We have a review!

Publisher's Weekly, the trade journal of the publishing industry, chose the Discovering the Mammoth to be reviewed this week. They can only review a fraction of the new books each week, so I think this is a good sign.

It's me

I don't usually post pictures of myself online. None of my social media avatars are pictures. But, the publisher needed a dust jacket photo, so I may as well share it. After all, it's going to be printed by the millions when my book becomes an international, runaway bestseller.

I've been blocked

My accomplishment of the day. He can dish out cold-hearted sneers all day, but remind him of his dog-murdering son and he turns all mushy.

Book update

Last night, at around midnight, I finished the last revisions on my book and shipped it off to publisher. My editor will be taking it to the London Book Fair next month. She also told me Nature has requested a review copy.

A holiday warning

This is a rerun of a post I wrote around this time a few years ago. I think it's still relevant.

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The men in black (MIB) entered UFO lore in 1956 in a book entitled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The author was one Gray Barker who had been a member of one of the first American UFO groups, the rather ambitiously named International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB). Though Barker's book dealt with a number of paranormal topics, the largest part of it dealt with his former boss, IFSB founder Albert Bender.

In 1953 the IFSB was about two years old with a few hundred dues paying members (called "investigators") who all received the Bureau's newsletter Space Review. The group was doing well enough when, in October 1953, Bender suddenly stopped publication of Space Review, and dissolved the IFSB. The last issue of the news letter gave only this explanation.

STATEMENT OF IMPORTANCE: The mystery of the flying saucers is no longer a mystery. The source is already known, but any information about this is being withheld by order from a higher source. We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but because of the nature of the information we are very sorry that we have been advised in the negative.

According to Barker, the reason Bender had so abruptly ended the group was that three mysterious men in black had visited Bender and warned him off. But before they did, the MIBs were good enough to explain at least part of the true secret of the flying saucers. UFOs, they said, actually come from Antarctica. They have bases in both polar regions and regularly fly between them. Bender told a different story in his own book in 1963.

Enough UFO stories end with the craft departing due north or south that Barker's version of Bender's visitors has been adopted by conspiracy theorists who believe in a decidedly terrestrial origin for saucers. My personal favorite version is that saucers and MIBs are Atlanteans from within the hollow earth, but the theory that they are Nazi refugees from super-scientific bases beneath the ice cap has its devotees, too.

The MIBs are the key to the mystery. The most mundane explanation that has been offered is that they work for the American government and that they are trying to hide the truth about the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs. But that could itself be disinformation. No government has the ability to do what the MIBs do. Think for a moment about the men in black. They have appeared all over the world. They have a special interest in unidentified flying objects and in protecting the polar regions. They seem to actually know what is in the minds of the people they visit. Who has the ability to manage an intelligence network like that? Ask yourself: Who has the ability to travel everywhere, at any time, and even seemingly to appear in two places at once? Who has a special interest in protecting the polar regions? Who knows when you are sleeping? Who knows when you are awake? Who knows if you've been good or bad?

I think you know the answer.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and be good for goodness sake.

Happy Holidays!

I just returned from a family party that involved dogs and toddlers. Now I'm looking at social media politics and thinking about it in the terms that I talk to dogs and toddlers. What is this? Is it shit? Is it? It is! What should we do with this shit? Should we fuck it? Yes, we should! Fuck this shit. Fuck this shit to hell. Is that eggnog?

Amazons on a map

While reviewing some of the illustrated maps I used for the book, I've taken to hunting for Amazons. This group is on the Pierre Desceliers 1550 map of the world. The map was probably commissioned as a gift for Henry II of France.

Amazons
Above is the illustration of a thing worthy of memory and of being described, that is, strange and barbarous women who are experts at war and who are called Amazons. They number about 200 million, alone without men for some time. When they return victorious from battle, they are loved by their husbands with whom they go only once a year, and only to have children. If they have a son, they nourish him for six months and then give him to his father; if it's a daughter, they keep and raise her to train in feats of arms.

According to map historian Chet van Duzer, the text likely comes from an edition of Ptolemy's Geography published earlier that century (he mentions four possible contenders). As was the case with illustrated maps of that century, the placement of decorations on Descelier's wasn't random. Mapmakers were trying to make sense of a new discoveries coming in every day. Monsters, new animals, foreign monarchs, and historical events were placed in their approximate correct locations.

The Amazon army on this map is shown north of the Caspian Sea marching westward toward "Region de Mithridates." This mangles two Amazon legends together and mis-locates the kingdom of Mithridates, but he deserves points for trying. He is attempting to make sense of contradictory ancient sources and integrate them with new discoveries. Central and Northeastern Asia, despite bordering the Old World civilizations remain badly understood for another two centuries.

NOTE: I earlier wrote about this map and my reasons for studying it here.

Book Update

My publisher, Pegasus Books, has released their summer catalog for next year and guess who is in it? This means it's starting to show up on the pages of Amazon and other fine booksellers. When I pointed this out on Saturday, some of my friends went pre-ordered copies. This gives it a sales ranking in the Amazon system and, as of today, it is the #1 New Release in Science > Fossils.

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Powell's (Portland)
Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle)

I worked at Elliott Bay for three years. I hope I get to do a reading there. If you have a favorite independent bookstore that you'd like to give a shout out to, mention them in the comments.

Trump is a disaster, Part 1

Trump is a disaster. Period. Anyone who wasn't an active supporter who says there is an upside to his election is full of crap. Okay, they are probably self-deluded and not intentionally selling crap, but you still should not be led to believe his election is anything but a disaster. I stayed quiet online for almost a week to avoid exploding. I'm nowhere near not exploding, but I'll risk making some preliminary observations.

Observation 1. Who is Trump?

Trump is a petty, mysogynistic, racist, narcissist lacking in any trace of human empathy. But what does he believe? At the top, he "believes" in anything that profits Donald Trump or makes him look good. Some people will point out that, in the past, he has said and done some things that do not fit with the extreme ideological right. During the primaries, the far right siezed on these statements to say he wasn't one of them. Now, the naive middle siezes on these statements to say he won't be as bad as all that. They are both wrong.

Trump only cares about Trump. Having said certain things in public, he'll stand by them as much as he feels he must to keep his followers. He will surround himself (and is) with extremists. His campaign rhetoric attracted extremists. The best way to keep them loving Trump is to give them what they want and put their idols in positions of power. He has no incentive to defy the people who elected him. He is not going to moderate his campaign positions unless he sees it as a way to improve his position. Extremism forever.

Trump is also a visciously petty and vindictive man. So are his followers. He will explore the possibilities of using the power of the federal government to settle personal scores. His advisors might convince him not to try it without us ever hearing about it in public, but don't think the conversations aren't happening.

NEXT: Part 2, The environment

Where are you going little ship full of wolves?

Olaus Magnus' 1539 map of Scandinavia, the Baltic Sea, and the North Atlantic, entitled the Carta Marina is a milestone of European cartography. At the time, it was by far the most accurate map of the region that had ever been made. Along with the correct geographic details and placements of human settlements, Magnus covered the map with hundreds of drawings of human history, ethnography, and natural history. Sixteen years later, he published a book expanding on those topics, entitled Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (History of the Northern Peoples). For the book, he prepared 481 woodcut illustrations (including some duplicates). Of the illustrations, 124 are adapted directly from the map while many others include elements from the map.

Unfortunately, many interesting illustrations from the map didn't make it into the book. We have no way of knowing what they indicate. Other illustrations, prepared for the book, don't always match the text of the chapters they've been paired with. I'm working on a couple of blog posts about strong women in the Historia. While I do that, let me share some of my favorite illustrations.

Before I offer the first illustration, let me make my excuses. Although he was Swedish, Magnus wrote his book in Latin. At the time, there weren't even that many Swedes who wrote and read Swedish, and he was a Catholic priest. I can bludgeon my way through Latin well enough to get the gist of a text, but I'm not going to spend a whole afternoon to get a clean literary translation for the caption to a picture only a few dozen people are going to look at (unless I really like the picture). Next, the good commentary on his illustrations appears to be primarily A) in Swedish and B) not online. I might be horribly wrong in my interpretations of the illustrations. I hope that makes them more fun to look at.

Here are the wolves:

They are sailing eastward across the Baltic south of the island of Gotland and parallel to an ice-bound Polish coast. I believe the indication of ice-bound waters was an innovation of this map. Their eagerly anticipated goal appears to be in the neighborhood of Memel, Prussia, now in Lithuania.

But, are they wolves? I checked all of the illustrations in the Historia looking for boats in the Baltic Sea, both for this story and another. I found another illustration, set farther north in the Baltic Sea, that is intriguing, puzzling, and tragic all at once.

The title of the chapter is "About horses of Sveica and Gothica, why they are preferred to others, and exported." The illustration shows a barefoot man on the shore. Next to him is a large horse. He holds one arm up, with the forefinger extended above the horse. The other arm is extended downward at a tied-up ship full of animals (they resemble my wolves, but are they horses?) who look away from him. Another boat is still at sea in the upper right corner filled with animals that have ears and horns (goats? How many animals are sailing around the Baltic? This question will come up later). The bottom right quarter is filled with a disturbing vignette of two or three horses at sea, trying to climb onto icefloes.

The chapter explains that the horses Sveica and Gothica [the core provinces of Sweden] are in demand for export, but that there is a royal edict against selling warhorses. Do the horse, the man, and the boat full of animals represent an honest trader dividing superior war-quality horses from shamed exportable horses? This is followed by a lot of text demonstrating how much they love their horses, including a poem. He then mentions the lively horses of the island of Oelandiæ (Elandia on the map, Öland in modern Sweden). He says they are lively and ready for action and then something about dancing dogs that I haven't properly translated. In this case, are we looking at a well trained troop of performing animals? The dog/wolves are looking away because they are waiting for their cue. This is not as crazy as it sounds. There will be other animals on boats.

So, who are the sly animals on the boat?

Note: Online you can find many images taken from the less detailed second edition of the Carta Marina. There are only two copies of the first edition that have survived. This is the map I'm using for all my posts. The book, the Historia, was translated and reprinted many times. For my images and my text, I'm using the first, Latin edition from this site. If you write about this, please link and credit carefully.