"DNA science apparently settles the biological question of who these ancient, advanced Hopewell mound builders were. But where else is this DNA found? And where did it originate?"—The Lost Civilizations of North America

In Part One of our series on diffusionist perspectives espoused in the Lost Civilizations of North America documentary (SI, September/October 2011), we discussed allegations made in the documentary that the true history of ancient North America has been hidden, perhaps intentionally, by mainstream scientists and historians (Feder et al. 2011). In Part Two (November/December 2011), we addressed claims made by diffusionists in general and in the documentary in particular concerning the discovery of artifacts with written inscriptions presented in support of that alternative history (Lepper et al. 2011). Here, in Part 3, we will address the interpretation proffered by some of those interviewed in the documentary that DNA studies prove a direct biological and historical connection between the mound builders of the American Midwest and the ancient inhabitants of the Middle East.

Lost Civilizations: Genetic Evidence

DNA studies have helped to address important questions about the biological makeup of Hopewell mound builder populations and where their ancestors came from, but the genetic data do not provide any evidence for a direct link between the Hopewell and Israelite populations of the Middle East, as some interviewees in Lost Civilizations claim. To date, DNA has been extracted from the remains of seventy-three individuals buried at two sites exhibiting Hopewell archaeological features (the pete Klunk mound group in Illinois and the Hopewell mound group in Ohio). Maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was analyzed, and it shows that the genetic makeup of these populations was broadly similar to other ancient and contemporary Native American populations from eastern North America (Mills 2003; Bolnick and Smith 2007) (Figure 1). When the Hopewell population (as well as other Native Americans) is compared with Old World populations, they are most genetically similar to populations in Asia. The scientific consensus, based on more than 150 studies of Native American genetic variation, suggests that all Native Americans are descended from a single source population that originated in Asia and migrated to the Americas via Beringia (Figure 2) approximately fourteen thousand to twenty thousand years ago (Kemp and Schurr 2010). This consensus reflects not only the observed patterns of mtDNA variation but also studies of paternally inherited Y-chromosome markers and biparentally inherited autosomal markers.

Figure 1. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup frequencies for Native American populations from eastern North America and the Galilee Druze. Note the level of consistency in the distribution of mitochondrial haplogroups among Native Americans. The distribution of haplogroups in a Galilee Druze population is quite different.

While the Lost Civilizations video does mention this "mainstream" perspective, it emphasizes a different interpretation of the Hopewell genetic data. Specifically, the video suggests that the presence of a mtDNA lineage known as "haplogroup X" in the Hopewell population is evidence of a pre-Columbian migration of Israelites to the Americas because haplogroup X originated in the "hills of Galilee" in Israel and began to disperse out of the Middle East approximately two thousand years ago. This argument is seriously flawed for four reasons.

First, while several genetic studies indicate that haplogroup X may have first evolved in the Near East (Brown et al. 1998; Reidla et al. 2003; Shlush et al. 2008), these studies do not suggest that it originated specifically in Israelite or other Hebrew-speaking populations. Haplogroup X is found throughout the Near East, western Eurasia, and northern Africa, and it is not unique to (nor especially common in) Israelite or Jewish populations (Reidla et al. 2003; Behar et al. 2004). Shlush et al. (2008) did find a higher frequency of haplogroup X in the Galilee Druze, a (non-Jewish) population isolate that practices a distinctive monotheistic religion, but the authors themselves point out that their nonrandom sampling strategy does not provide an accurate estimate of population haplogroup frequencies. Furthermore, Shlush et al. (2008) argue that the Galilee Druze represent a contemporary "refugium" for haplogroup X, not that haplogroup X must have originated in the hills of Galilee (as diffusionist Donald Yates claims in the video).

Figure 2. This map shows the configuration of the modern coastlines of northeast Asia and northwest North America, along with the maximum Late Pleistocene extent of the Bering Land Bridge. Its existence, between thirty-five thousand and eleven thousand years ago, provided a broad avenue across which human beings first entered the New World from the Old.

Second, and more important, the forms of haplogroup X found in the Galilee Druze (and elsewhere in the Near East) are not closely related to the particular form of haplogroup X found in Native Americans. All members of haplogroup X share some mutations, reflecting descent from a common maternal ancestor, but other mutations divide haplogroup X mtDNAs into various subdivisions (subhaplogroups) that diverged after the time of the shared maternal ancestor (Reidla et al. 2003). The Hopewell and other Native American populations exhibit sub-haplogroup X2a, which is different from the subhaplogroups present in the Galilee Druze (subhaplogroups X2*, X2b, X2e, X2f) or other Middle Eastern populations (Reidla et al. 2003; Shlush et al. 2008; Kemp and Schurr 2010). Because subhaplogroup X2a is not found in the Middle East and is not particularly closely related to the forms of haplogroup X that are found in that region, the haplogroup X data do not provide any evidence for a close biological relationship between Hopewell and Middle Eastern populations or any support for a direct migration from the Middle East to the Americas in pre-Columbian times.

Third, it is misleading and inappropriate to focus exclusively on haplogroup X and to ignore all other mtDNA lineages when considering the genetic origins of the Hopewell mound builders-especially since haplogroup X was found in only one of the seventy-three Hopewell individuals studied. As noted earlier, when all mtDNA haplogroups present in the Hopewell population (as well as other Native Americans) are considered, the genetic evidence clearly indicates an Asian origin. Furthermore, if there had been a pre-Columbian migration of Israelites to eastern North America, we would almost certainly see other common Middle Eastern lineages in the Hopewell and other Native American populations. We don't. None of the thirteen other mtDNA haplogroups found in the Galilee Druze is present in the Hopewell or other pre-Columbian Native Americans (see Figure 1). Nor do we see any of the common Druze or Middle Eastern Y-chromosome haplogroups in indigenous Americans. The genetic data therefore provide no evidence whatsoever for a migration of Israelites to eastern North America.

Finally, DNA studies do not suggest that haplogroup X began to disperse out of the Middle East only about 2,000 years ago, as diffusionist Rod Meldrum claims in the Lost Civilizations video. Meldrum argues that there is a scientific controversy over the rate of mtDNA mutation, and he suggests that (a) the most accurate mutation rate estimates come from human pedigree studies and (b) those mutation rates demonstrate that haplogroup X began to diversify and spread approximately two thousand years ago. However, the particular controversy that Meldrum cites is a decade old, concerns the mutation rate in only one small segment of mtDNA (the control region), and has generally been resolved. Pedigree studies measure the rate of mutation observed in parent-offspring comparisons, but many mutations are eliminated within a few generations of their occurrence because of natural selection, genetic drift, and recurrent mutation at some sites in the DNA. The measurable rate of mtDNA evolution therefore decreases over time (Soares et al. 2009), making it inappropriate to use mutation rate estimates from pedigree studies for dating the origin and diversification of most lineages (for example, any that originated more than a few generations ago). Instead, the mtDNA mutation rate is calculated by measuring the number of genetic differences between two or more individuals (or species) and then dividing that number by the length of time since they diverged from a common ancestor. The timing of their divergence is based on fossil, archaeological, and/or geological evidence, and it is not simply "theoretical" (as Meldrum suggests). Furthermore, Meldrum does not rely on newer findings to argue that haplogroup X began to diversify and spread only two thousand years ago, as he claims, but rather on an old and unusually fast estimate of the mtDNA mutation rate (Parsons et al. 1997). Virtually all pedigree studies have found significantly lower mutation rates (Howell et al. 2003) than the one Meldrum uses, which suggests that haplogroup X began diversifying much earlier than he claims. Studies of the complete mitochondrial genome (rather than just the control region), using less controversial mutation rates for the mtDNA coding region, also suggest that haplogroup X began to diversify much earlier (~31,800 years ago; Soares et al. 2009).

Conclusion

In the past, many scholars have pointed to a sometimes explicitly racist agenda behind the claims of diffusionists who argue that the glories of Native American civilizations were achieved only through borrowing from various Old World groups. The producers of the Lost Civilizations of North America and the diffusionists they feature in their documentary turn this argument on its head by suggesting that it is instead those “mainstream” scholars who are the real racists because they deny Native Americans their role in an already globalized world of the early centuries of the Common Era. However, the only support for this picture of Native American–Old World interactions two thousand years ago comes from resurrected frauds and distorted history. There is no credible archaeological or genetic evidence to suggest that any Old World peoples migrated to the Americas after the initial incursion from Siberia prior to the tentative forays of the Norse beginning at around 1000 CE other than limited contacts between Siberia and the American arctic.

References

Behar, Doron M., Michael F. Hammer, Daniel Garrigan, et al. 2004. Mtdna evidence for a genetic bottleneck in the early history of the Ashkenazi Jewish population. European Journal of Human Genetics 12: 355-64.

Bolnick, Deborah A., and David G. Smith. 2007. Migration and social structure among the Hopewell: Evidence from ancient DNA. American Antiquity 72: 627-44.

Brown, Michael D., Seyed H. Hosseini, Antonio Torroni, et al. 1998. MtDNA haplogroup X: an ancient link between Europe/Western Asia and North America? American Journal of Human Genetics 63:1852-61.

Feder, Kenneth, Bradley T. Lepper, Terry A. Barnhart, and Deborah A. Bolnick. 2011. Civilizations lost and found: Fabricating history, part one: An alternate reality. Skeptical Inquirer 35(5) (September/October): 38-45.

Howell, Neil, Christy Bogolin Smejkal, D.A. Mackey, et al. 2003. The pedigree rate of sequence divergence in the human mitochondrial genome: There is a difference between phylogenetic and pedigree rates. American Journal of Human Genetics 72: 659-70.

Kemp, Brian M., and Theodore G. Schurr. 2010. Ancient and modern genetic variation in the Americas. In Human Variation in the Americas. Benjamin M. Auerbach, editor. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Paper No. 38: 12-50.

Lepper, Bradley T., Kenneth L. Feder, Terry A. Barnhart, and Deborah A. Bolnick. 2011. Civilizations lost and found: Fabricating history, part two: False messages in stone. Skeptical Inquirer 35(6) (November/December): 48-54.

Mills, Lisa. 2003. Mitochondrial DNA analysis of the Ohio Hopewell of the Hopewell Mound group. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.

Parsons, Thomas J., David S. Muniec, Kevin Sullivan, et al. 1997. A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial DNA control region. Nature Genetics 15: 363-68.

Reidla, Maere, Toomas Kivisild, Ene Metspalu, et al. 2003. Origin and diffusion of mtDNA haplogroup X. American Journal of Human Genetics 73: 1178-90.

Shlush, Liran I., Doron M. Behar, Guennady Yudkovsky, et al. 2008. The Druze: A population genetic refugium of the Near East. PLoS ONE 3(5): e2105.

Soares, Pedro, Luca Ermini, Noel Thomson, et al. 2009. Correcting for purifying selection: An improved human mitochondrial molecular clock. American Journal of Human Genetics 84: 740-59.

Disclaimer

We are well aware that a claim underlying the Lost Civilizations documentary—that the mound-building people of the American Midwest were migrants from the Middle East 2,000 years ago—may be informed by religious doctrine. It is our position in this paper, however, that whatever inspires this claim is not nearly as important as the fact that it is plainly wrong. As such, we will leave it to others to assess the role played, if any, by religion in shaping Lost Civilizations and focus instead on scientific evidence relevant to that claim.

In May 2009 a meteorite impact was reported just thirty miles south of Fort Worth, Texas, but the mysterious object was of a very unusual composition for a meteorite. Had an impact occurred, it would have caused widespread devastation-yet nothing of the sort happened.

From my perspective, the event started to unfold at 8:20 AM CDT on May 18, 2009, when I received a phone call from Sue Stevens, the senior media relations officer at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). I'm an associate professor of physics and currently director of the astronomy program at the same institution. Arlington, well known as a sports and university city, is located in the center of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Stevens told me that she received an urgent phone call from Richard Ray, a reporter from a Fox TV affiliate, about a truly extraordinary event: a meteorite impact that occurred overnight, just south of Fort Worth. Richard Ray wanted to give me a call within the next few minutes, and he wanted to meet me at the impact site later that day.

Of course, I agreed. The reporter explained to me that the meteoric impact occurred close to Texas State Highway 67 at a location thirty miles south of Fort Worth, very close to the county line between the Erath and Somer­vell counties in the proximity of Chalk Mountain. In fact, this place is located at the northern outskirts of the Texas Hill Country, a geographical region of Central Texas four times the size of Connecticut. The Texas Hill Country is known for its vast diversity in botany and wildlife. Geological features include limestone and granite. It is noteworthy that the greater area of the alleged meteoric impact site is known for mysteries such as UFO sightings near Stephenville (January 8, 2008) and the "Creation Evidence Museum" in Glen Rose. Some of the UFO sightings have meanwhile been attributed to night flights and flares dropped by US Air Force F-16s stationed at Fort Worth (see "The Stephen­ville Lights: What Actually Hap­pened," Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 2009).

Overall setting of the meteoric site. Credit: Steve Hudgeons, Texas Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) lead investigator; forwarded by Richard Ray, Fox TV.

Visiting the Impact Site

Due to my work schedule, I decided to meet the television reporter at noon at the site of the alleged meteorite impact. I was accompanied by Aurelian Balan, the astronomy laboratory supervisor at UTA. At the site of impact, we met Corky Underwood, who owned the property. we also met Arthur J. Ehl­mann, emeritus professor of geology at Texas Christian University (TCU), a leading expert in meteoric research, as well as the current curator of TCU's Oscar E. Monning Meteorite Gallery. There were a few other spectators as well.

The site of impact was quite amazing. The supposed meteorite was nearly round in shape and as big as a standard refrigerator. It was of a grayish-white color and did not show any signs of heat-related coating or disintegration.
It was sitting near the end of a trench, and as a secondary feature it was sitting on a crater about three times the diameter of the meteorite. The trench itself seemed to indicate that the meteorite was partially sliding on the ground before coming to a complete stop. Corky Under­wood also pointed to some trees in the background that had apparently been damaged by the in­coming "meteorite." "These trees were perfectly all right before the meteorite hit," he said. The tracks on the ground as well as the smashed trees pointed to an extremely inclined meteoric trajectory.

My colleague Arthur Ehlmann chipped off a piece of the meteorite with his pocket knife. "This is limestone," he explained. "This can't be from outer space." Limestone is a sedimentary rock, one of the three major rock groups that form Earth's crust. It is composed mostly of calcium and magnesium carbonates and is formed via deposition in water. Limestone isn't found in meteorites.

Meteorite and crater. Credit: Steve Hudgeons, Texas Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) lead investigator; forwarded by Richard Ray, Fox TV.

Meteorite Origins

Meteorites are natural objects originating in outer space that survive impact with Earth's surface. Most meteorites derive from small astronomical objects called meteoroids, but they are also sometimes produced by impacts of asteroids, the large counterparts of meteoroids. When they enter the atmosphere, impact pressure causes the body to heat up and emit light. Meteorites have traditionally been divided into three broad categories: stony meteorites are rocks, mainly composed of silicate minerals; iron meteorites are largely composed of metallic iron-nickel; and stony-iron meteorites contain large amounts of both metallic and rocky material. Stony meteorites are by far the most abundant. Modern classification schemes divide meteorites into groups according to their structure, chemical and isotopic composition, and mineralogy.

Most meteoroids disintegrate significantly when entering Earth's at­mos­phere. If they hit the ground, the objects are known to arrive at their terminal velocity and typically create craters about ten times their size. Explosions, detonations, and rumblings are often heard during meteorite falls, which can be caused by sonic booms as well as shock waves resulting from major fragmentation events. These sounds can be heard over wide areas, up to many thousands of square miles. As meteoroids are heated during atmospheric entry, their surfaces melt and experience ablation. They can be sculpted into various shapes during this process. Obviously, all these features are in stark contrast to those of the meteorite encountered at Chalk Mountain.

The Meteorite in the News

The Chalk Mountain meteorite re­ceived significant news coverage, in­cluding from Fox TV. Although the Fox TV clip, which aired on the evening of May 18, 2009, was clearly skewed toward sensationalism, it was still technically correct because it stated that the so-called meteorite finding poses an unsolved mystery because its origin is still unknown. I also gave an interview to Whitney White-Ashley from a small local newspaper located at Glen Rose, the seat of Somer­vell County. Angelia Joiner later published an online article about the meteorite that tried to create the impression that there is chemical evidence that the rock is not from the immediate area. Joiner also quoted Steve Hudgeons, lead investigator of the Texas Mutual UFO network, who offered a calculation about the trajectory of the rock. At that time, the true origin of the meteorite was a mystery.

A piece of earth-moving equipment available from “RECS—Rental Equipment Contractor Supplies.” The company’s website identifies Elaine Underwood as owner and Corky Underwood as sales/operation manager.

Conclusion

I received an unexpected and intriguing clue via email on May 20, 2009, from John Maroul of Benbrook, Texas, who had previously forwarded me a list of science questions about meteorites. His email read in part: "Look what Corky Underwood does for a living: Rents and sells heavy equipment that can carve limestone and dig trenches. Not saying he hoaxed this but it is more than suspect."

The solution to the meteorite mystery at Chalk Mountain turned out to be both trivial and embarrassing. John Maroul's email also pointed me to the website www.recsinc.com, which contains detailed information on renting out earth-moving equipment. Accord­ing to the website, the company's equipment is able to handle dirt and all sizes of rock. Together with the overwhelming scientific evidence that the "meteorite" could not be from outer space due to its limestone composition and, additionally, would not have survived its path through Earth's atmosphere, this was the final piece of the puzzle. Problem solved-it was almost certainly a hoax.

For those of you who would like to find and visit the alleged site of the "meteorite impact," please be aware: the site is located on private property (indicated by a clearly visible sign), and most Texans, especially those in the Hill Country, own guns. There may be an admission fee.

Note

I later called the Fox News reporter to tell him my conclusion and the evidence on which it was based. Shortly after our phone conversation, the Fox News clip (which was about two minutes long) became unavailable.

References

Bennett, Jeffrey, and Seth Shostak. 2007. Life in the Universe, 2nd ed. Boston, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.

Comins, Neil F., and William J. Kaufmann III. 2008. Discovering the Universe, 8th ed. New York: W.H. Freeman and Co.

Creation Evidence Museum Online. Available online at http://www.creationevidence.org; accessed January 1, 2011.

Ehlmann, Arthur J. 2008. The Oscar E. Monning Meteorite Collection Catalog. Tucson, Arizona: Stanegate Press.

Joiner, Angelina. Mysterious crater and rock baffles all. Available online at http://www.angeliajoiner.com; accessed March 29, 2010.

"RECS-Rental Equipment Contractor Sup­plies." Accessed April 7, 2010; January 5, 2011. Available online at www.recsinc.com.

Seeds, Michael A. 2006. Horizons: Exploring the Universe. 9th ed. Belmont, California: Thom­son Brooks/Cole.

Ever since the FDA approved the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in 2006, its introduction has been embroiled in a medical, social, cultural, and political controversy. This controversy has once again been rekindled in the recent Republican primary debates between Texas governor Rick Perry and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann from Minnesota, in which Bachmann emphatically stated that Merck's HPV vaccine, Gardasil, causes mental retardation.

As a physician, parent, and author of the award-winning book The HPV Vaccine Controversy: Sex, Cancer, God and Politics (Praeger, 2008), I feel compelled to comment on this issue.

A report presented by four different sources to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), an independent panel of experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on vaccine policies, found no signals to link Garda­sil directly to any of the serious adverse effects that have been publicized in the media.

To clarify this and help consumers make the best-informed decision be­fore vaccinating, it is helpful to understand the difference between a side effect (caused directly by the vaccine) and an adverse effect (which usually occurs within six weeks after the administration of a vaccine but may or may not be related to the vaccine).

1) The most common side effects reported are pain followed by swelling and redness at the site of injection. These temporary symptoms usually resolve within a few days, as is the case with most other vaccines.

2) The number of adverse effects that link the HPV vaccines to the nervous system disorder Guillain-Barré Syn­drome is around one to two out of every 100,000 cases-about the same as the number of cases that occur in the general population as a sheer coincidence or chance-and such disorders have the same statistical occurrence as the population at large that has not been vaccinated.

It is obvious that the greater the number of shots administered (as of June 22, 2011, 35 million doses of Gardasil had been distributed), the more likely the chance for these rare and unexpected events to occur. It should be noted that there is no report from the CDC of Gardasil resulting in mental retardation.

The HPV vaccine has established a decent track record at five years post-licensure. Based upon these current findings, the FDA strongly recommends vaccinating the target population: nine- to twenty-six-year-old females and males. The CDC will continue to be vigilant and monitor safety data on an ongoing basis. Nevertheless, it is helpful to remind ourselves that regardless of how well studies are conducted, gray zones of risk exist. The history of medicine has shown us that such unfortunate events do occur for unknown reasons, and research is underway to study if genetics and environmental factors have a role to play in such rare and serious events.

One should always balance the great­er good with these potentially minimal risks when evaluating the ad­vantages offered by new and emerging medicines. Scaremongering for personal political gain does not bode well for the education and welfare of the public. In the case of the HPV vaccine, it would be a shame if negative attention created by a few rare effects hampers the efforts to reach millions of women and men who risk losing their lives to HPV-related diseases, including cancers and particularly cervical cancer, both in our country and around the world.

Herbal medicines are currently quite popular; consumers are spending billions on them each year. Enthusiasts praise them as natural and safe, while skeptics often see them as little more than glorified placebos. The general public is frequently confused by such controversies, by a plethora of misinformation, and by the bewildering categories of medicines derived from herbs (U.S. Government Accountability Office 2010). Here I will try to clear up some of this confusion by explaining what the different categories are.

Herbal Medicines

Herbal medicines are preparations made from whole plants or whole parts of plants. They are also called botanical medicines, remedies, or supplements. Invariably they contain a mixture of ingredients, some of which may be pharmacologically active. Frequently they are marketed as dietary supplements, which are not required to have proven efficacy, safety, or quality in the United States and most other countries (Marcus and Grollman 2002, 347). Thus the spectrum is wide with both high- and low-quality products often placed side by side. Calls for tighter regulation are made regularly (e.g., U.S. Government Accountability Office 2009) but are routinely frustrated.

Herbal medicines are mostly used by consumers for self-treatment of minor symptoms. Doctors rarely employ them (except in some countries, such as Germany) and, crucially, traditional herbalists use an entirely different approach with each treatment.

The majority of herbal medicines have not been scientifically tested. But some have been adequately analyzed, standardized, and submitted to clinical trials (Ernst et al. 2006). St. John's Wort (Hypericum perforatum) is perhaps the best-investigated example. We know that this herbal antidepressant has several pharmacologically active ingredients that have been standardized in high-quality products and tested for efficacy and safety in approximately fifty clinical trials and many post-marketing surveillance studies. The results leave little doubt that St. John's Wort is efficacious for mild to moderate depression. It is also relatively safe as long as it is not combined with other drugs (Ernst et al. 2006).

When taken together with other medications, St. John's Wort can powerfully interact such that it lowers the plasma level of many drugs (Izzo and Ernst 2001, 15) which, of course, can have serious consequences. Thus the example of St. John's Wort goes some way toward demonstrating that herbal medicines can do both good and harm to patients. In other words, some herbal medicines are complicated pharmacological treatments and are biologically plausible (Schulz and Hänsel 2003).

Many other herbal medicines are not well-researched; therefore we cannot be certain about their risk-benefit profile (Ernst et al. 2006). Even the well-researched examples like St. John's Wort should be approached with healthy skepticism: the few high-quality products available are outnumbered by supplements of low quality and dubious content. Thus the market of herbal medicines is littered with products that contain little or no herbal ingredients (Sievenpiper et al. 2004, 27), are adulterated with prescription drugs (Miller and Stripp 2007, 9), or are contaminated with heavy metals (Buettner et al. 2009, 24; Cohen 2009, 361).

Synthetic Drugs Derived From Herbs

Many of our modern drugs (e.g., aspirin, Morphium, Tamoxifen, Vin­cris­tin, etc.) were originally derived from botanical material. In fact, many skeptics wonder why we cannot also extract and synthesize the active ingredients from well-researched herbal medicines such as St. John's Wort and generate single ingredients derived from that plant. This would clearly solve several problems inherent in herbal medicine, such as standardization.

While this approach of creating pure compounds does work occasionally, it fails in other instances. One reason can be the fact that herbal medicines tend to have not one but a multitude of pharmacologically active ingredients. Thus extracting only one ingredient might reduce the pharmacological activity of the whole plant extract.

Single ingredients derived from herb­al extracts can no longer be considered herbal medicines as, by definition, herbal medicines are based on the whole plant. Nevertheless, such drugs are reminders of the fact that many plants contain molecules that are pharmacologically active and can thus have both beneficial and detrimental health effects.

Traditional Herbalism

If a patient consults a Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or European herbalist, he will be diagnosed and treated according to obsolete and untested principles of diagnosis, pathophysiology, and so forth. Treatment will typically be individualized according to the characteristics of each patient and based on complex, tailor-made herbal mixtures of several (up to ten) herbal extracts. This means that ten patients suffering from depression may receive ten different, individualized concoctions, none of which might contain St. John's Wort, the only evidence-based herbal antidepressant. In other words, the biological plausibility of traditional herbalism is questionable.

Traditional herbalism is thus dramatically different from the herbal medicine described above. To scientifically test its value can be complex but it is doubtlessly possible. Few rigorous studies of this approach are currently available, and those that have been published do not support the notion that traditional herbalism is effective (Guo et al. 2007, 83).

Neither can we be certain about its safety. Because the tailor-made concoctions of traditional herbalists may contain a confusing number of active ingredients, the potential for toxicity, herb-drug interaction, contamination, and so on can be considerable. More vigorous regulation of herbalists, a subject currently being discussed in Europe (Hawkes 2010, 339), is therefore required.

Homeopathic Remedies

The public frequently confuses homeopathy with herbal medicine. The error usually arises because many homeopathic remedies are produced from "mother tinctures," which are based on herbal extracts. Thus they can carry the same (or similar) names as herbal products. The difference is that homeopathic remedies are typically highly diluted and therefore contain no active ingredients at all. Thus homeopathy lacks any biological plausibility.

Arnica is a good example. It is used as an herbal cream as well as a homeopathic remedy. Because it is toxic, Arnica should not be taken as an oral herbal medicine. Being highly diluted, homeopathic Arnica is, of course, both nontoxic and entirely ineffective (Ernst and Pittler 1998, 133).

Bach Flower Remedies

These products are currently very popular for self-medication, particularly in Europe. They are produced by placing freshly picked flowers in spring water. Thus they are also plant-derived and frequently confused with herbal medicines. After the flowers have floated for a while, the water is mixed with brandy and sold at high prices as Bach Flower Remedies.

Bach Flower Remedies were developed by the British physician Edward Bach, who had previously worked as a homeopath. His remedies have, however, little in common with homeopathy except, of course, that they are neither biologically plausible nor of proven effectiveness for any condition (Ernst 2010, 140).

Anthroposophical Medicines

Rudolf Steiner developed his anthroposophical medicines about one hundred years ago (Ernst 2008, 150). They are produced according to protocols similar to those of homeopathic remedies. Unlike homeopathy, however, anthroposophical medicine does not follow the "like cures like" principle.

As many anthroposophical medicines are based on plants, they are also often confused with herbal medicines. The best known example is Iscador®, a fermented mistletoe preparation that is a highly popular treatment for cancer in Europe. Numerous trials exist, but collectively their results do not show that this is an effective therapy (Horneber et al. 2008, 16).

Conclusion

Many articles on herbal medicine conclude by stating that more research is needed. Between 1999 and 2007, the National Institutes of Health has spent US $1.9 billion on research into dietary supplements (Regan, Wambogo, and Haggans 2011, 141). Not all of this money was well invested (Ernst et al. 2011). I therefore advocate not necessarily more research but better-designed studies into the few plausibly beneficial aspects of herbal medicine. n

References

Buettner, C., K.J. Mukamal, P. Gardiner, et al. 2009. Herbal supplement use and blood lead levels of United States adults. Journal of General Internal Medicine 24(11): 1175-82.

Cohen, P.A. 2009. American roulette: Con­taminated dietary supplements. New Eng­land Journal of Medicine 361(16): 1523-25.

Ernst, E. 2008. Anthroposophic medicine: A critical analysis [in German]. MMW Fortschritte der Medizin 150(Suppl. 1):1-6.

---. 2010. Bach flower remedies: A systematic review of randomised clinical trials. Swiss Medical Weekly 140: w13079.

Ernst, E., and M.H. Pittler, 1998. Efficacy of homeopathic arnica: A systematic review of placebo-controlled clinical trials. Archives of Surgery 133(11): 1187-90.

Ernst, E., M.H. Pittler, B. Wider, et al. 2006. The Desktop Guide to Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Elsevier Mosby.

Ernst, E., S.K. Hung, and Y. Clement. 2011. NCCAM-funded RCTs of herbal medicines: An important critical assessment. Perfusion 24(3) 89-102.

Guo, R., P.H. Canter, and E. Ernst. 2007. A systematic review of randomised clinical trials of individualised herbal medicine in any indication. Postgraduate Medical Journal 83(984): 633-37.

Hawkes, N. 2010. A spanner in the herbal works. BMJ 339: b5441.

Horneber, M.A., G. Bueschel, R. Huber, et al. 2008. Mistletoe therapy in oncology. Cochrane Database Systems Review 16(2): CD003297.

Izzo, A.A., and E. Ernst. 2001. Interactions between herbal medicines and prescribed drugs: A systematic review. Drugs 15: 2163-75.

Marcus, D.M., and A.P. Grollman. 2002. Botanical medicines: The need for new regulations. New England Journal of Medicine 347(25): 2073-76.

Miller, G.M., and R. Stripp. 2007. A study of western pharmaceuticals contained within samples of Chinese herbal/patent medicines collected from New York City's Chinatown. Legal Medicine 9(5): 258-64.

Regan, K.S., E.A. Wambogo, and C.J. Haggans. 2011. NIH and USDA funding of dietary supplement research, 1999-2007. Journal of Nutrition 141(1):1-3.

Schulz, V., and R. Hänsel. 2003. Rational phytotherapie: A physician's guide to herbal medicine, 5th ed. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Sievenpiper, J.L., J.T. Arnason, E. Vidgen, et al. 2004. A systematic quantitative analysis of the literature of the high variability in ginseng (Panax spp.): Should ginseng be trusted in diabetes? Diabetes Care 27(3): 839-40.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. 2009. Dietary Supplements: FDA Should Take Further Actions to Improve Oversight and Consumer Understanding. United States Accountability Office, January: Report to Con­gressional Requesters. GAO-09-250. Available online at www.gao.gov/new.items/d09250.pdf.

---. 2010. Herbal Dietary Supplements: Examples of Deceptive or Questionable Marketing Practices and Potentially Danger­ous Advice. United States Govern­ment Accountability Office, May 26: Testimony Before the Special Commitee on Aging, U.S. Senate. GAO-10-662T. Available online at www.gao.gov/new.items/d10662t.pdf.

Members of the Independent Investigations Group and sixteen volunteers, including former Olympic gymnast Dominique Dawes, conducted a test of Power Balance bracelets. The results will not be surprising to skeptics.

Power Balance bracelets are silicone wristbands that are embedded with two Mylar holograms. On October 21, 2010, the Independent Investigations Group (IIG) conducted a double-blind test to determine whether Power Balance’s claims that the holograms on their bracelets (then selling online for $29.95) work with the body’s “energy field” to improve strength, flexibility, and balance by “optimizing the body’s natural energy flow.” The company’s website also included a tangle of information that attempted to draw connections between Eastern medicine, “body frequencies,” and “positive energy.” The following excerpt, once available on the Power Balance site, gives insight into the company’s rationale behind its product: “Most everything has a frequency inherent to it. Some frequencies react positively with your body and others negatively. When the hologram comes in contact with your body’s energy field, it allows your body to interact with the natural, beneficial frequency stored within the hologram. This results in improved energy flow throughout your body.” (See Harriet Hall’s excellent article about these claims, “Power Balance Technology: Pseudoscientific Silliness Suckers Card-Carrying Surfers,” in the May/June 2010 Skeptical Inquirer; also available online.) The company relies heavily on testimonials from blue-chip pro athletes like Shaquille O’Neal of the Boston Celtics, Lamar Odom of the Los Angeles Lakers, and Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls. Odom and others are paid to endorse the product and do wear the bracelets during games.

The Power Balance bracelets and their hologram stickers.

Power Balance once used highly subjective applied kinesiology tests to demonstrate that the bracelets work. In these types of “tests,” one person analyzes another’s resistance and balance by applying pressure in various ways. (The applied kinesiology videos are no longer on Power Balance’s website, www.powerbalance.com.)

A volunteer running the test course.

The applied kinesiology method of testing the bracelet’s effectiveness is problematic and full of flaws for a number of reasons. There is no way to know from videos of these tests how much pressure the tester is exerting, whether the technique used to apply the pressure is identical each time, or whether the resistance from the person being tested is the same each time. Most people’s flexibility seems to improve from their first stretch to their second stretch regardless of whether they are wearing the bracelet. (I invite you to try this for yourself using no bracelet.)

Also, the people being tested may unconsciously change their own resistance when they know the bracelet is on and think it should be helping. Indeed, the psychological effect of believing the bracelet will help may be the only real effect Power Balance can claim. Every athlete knows that confidence is an asset.

To remove this suggestive influence of the bracelets, we decided to test sixteen volunteers, including former Olympic gymnast Dominique Dawes, on a brief obstacle course that included a 16’×4”×4” balance beam, a figure-eight–shaped course (which our volunteers ran while holding two thirty-pound dumbbells), and a stretch test. Dawes was there with Yahoo News, which shot some video of our test for a story. Dawes, by the way, arrived with a healthy skepticism that seemed to get even stronger when she learned of the test results.

The test was double blinded: neither the test participants nor the testers knew which bracelet was the “real” Power Balance band.

In random order, each of the sixteen volunteers went through the course four times: once with the real bracelet on and three times with each of the bracelets that had no holograms. The test was double blind; we taped over the bracelets so that no one—volunteers and testers alike—knew whether each volunteer was wearing a real Power Balance bracelet or one that had had the holograms removed. The power of suggestion was therefore eliminated.

By the end of the test, each of the four bracelets (labeled A, B, C, D)—three sans hologram and one “genuine”—had been carried through the course a total of sixteen times. We distributed the bracelets equally among the volunteers through all four rounds of trials to ensure that no bracelet had a numerical or sequential advantage at any given time. (We considered that the experience of running the course in early trials might help the subjects improve their times in their subsequent attempts. To correct for improving scores due to familiarity with the course—sometimes called the “Order Effect”—four people wore bracelet A in the first round, four different people wore bracelet A in the second round, and so on, for each of the four rounds.)

So what happened?

If the one genuine Power Balance bracelet had an intrinsic value that really did confer better balance, flexibility, and strength upon its user, we should have seen cumulatively better scores from the people who wore that bracelet (C) when compared to the people wearing the three “dummy” bracelets (A, B, and D). The overall scores between the four bracelets were in fact very close together: half the participants who wore the real bracelet did slightly better, and half did slightly worse—exactly as would be expected by chance. Table 1 shows the results of the obstacle course. Bear in mind that a lower time indicates a better performance. When it came to flexibility, the results were much the same: the overall scores were very close. This time, the Power Balance bracelet (also C in Table 2) fared slightly better than the other bracelets but, again, not significantly so.

Our initial conclusion was that Power Balance bracelets have no discernable effect when the wearer doesn’t know whether or not he or she is wearing one with a hologram. In other words, the bracelet itself doesn’t seem to be doing anything. These results are consistent with work done by Richard Saunders for the Australian Skeptics (see “Power Balance Down and Out,” SI, News and Comment, September/October 2011) and by John Porcari at the University of Wisconsin at Lacrosse, both of whom conducted blinded tests of Power Balance’s efficacy and found no difference between Power Balance products and dummy stand-ins used to blind the user.

The IIG at CFI–Los Angeles has now added its findings to the growing pool of Power Balance’s negative test results. Although the bracelet might have some value as a sort of rabbit’s foot meant to boost one’s confidence, Power Balance bracelets are a bust as a boon to one’s athletic prowess.

It was like déjà-vu. In 2008, in a traveling exhibition called “Vatican Splendors,” I had seen the Holy Mandylion, also known as the Image of Edessa, which was once held to be the miraculous self-portrait of Christ (Nickell 2009). Now, in Genoa the following year, I was seeing another such image and recalling how in the Dark Ages the Image was said to be able to miraculously duplicate itself—one way to explain how there could be so many “originals.”

Pious Legend

The original, according to legend, was produced for King Abgar of Edessa after he sent a messenger, Ananias, with a letter to Jesus requesting a cure for the king’s leprosy. If Jesus was unable to come, Ananias was instructed, he was to bring the holy man’s portrait instead. But as Ananias attempted to paint a picture Jesus himself intervened, washing his face in water and inexplicably imprinting his visage on a towel—hence the name Mandylion, a unique word of Byzantine Greek coinage describing a holy facecloth (Wilson 1979, 272–290; Vatican 2008).

Alas, this legend is unknown before the fourth century; moreover, there are conflicting versions. One attributes the Image to the bloody sweat exuded by Jesus during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44). A later legend holds that a woman named Veronica, who pitied Jesus as he struggled with his cross on the way to his crucifixion, gave him her veil or kerchief with which to wipe his bloody, sweaty face. In fact, however, this made-up tale obviously derives from the fact that veronica is simply a corruption of vera iconica, medieval Latin for “true image” (Nickell 2007, 71–76). In one revealing fourth-century text of the Edessan legend, the image is not claimed as miraculous but instead merely the work of Hannan (Ananias), who “painted a portrait of Jesus in choice paints” and gave it to the King (qtd. in Wilson 1979, 130).

Astonishingly, many Shroud of Turin devotees, following Ian Wilson (1979, 119–121), believe the “shroud” is the lost original of the Edessan Image! How do they equate the latter’s face-only image with the full-length, front-and-back bodily images of the Turin cloth? They imagine the shroud was folded so that only the face showed—never mind its lack of record for over thirteen centuries, a bishop’s report of the forger’s confession, pigments and paint that make up the image and “blood,” and radiocarbon dating to the time of the forger’s confession: about the middle of the fourteenth century (Nickell 1998; 2007).

Competing Mandylions

According to the authoritative source The Dictionary of Art (Turner 1996), the Edessan Image “entered Christian iconography during the 11th and 12th centuries, first in manuscript picture cycles that were elaborated to accompany narratives of the Edessan legend and then as part of a fixed scheme of images in church decoration.” Three of these “original” Mandylions have received the most attention, each supposedly having been the very one brought to Constantinople in 1204 by crusaders. One, the Parisian Mandylion, was acquired by King Louis IX in the thirteenth century and became lost in 1792, probably destroyed in the French Revolution.

Of the two surviving examples, the Vatican Mandylion has no certain history prior to the sixteenth century. In 1517 the nuns of San Silvestro in Capito were reportedly forbidden to exhibit it so that it would not compete with their church’s “Veronica” (Wilson 1991). The Vatican now concedes (in the official Vatican Splendors exhibit text [Vatican 2008]) that “. . . the Mandylion is no longer enveloped today by any legend of its origin as an image made without the intervention of human hands. . . .” I understand this to be an admission that not only is the Vatican version merely an artist’s rendering but that such is true of all Mandylions.

This brings us to the other surviving image, the Genoese Mandylion. It, too, lacks meaningful provenance. It is allegedly traceable to the tenth century, but its verifiable history dates only from 1362. At that time Byzantine Emperor John V donated it to Genoa’s Doge Leonardo Montaldo after whose death in 1384 it was bequeathed to the Genoese Church of St. Bartholomew of the Armenians. It arrived there in 1388; that is where it remains and where I photographed it (Figure 1), displayed in a gilt-silver enameled frame of the fourteenth-century Palaeologan style.

Interestingly, fragments of ancient Persian and Arabian fabrics were found stuck on the back of the Genoese icon panel. The Arabian fragment is from the sixteenth century, whereas the figural silk Persian one has been attributed to the tenth century on stylistic grounds. However, radiocarbon testing of the wood gave a more reliable date range of 1240–1280 (Wolf 2005).

Similarities

Both the Vatican and the Genoese Mandylions are painted (the Genoese in egg tempera, the Vatican apparently the same) on linen cloth that has been glued to a wood panel (Vatican 2008; Church of St. Bartholomeo degli Armeni 2009; Wilson 1991, 113–114, 137–138). However, both X-rays and tomography (an X-ray technique whereby selected planes are photographed) reveal that the Genoese image-bearing cloth covers an original image painted on wood (Bozzo 1994). Also, the Vatican’s on-cloth image shows alterations (in X-rays and reflectographic and thermographic photographs), especially in the nose, which was originally shorter, “so that the image originally must have had a different physiognomy” (Vatican 2008, 58).

In 1996, the Vatican Museum’s experts concluded (according to Vatican 2008, 58):

The version in the Vatican and the one in Genoa are almost wholly identical in their representation, form, technique, and measurements. Indeed, they must at some point in their history have crossed paths, for the rivet holes that surround the Genoese image coincide with those that attach the Vatican Mandylion to the cut-out sheet of silver that frames the image. . . . So this silver frame, or one like to it must also have originally covered in the Genoa.

See my summary comparison of the two Mandylions (Table 1—based on Vatican 2008; Bozzo 1974; Wolf 2005).

Table 1. Summary comparison of the Vatican and Genoese Mandylions.

Indeed, the images themselves, as they now appear to the eye, are remarkably alike. Measurement ratios—involving the most critical areas: the eyes, lengthy nose, and mouth—are strikingly similar. Therefore, when photographs of the images are brought to the same scale (based on inter-pupillary distance), those features effectively superimpose, as I determined by using computer-generated transparencies. (These were prepared by CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga using photos taken by art experts [Wilson 1991, plates 13 and 14]. However, the lack of a forensic scale in each prevents reaching a definite conclusion as to whether tracing might have been involved.)

Conclusions

Since the prototypical image for the later Mandylions and “Veronicas” first appeared in Constantinople in the tenth century, many copies have been made. In one known seventeenth-century instance, no fewer than six “exact” facsimiles were carefully made. Such replicas could later be mistaken for or misrepresented as the original, as happened, for example, with one that was specially made and sent to plague-ridden Venice in the 1470s; it later became known as the Holy Face of Alicante in Spain (Wilson 1991, 101–108).

Perhaps this is what occurred in the case of the two existing Mandylions. The Genoese image, with its older provenance and two-stage creation, appears to be the earliest. Its original image was certainly an artist’s copy, since it was painted not on cloth but directly on the wood panel. (One source reports that it has the same dimensions as the missing central panel of a triptych in the St. Catharine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai [Wolf 2005].)

Vatican experts acknowledge the evidence suggesting that their Mandylion is “a later replica of the one now in Genoa; that it was produced in the fourteenth century, when the Genoese version . . . was given its existing Palaeologan frame; and that it was then placed in the silver frame of the older version,” thus explaining the matched rivet holes (Vatican 2008, 57). Their main reservation is that the alterations in the Vatican image’s features (especially the nose) may be inconsistent with a simple, direct copy. However, it would seem that the alterations might be due only to the image having been alternately painted and corrected in the freehand process of copying it. Expert examination, in fact, showed “no signs of overpainting” (Vatican 2008, 57).

In brief, then, the totality of evidence is most consistent with the hypothesis that the Genoan Mandylion is a replica, made no earlier than the thirteenth century, and that the Vatican Mandylion is a fourteenth-century copy of that replica. There is no proof that either was directly copied from the now-lost twentieth-century “original,” and instead there is proof against it. Neither is there any credible evidence that there was an authentic first-century image of Jesus—miraculous or otherwise. The Shroud of Turin is not such an original, having been proven to be the work of a confessed forger in the middle of the fourteenth century. Thus, the shroud image simply followed the traditional likeness and not the other way around.

Acknowledgments

Many people helped with this research project. Massimo Polidoro saw to it that I was invited to Italy’s largest science festival (October 30–November 1, 2009); he and others, including Luigi Garlaschelli, Enrico Scalas, Beatrice Mautino, Stefano Bagnasco, Marta Annunziata, and Andrea Ferrero, showed me many kindnesses and accompanied me to various sites for research. I am also most appreciative of Fabio Lottero of Genoa, who returned to St. Bartholomew’s to obtain for me an English translation of the official brochure. Closer to home, I am grateful to Tim Binga, Lisa Nolan, Henry Huber, Matt Cravatta, Paul E. Loynes, Chris Fix, and Barry Karr for their help with various aspects of my travel and research—in addition to my longsuffering wife, Diana Harris, who accompanied me in 2008 to view the traveling Vatican exhibit.

References

Bozzo, Collette Dufour. 1974. Il ‘Sacro Volto’ di Genova. Rome: Instituto Nazionale d’Archeologia e Storia dell’ Arte; summarized in Wilson 1991, 88, 113–114, 138.

Church of St. Bartholomeo degli Armeni. 2009. The Holy Face (Official brochure, in English).

Nickell, Joe. 1998. Inquest on the Shroud of Turin: Latest Scientific Findings. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

———. 2007. Relics of the Christ. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky.

———. 2009. The Image of Edessa revealed. Skeptical Briefs 19(2)(June): 9–10, 15.

Turner, Jane, ed. 1996. The Dictionary of Art. 34 vols. New York: Grove’s Dictionaries, 20:251, s.v. Mandylion of Edessa.

Vatican. 2008. Mandylion of Edessa. In Vatican Splendors: From Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican Museums and the Swiss Guard. Vatican City State: Governatorato, 55–58.

Wilson, Ian. 1979. The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ? Revised ed. Garden City, New York: Image Books.

———. 1991. Holy Faces, Secret Places: An Amazing Quest for the Face of Jesus. New York: Doubleday.

Wolf, Gerhard. 2005. Das Mandylion von Genua. Available online at www.mpg.de/840449/forschungsSchwerpunkt1.

Massimo Polidoro examines the icon that had wept while Father Avondios looks on.

Tears and a Strange Potato

“It was around 4:30 PM and we were cleaning up the church right before the Vespers,” said Archbishop Avondios. “Suddenly, somebody noticed that the painting with the Madonna in our church was weeping. The same way as it did last year.” In April 2010, the same thing allegedly happened, and it is said that there had been another weeping in 2008.

“A miracle? We don’t use that word,” said Avondios. “But something has happened. And it is not a trick.”

A few days after the event, an Italian television show devoted to the paranormal, Mistero, called me asking if CICAP, the Italian skeptics committee, was interested in investigating the case. Of course we were. After obtaining permission from the Archbishop, I went to the little church in Via San Gregorio. The place is quite unique, since the Orthodox Church has been established inside the only remaining building of what was once the Lazzeretto, the place where those suffering from the plague were brought between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The building was once a huge square, but in the following centuries, when the city grew much larger, it was torn down in order to allow for the construction of roads and houses in what is now part of downtown—one of the busiest quarters of Milano.

Father Avondios was there waiting for me, and he was quite willing to help. However, before visiting the church and looking at the painting, we had to wait for the television crew to arrive. So he told me that there was at least one prodigious event that had already taken place since the latest weeping. He introduced me to a woman named Nechita from Eastern Europe who told me that until some weeks before she seemed unable to become pregnant. However, after visiting the icon and praying to the Madonna, the happy event took place and she was now with child.

A close-up of the sliced potato in its water box.

As further proof that something miraculous was going on, she showed me a curious relic. In a plastic box filled with water were two slices of a potato. While cooking at home, Nechita saw a strange dried-up shape that resembled a little tree inside a potato she had cut open. She took it as a sign and decided to keep the slices. Furthermore, although the potato had been cut awhile ago, it had not become dark: it still was clean and white, as if it would keep fresh forever. “We have asked around and nobody has ever seen anything like that,” said Nechita. “I am sure that is part of the miracle.” I photographed the slices just before the television crew arrived.

Tiny Drops of Something

We finally entered the cramped room that served as the main church hall, where dozens of sacred paintings, icons, reliquaries, and candles were kept and where women were allowed inside only with their head covered by a shawl. It contained a painting of the Madonna with baby Jesus and two little angels crowning her—a classic orthodox icon, probably not more than fifty years old, with gold and red as the prevailing colors and writing in cyrillic inside it.

The picture had now been put in a case with a glass cover over it in order to preserve it, whereas when the weeping occurred it was left in the open and people could touch it (and they constantly did, as a few films available on the web clearly show). For this occasion, while the cameras were rolling, Father Avondios promptly opened the case and took the painting out for us to see up close. There were traces of some liquid, which had oozed and had now dried up, starting at the eyes of both the Madonna and Jesus and trailing down. “You see?” asked Father Avondios. “There still are little drops of tears. It is still weeping.”

Father Avondios showing the sliced potato with tree shaped signs.

It was not actually “weeping,” but as I looked closely at the painting I could see that there were in fact tiny little drops of something that still hadn’t dried. By running some new cotton swabs on the painting, I was able to capture some of those traces. The idea was to take them to the lab in order to see if some kind of analysis was possible. Father Avondios, a quite young Archbishop with a nice eastern accent and a good sense of humor, was quite helpful. He even took off some splinters from behind the painting with a knife in case we needed to examine those as well.

For the moment that was all I could do. Later I gave the samples to my good friend and colleague Luigi Garlaschelli, a chemist at the University of Pavia, and he checked with their labs to determine what sort of analysis was possible.

A Partial Solution to the Mystery

While that was going on in Pavia, I was interested in checking on the mysterious potato slices. I reached the Agronomy Department at the Regione Piemonte in Turin, where I knew some people who had been crucial in solving a previous “vegetable mystery.” I had been shown some apples on whose surfaces odd drawings and dark wavy lines had appeared—bizarre but not uncommon. In fact, it turned out that the apples were suffering from an infection due to poor preservation. I got a similar answer in the case of the strange “tree” in the potato slices. It was a well-known form of plant disease called “empty heart,” which is caused by imbalances in nutrients and water. As for the potato remaining preserved, the agronomists explained to me that it is a natural reaction to the fact that the slices were kept under water. Oxygen is what turns a potato or a fruit dark, and the lack of it can only slow down the decaying process.

In a few weeks, Garlaschelli had the results from the Mass Spectrometry Labs in Pavia. It turned out that the substance found on the painting was some kind of vegetable oil. The suspicion that the painting itself had produced the oil was immediately discarded because a) oil paint is made with mineral oil because vegetable oils are easily perishable and b) if it was a natural transudation it would have taken place all over the painting and certainly not only around the eyes of the Madonna and her baby.

What conclusions can be drawn? The most logical one is that the oil came from outside the painting and it was either made to appear by some supernatural (and unproven) means or somebody put it there—it is now impossible to guess who and why. There were many people freely moving around the church area while I was there, and—as shown by various news clips—the painting had been left without a glass cover before our arrival, so anybody who wished could reach and touch it.

Father Avondios wrote to me later: “We have always been and will be very careful in our statements and in declaring true an event or an apparition, independently from the results of the analysis. I have always been open and curious, and that’s why I allowed for the tests to be performed. We will still worship and respect the icon of the Madonna not because of a supposed miracle but as an instrument of devotion to the Mother of our Lord.”

During our investigation, the police department had concluded work on another weeping Madonna case. This one was a print of a Madonna owned by a couple in Messina, Sicily, that they swore had wept blood. The house had since then been visited by thousands of pilgrims. Finally, the police were able to determine that the blood was human and that the DNA belonged to one of the owners. Now the couple risks charges of “abuse of popular credulity,” something that Italian law still considers a crime.

However, to patients suffering from an incurable disease a new idea represents one thing: hope. Science, by contrast, cares only about what works and is dispassionate, which is easily portrayed as heartlessness. Hopeful nonsense thus has a public relations advantage over pitiless science every time.

We are seeing this effect now with a new idea in the science of multiple sclerosis (MS). A lone Italian vascular surgeon, Paolo Zamboni, proposed that MS is not caused by an autoimmune process (the immune system attacking the nervous system) but rather by blockages in the veins that drain blood from the brain. He published his initial study that found a “dramatic” association between MS and these venous blockages (Zamboni et al. 2009). He called the condition chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI).

The paper set off a bitter controversy. Zamboni is suggesting that decades of MS research have been on the wrong track and that he has found the true cause—and potential cure—of MS with a simple diagnostic procedure. The press loved it—a lone maverick challenging the status quo with a bold new idea. Many patients with progressive and difficult-to-treat MS also loved it, for it provided hope of an effective treatment. (As an aside, there are several effective treatments for MS but not all types of MS or all patients respond.) When the neurological community treated Zamboni’s claims with (perfectly reasonable) skepticism, some patients began to weave conspiracy theories to explain the resistance. They wanted the new treatment, and they didn’t want stuffy neurologists getting in the way because their turf was being threatened by a surgeon (at least that is the narrative they told each other.) But science is pitiless and doesn’t care for narrative, turf, or good headlines.

Despite the low plausibility and the fact that Zamboni’s claims ran counter to the carefully accumulated MS research to date, many centers set about to replicate his findings. Replication is a key process in science. If a phenomenon is real, then it will be real in any lab. Zamboni’s findings were dramatic, so they should be easy to replicate.

Two years later we have several good replications. One study did produce similar findings to Zamboni, although the association was not as strong (Al-Omari and Rousan 2010). The next three, however, were all dead negative (Sundström et al. 2010; Doepp et al. 2010; Krogias et al. 2010). Skepticism mounted. Another study this year comparing MS patients to normal controls concluded, “This triple-blinded extra- and transcranial duplex sonographic assessment of cervical and cerebral veins does not provide supportive evidence for the presence of CCSVI in MS patients. The findings cast serious doubt on the concept of CCSVI in MS” (Mayer et al. 2011).

The largest replication to date (Zivadinov et al. 2011) found a small association between venous blockage and MS and concluded, “Our findings are consistent with an increased prevalence of CCSVI in MS but with modest sensitivity/specificity. Our findings point against CCSVI having a primary causative role in the development of MS.”

These findings are interesting. They do not entirely rule out a correlation between CCSVI and MS. However, the results are very ambiguous. There is a statistical correlation between MS and CCSVI, but there is also a correlation with other neurological diseases—with very different histories and probable causes from those of MS. CCSVI was also found in a quarter of healthy controls. So CCSVI is not specific to MS, and almost half of MS patients do not meet criteria for CCSVI.

To summarize all of the existing research on CCSVI and MS: The results are mixed with variable methodology used but are generally negative. No one has found the dramatic results first published by Zamboni. After a couple years of research, his implausible idea is not looking very good. At best we can say that there may be a small and inconsistent correlation between venous blockages and MS. If the correlation is true, it is also possible that these blockages are a result of MS, perhaps caused by inflammation, and are not necessarily a cause of MS.

Despite these largely negative findings, there are still many MS patients clamoring for treatment. The treatment of CCSVI is called the liberation procedure (essentially opening up the blocked veins, a procedure not without risk). Clinics are opening up offering the treatment to desperate patients—putting treatment ahead of the evidence or even using a treatment in the face of negative evidence, which is always a bad idea.

There are also calls, especially in Canada, for clinical trials of the liberation procedure. Such trials are not justified by the science that has been done so far, but because clinics are already offering the liberation procedure, this may force the hands of MS researchers. Before subjecting people to experimental medical interventions, ethics demands that we do sufficient basic science research to demonstrate that there is at least a reasonable chance of benefit. We have not crossed that line with CCSVI and the liberation procedure. Advocates of the procedure, however, are likely to succeed in making an end run around the usual safeguards of ethical medical research.

Those promoting CCSVI and the liberation procedure are likely to be portrayed by some in the media and by hopeful patients as brave mavericks. That is the hopeful, romantic, and sensational view. I suspect, however, that in the end the science will tell a different story.

References

Al-Omari, M.H., and L.A. Rousan. 2010. Internal jugular vein morphology and hemodynamics in patients with multiple sclerosis. International Journal of Angiology 29(2): 115–20.

Doepp, F., F. Paul, J.M. Valdueza, et al. 2010. No cerebrocervical venous congestion in patients with multiple sclerosis. Annals of Neurology 68 (2): 173–83.

Krogias, C., A. Schröder, H. Wiendl, et al. 2010. Chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency and multiple sclerosis. Critical analysis and first observation in an unselected cohort of MS patients. Der Nervenarzt 81(6): 740–46, DOI: 10.1007/s00115-010-2972-1.

Mayer, C.A., W. Pfeilschifter, M.W. Lorenz, et al. 2011. The perfect crime? CCSVI not leaving a trace in MS. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 82(4): 436–40.

Sundström, P., A. Wåhlin, K. Ambarki, et al. 2010. Venous and cerebrospinal fluid flow in multiple sclerosis—a case-control study. Annals of Neurology 68(2): 255–9.

Zamboni, P., R. Galeotti, E. Menegatti, et al. 2009. Chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency in patients with multiple sclerosis. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 80(4): 392–9.

Zivadinov, R., K. Marr, G. Cutter, et al. 2011. Prevalence, sensitivity, and specificity of chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency in MS. Neurology 77(July): 138–44.

Anti-Stratfordians start with the answer they want and work backward to the evidence—the opposite of good science and scholarship. They reverse the standards of objective inquiry, replacing them with pseudoscience and pseudohistory.

Could a mere commoner have been the greatest and most admired playwright of the English language? Indeed, could a “near-illiterate” have amassed the “encyclopedic” knowledge that fills page after page of plays and poetry attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon? Those known as “anti-Stratfordians” insist the works were penned by another, one more worthy in their estimation, as part of an elaborate conspiracy that may even involve secret messages encrypted in the text.

Now, there are serious, scholarly questions relating to Shakespeare’s authorship, as I learned while doing graduate work at the University of Kentucky and teaching an undergraduate course, Survey of English Literature. For a chapter of my dissertation, I investigated the questioned attribution of the play Pericles to see whether it was a collaborative effort (as some scholars suspected, seeing a disparity in style between the first portion, acts I and II, and the remainder) or—as I found, taking an innovative approach— entirely written by Shakespeare (see Nickell 1987, 82–108). However, such literary analysis is quite different from the efforts of the anti-Stratfordians, who are mostly nonacademics and, according to one critic (Keller 2009, 1–9), “pseudo-scholars.”

Through-the-Looking-Glass Syndrome

Like many other crank ideas and conspiracy theories, the notion that William Shakespeare did not write the plays and poems attributed to him may at first sight seem absurd. But step through the looking glass (to use Lewis Carroll’s term) and adopt the farfetched premise, and things can look very different. By thus starting with the answer and working backward to the evidence—the opposite of the approaches of science and scholarship—one can seemingly reverse the burden of proof and mirror the development of a viable hypothesis.

I call this process the Through-the-Looking-Glass Syndrome because the individual who suffers from such a bout of contagion has entered a realm in which the very standards of objective inquiry are effectively reversed, becoming their superficial lookalikes: pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and so on.

People are drawn into this illusory world, it appears to me, by something other than impartial reason. Having investigated questionable claims for more than four decades, I have marveled at how certain persons have walked, been lured, or stumbled headlong into some strange but profound belief. For example, time and again someone has been so attracted to the “haunting” image on the Shroud of Turin that he will not accept it as the red- ocher (iron-oxide) pigmented work of a confessed fourteenth-century artist, which has been confirmed by microchemical tests and radiocarbon dating. Wishfully believing that the cloth really wrapped the body of Jesus in the tomb, he sees the forger’s confession as false, the iron-oxide as a contaminant, and the carbon-dating as an error resulting perhaps from a burst of radiant energy that altered the carbon ratio at the moment of Christ’s miraculous resurrection (Hoare 1994; cf. Nickell 1998).

Countless more examples could be given. Anthropologist Grover Krantz believed that Bigfoot—indeed as portrayed in the famously faked Roger Patterson “Bigsuit” film of 1967— was the surviving giant ape Gigantopithecus. Harvard psychiatrist John Mack ignored evidence of his patients’ fantasy proneness and “waking dreams” to suggest they had been abducted by aliens. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the rationalist detective Sherlock Holmes, was easily duped both by séance trickery and schoolgirls’ hoaxed fairy photos (Nickell 2011, 68–72; Nickell 2007, 251–58; Nickell 1994, 153, 175–76).

As we see, many of the proponents of such ideas are quite intelligent. However, it seems that—just as in jujitsu when one’s large size becomes a liability once one has been thrown off balance—a person’s own intelligence can work against him when he is under the spell of the Through-the-Looking-Glass Syndrome: the intelligent person may be able to think up rationalizations and theoretical complexities of breathtaking cleverness, fooling first himself, then others. So it is with the Shakespeare-wasn’t-written-by-Shakespeare minions, as we shall see.

Stage Left: The Baconians

For nearly two centuries after his death, Shakespeare went unquestioned as the author of the plays and poems bearing his name. The first recorded doubter was a Reverend James Wilmot who—having undertaken to write a biography of the Bard but being unable to turn up a single original manuscript in Stratford—expressed his suspicions to a Quaker acquaintance, who reported them to his local Philosophical Society in Ipswich in 1805. In 1848, Colonel Joseph C. Hart published a book on seafaring that also included his notions on various other topics. Hart despised Shakespeare, whom he accused of buying or stealing plays that he “first spiced with obscenity, blackguardism and impurities before they were produced”; he felt the admirable portions, such as Hamlet’s soliloquies, were attributable to another (keller 2009, 138–41).

The first book-length assault on the Bard was launched in 1857 by a woman named Delia Bacon. Her 675-page The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded cast Shakespeare as “a stupid, ignorant, third-rate player” in a “dirty, doggish group of players.” Surely he could not have written the great works bearing his name, she concluded. Rather, Bacon (the sister of Congregational minister Leonard Bacon) believed the works must have been produced by a secret society of literary figures with Sir Walter Raleigh (1552– 1618) as head and Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) as guiding light. She believed, wrongly, that she was descended from the latter. So fanatical was Delia Bacon that she once spent a troubled night, armed with lantern and spade, at Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church planning to literally dig for answers. Believing she had deciphered cryptic messages in Francis Bacon’s letters that pointed to certain secrets—perhaps even manuscripts—hidden in a hollow beneath the gravestone, she fully intended to excavate but then struggled with her supposed evidence and finally lost her nerve. She died insane at age forty-eight (Keller 2009, 141–42; Schoenbaum 1991, 385–94).

Figure 1. The 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s complete works.

Delia Bacon had set the stage, as it were, for subsequent “Baconians”—those who became convinced Sir Francis Bacon had indeed written as “Shakespeare.” Enter a Minnesota crank named Ignatius T. Donnelly, who had previously “proved” that both Aztecs and Egyptians descended from a race that inhabited the (imaginary) “lost continent” of Atlantis. Donnelly pored over a copy of Shakespeare’s complete plays, the 1623 First Folio (see figure 1), and divined certain mathematical formulas (involving a set of “basic numbers” and “factor numbers”) that let him “decipher” supposed messages from the text. When the result was gibberish, as it often was, Donnelly modified the rules, which made cryptographers quick to laugh at his approach. “They pointed out,” explains code master Fletcher Pratt (1942, 87), “that his rules for solution were practically all variables, and that his solution in fact consisted of finding whatever words he wished to make up part of his ‘decipherment’ and then finding some combination of basic numbers and factor-numbers that would yield the desired result. Given so many variables it is possible to extract almost any message from a wordage as large as Shakespeare’s. . . .”

Nevertheless, other Baconians followed. Orville Ward Owen, a physician in Detroit, caught the bug and spent the remainder of his life utilizing his own supposedly improved method of decipherment. One of Owen’s divined Baconian messages urged, “Take your knife and cut all our books asunder, And set the leaves on a great firm wheel/ which rolls and rolls.” Inspired, Owen constructed two massive reels, turned by (appropriately) a crank, which unrolled a thousand-foot canvas. Mounted in rows on this were the printed pages of text from Shakespeare, Bacon, and others. Owen or a member of his three-woman staff operated the machine using “key” words to extricate text dictated to a typist. In time Owen published five of his six volumes of Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story. Still later he received communications from Bacon’s ghost (Schoenbaum 1991, 411–13).

Owen’s secretary, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, next launched her own unique method of deciphering Bacon’s supposedly concealed messages. She in fact employed a “biliteral cipher” actually invented by Bacon. (One of the ciphers I studied as a budding cryptanalyst of about twelve, it employs two fonts of printing type, say, roman and italic, which we can designate a and b. The text that will carry the secret text is marked off in five-letter units, so that the letter A can be represented by aaaaa, B by aaaab, and so on [see Gaines 1956, 6– 7].)

Unfortunately, Gallup’s supposed decipherments were subjected to detailed analysis, most thoroughly by the famous American code experts Colonel William and Elizabeth Fried man, with devastating results. The type of Elizabethan times bore imperfections, became battered, was often mixed indiscriminately, which—coupled with the effect of rough paper and other factors—meant that “differences” in type could easily be found, even where none existed (Pratt 1942, 90–91). As Shakespearean scholar Samuel Schoenbaum (1991, 419) says of Gallup, “What she had discovered was not a biliteral cipher but a biliteral Rorschach test.” Moreover, the revealed text bore words that were not in use until after Bacon’s death. Gallup did admit, at one point, that to distinguish between a and b typefaces, it was necessary to use “intuition” (Pratt 1942, 91–92). The entire quest of the Baconians to find secret texts in Shakespeare’s writings is reminiscent of journalist Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code books (1997; 2002), which tout “predictions” of modern events that were allegedly “encoded” in the Hebrew Bible about three thousand years ago. (See Thomas 2003 for a rebuttal.)

Marlowe et al.

Although there is no convincing evidence that Bacon ever wrote a single play, there were many adherents to the Bacon-as-Shakespeare “theory.” However, that conviction was eventually followed by a Marlovian craze—the belief that Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), the greatest Elizabethan dramatist prior to Shakespeare, penned “Shakespeare.” The fact that Marlowe was killed in a tavern fight before the majority of the Bard’s plays had been written did not faze the Marlovians. Having stepped through the looking glass, their chief advocate, a Broadway press agent named Calvin Hoffman, conjured up an explanation.

Marlowe’s death, Hoffman imagined, was staged by killing some foreign sailor in his stead, while Marlowe fled via France to Italy where he began to write plays before eventually returning to England in disguise. Everything was supposedly arranged by his aristocratic gay lover who hired an actor, Will Shakespeare, to allow his name to grace the manuscript. This imagined scenario was, said the Times Literary Supplement (January 24, 1956), “a tissue of twaddle,” but surely the reviewer was being too kind (Schoenbaum 1991, 445–47).

Beyond Marlowe, some seventy other candidates have been proposed, ranging from Sir Walter Raleigh, Cardinal Wolsey, and Ben Jonson to various earls—of Darby, of Essex, of Rutland, and, of course, of Southampton (the latter having been Shakespeare’s patron)— and even Queen Elizabeth I (Wilson 1993, 15–20; Keller 2009, 135–36 Schoenbaum 1991, 395–404). Then there is the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, the current favorite of the anti- Stratfordians.

The Earl of Oxford

In 1920, an english schoolmaster with the unfortunate name J. Thomas Looney published his “Shakespeare” Identified, setting forth the claim that the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (1550–1604), was the true author of the plays and poems bearing Shakespeare’s name. Intellectually naive, the book unsurprisingly attracted many followers.

The Loonies adopted “Oxford” as their standard bearer even though he had died before King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and several other plays were performed. They postulate that scholars misdated Lear and Macbeth and that the other plays, having been left unfinished, were subsequently completed by inferior dramatists (Schoenbaum 1991, 430–34).

Their evidence for Oxford as author is as questionable as their belief is impassioned. They discovered, for example, in a 1578 address to Oxford by fellow poet Gabriel Harvey, a tell-tale clue: Harvey says, “Thine eyes flash fire, thy will shakes spears…” [emphasis added]—an unmistakable reference to the Bard! Unfortunately, this is a rogue translation of the Latin, which really just says, “Thine eyes flash fire. Thy countenance shakes a spear” (Keller 2009, 162–64).

One Oxfordian of the 1940s even enlisted the aid of a spiritualist. The medium used “automatic writing” to link Shakespeare, Bacon, and Oxford, who supposedly had collaborated to produce the plays (Wilson 1993, 19–20).

Oxfordians believe the Earl of Oxford adopted “William Shakespeare” as a pen name. That the hyphenated version is used for about half of the quarto editions of the plays led one recent Oxfordian, Charles Ogborn Jr., to write in 2009, “When we come upon a regularly hyphenated English name compounding two words not in themselves names and also descriptive of an action, we may be sure that the name is fictitious and intended to be understood as of allegorical significance.” This is absurd and begs the question, why then was not the hyphenated spelling used for all printed versions of the plays? In fact, creative phonetic spelling was common in Shakespeare’s time, as evidenced, for example, by such different versions as Will, Willm, William, Willelmum, etc., and Shakspere, Shackspere, Shaxpere, Shagspere, Shakespear, Shake-speare, and Shakespeare; likewise, there were eleven different versions of Christopher Marlowe’s surname (Keller 2009, 156–57).

In 1987 a moot-court debate on the Oxford-versus-Shakespeare controversy was held at the American University. It was presided over by three U.S. Supreme Court Justices: Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, and John Paul Stevens. They found in favor of Shakespeare, and Justice Stevens pointedly concluded that “the Oxfordian case suffers from not having a single, coherent theory of the case” (qtd. in Bethell 1991, 47).

Will the Real Shakespeare…

Or this heading could read, “Will, the real Shakespeare.”

Although the anti-Stratfordians savage Shakespeare (but resent any criticism of themselves or their candidate for authorship), the fact is that there is no proof (innuendo and coincidence and mystery mongering are not proof) that “Shakespeare” was written by anyone other than William Shakespeare. And there is much evidence that he was indeed the author.

The famous individual of that name was a historical personage born at Stratford in 1564 and christened (according to the Holy Trinity Church baptismal register) on April 26: “Guliel mus filius Johannes Shakspere”—that is, translating from the Latin, “William, son of John Shakspere” (Schoenbaum 1991, 7–8). While there is no record of Shakespeare attending Stratford’s grammar school, there is no record of anyone doing so prior to the nineteenth century (Matus 1991, 66); old records are frequently incomplete or missing (as I learned during my years as a certified geneaological specialist). A marriage license was issued on November 27, 1582, to “Willelmum Shaxpere et Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton”— the clerk apparently mis-hearing the bride’s surname, which was Hathaway; the matter was resolved by a bond of the next day for “Anne Hathwey” to wed “William Shagspere.” Subsequent records list the baptism of their eldest daughter Susanna (in 1583) and twins, Hamnet and Judith (1585) (Schoenbaum 1991, 10–12).

From 1585–1592 transpired the somewhat misnamed “lost years,” during which Shakespeare was known to have been in London. In 1592 Robert Green alerted his fellow dramatists to Shakespeare as a young literary encroacher, calling him

. . . an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger’s heart wrapped in a Player’s hide [quoting from Shakespeare’s Henry VI¹] supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse [unrhymed iambic pentameter] as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum [Jack-of-all-trades], is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in the country.

The pun on his name, coupled with the readily identifiable line, represents the earliest mention of Shakespeare as an actor and playwright (Wilson 1993, 124–25).

Additional evidence reveals the continuing life of a very real person:

For instance, Shakespeare is by no means without background documentation, albeit mostly of a dry-as-dust legal variety. With occasional exceptions, the christenings, marriages and deaths of the close members of his family are all to be found in the still-extant registers of his home parish church, Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon. As record of his life as a successful working actor, his name appears high in Ben Jonson’s First Folio’s cast lists of the performances of some of Jonson’s plays by Shakespeare’s company. In the case of some, but by no means all, of Shakespeare’s plays as published in his lifetime, his name is linked with them formally both on the title page and on the surviving official register of the Stationers’ Company, the official trade union of the booksellers and printers of his time. London Public Record Office documents show him to have acted as witness in a court case, complete with his authenticated signature to this effect. Also in London’s Public Record Office and elsewhere are to be found deeds of his property dealings (with two more of his signatures), the wills of his London fellow actors and Stratford friends, which include some kindly remembrances of him, and his own will, the latter of which bears the final three of the six signatures generally agreed as authentically his. (Wilson 1993, 9)

William Shakespeare died about April 23, 1616, and was buried on April 25. In 1623 the famous First Folio of his plays, collected by fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, was published (again, see figure 1), showing a body of work so impressive that many believe it must be the work not of a commoner but an aristocrat.

How did the Bard acquire the vast learning shown in his writings? Shakespeare’s inherent genius would have been supplemented by a serious education in grammar school (where he would have learned some Latin and Greek) and later residence in London, Britain’s intellectual center, where he obviously read omnivorously. Himself an actor, as well as a shareholder in an acting company and a theater, he befriended many playwrights, poets, scholars, travelers, gentlemen, and others (Keller 2009, 12, 271)—sources of knowledge indeed. (Nevertheless, Shakespeare did not always get things right: for example, he gave Bohemia a seacoast and put clocks in ancient Rome [Evans 1949].)

Oxfordians wonder at the absence of any manuscripts, letters, or diaries in Shakespeare’s handwriting, but there is a general lack of such materials from Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists (Keller 2009, 4). They apparently placed little value on keeping such items, since collecting literary autographs did not become a serious endeavor until the latter part of the eighteenth century (Matus 1991, 70).

To sum up, there really was a Shakespeare, and to believe that someone else wrote the plays and poems bearing his name—that there was in fact a conspiracy to perpetrate an elaborate hoax—is to gratuitously violate the principle of Occam’s razor, the dictum that the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is to be preferred.

But those who have stepped through the looking glass will not be dissuaded. As Schoenbaum (1991, 451) notes, nothing “will erase suspicions fostered over a century by amateurs who have yielded to the dark power of the anti-Stratfordian obsession. One thought perhaps offers a crumb of redeeming comfort: the energy absorbed by the mania might otherwise have gone into politics.”

Note

1. From part III, act I, scene iv, line 137. Shakespeare’s correct wording is “O tiger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide!”

References

Bethell, Tom. 1991. The case for Oxford. The Atlantic Monthly October: 45–61.

Drosnin, Michael. 1997. The Bible Code. New York: Simon & Schuster.

———. 2002. The Bible Code II. New York: Viking Press.

Evans, Bergen. 1949. Cited in Keller 2009, 48–49.

Gaines, Helen Fouché. 1956. Cryptanalysis: A Study of Ciphers and Their Solution. New York: Dover.

Hoare, Rodney. 1994. The Turin Shroud Is Genuine. London: Souvenir Press.

Keller, Frederick A. 2009. Spearing the Wild Blue Boar—Shakespeare vs. Oxford: The Authorship Question. New York: iUniverse, Inc.

Matus, Irvin. 1991. The case for Shakespeare. The Atlantic Monthly October: 64–72.

Nickell, Joe. 1987. Literary investigation: Texts, sources, and “factual” substructs of literature and interpretation. Doctoral dissertation, Lexington: University of Kentucky.

———. 1994. Camera Clues. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.

———. 1998. Inquest on the Shroud of Turin: Latest Scientific Findings. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

———. 2007. Adventures in Paranormal Investigation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

———. 2011. Tracking the Man-Beasts. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

Ogborn, Charles. 2009. Quoted in Keller 2009, 157.

Pratt, Fletcher. 1994. Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and Ciphers. Garden City, New York: Blue Ribbon Books.

Schoenbaum, S[amuel]. 1991. Shakespeare Lives. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Thomas, David E. 2003. It’s ba-a-ack! The Bible Code II (book review). Skeptical Inquirer 27(2) (March/April): 59–60.

Wilson, Ian. 1993. Shakespeare, The Evidence: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and His Work. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

“Our histories should give only what is known to be the truth, and falsehood should always be cried down whenever it is known to exist.”

—David Wyrick, accused perpetrator, but likely victim, of the Newark “Holy Stones” forgeries (1860)

As noted in Part One of this discussion (SI, September/October 2011), the documentary The Lost Civilizations of North America (produced by Steven Smoot, Rick Stout, and Barry McLerran) purports to be an exploration of “the fascinating world of ancient North America, and why the artifacts and evidences of ancient civilizations have been lost and largely ignored” (qtd. from the DVD’s website at www.lostcivilizationdvd.com/documentary.html). The ancient civilizations that are alleged to have left their mark in pre-Columbian North America include, at a minimum, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Celts. The documentary acknowledges that “mainstream archaeologists” do not accept the claim that any of these civilizations had contact with the indigenous North American cultures, yet it features the views of several “diffusionists,” none of whom appear to be archaeologists (“mainstream” or otherwise). These diffusionists argue that a wealth of artifacts appears to support the “lost civilization” claim, and they purport to explain why mainstream archaeologists have so assiduously ignored or suppressed this evidence for numerous episodes of intercontinental intercourse.

What Is the Evidence for Lost Civilizations in North America?

Interspersed throughout Lost Civilizations of North America are images of a bewildering variety of artifacts, some of which are recognized icons of American archaeology while others are less familiar and even startlingly odd. The narrator explains these puzzling juxtapositions as follows:

Many artifacts are shown throughout this film. Some artifacts are accepted as authentic by the scientific community today, and some are not. In many cases authentic artifacts may be shown alongside controversial ones. This is done in part to underscore the difficulty in determining authenticity, and also to illustrate a conflict that exists between mainstream anthropologists, and those who have been termed “diffusionists.”

Figure 1. Ostensibly discovered in an ancient mound located in West Virginia, the Grave Creek Stone’s inscription (top) reflects an impossible mixture of a number of Old World written languages (Grave Creek Mound Museum). The artifact on the bottom is one of hundreds of “Michigan Relics” produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were supposed to prove the presence of all manner of Old World people in the New World in antiquity (courtesy of Thom Bell).

There are numerous problems with this justification for intentionally blurring the distinction among verifiably ancient artifacts, objects of questionable authenticity, and objects that are demonstrably fraudulent. First, it falsely suggests that there is a legitimate scientific controversy over the interpretation of these artifacts. Framing this alleged controversy in this way is very similar to creationists attempting to characterize their argument with evolutionary biologists. As with that more familiar canard, there is no real scientific controversy. We are not aware of any contemporary anthropologist who thinks there is scientific validity to the infamous artifacts featured in this documentary, such as the Michigan Relics (Halsey 2004), the Grave Creek Stone (Lepper 2008), the Bat Creek Stone (Mainfort and Kwas 2004), and the Newark “Holy Stones” (Lepper and Gill 2000) (figure 1).

The effect of presenting these bogus objects in juxtaposition with ancient masterpieces, such as the Adena effigy pipe (figure 2), also shown in the documentary, is to validate infamous frauds at the expense of the authentic artifacts. It appears deliberately obfuscatory and is demeaning to the achievements of the ancient Native American artisans.

Second, we believe that the documentary’s justification for mixing authentic with “controversial” artifacts wildly exaggerates the “difficulty in determining authenticity.” In any archaeological analysis, the key to determining the authenticity of a putative ancient artifact is to establish its context. For virtually none of the disputed artifacts shown in the documentary is there any reliable information about its archaeological context. To begin with, none of the artifacts shown, nor any similar pieces that might lend support to the authenticity of the objects highlighted in the video, has been recovered in any modern archaeological excavation using the tools and techniques of late twentieth-century archaeology. This is a crucial point: by and large, artifacts with putative ancient Old World writing were found in New World sites during only a rather narrow window of time (primarily from the mid-nineteenth into the early twentieth century), a period during which there was enormous controversy concerning the origins of the mound builders of the American Midwest and Southeast. In the far more extensive archaeological fieldwork accomplished between 1930 and the present, no such artifacts have ever been discovered by professional archaeologists. We can think of no legitimate artifact category in which archaeologists ceased finding examples of an artifact type once the field became professionalized with applied scientific methodology.

Figure 2. The Adena effigy pipe is a remarkably decorated tubular smoking pipe made from Ohio pipestone. It was found in the Adena Mound in Chillicothe, Ohio, which gave its name to the Adena culture, circa between 800 BCE and 100 CE. (Ohio Historical Society)

In many cases, moreover, information on the historical context of these inscribed objects has demonstrated that they are frauds or forgeries. The video’s narrator asserts, for example, that the Bat Creek Stone was “found using modern methods within the original surroundings” (emphasis added) (figure 3). Donald Yates, a featured diffusionist who holds a doctorate in classical studies, goes on to assert that naysayers can’t dismiss this artifact because it was recovered in an “official excavation by the Smithsonian Institution,” as if that alone should be considered sufficient evidence—by professional archaeologists or anyone else, for that matter—for its acceptance as genuine.

It certainly is true that John Emmert, the man who claimed to have found the Bat Creek Stone, was in the employ of the Smithsonian Institution at the time of its discovery. During this period, the Smithsonian hired an eclectic assortment of individuals with varying levels of expertise to conduct local operations on the Institution’s behalf. Emmert appears to have been one of the lesser qualified excavators, and he was later fired because of questions about the quality of his work (Mainfort and Kwas 1991, 12). Even discounting the obvious questions about his competence, since Emmert excavated the stone in 1889, his methods could hardly be considered “modern” in any meaningful sense. Finally, since the archaeologists Robert Mainfort and Mary Kwas discovered the source used by the forgers of the Bat Creek inscription, conclusively demonstrating it to be a fraud (Mainfort and Kwas 2004), consideration of Emmert’s qualifications is moot. It is clear now that Emmert either perpetrated the fraud himself or failed to detect the imposture because of his dodgy methods.

Figure 3. The Bat Creek Stone is one of a number of ancient artifacts found in North America bearing inscriptions in Old World scripts. All such artifacts have been shown to be fraudulent.

The Newark Holy Stones

The artifacts given the most screen time in the documentary are the so-called Newark “Holy Stones.” In fact, the narrator refers to the controversy surrounding the interpretation of these artifacts as a case study that “demonstrates the division between some diffusionists and most mainstream archaeologists.” If the producers of the documentary sincerely believe this statement, then it is difficult to understand why they feature only the diffusionist side of the argument. What makes this one-sided presentation particularly perplexing is that one of the scientists interviewed (one of the authors of this article) has written extensively on the Newark “Holy Stones” and therefore could have ably represented the “mainstream” view (Lepper 1999; Lepper and Gill 2000). Note that the narrator’s use of the qualifier in his phase “most mainstream archaeologists” leaves the listener with the false impression that there might be some “mainstream archaeologists” out there who accept the Newark “Holy Stones” as authentic. We are aware of none who have gone on record in support of these egregious, if historically interesting, forgeries.

Figure 4. About 6.8 inches in length and made from black limestone, the Decalogue Stone is named for the fact that it is inscribed with the Ten Commandments in an ancient-looking form of Hebrew. It was discovered in 1860 during excavations in the remains of the largest stone mound in North America. (Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum)

The Newark “Holy Stones” consist of five separate artifacts, at least two of which even many diffusionists acknowledge to be fraudulent (Lepper 1991). The documentary focuses on the second of the artifacts to be reported although both of the two surviving “Holy Stones” are featured in various video clips.

David Wyrick, a Licking County, Ohio, surveyor and avocational archaeologist, made his first sensational discovery, the so-called “Keystone,” in a shallow excavation at the monumental Newark Earthworks. He found the “Decalogue Stone” (figure 4), even more spectacular and apparently definitive proof of his belief that ancient Israelites had built the ancient mounds, just five months later at a different site a few miles south of Newark (Lepper and Gill 2000).

The Reservoir Stone Mound, also known as the Jacksontown Stone Mound, was the largest aboriginal stone structure in North America north of Mexico. It was forty feet in height and 180 feet in diameter. First described in 1822 in a call to preserve the magnificent edifice, it was, nevertheless, largely destroyed between 1831 and 1832 when the stones were used in the construction of an extensive series of dikes framing the reservoir on the Licking summit of the Ohio and Erie Canal. Estimates vary, but between 10,000 and 15,000 wagon loads of stone are said to have been hauled away for this purpose. When the bulk of the stones had been removed, a portion of a circular arrangement of ten to twenty eight-foot-tall earthen mounds was revealed.

In the video, Ancient American magazine’s publisher Wayne May narrates the story of Wyrick’s discovery of the Decalogue Stone:

They found one major earth structure in the center surrounded by twelve small burials. David Wyrick went straight for the middle one with nine other gentlemen and they began to dig that mound down and they uncovered it—and when they did they found a wooden coffin made out of oak and opening up that coffin in there was a large skeleton of a man, but also in this coffin was a little box no more than maybe about eight or ten inches in size and it was cemented shut. Wyrick and the men, while they were all there together, they pried this box apart and in it was a black stone. They opened this box and here was this unusual artifact.

This account of the basic facts of the discovery is riddled with errors. Some may seem trivial, but they are important to document because they demonstrate a pattern of carelessness with regard to facts that is depressingly typical of the diffusionist literature.

1. The Decalogue Stone was not found in the central mound but in one of the ten to twenty mounds arranged in a ring at the base of the stone mound. The exact total of these small mounds was never recorded, probably because the entirety of the stones have never been removed, leaving some still buried beneath the remnants of the mound. May’s reference to “twelve” leaves the unwarranted impression of an exact count. The fact that May settled so precisely on the number twelve may have something to do with the mystical significance of that number in the Judeo-Christian tradition (twelve tribes of Israel, twelve disciples, etc.).

2. Wyrick did not undertake his investigation with nine other men but with five.

Sources allow us to identify at least four of them: Jacob Wyrick, John Nicol, John Haynes, and John Larett. Nicol’s presence is significant, because he was directly implicated in the blatant hoax of two of the subsequent “Holy Stones” (Lepper 1991).

3. Wyrick’s team did not discover the wooden “coffin.” The “coffin,” originally described as a “trough,” was found in 1853 by William Parr (Wyrick 1860). Parr cut off a piece of the wooden trough to retain, but he left the rest in the hole to be reburied. Wyrick and a group of men returned to the site in August of 1860 to re-excavate the mound in order to recover the wooden “sarcophagus.” The excavation that resulted in the recovery of the Decalogue Stone was Wyrick’s second expedition to the site and at least the third time the mound had been dug into.

4. Neither Wyrick nor Parr recovered the skeleton of a “large man,” and the Decalogue Stone was not found in the coffin but rather several inches beneath it. Wyrick (1860) reported that Parr found human bones, but they amounted to only “bits of skull,” a few teeth, and some hair. There would have been no way to reliably identify either the sex or the size of the person represented by these meager human remains, and the bones are not known to be curated in any museum collection where they could be re-studied using modern forensic methods. The only artifacts associated with the human remains were ten copper bracelets. The Decalogue Stone was found in clay well below the original depth of the wooden burial platform.

May then recounts Wyrick’s efforts to interpret the Decalogue Stone:

They took it to some scholars—identified that it was probably some type of Hebrew. They took it to some rabbis living in the area and looking at it, they said yes they could read it and it was a complete rendition of the Ten Commandments. They called it block Hebrew. And so then naysayers started picking on Wyrick. He was accused of sticking this stone in front of these nine men somehow and being able to hide it and conceal it.

And it wasn’t until sometime in the 1900s, lo and behold, in Israel they find, guess what, they found block Hebrew. The block-style of Hebrew was given a name by the experts—monumental Hebrew, because of the way it was written. Long after Wyrick. After!

In other words, May is claiming that the version of Hebrew found on the Decalogue Stone could not have been fraudulently produced in 1860 because this form of writing was not known until years after the discovery of the stone. This is all nonsense. In fact, Wyrick took the Decalogue Stone directly to the local Episcopal Minister, John McCarty, who published a comprehensively annotated translation of the inscription within a week of its discovery (McCarty 1860).

There were rabbis who could, indeed, read the inscription. Abraham Geiger, a highly respected German rabbi and scholar of Hebrew, concluded in the July 27, 1860, New York Times that the Decalogue Stone inscription was “the bungling work of an unskilled stone mason and the strangeness of some letters as well as the many mistakes and transpositions was his fault. The letters are not antique. This is not a relic of hoary antiquity” (qtd. in Alrutz 1980, 41).

Geiger’s assessment has been confirmed and elaborated by our colleague Jeff Gill, who noted specific errors in the inscription that could have occurred only if someone were working from a conventional nineteenth-century typeface Hebrew text and then converting each letter into the corresponding antique-looking character of the Decalogue alphabet. Doing so would result in a recurring pattern of error, which confirms the modern source for the inscription (Lepper and Gill 2000, 20). Frank Moore Cross, Harvard University professor of Near Eastern languages and one of the foremost contemporary authorities on ancient Hebrew, fully corroborated Gill’s conclusions, writing that it was clear that “the modern forms of the Hebrew character[s] . . . stand ultimately behind” the Decalogue Stone inscription (Cross 1991). Cross offered his opinion that the Decalogue Stone was a “grotesque” forgery that could not be taken seriously.

May’s peremptory dismissal of the idea that Wyrick might have been able somehow to bury the fraudulent Decalogue Stone in front of the “nine” witnesses is completely unwarranted, since the mound in question had been dug into on at least two previous occasions. Moreover, Wyrick’s plan to continue his investigation of the mound was known by at least five other individuals, any one of whom would have had ample opportunity to plant the artifact within the excavation before the day arranged for the second expedition. Nicol’s subsequent involvement in a similar proven hoax casts considerable suspicion in his direction.

May’s claims about the significance of block Hebrew, also called monumental Hebrew, are specious and uninformed. “Block Hebrew” is simply what palaeographers and epigraphers call Classical Hebrew orthography from the Second Temple–era down to the present, and there is no coherent correspondence between any ancient epigraphic Hebrew and the Decalogue alphabet.

Finally, by ignoring the historical context in which the Newark “Holy Stones” appeared, May and other diffusionists lose the opportunity to understand the true nature of the forgeries. The Newark “Holy Stones” represented an attempt to encompass the prehistory of the New World within the biblical history of the Old World, thereby undermining the dangerous doctrine of polygenesis, which sought to provide a scientific justification for both the enslavement of African people and the forced removal of Native Americans from their homelands. Ironically, these ideas would have provided some support and nuance for a central theme of the Lost Civilizations of North America documentary.

How Did Important Evidence of a Lost Civilization Come to Be ‘Lost’?

Lost Civilizations of North America advances the unsupportable proposition that the epigraphic evidence supporting diffusionist claims was not simply discarded after a thorough review by fair-minded scholars, but that it was actually accepted and deliberately suppressed by official historians because “the idea that ancient inhabitants knew of and used Middle Eastern Hebrew symbols undermined the notion that Native Americans were isolated savages.”

The claim that scholars have dismissed or even destroyed data to support racist interpretations of America’s past are made explicitly by Wayne May in the documentary. His argument rests on the use of a selectively edited quotation by John Wesley Powell, who served as the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology and the U.S. Geological Survey: “Hence, it will be seen that it is illegitimate to use any pictographic matter of a date anterior to the discovery of the continent by Columbus for historic purposes.” This quote appears on the screen just as we show it here, ending with a period as if this were the complete thought expressed by Powell. From this it is asserted that scientists knew about Native American writing and conspired to suppress the truth about such writing and its connection to Old World alphabets by forbidding the scientific use of these “pictographs.” This is, of course, patently false, and when his statement is read in its full context it is clear that this was not what Powell meant. The quoted phrase does not end in a period as shown in the documentary. Instead, a semi-colon separates the first part of the sentence from the rest of Powell’s thought. Powell’s entire statement is repeated here with the part excised in the documentary in italics:

Hence, it will be seen that it is illegitimate to use any pictographic matter of a date anterior to the discovery of the continent by Columbus for historic purposes; but it has a legitimate use of profound interest, as these pictographs exhibit the beginning of written language and the beginning of pictorial art, yet undifferentiated; and if the scholars of America will collect and study the vast body of material scattered everywhere—over the valleys and on the mountain sides—from it can be written one of the most interesting chapters in the early history of mankind. (Powell 1881, 75)

In other words, while Powell felt it “illegitimate” to interpret pictographs (figure 5) directly as a form of written history, he nevertheless felt they were of enormous importance and should be collected and analyzed precisely because they represent the beginning of a written language (exactly what the documentary claims Powell and others were attempting to hide) and a history could be derived by those who studied them. Powell was not attempting to suppress archaeological evidence but simply trying to subordinate theory to the collection of data.

Figure 5. Petroglyph panels, like this spectacular example called Newspaper Rock (in Utah), are splendid works of art. While pointing out that petroglyphs and pictographs could not be identified as a formal written language, John Wesley Powell nevertheless explicitly recognized their significance for the stories they told of the lives of Native Americans. (K. Feder)

Clearly, Powell got it wrong on some issues. For example, while he correctly noted that the “pictographs” produced by the civilizations of Mesoamerica were more “conventional” than those seen in North America, he incorrectly surmised that theirs wasn’t a true system of writing. This error, however, does not warrant the implication made in the documentary that his goal was to suppress any evidence showing that the native people of North America were capable of developing civilization. Exactly the opposite is true. As a matter of fact, Powell worked to dispel the myth of a mound-building people distinct from Native Americans, a conclusion he based not on armchair theorizing but on masses of data from extensive American ethnological and archaeological fieldwork. It is incredible that anyone would suggest, as the producers of Lost Civilizations clearly do, that Powell “robbed” Native Americans of their history. This is one of the more egregious of several non sequiturs present in the documentary. Powell’s purpose was to unite American archaeology and ethnology in the study of the mounds, not to suppress evidence. That is not to suggest that he did not have predispositions, opinions, and biases. Who does not? Yet Powell did as much as anyone at the close of the nineteenth century to make American archaeology and ethnology more exacting sciences. His critical comments on limitations attending the use of certain kinds of anthropological data still bear reading today.

Why Are Archaeologists Skeptical about Old World Visitors to the New World?

This brings us to a subject touched on only briefly in the documentary: the Norse settlement of North America circa 1000 CE. The clear implication in the documentary is that since it can be demonstrated that the Norse were here one thousand years ago, it is also possible that Middle Easterners were in the New World two thousand years ago.

In fact, before the 1960s, archaeologists were generally skeptical about claims of a pre-Columbian Norse discovery and settlement of the New World primarily because these claims were based not on material remains found in North America reflecting a pre-Columbian Norse presence but on the interpretation of historical documents—specifically, two Norse sagas (Eric the Red’s Saga and the Greenlander’s Saga), both of which had been committed to paper fully two centuries after the events discussed were supposed to have taken place.

Archaeologists, with a focus on material evidence, tend to subscribe to essayist Ambrose Bierce’s definition of written history: “An account mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools” (Bierce [1911] 2003). Essentially, material remains—the things people made, used, and then either lost or discarded—represent the gold standard in archaeological analysis. So, while the two aforementioned sagas claimed that lands to the west of the Norse settlements in Greenland had been discovered, explored, and briefly settled, most in the archaeological community were skeptical of taking the sagas literally without material evidence as confirmation.

This all changed when, in the early 1960s, artifacts and even structures unquestionably of Norse origin were found by archaeologists working in Newfoundland at the site of L’anse aux Meadows. Items such as a ring-headed bronze pin, a soapstone spindle whorl, iron boat rivets, and the remnants of turf houses were excavated, all in the clear context of the remains of an entire ancient settlement (Ingstad and Ingstad 2000). These material remains looked nothing like any that had been found at native sites but matched, in detail, objects found in known tenth- and eleventh-century Norse sites in Greenland, Iceland, and Scandinavia. Radiocarbon dates proved that the Newfoundland village had been occupied before 1000 CE, placing it in time roughly contemporaneous with the events described in the sagas. Subsequent research throughout northeastern Canada has revealed additional material evidence of a Norse presence there about one thousand years ago (Sutherland 2000). As a result, archaeologists now fully accept that the Norse came to the New World, explored, and, in some cases, settled there five centuries before Columbus.

The Norse example is an instructive lesson in assessing the underlying claim made by the Lost Civilizations documentary. It is, unfortunately, a lesson lost. If interlopers from the Middle East arrived in North America two thousand years ago, one would expect there to be abundant material evidence of their presence. If a handful of Norse explorers and settlers left behind recognizable elements of their material culture scattered across Canada, certainly a large contingent of Hebrews moving into Ohio and building the literally thousands of mound sites found there would have, just like the Canadian Norse, left behind villages littered with material objects diagnostic of their culture and easily distinguishable from that of the native people already there. Their material culture would be found abundantly virtually anywhere archaeologists—or, for that matter, anyone else—dig. They certainly would have left behind more than a handful of inscribed tablets. But there is no such evidence for the presence of Hebrews or any other Old World people in pre-Columbian Ohio. In this case we are confident in turning the old cliché on its head: here, at least, the absence of evidence is, indeed, evidence of absence.

Finally, we wish to make one additional point. It is not surprising that when individuals in the nineteenth century, for whatever reason, wished to convince their contemporaries that the mounds had been constructed by Middle Easterners, the most obvious and, to be frank, easiest way to attempt this was to manufacture fake artifacts, like the Newark “Holy Stones,” with inscriptions on them. It would have been far more difficult (in reality, virtually impossible) to concoct entire sites with trash pits, house remains, and burials—all reflecting the morphology, artifact types, skeletons, and burial practices appropriate for and diagnostic of Hebrews dating to the first century. Let’s not be too hard on the fabricators of these frauds, hoaxes, and forgeries; they did the best they could—and they’re still fooling some people even today.

One additional category of evidence discussed in Lost Civilizations will be examined in the third article in this series: genetic data used to trace the origins of the Native Americans in general and the mound builders in particular.

References

Alrutz, Robert W. 1980. The Newark Holy Stones: The history of an archaeological tragedy. Journal of the Scientific Laboratories, Denison University 57: 1–57.

Bierce, A. [1911] 2003. The Devil’s Dictionary. New York: Bloomsbury.

Cross, Frank Moorel. 1991. Personal correspondence to Lepper (September 15).

Halsey, John H. 2004. Forgeries, fakes and frauds. Michigan History (May/June): 20–27.

Ingstad, H., and A.S. Ingstad. 2000. The Viking Discovery of America: The Excavation of a Norse Settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Breakwater Books.

Lepper, Bradley T. 1991. ‘Holy Stones’ of Newark, Ohio, not so holy after all. Skeptical Inquirer 15(2): 117–19.

———. 1999. Newark’s ‘Holy Stones’: The resurrection of a controversy. In Newark ‘Holy Stones’: Context for Controversy, ed. P. Malenke (Coshocton, Ohio: Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum), 15–21.

———. 2008. Great find in West Virginia nothing more than a fraud. Columbus Dispatch (November 11): B7.

Lepper, Bradley T., and Jeffrey B. Gill. 2000. The Newark Holy Stones. Timeline 17(3): 16–25.

Mainfort, Robert C., and Mary L. Kwas. 1991. The Bat Creek Stone: Judeans in Tennessee? Tennessee Anthropologist 16: 1–19.

———. 2004. The Bat Creek Stone revisited: A fraud exposed. American Antiquity 69: 761–69.

McCarty, John W. 1860. Philology of Holy Stone No. 2. Cincinnati Daily Commercial (November 7).

Powell, John Wesley. 1881. On limitations to the use of some anthropologic data. In First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution 1879–80 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), 73–86.

Sutherland, P.D. 2000. The Norse and Native North Americans. In Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, eds. W.W. Fitzhugh and E.I. Ward (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press), 238–47.

Wyrick, David. 1860. The recent mound exhumations. Saturday Evening Post (September 8): 6.

Disclaimer

We are well aware that a claim underlying the Lost Civilizations documentary—that the mound-building people of the American Midwest were migrants from the Middle East 2,000 years ago—may be informed by religious doctrine. It is our position in this paper, however, that whatever inspires this claim is not nearly as important as the fact that it is plainly wrong. As such, we will leave it to others to assess the role played, if any, by religion in shaping Lost Civilizations and focus instead on scientific evidence relevant to that claim.