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June 9, 2020 - Skeptoid
18:51
Skeptoid #731: More Out of Place Artifacts

A survey of seven of the most popular out-of-place artifacts said to overturn human history. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Out of Place Artifacts Explained 00:07:16
Sometimes an object is found where it has no place being, like a modern piece of electronics inside a lump of coal that's millions of years old.
Some people attribute this to time travel, and others just scratch their heads and can't come up with any explanation.
They're called out-of-place artifacts, and today we're going to have a look at some of the best known and see if we can find a place for them.
That's coming right up on Skeptoid.
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More out-of-place artifacts.
A few years ago, we did a quick roundup of a few of the most famous OPARTs, out-of-place artifacts, which are items alleged to have been found in some context which is impossible according to our model of world history.
Thus, OOPARTs are often claimed by those who promote them to be evidence of some alternate model of human or natural history.
As the cases these people make can often be persuasive, oop arts, many of which are featured on de-educational TV shows like Ancient Aliens, do indeed represent a significant threat to the public intellect.
Today, we're going to point the skeptical eye at seven popular examples.
We'll get started with one that comes from Mexico: the Acombaro Figures.
They first surfaced in Mexico in 1944 when a German immigrant, Voldemar Julsrud, said he found a few on his own, then hired a local farmer to dig up more.
Eventually, he had over 32,000 little ceramic figurines, each a few inches high, each representing some kind of strange creature.
Some vaguely resembled animals, some looked humanoid, many more were imaginative creatures of all descriptions.
In point of fact, many of them looked a lot like the chess pieces aboard the Millennium Falcon.
From the beginning, young earthers asserted that they were all close matches for dinosaur species and were thus proof that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.
One, Don Patton, had some of them carbon dated and reported they were between 1500 and 6,500 years old.
However, the laboratory itself reported that no conclusive results could be obtained.
The figures never succeeded in attracting much attention from scientists for a variety of reasons.
First, everything about them is consistent with large-scale production by small artisan communities for the tourist trade, especially given that Julsrud openly said he paid for each of them.
Second, archaeologist Charles DiPeso was there at the time and watched some being unearthed and concluded they had clearly just been planted in loose topsoil for him to see.
Their surfaces were clean and unmarred by any aging, and they were unblemished save for a few with clean breaks.
Finally, thermoluminescence dating which had been done on the figures and which can reveal when a ceramic was fired was proven to be invalid in 1976, with the nature of the errors providing sufficient evidence that they'd been fired about the same time they were supposedly found.
The London Hammer.
This was covered in a 2014 Skeptoid blog post by Mike Weaver.
The hammer was discovered in London, Texas, in either 1934 or 36.
It's an old iron hammer, similar in shape to a tack hammer, very corroded, with a weathered and cracked wooden handle.
Much of it is embedded in a mineral concretion.
Young earthers use it as evidence that the geological formation where it was found, conventionally dated at approximately 110 million years, cannot be any older than modern humans, and thus a radical revisioning of all geological science is needed, which would just happen to match the young earth narrative.
As the hammer is currently in possession of the Creation Evidence Museum of Texas, reliable, transparent testing of it has understandably not been permitted.
However, there is nothing about the hammer that has piqued the interest of knowledgeable geologists.
First, the accounts of its discovery make no claim that the concretion surrounding the hammer was actually part of the local native rock.
Every indication is that it was separate.
Second, the concretion itself is not unusual and does not indicate extreme age.
Dissolved sediment easily forms rock-hard nodules around objects, the famous Koso artifact spark plug being a familiar example of how this can happen in just a few decades.
The Wolf's Egg Iron From a coal mine in Austria came a strange irregular lump of iron, half the size of your fist, said to have been found inside a piece of coal by a worker breaking up larger pieces in 1885.
A perfectly plausible early interpretation was that it was meteoric in origin, which stood until a sample was analyzed in the 1960s and determined that the composition was not right.
However, it does look a lot like some iron meteorites.
One popularly nominated explanation is that it could easily have been a piece of ballast from the mining equipment used, which somehow got mixed in with the coal.
I was unable to determine what was meant by ballast.
I thought perhaps material loaded into a hopper as a counterweight, but found no such equipment.
The fact is that it's unknown where this lump came from, how or if it actually did get mixed in with a load of coal, but it's also so unremarkable, with an unlimited number of possible explanations, that it doesn't really constitute a mystery.
Skeptical Adventures at Sea 00:02:28
History is not overturned by this object, and it can't really even accurately be described as out of place, because nobody knows what its place is.
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The Dorchester Pot The story goes that in 1851 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, workers dynamiting some native rock discovered the remains of an ornate silver pot that had been embedded deep within the rock, and that they'd just blown into two separate pieces.
It was reported in the Boston Transcript newspaper, and supposedly lending the story some credibility is that it was republished in an 1852 issue of Scientific American.
The Bell in the Coal Hopper 00:05:41
That particular rock is now known to be over half a billion years old.
So the Dorchester pot has become a favorite of ancient advanced civilization theorists.
But what these modern sources often fail to note is that the Scientific American article was openly mocking the publication of such a foolish story.
It was not reporting the find as legitimate.
Further harming the credibility is that of the many photographs of the object available, no two are of the same one.
They're all of various silver hookah bases from 19th century Indian water pipes, and all are in excellent condition, with not one appearing to have been blown in half by dynamite.
If anything interesting was found on that day in 1851, we don't know it, because all extant evidence is clearly misattributed.
The Wedge of Ayud At a construction site in Ayud, Romania, in 1974, digging was stopped when mastodon bones were unearthed by the excavator.
As the bones were being collected from the hole, at the 11,000-year level, 11 meters below the surface, someone found an even stranger object buried with them.
It was a metallic wedge, crisply machined and obviously artificial.
Testing revealed it to be an aluminum alloy, and it was given to the National Museum of Transylvanian History as evidence of ancient alien visitation.
However, the object is easily recognized by anyone who does excavation.
It's simply a replaceable tooth for the excavator bucket, which broke off at some point during the dig.
The specific alloy was Duralumen 2000, which is often used on excavators in place of the usual steel for digs in which there's a risk of sparking.
The Upshur Bell In 1944, a 10-year-old boy named Newton Anderson was shoveling coal in his family's basement when he found a bell which appeared to him to break out of a piece of coal.
He kept the bell for 63 years and researched its history.
It is a brass ganta, a ceremonial bell used in Hinduism, with the figure of the deity Garuda atop the handle.
It is in excellent condition.
Anderson ultimately sold the bell to the creationist website genesispark.com, where it is presented as probably being the work of Tubal Kane, a blacksmith mentioned in the book of Genesis.
This identification is made in support of young earth creationism, which posits that Earth's sedimentary rocks were formed in Noah's flood.
Thus, it's perfectly rational that one of Tubal-Kane's creations could wind up encased in natural coal.
Why the biblical Tubal-Kane would have been in the business of casting ceremonial Hindu pieces is not persuasively argued in this narrative.
As no evidence supports this, and as this particular ganta is substantially identical to the countless others in the world that lack its fanciful backstory, it has never really been favored with any serious skeptical attention.
The young Anderson easily could have been fooled by the bell being in the coal hopper, possibly even partially or totally encased in hardened coal slurry, a mixture of coal dust and water that can harden and appear to be native coal.
The Dashka Stone This giant stone slab, discovered in Russia in 1999, is claimed to be a 120 million-year-old writing tablet, 1.5 meters high and 1 meter wide, and weighing one ton.
Physicist Alexander Chuviroff asserts that it is a topographical map of the Earl Mountains, and believes that the pattern of inscriptions covering it, basically short lines running in three directions, are an early form of Chinese writing.
He points to two thin layers of different type of rock on its front surface as proof that it was artificially manufactured to serve as a writing tablet.
This is a case where simply contacting any geologist, as I did, quickly answers all the questions.
The face of the Dashka stone was probably a bedding plane between two layers of sedimentary rock, along which some movement may have occurred during a period of deformation in which the other cracks perpendicular to the face also formed.
These cracks are textbook compression shear fractures, and their three directions indicate at least three deformation events.
The layers of different rock at its surface are not the result of artisanal tablet construction, but are simply indicative that the shear zone developed within a sedimentary rock complex.
Geologically, it's a really neat piece that tells a clear story, one which is absolutely typical.
No archaeologists, linguists, geologists, or other scientists with relevant expertise accept Chuviroff's claims for any number of reasons.
This is symptomatic of so many of these oopart examples.
Reporting Errors and Corrections 00:03:22
The claims are usually made by people believing themselves to have superior expertise in a field in which they have no education or experience, often because it simply strokes their preferred worldview.
This is the case with Don Patton misrepresenting the carbon dating results because it would suit his young earth beliefs.
And it's the case with Professor Chuviroff blocking out the geologists because their explanation clashes with his.
Whenever you hear a story about an upart that someone is claiming has overturned some branch of science or history, you'll almost always find a non-expert individual at the heart of the claim.
And you'll almost always find that individual has some motivation.
And whenever a motivated crackpot makes an implausible claim, you should always be skeptical.
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