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Michael Shermer vs. "alternative history" Hancock and Crandall

Cosmic Yak said:
Interesting. At the time of my post, you hadn't, or at least you didn't mention it before. If that's true, then less than 24 hours have elapsed between your not having contacted them, and your claim that you had.
Were you really expecting a response that quickly? My experience of bureaucracies the world over tells me not to expect anything at all in less than a week.
Have you tried contacting someone who knows about forestry, rather than economics? It is hardly surprising that your PHD had never heard of the project: it's hardly their field.
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I said I looked to every source I could find. Enumerating each one seems like another waste of my time.

I messaged them over a week ago. They did not respond, likely because I am not a Chilean citizen nor an official representative of the U.S. *They didn't even have a selection or option to respond to "Americans"...

EVERYHING is economics. You cannot do anything without escaping cost. The bigger the project the more inescapable the numbers. MILLIONS of trees needing 11 daily saturations, all plowed and planted simultaneously would cost too much to hide in such a small country.

This guy has written books on the Chilean and other South American economies, and had never heard of it.
 
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King of the Americas said:
Thesis Statement: Do pre-Columbian garden plots' style and measurements connect different geographical locations to a single agrarian culture?
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Except you haven't found any pre-Columbian garden style plots.
We keep telling you this, but you seem to be refusing to listen.

King of the Americas said:
Method: Using historic shipping routes revealed on google earth, I look to date, in-land intersection points for similarly shaped and sized large agricultural grids in-use or abandoned.
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You also haven't found any ancient shipping routes on Google Earth.
 
King of the Americas said:
I said I looked to every source I could find. Enumerating each one seems like another waste of my time.
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Give us a small number of these contacts, in that case. But as always, you give us no response at all, yet other posters go to the trouble of responding substantively to your many queries and observations.
This guy has written books on the Chilean and other South American economies, and had never heard of it.
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Who?
 
Porpoise of Life said:
You can't use Google Maps to determine the age of a field.
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You definitely can't use it to determine ancient shipping routes but KotA is somehow under the delusion that he can look at features on the floor of the Pacific Ocean (a mixture of low-res data for most of the ocean floor and long tracks of higher-res data from ships that gathered higher-resolution data) and determine they are actually some sort of navigational tool for directing ancient people towards inland forests. Or something. He's Gish Galloping from one idea to the next so fast it's hard to keep up with and remember just what it is he's claiming, especially when he goes out of his way to say he's not claiming anything (until an International team of archeologists, dendrochronologists, oceanographers, etc. accedes to his requested and starts doing sciencey stuff on his behalf).

As usual, he's very careful not to actually say what he think's he's looking at. Those supposed straight lines he's following are:

1. On the bottom of the ocean floor, thousands of feet below the ocean surface.

2. Kilometers wide and thousands of kilometers long.

3. Look more natural and rugged and detailed than the surrounding ocean floor, the reason for which is obvious. The surrounding ocean floor in Google Earth was composited from low res data, so it looks relatively smooth and flat (the ocean floor is not actually that smooth and flat) but the long tracks look more rugged and craggy because they are higher resolution scans of the ocean floor and thus reveal the kind of data that's missing for the rest of the ocean.

4. KotA has acknowledged that 'some' of the lines are from these higher resolution scans, but he thinks some are some sort of ancient 'guild post' lines or something or other. Not only won't he actually say what the ancients built and why, at the bottom of the ocean, he refuses to identify which ones he think are real and ancient and which are just artefacts of tracks of higher resolution data in Google Earth.

The idea that ancient peoples carved out canyons and ridges for stretches thousands of kilometres long and kilometres wide, on the bottom of Pacific Ocean, as some sort of aid to people navigating by ship on the surface of the ocean (or perhaps he believes ancient peoples traded via a network of ocean floor caravan routes, who knows what he thinks when he refuses to say) is of course too ludicrous for words, but he thinks it's true while simultaneously getting all hot and bothered and resort to ALL CAPS mode when confronted with the idea of modern tree plantations carried out by modern governments or modern businesses.
 
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JesseCuster said:
The idea that ancient peoples carved out canyons and ridges for stretches thousands of kilometres long and kilometres wide, on the bottom of Pacific Ocean, as some sort of aid to people navigating by ship on the surface of the ocean (or perhaps he believes ancient peoples traded via a network of ocean floor caravan routes, who knows what he thinks when he refuses to say) is of course too ludicrous for words, but he thinks it's true while simultaneously getting all hot and bothered and resort to ALL CAPS mode when confronted with the idea of modern tree plantations carried out by modern governments or modern businesses.
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Yeah, it doesn't look like the MO of someone who's actually serious about his own claims...

Also, there's apparent straight lines on the surface of Mars. I guess that proves his ancient astronaut hypothesis too, then.
 
If they are indeed a scam, the tamarugo plantations have been remarkably successful in deceiving scholars, I must say.
Man-made tamarugo plantations are being introduced in the Tamarugal Pampa which are transforming the absolute desert ecosystem into an agroecosystem. The result, is a noteworthy increase in overall productivity in one of the most inhospitable regions of the world (Habit et al., 1981). The potential value of the tamarugo was noted as early as 1918 when Maldonado, a forest inspector called for a tamarugo forest preserve, considering it most important for the Chilean desert (Burkart, 1976).​
James A. Duke. 1983. Handbook of Energy Crops. unpublished. https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/duke_energy/Prosopis_tamarugo.html
 
King of the Americas said:
That's just the locational tool. The sites found would indeed need to be tested or their providence researched.

We're not to the data collection and test portion yet.
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You haven't got to the 'data collection and test portion' yet, but that hasn't stopped you from barrelling right through to the 'oddball conspiracies and wild conclusions' portion of your idea...
 
King of the Americas said:
I found zero natural, old-growth, groves anywhere on the English or Scottish isle.

Do you know of any?
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Yes but it is mixed wit ha lot of planted stuff. Britain was heavily deforested, there isn't a lot of ancient woodland left but a lot has been replanted in the last 70 or so years.
 
By the way, regarding the actual topic of this thread, I've been reading Regenesis by George Church (the book is about biotechnology I guess), and in it he mentions:

"The tetraploid wheat hybrids were adopted by humans possibly as early as 17,000 BCE (based on carbon-14 isotopic dating), in what is now southern Turkey (based on DNA studies), and then spread as far as Egypt to feed the pharonic dynasties."

The date of 17,000 BCE is earlier than I'd heard of previously but is in line with the possibility that the builders of GT were a stone age agricultural society.

As I said earlier in the thread I don't think that's entirely ruled out, and it's much more interesting to me than the ridiculous ideas that GT was part of a global civilization that had developed nuclear weapons and space travel.

I think the date of 17,000 BCE is a very speculative one as actual agriculture instead of the gathering of grains and is probably the same one mentioned in this wikipedia article:
[hlite]Finds of large quantities of seeds and a grinding stone at the paleolithic site of Ohalo II in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee, dated to around 19,400 BP has shown some of the earliest evidence for advanced planning of plant food consumption and suggests that humans at Ohalo II processed the grain before consumption.[/hilite][35][36] Tell Aswad is oldest site of agriculture with domesticated emmer wheat dated to 8800 BC.[37][38] Soon after came hulled, two-row barley found domesticated earliest at Jericho in the Jordan valley and Iraq ed-Dubb in Jordan.[39] Other sites in the Levantine corridor that show the first evidence of agriculture include Wadi Faynan 16 and Netiv Hagdud.[5] Jacques Cauvin noted that the settlers of Aswad did not domesticate on site, but "arrived, perhaps from the neighbouring Anti-Lebanon, already equipped with the seed for planting".[40] The Heavy Neolithic Qaraoun culture has been identified at around fifty sites in Lebanon around the source springs of the River Jordan, however the dating of the culture has never been reliably determined.
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But anyway I don't think we can entirely rule out the idea that there were relatively small scale agricultural societies at the time of GT. It's close enough to the origins of agriculture that it could be an early example. At that stage I'd guess that there wouldn't have been too much of an effect of artificial selection yet either so it might be hard to tell the difference between wild and cultivated grains. It's even possible that it was an early experiment that ended in the collapse of that society and a reversion of hunter-gatherer lifestyles.
 
King of the Americas said:
How old is the oldest living tree in England?
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The oldest trees are older than the division of Britain into England, Wales and Scotland so it's more appropriate to refer to the oldest tree in the island of Britain.

That may be the Fortingall YewWP. It is of unknown age, but perhaps as much as 2000 years. For some reason a preposterous legend states that Pontius Pilate was born in Fortingall, and would have known that very tree in its young days. Most improbable, as that part of Britain was not entered by the Romans until c80 CE and was outside the boundaries of their Empire in later centuries.

I once slept near the tree in a tent, and remember the huge number of large hairy moths attracted to my camping lantern.
 
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