecting it
from the nearby savannah, which is really a vernal wetland. The site
itself - once excavated - proved extraordinary by Paleolithic standards.
It turns out the village was larger than first presumed and included
human burials beneath the volcanic flagstone floors. The floors are
sunken a little below the hill to give room for stone slab walls which
are tilted upright. The type of roof is unknown. Thatch would be a
good guess given all those grasses in the savannah-wetland.
Again, we are talking about a village that is more than 14,000 years
old, assuming the carbon 14 isotope dating techniques are accurate.
Later neolithic sites in Europe (6,000 years old or so) are all built
on hills and are clearly defensive to protect against hooligans. Twinkie
Town 1 does not appear be defensive, except for weather disasters.
Clearly the Natufians had access to wood, water, grain and gazelle,
but are not believed to have farmed. The culture appears somewhere
between hunting-gathering and intentional agriculture. Curation of
the grassland might be an appropriate way to look at it. No pottery
was observed in the digs, so the bread-making technique is a puzzle.
Disaster did occur at Twinkie Town 1. The earliest date of the village
is 14,500 years gone by. the latest is 14,200 years ago.
Somewhere in that timeframe Twinkie Town 1 was abandoned because of
flooding. The village was re-established but no one knows whether
it was soon after the disaster or hundreds of years later.
During the first abandonment, Noah and his ark may have cruised through, searching for a couple of gazelles to add to his collection.
The digs surprised the diggers when they found two sites, one atop
the other separated by almost 2 feet of mud. The diggers were equally
surprised to find two fireplaces in the same location, with one of
below the mud and the other atop the mud.
Both fireplaces had evidence of toaster crumbs but the lower fireplace
had more preserved artifacts. It could be that the upper fireplace
just had more weathering during the eons and less organic material
was preserved. The architecture of the upper and lower villages is
the same.
It has been firmly established (by me, a skilled quack science reporter)
that Twinkies are critical to human existence and survival.
I firmly established this during many backpacking trips to the high
Sierra. Backpacking is a spartan business and Twinkies are one of
the few luxuries light enough to strap to the top of the packframe.
The black bears and the wolverines snickered about this as we hiked,
but they were just jealous that I had Twinkies and they didn't. I
am quite sure I could not have survived without this fine confection.
That is the basis of my suspicions about the lost Twinkies of the
Jordanian desert 145 centuries ago.
Some thoughts on how the Natufians pulled off bread baking in what
is basically a barbecue pit:
1. This bread could have been baked with the blackened salt method.
Salt is the tin foil of the ancients and the nearby dry lake is likely
to have a lot of salt on the surface as do the pleistocene lakes of
the American southwest.
The salt would blacken in the fire and then be peeled off reserving
the moisture of the tasty bread.
2. Bannock, which is a concoction made of flour, salt, baking powder,
Crisco and water. It is something like a cross between a flapjack
and a biscuit. It cooks on an open fire. My wife is an expert at backpacking
bannock cookery. She puts all the dry stuff in a ziplock bag and adds
water and kneads in the field.
`Course the Natufians would substitute gazelle pemmican for the Crisco.
3. Navajo tacos. This is fried flatbread, which is just flour and
water fried in lard. Without all the tasty toppings it's a little
spare but it is better then porridge. It can be either baked or fried.
One other thing: Bread can be dried and stored for lean times then
rehydrated to taste like fresh. The late Colin Fletcher included an
anecdote on this process in his book, The Man from the Cave.
Sources for this essay are listed below and worth reading.
Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years
ago in northeastern Jordan.
Excavations at the Late Epipalaeolithic Site of Shubayqa 1: Preliminary
Report on the First Season (2012)
Also What John Muir Missed ... essay on California Indians who didn't farm but did curate
middle of the Jordanian desert.
The first Twinkie, which is the only substance on earth that will
not petrify, even after 14,000 years. It's there I tell you, still
in its little cellophane wrapper and still edible.
The quest for the first Twinkie leapt forward with the publication
July 16, of evidence of the first documented breadmaking by a paleolithic
culture that predates both pottery and farming.
The publication is the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
which is basically the Smithsonian Institution. The article is titled,
Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 yearsago in northeastern Jordan
I know you're thinking that the Twinkie angle is pretty half-baked.
But consider that if I am right, the famous archaeologist Indiana
Jones will really have something to sink his teeth into.
The cultural site of Shubayqa 1 was once the real estate of the Natufian
people, who had the lucky habit of building villages and staying put,
instead of following around and pestering Mammoths and cave bears.
Paleolithic cultures are believed to have been migratory, stopping
only at rock shelters and caves and such.
Natufian sites abound in the Middle East, and these folks are even
thought to have been the first occupants of the biblical city of Jericho,
which has been continuously occupied for at least 10,000 years.
I could not pronounce Shubayqa if my life depended on it ,so I
have renamed Shubayqa 1 to Twinkie Town 1. There are in fact 6 Twinkie
towns in the Jordanian desert all on the shores of a giant dry lake
and all barely explored. Twinkie Town 1 was first noted in 1992, and
partially excavated in 1996.
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| This map can be better viewed at Excavations at the Late Epipalaeolithic Site of Shubayqa 1 ... cited at the bottom of this post. |
seasons and breadcrumbs were discovered and analyzed.
Natufian bread and Twinkies are not that far apart on the food chain.
The bread was mostly starch with cereal grains thrown in. The bio-archaeologists
speculate that this bread was fermented flat bread, like a DiGiorno
self-rising pizza, with a bit of San Francisco sourdough starter thrown
in.
Momma,s little baby likes shortenin' bread
Twinkies are mostly shortening bread with sugar and wheat thrown in.The authors of the above paper suggest the Natufians may have even
made beer, once they got the fermentation thing going. Among the cereal
grains were millet, barley, oats and proto-wheat known as einkorn.
From the fire pits, the expedition deduced that the Natufian's favorite
victuals were gazelle burgers. What's the point of a burger without
a tasty bun?
Twinkie Town 1 sits on a little stone-covered hillock protecting it
from the nearby savannah, which is really a vernal wetland. The site
itself - once excavated - proved extraordinary by Paleolithic standards.
It turns out the village was larger than first presumed and included
human burials beneath the volcanic flagstone floors. The floors are
sunken a little below the hill to give room for stone slab walls which
are tilted upright. The type of roof is unknown. Thatch would be a
good guess given all those grasses in the savannah-wetland.
Again, we are talking about a village that is more than 14,000 years
old, assuming the carbon 14 isotope dating techniques are accurate.
Later neolithic sites in Europe (6,000 years old or so) are all built
on hills and are clearly defensive to protect against hooligans. Twinkie
Town 1 does not appear be defensive, except for weather disasters.
Clearly the Natufians had access to wood, water, grain and gazelle,
but are not believed to have farmed. The culture appears somewhere
between hunting-gathering and intentional agriculture. Curation of
the grassland might be an appropriate way to look at it. No pottery
was observed in the digs, so the bread-making technique is a puzzle.
A tale of two Twinkie Towns
Disaster did occur at Twinkie Town 1. The earliest date of the village
is 14,500 years gone by. the latest is 14,200 years ago.
Somewhere in that timeframe Twinkie Town 1 was abandoned because of
flooding. The village was re-established but no one knows whether
it was soon after the disaster or hundreds of years later.
During the first abandonment, Noah and his ark may have cruised through, searching for a couple of gazelles to add to his collection.
The digs surprised the diggers when they found two sites, one atop
the other separated by almost 2 feet of mud. The diggers were equally
surprised to find two fireplaces in the same location, with one of
below the mud and the other atop the mud.
Both fireplaces had evidence of toaster crumbs but the lower fireplace
had more preserved artifacts. It could be that the upper fireplace
just had more weathering during the eons and less organic material
was preserved. The architecture of the upper and lower villages is
the same.
It has been firmly established (by me, a skilled quack science reporter)
that Twinkies are critical to human existence and survival.
I firmly established this during many backpacking trips to the high
Sierra. Backpacking is a spartan business and Twinkies are one of
the few luxuries light enough to strap to the top of the packframe.
The black bears and the wolverines snickered about this as we hiked,
but they were just jealous that I had Twinkies and they didn't. I
am quite sure I could not have survived without this fine confection.
That is the basis of my suspicions about the lost Twinkies of the
Jordanian desert 145 centuries ago.
Some thoughts on how the Natufians pulled off bread baking in what
is basically a barbecue pit:
1. This bread could have been baked with the blackened salt method.
Salt is the tin foil of the ancients and the nearby dry lake is likely
to have a lot of salt on the surface as do the pleistocene lakes of
the American southwest.
The salt would blacken in the fire and then be peeled off reserving
the moisture of the tasty bread.
2. Bannock, which is a concoction made of flour, salt, baking powder,
Crisco and water. It is something like a cross between a flapjack
and a biscuit. It cooks on an open fire. My wife is an expert at backpacking
bannock cookery. She puts all the dry stuff in a ziplock bag and adds
water and kneads in the field.
`Course the Natufians would substitute gazelle pemmican for the Crisco.
3. Navajo tacos. This is fried flatbread, which is just flour and
water fried in lard. Without all the tasty toppings it's a little
spare but it is better then porridge. It can be either baked or fried.
One other thing: Bread can be dried and stored for lean times then
rehydrated to taste like fresh. The late Colin Fletcher included an
anecdote on this process in his book, The Man from the Cave.
Sources for this essay are listed below and worth reading.
Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years
ago in northeastern Jordan.
Excavations at the Late Epipalaeolithic Site of Shubayqa 1: Preliminary
Report on the First Season (2012)
Also What John Muir Missed ... essay on California Indians who didn't farm but did curate
Index to all the stories on this blog
Saturday, December 2, 2017
Juice Newton and the battle of the Little Bighorn
Or, the Mystery of the copper cartridges
I have done some stupid things in my life that I will admit to.
One was handling a .22 caliber automatic pistol belonging to my older brother. I was cautious and looked down the barrel to make sure it was not loaded. Then, just for extra safety, I pointed to the sky and pulled the trigger.
I was unfortunately sitting in the back of a 1958 Ford hardtop at the time. Ruining the trade-in value of a perfectly good Ford was one thing; mother's screaming from outside the car was quite another. I was pretty sure the world had ended, and so did my older brother by the time she was through with him.
The reason I am admitting this is to illustrate my extensive firearms training, when many years later I discovered a cache of ancient ammunition in Sun Valley, California. When the ammo was discovered in the course of a gardening project, I was approaching my 11th birthday in 1964. The discovery has troubled me since.
Most of the ammo was spent cartridges but oddly they were made of copper instead of brass. Also oddly, they did not seem to have ejector rings required of repeating firearms, Who the hell had been shooting up the place? The neighboring house 10-feet away from the find dated at least to the 1920s. Some other houses in the vicinity dated to the turn of the 20th century at least and may have dated to the 1880s when Charles Maclay carved up the old Verdugo ranchos into 10 and 20-acre farm plots.
For years, my youthful brain entertained the idea that my backyard may have been the real site of the two Battles of Cahuenga, where the California Rancheros sought autonomy under Mexican rule in 1831 and 1845.
Or was it possible that there was a third Battle of Cahuenga, between the Californios and the United States troops in 1848. The treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo was said to have been signed at Campo de Cahuenga. Could there have been a little last-gasp shooting there?
Officially, my brain is wrong, because there is no record of metal cartridge ammo being used before 1850 and mostly not until after the Civil War decades later.
Unofficially, I've discovered a lot of history is wrong or has completely disappeared.
A case in point: The Battle of Juice Newton. In 1978, or thereabouts, I saw the singer Juice Newton fronting the band, Asleep at the Wheel at the Palamino nightclub in North Hollywood. I may have consumed a lot of expensive liquor that night, but I know what I saw, but can find no evidence the two ever associated in the modern internetti world. It never happened, according to current folklore.
Which logically brings us to the Battle of the Little Bighorn of June 25, 1876 - The centennial of United States of America. Copper cartridges abound, both of the Indian forces and the Seventh Calvary. A 1984 field survey established what was shot and who shot what.
Juice Newton was not involved in any of this, I'm pretty sure, and no automobiles were wounded.
Lore (almost as good as a fact) indicates that copper cartridges were used as late as the Spanish-American War, among state militias and volunteer militias, who were issued the surplus 1873 Springfield carbines and rifles of the post-civil war era.
The problem is that these weapons were .45 caliber; my little stash of ancient ammo was no more than 30-ish caliber. All the cartridges appeared to be the same.
So the winner is ...
The Winchester .32-20, designed in the 1882 as a small game cartridge, which was adapted by Colt and Smith-and-Wesson into a revolver cartridge. I learned this on the internet, which sometimes is almost as good as a fact.
So perhaps some militia group training for the Philippines or trying to remember the Maine, did some practice in the sandy rangeland that Roscoe (later Sun Valley) was at the turn of the 20th Century.
This stash of ammo had a military look to it. The Army likes to collect things in groups. Hunters or sportshooters would not be so tidy. One time on the Arizona border I came across about a gazillion churchkeys, used to open tins and bottles. This was at the Blythe Intaglios, a prehistoric site that was used by George Patton for armored tank training in preparation for the North African campaign of World War Two.
Or ...
This backyard in Sun Valley was the site of the famous Apache attack of 1914.
The silent-movie cowboy William S. Hart, made something like 74 western movies in Southern California between 1914 and 1925. The black smoke from the black powder cartridges would have been ideal, since these movies did not have any sound.
Back then you wouldn't have needed blank cartridges since the attacking Indians and the Blue Coats would have been separate movie shots.
At this point, I am kind of going with the movie idea, since I make some movies and kind of understand the process.
And anyone who reads this will be happy to know I have only killed one other automobile during my firearms career. In the high Sierra, the howls of the coyotes in the night were troubling my wife, who suggested I load the Crossman pellet revolver, just in case.
We had no intention of shooting at coyotes but the thing made a pretty good bang, which might discourage them.
Marcia was trying to sleep in the tent while I sat by the campfire sipping snakebite tonic just in case the snakey people were planning sneaky snake shinanigans. I fired off a round to see if the gun worked and hit our black Nissan pickup truck that I couldn't see in the black of night and the fog of snakebite tonic.
It was only a flesh wound. Somewhere in the night, I heard coyotes chuckling.
Index to all the stories on this blog
Friday, April 14, 2017
The case of the murdered mummy
It’s been 26 years since the remains of Otzi The Iceman were recovered from a receding glacier in the Otzal Alps of Italy.
It was a lonely place to die, and it took a decade to discover he was murdered by an archer who fired from a lower elevation. The body was frozen immediately after because it was not scavenged by the critters. He was a mummy before he was yummy.
He is the oldest mummy in the world, as well as the only stone-age man who died while he was still a working stiff. Still is. For a dead guy, he has enjoyed a remarkable second career, as a scientific specimen and tourist attraction.
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| Otzi and his spiffy outfit. |
This case has recently come to the firm of Holmes and Raven, Consulting Detectives.
We have been engaged by the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who is convinced that migrants from the Middle East are polluting the Rhine River where it dumps into the North Sea near Tulipville in Holland.
Wilders is convinced migrants were responsible for Otzi’s death.
We are sad to report Wilders is correct. Migrants and global warming, which sounds familiar to the modern debate.
Here’s a short summary of the victim, compiled by J. Edgar Flintstone, head of the Neolithic Bureau of Investigation when Otzi was still just a missing person’s case.
Name: Otzi T. Iceman
Race: Caucasian.
Occupation: Part-time neolithic farmer; full time alpine hunter.
Age: 46ish
Likes: Ibex burgers
Dislikes: Trespassers with arrows, grizzly bears.
Identifying marks: Tatoos on lower body; lots of them.
Personal property: Flint dagger, copper axe, bow and quiver. Quiver contains two broken arrows and 12 incomplete arrow shafts. Bow probably not functional. No bow string.
Flintstone, in typical cop fashion, focused on Otzi’s wife’s boyfriend, but the case went nowhere.
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| Quick Watson, doom is afoot |
My associate, Sherlock Holmes, took a high interest in our case, as, he too, died more than a century ago but has continued to enjoy a stellar career up to the present day.
Turns out, Sherlock didn’t really expire, only his copyright did.
Holmes and Raven is a multinational consultancy. Holmes still keeps his rooms at 221B Baker Street, London, while I keep an office at 710 Ashbury St., San Francisco. Technically, I am in the alley behind 710 Ashbury in an abandoned refrigerator crate. My files are kept in a Safeway shopping cart.
After Otzi was removed from the glacier in the fall of 1991, he was taken to the University of Innsbruck on the Austrian side of the Tyrol, where it was quickly determined he was a later stone-age man. The folks at Innsbruck knew they had hit the archaeological jackpot.
Before Otzi, the archaeological business had been slow. During the summer just ended, Innsbruck grad students were excavating in the path of some civic improvement to remove and catalogue pottery shards from the historical period.
At Innsbruck, Otzi quickly developed a narrative based more on assumption than scientific inquiry : He was neolithic sheepherder who suffered some tragedy. The location of the body indicated he was under high stress when he died. He was attempting to flee from something and flee to something at the same time. The iceman was in a desperate situation.
The German-born Konrad Spindler, wrangled control of the iceman, much to annoyance of many of the scientists who worked on the project.
The Austrians had Otzi until 1998 and collected a great deal of information about the neolithic life of the iceman but missed the important clue: He had been murdered.
The arrowhead that killed him was discovered by X-ray (CT scan) in 2001 in Bolzano Italy, where Ozti had new accommodations.
Round up the usual suspects
The immediate conclusion was Otzi’s death occurred during some sort of hunting mishap involving Dick Cheney. Cheney’s old enough, but is known to avoid places where he cannot see an oil well. He also avoids areas with strong extradition laws.The next suspect was O.J. Simpson, but Johnnie Cochran was still Simpson's attorney of record. “If it’s Frozen Fritz, you must acquit,” Cochran kept shouting. The Italians did not need that kind of grief.
Unless you are Jimmy Hoffa, the body of a murder victim is easier to locate than the murderer. Holmes and Raven have proceeded on that basis.
Holmes Victorian-era mantra was: “If you eliminate the impossible, that which remains, however implausible, must be the truth.”
Here in the 21st Century, he has modified the doctrine to: “Throw out the poppycock and evaluate the rest as less likely or more likely.” We proceeded on that basis.
Did Otzi know his killer? He did not. The arrowhead that killed him is unlike the arrowheads he carried. This is clear from the X-ray. The fatal arrow is small and light - the size of a dime - and is cut to resist removal. The arrowhead is still in the victim, and it is not known whether it is flint, volcanic glass, quartz, or even feldspar.
We are amazed at the lack of curiosity about this matter in the archaeological world. The arrow shaft was not found with the body, indicating someone tried to remove the shaft, perhaps tearing tissue and killing him. The archer who shot him would not have bothered.
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| The fluted arrow that killed Otzi differs from the arrows he carried, which points away from a tribal feud. |
Was Otzi so desperate that he made desperate decisions by climbing the treeless Alps to escape death?
Less Likely.
The Otzi's gang was in a serious running fight lasting at least three days and perhaps three weeks, based on Otzi’s movements, tracked from pollen, in him or on him. Pollen tells us Otzi was high in the forested region, went down the mountain quickly and then returned to ascend to an area above the forested region. Others must have been with him, on the second trip if not on the first.
The plateau, where he met his fate would have been the perfect defensive position. The glacier had receded, and had carved a flat area surrounded by very steep slopes. Enemies trying to climb these slopes would be sitting ducks. The gully where Otzi’s remains were found added additional protection.
This didn’t work out for Otzi, who was likely the oldest member of the party but also likely to be the most knowledgeable about that section of the Alps. The climb from the pass is still arduous and Otzi may have been the last man up - just enough for a skilled archer to target the iceman. The defensive strategy apparently worked, given only the lone iceman was preserved in the gully.
The plateau has never been archaeologically surveyed. Only the gully where the body was found was thoroughly examined. The site itself is a train wreck. After Helmut and Erika Simon discovered the remains, 22 alpinists visited the site before Otzi was removed by helicopter. Some of the visitors broke things, tramped and crushed artifacts, and some removed artifacts.
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| The Otzi find site is identified by red dot. Below at the pass is the hotel for alpinists. In the Neolithic this was probably a Motel 6. |
The usual suspects.
I sided with the logic of the anthro-archaeological thesis that Otzi’s neolithic tribe were both farmers and herdsmen. The sheep and aurochs could manure the fields in winter and be driven to the high meadows in spring and summer.
Otzi’s kit contained two or three items that could have come from domestic animals. But even Spindler conceded that those products could have come from the wild versions of those same animals. Nothing he wore was woven.
My thinking: Herders, if successful, would need more and more land for their operations, which would lead to range wars with their opponents on the other side of the hill.
But old Sherlock went with the unfortunate fact that there is no evidence for the herding thesis while there is ample evidence for the migration thesis.
Our employer, the Dutchman, Wilders, really liked the idea that proto-Russians from the Black Sea were the culprits in the murder.
Sherlock even went so far as to name the killer: A neolithic archer named Boris Badenov
Spindler, the German, had different ideas. He thought the mountain people of the Austrian Tyrol and the Italian South Tyrol, had been pushed there from the Rhine River of the north and from the south by neolithic linguini farmers of Italy.
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| The Julian Alps viewed from Slovenia. You can see why Slovenians don't get good pizza delivery. |
Archaeological evidence does not support a neolithic presence in Italy, because Italy was just too hard to get to: surrounded on three sides by sea, the only passage would have been a through the Julian Alps from Slovenia. Spindler was hot to connect Otzi to the cultural tombs of Remedello more than 100 miles to the south and more that 1,000 years into the future, but also conceded this was a bit of a stretch.
Spindler did write that what little is known about the neolithic farming settlements of the Tyrol, Swiss lakeside villages and the South Tyrol, is they were all built on defensive, hilltop sites. Good (de)fences, make good neighbors, I guess.
The whole of the neolithic era in Europe, from about 8,000 BC to about 2,800 BC, reminds me of California weather: Fire, flood, earthquakes and the occasional volcanic eruption. We know that this is just divine retribution. Coveting thy neighbor’s ass is the least of our sins.
But what about poor Otzi?
Sure, he and his clan were overhunting and otherwise screwing up the alpine ecosystem, but it wasn’t exactly Sodom and Gomorrah, which is far to the west in Hollywood and parts of Burbank, and far into the future.
Among the nine Carbon 14 dates of and around Otzi’s person, the latest date of his death was about 3,140 BC and the earliest about 3,350BC. His clothing and tools are consistent with the average date of 3,200 BC. Almost everything he wore, ate, or used is now extinct in the Otzal Alps.
Think globally; shoot locally
The world in 3,200 BC was a hopping joint. The Sumerians were recording tax records on clay tablets and Troy I, in Turkey was established as a trading center between East and West. But most important was a world-wide drought that caused the abandonment of all the clay cities in the Indus Valley of Pakistan and presumably a migration from the Black Sea region into the Alps, first upstream along the Danube River and then downstream along the Rhine River.With this came the dispersion of the Indo-European language,which is the root language of English, German, Italic, Spanish and Sanskrit of the Indus Valley. One of the commonalities of Indo-European based language is the word for snow. Only Finnish and Iberian Basques do not share the Indo-European root.
Hence we have our migrants, among them, Mr. Badenov and his girl, Natasha, both of whom later gained prominence in Mooselvania.
Meanwhile in 3,200 BC, Italy’s neighbor to the east (Slovenia) was busy inventing the wheel, and building dugout canoes. At some point, archaeologists are just going to have to concede that watercraft were part of neolithic equation in Europe, England and even North America.
The 9-mile gap between Morocco and Gibraltar would have been a big time-saver, compared to walking completely around the Mediterranean Sea.
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| Replica of Slovenian wheel, the oldest wheel ever found. |
The Heretics.
Two scientists who studied Otzi have been viewed with academic suspicion but both have come up with plausible thesis about the iceman’s fate.
Thomas Loy concluded Otzi had four samples of human blood that was not the iceman’s own. Two different samples were on one arrowhead; one sample was on Otzi’s flint dagger, and one sample was on Otzi’s clothing.
This news was reported in the popular press, but Loy did not publish his findings in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, so the results of findings remain somewhat cryptic.
Loy taught and worked at the University of Queensland, Australia and was found dead at his home there in 2005. Among his projects was writing a book about Otzi.
Loy’s claim to fame and infamy was founded on his curiosity about the patina found on ancient spearpoints which turned out to be blood. This was a controversial subject, indicating that artifacts had been mishandled historically by washing off the coatings on hunting points.
The second heretic is Bryan Sykes, a geneticist. Sykes works with mitochondrial DNA, passed only through mothers. He was among the first geneticists to successfully extract ancient DNA and to amplify (PCR) DNA into a usable quantity.
He extracted DNA from Otzi, but created controversy by opposing the thesis that paleolithic hunter-gatherers were replaced in Europe and the Middle East by successive waves of migrants from out of Africa.
Sykes findings were that mtDNA did not point back to Africa, but instead the hunter-gatherer migrants must have become the neolithic farmers who became modern Europeans. Sykes proposes that all of modern Europe is descended from only seven paleolithic clans.
None of this looks good for Otzi's neolithic clan. Vestiges of Otzi's DNA have turned up in Europe, Wales and Corsica but the thread is thin. The mtDNA of his mother, an ancient Swiss Miss appears to have disappeared.
Sykes, the DNA guy has since turned his attention to finding DNA samples of the Abominable Snowman. Sykes has also established a commercial DNA business where folks can send their spit to find out if their real father was the postman.
I tried this out on Sherlock because you have to admit the guy is a little odd. Sherlock was chastened to discover his mother was Charlotte Bronte and his father was an Underwood typewriting machine favored by Arthur Conan Doyle.
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| The South Tyrol , where Otzi hung out. The dotted line is the path used by Helmut and Erika Simon who discovered the iceman. Otzi most certainly used the same route from his village which may now be beneath Vernagt Lake, a modern reservoir. |
Sources:
The man in the ice, by Konrad Spindler, English translation 1994. Worth reading for details on initial find of Otzi.
Iceman, by Brenda Fowler, 2000. The book-length feature story about the scientific staff at Innsbruck.
Every bone tells a story, by Jill Rubalcaba and Peter Robertshaw, 2010, a collection of stories about early-man discoveries, including Otzi.
Seven daughters of Eve, by Brian Sykes, 2001. DNA of early man.
And a whole bunch of internetti stuff, some of which is hyperlinked throughout this essay.
Index to all the stories on this blog
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