by Adrian Berry
Surrounded by these icebergs and by thick fog, the ship was soon in deadly peril. For ‘between 11 and 12 days’, wrote in the log, ‘we were in imminent danger of the inevitable loss of all of us in case we starved, being alone without a consort.’ They were saved by the smallness of the ship, which made it responsive to controls, and by its shallow draft.
, who lived to 86, was one of the most remarkable scientists of all ages. A friend of - probably the only friend that cantankerous man ever had - he was influential in securing the publication of his Principia, that basis of all celestial laws. He also discovered the first known globular cluster whose ancient stars today defy our attempts to age the universe.
And he was a great character too, as shown by his entertainment, when Astronomer Royal, of the visiting Russian tsar Peter the Great. They ended up drunk in a ditch.
Chimps Like Us
Humans are not the only animals that engage in war, politics and medical research. Chimpanzees have been known to do these too.
‘When I first started studying them I thought they were nicer than we are,’ says the veteran chimpanzee expert . ‘But time has revealed that they can be just as awful.’
In some 30 years of watching chimpanzees - our closest cousins - at Tanzania’s 50-square-kilometre Gombe National Park, Goodall (whose life-story appeared in the National Geographic) has witnessed such phenomena as the Four-Year War, in which two rival tribes of chimps systematically stalked and slaughtered each other.
What most astonished her in this conflict, in which more than ten adults and all their young lost their lives, was its stealthy professionalism. (It was apparently aimed at taking vengeance on animals who were ‘traitors’, who had deserted one tribe and joined the other.) Warriors carrying out an attack or preparing for an ambush would move through the forest in single file, their hair bristling with fear and excitement, stepping from stone to stone to avoid making any tell-tale rustling sound. Then, when battle was joined, the two armies would tear at each others’ flesh with their teeth.
But they used no other weapons. Military technology is one of the few areas in which chimpanzees have failed to make human-like progress. Goodall and her colleagues have observed striking traits of chimp behaviour:
Clothing. They have learned to use twigs as ‘sandals’ to protect their feet from thorns.
Using man-made objects for political propaganda.
One diminutive chimp called bluffed his way to the leadership of his group by banging kerosene cans together to create noisy displays and increase his own importance.
Psychology. A group ruler called Faben had a brother named Figan. When Faben disappeared, Figan began to imitate the behaviour and body language of his vanished brother to persuade others that their personalities were identical. By doing this, he successfully won the leadership of his group and held it for ten years.
Medicine. Some chimpanzees swallow the leaves of Aspilia, a plant that relieves stomach pains and kills internal parasites.
Tool-making. They pare down blades of thick grass and poke them into termites’ nests to trick the insects into coming out to be seized and eaten.
Awe and wonder. They perform a ritual dance in front of a high waterfall, apparently displaying the emotions that may have led early humans to religion.
Marriage. A male and female, Evered and Winkle, lived alone in order to raise their own offspring. Throughout their lives they showed clear knowledge that their son Wilkie was theirs.
Being obnoxious. A ‘spoiled brat’ of a chimp named Frodo kicked a reporter down a hillside, seized Goodall by the ankle and pulled her to the ground, pushed a photographer over on top of her, and walked off, grinning.
None of this should surprise us since 98 per cent of the genetic material of chimpanzees is identical to ours, a far higher proportion than in any other species. Indeed, it was only six million years ago, the merest blink of an eye in the age-long history of mammals, that man and chimpanzee shared a common ancestor.
But how did this ancestor become an ancestor of such able descendants? Reports in Nature have identified the first known of the great apes that crossed the all-important gulf between walking on four legs and walking on two. An ape that lived nine million years ago called Dryopithicus laietanus appears to have learned to swing on branches and rush through the forests in Tarzan-like fashion, a habit still enjoyed by tree-climbing children and circus acrobats.
‘It was long believed that all the great apes went through this vital intermediate phase,’ said one of the scientists, Peter Andrews, of London’s Natural History Museum, ‘but this, from the examination of a fossil found in Spain, was the first proof of it.’
Clever ape-like behaviour suggests that it was not for nothing that the phrase ‘to monkey with’ originally meant adding water to milk and selling it as pure milk.
Faking the Shroud . . .
As radiological tests proceeded in 1988 to determine, once and for all, whether the Turin Shroud was genuine or faked, the enquirers were ‘scooped’ by an unofficial group who presented ‘overwhelming evidence’ that it was a forgery by an unknown fourteenth-century French artist.
Joe Nickell, a teacher, a former magician and a member of the famous Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which has exposed countless frauds, set out to examine the complaint made in 1389 by a French bishop to Pope Clement VII that an artist in his diocese had ‘falsely and deceitfully procured for his church a certain cloth, upon which, by clever sleight of hand, was cunningly depicted the image of a man that he falsely pretended was the actual shroud in which Our Saviour was enfolded in the tomb’. In the light of a further statement from the bishop that the unnamed forger had confessed, Nickell decided that the best way to discover how the supposed forgery could have been committed was to attempt one himself.
He was struck by the fact that the image of in the Shroud is no ordinary painting but is similar to a photographic negative, in the sense that its prominences are dark and the recesses are light. Believers say this is due to a burst of energy that accompanied the Resurrection, but Nickell wondered if it had been created b}^ a technique similar to brass-rubbing, the oldest form of printmaking. This creates negative images as in the Shroud.
‘Artists in the fourteenth century were skilled in creating negative images,’ said Nickell, ‘and I set out to imitate their methods, being careful to use only materials and techniques that were available to them.’
He started experimenting with a bas-relief of ’s Praying Hands, coating them with a moist rouge paint. It made a good negative image, not dissimilar to that of the Shroud, but the edges were too sharp. The moist rouge coating also had the disadvantage of preventing him from seeing the image as it formed. And he was sure the original artist would have liked to see what he was doing.
‘And so, instead of moist rouge, I tried a mixture of myrrh and aloes. But my final choice was some powdered pigment made of iron oxide which is consistent with the findings of the latest microscopic tests on the Shroud. I started by creating a bas-relief of ’s features which one of our team had made from plaster. I then took a wet cloth and moulded it over the bas-relief, taking care to remove any wrinkles.’
After allowing the cloth to dry, he used a dauber to rub this pigment into the cloth. He thus obtained on the cloth an image which, in the words of a critic, was ‘identical, to all practical purposes, to that of the Shroud’.
Nickell believes there are many other vital aspects of the Shroud that prove beyond doubt that it was a medieval forgery. The strongest one is the blood, evidently painted on after the image was formed. ‘The blood is red, and it shouldn’t be. It should be black. Blood blackens very soon after it has been shed.’
Another discrepancy about the blood has been pointed out by one of his team, , a former chief medical examiner, who had examined many a corpse; that blood does not flow in neat little rivulets down the body, as it does in the Shroud. It and blackens. But there is nothing of th
is in the Shroud. It is all so artificial and artistic, not like the injuries to a real corpse.
‘The blood itself on the Shroud has been subjected to forensic chemical tests,’ Nickell pointed out, ‘and a very odd thing was discovered. It was found to contain traces of red ochre paint, which was widely used by artists in the Middle Ages, but would cause lethal mercury poisoning if it ever found its way into a human bloodstream.’
Proponents of the genuineness of the Shroud say that it probably at one time hung under a giant fresco ceiling which dripped paint on it. But where and when they cannot say. Nickell found that a ‘very ingenuous explanation. The Shroud is supposed to have received its image by being wrapped around ’s head. But if one does that to a real, three-dimensional head - as opposed to a flat bas-relief- the laws of geometry predict that you will get distortions. You should have a grotesquely distorted face. But instead we have this flat image. It is absolutely inconsistent with the image I obtained with my experiment.’
But Nickell and his team believe the most devastating evidence of all is the 1,300-year gap between the time the Shroud was supposedly created and when it was first heard of.
‘One would have supposed that this holiest of relics would have been known throughout Christendom. But for more than a thousand years it was unknown. St Augustine used to lament that no one knew what looked like. In the early Middle Ages, artists painted like a clean-shaven, Apollo-like youth. Then in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries he - in the eyes of artists - took on precisely the venerable appearance that he has in the Shroud.’
Even if we discount the fact that the fourteenth century was a time of widespread forged holy relics - no less than three churches claimed to have the corpse of at the same time - the theory that the Shroud was a forgery of that century accounts for all the known evidence.
. . . And Faking the Aliens
Many will have seen film footage showing the supposed autopsy of an alien visitor to Earth - the so-called ‘Roswell incident’ - all those who saw it, who possessed any sense, knew it must be a fake. But the most interesting question, not answered until now, was how it could have been faked.
Now this ignorance is at an end. Two fascinating reports in Skeptical Inquirer, the bimonthly scourge of hoaxers and fakers, show exactly how it could have been done and how, if their authors had been at work, the ‘alien’ could have been considerably more convincing.*
*The Skeptical Enquirer, published by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, 3965 Rensch Road, Amherst, New York 14228-2743
The background to this piece of UFO folklore is well known. At Roswell, New Mexico, in July, 1947, there was some kind of aerial accident. Probably a military surveillance plane crashed, and the US government naturally tried to hush it up, not wishing its scattered parts to fall into Soviet hands. But UFO fanatics proclaimed that something very different had happened; that an alien spacecraft had crash-landed, killing its occupant, whose corpse the film purported to show.
‘I think it could have been a much better fake,’ says one of the Inquirer’s writers, Trey Stokes, a Hollywood special effects artist who has created monsters and alien creatures for such films as The Abyss, Batman Returns, RoboCop II, and The Blob, who then explains how he would have set about faking it.
The requirements, he says, were straightforward. The film should look like a 1940s-era documentary. The ‘alien’ should resemble the popular conception of one - almost human, but not quite - and the dead creature should be seen under dissection by actors pretending to be medical investigators who ‘discover’ non-human internal organs.
The easiest approach is to get a person who in size and shape most resembles the intended alien, and build a plastic ‘body cast’ around him. Remove the human subject and you have the basic shape. Then, to give it an outlandish appearance, cover it with alginate, a paste-like substance used by dentists to make tooth casts that quickly solidifies into a rubbery semi-solid. Give the alien six fingers and six toes -ten would be much too ordinary. To do this, wires should be inserted in its ‘hands’ and ‘feet’ so that these digits stick out. Then redesign the head so that its face has a peculiar staring expression.
Now the cameras roll and the ‘investigators’ are seen cutting up the body. They are likely to have employed what calls ‘one of the oldest tricks in the book’. One of them takes a scalpel and attaches a small tube to its side that faces away from the camera. As the scalpel moves, the alien ‘blood’ flows through the tube so that the scalpel leaves a trail of it. The investigators then extract from the stomach suitably treated livers or kidneys obtained from the local butcher.
So much for how a Hollywood pro would have done the job. But the actual filmed performance, says , a surgeon from Cleveland, Ohio, showed monumental incompetence. It was clearly managed by ‘poorly advised non-professionals’.
The hooded figures around the cadaver appeared to be wearing bee-keepers’ masks that would have neither kept in their own microbes nor protected them from alien ones. They slashed and hacked at the alien, in a manner far removed from the careful, scientific way in which ichthyologists were filmed in 1952 dissecting the prehistoric Coelacanth found fully preserved in the Indian Ocean.
‘Inexperienced and unskilled hands are seen groping around randomly and unsystematically, without any sign of efforts to recognize or analyse organ structures, relationships or continuity. The bizarre body contents are blindly chopped out and tossed into pans.’
If this alien was genuine, adds sarcastically, then the way it was shown being treated in the film was ‘a documentation of the crime of the century - the brutal butchery, devastation and destruction both of unique evidence and of an unparalleled opportunity to gain some understanding about this deformed creature.’
Both writers are nervously aware of the danger that their comments may teach/provoke some future UFO faker to produce more believable footage.
How We Lost a Race and Won the World
What happened to Neanderthal Man, the race that populated Europe and the Middle East from 100,000 to 40,000 years ago and then vanished? Their total disappearance is one of the profound-est riddles in history; we have now come slightly closer to solving it.
They were not quite like us, this somewhat sinister people whom , in a famous short story called ‘The Grisly Folk’. They were slightly smaller and stockier than our own ancestors of the time, Cro-Magnon Man (a term taken from the rock shelter in southern France where their remains were discovered in 1868.) The Neanderthals -named after a skeleton found in a cave in the German Neander valley in 1856 - were heavy-featured, strong-jawed with prominent brow ridges on a sloping forehead and probably very hairy. In a word, they must have looked brutish. Did our ancestors massacre them, if, as suggests, they were in the habit of carrying off their children, presumably to eat them?
The saga of the Neanderthals has been ably put together by , an expert on early man, in Discover. He concludes that both statements are probably incorrect -especially as no mass graves have ever been found of slaughtered Neanderthals - but that there is an even more extraordinary explanation for their disappearance.
First, the background. All living humans are believed to be descended from a single woman (generally known as ‘’) who lived in Africa some 200,000 years ago (see Explosion of Ancestors, p. 53). She, of course, had her own ancestors, but the entire descent passes through this one female individual. Between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago the descendants of migrated across Europe and Asia. Their travels brought them into direct contact with the Neanderthals. These were modern man’s cousins, but descended from a much older branch of the race. (Both, apparently, had a common ancestor in Homo Erectus who lived in Africa between a million and 700,000 years ago.)
What happened when the two remote branches of humanity met? According to the evidence, absolutely nothing. One would expect the two races either to make love or war, and they did neither. Shreeve admits that this is baffling. ‘Humans love
to mate. The barriers between races, so cruelly evident in other respects, melts away when sex is at stake.’ He points out that Captain ’s sailors made love without hesitation to Pacific islanders of different skin colour to their own, and that , conqueror of the Aztecs, for reasons of love or lust rather than politics, married an Aztec princess.
The extraordinary truth appears to be that our Cro-Magnon ancestors co-existed with Neanderthals for 50,000 years and never had sex with them. The reason for this is that they were not the same species, the definition of a species being, in the words of the biologist , that they are ‘reproductively isolated’. In short, a species is a group that does not mate with anything except itself.
If this definition applies, then the Cro-Magnons were simply not interested in the Neanderthals. They ignored them sexually and socially. They regarded them merely as uninteresting animals.
, of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, likens this phenomenon to animals - birds or dogs - who respond only to mating calls from members of their own species. ‘A female of one species might hear the song of the male of another, but she won’t make any response. She doesn’t see what all the fuss is about.’
Shreeve suggests that the situation may well have been similar to that of two species of hyrax mammals in East Africa, which look outwardly the same but never mate because the males’ penises are of different sizes. They, like the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, see each other often but, lacking a common ‘fertilization mechanism’, take not the slightest notice of each other.
Wealth and success depend on material progress which, in turn, requires a large and mutually cooperating population. The Neanderthals, cut off from the society of their cleverer cousins, can only have gone backwards and perished.
The Deadliest Weapon