Paleo to Pioneer

Late in the summer of 1927 Harold Cook and Jesse Figgins of the Denver Museum led an excavation in Dead Horse Gulch* near Folsom, New Mexico where an extinct animal, the large Pleistocene bison (Bison antiquus occidentalis, up to 8 feet tall for a good sized male) was found directly associated with human artifacts in undisturbed layers of dirt.  Both Cook and Figgins are very well known for this find within archaeology and even anthropology in general, though the Wikipedia page is a travesty that will be fixed soon.  Today, outside of those arenas not so much.

When internet book sales first got going in the late 90s or so there was a good period when really interesting rarer or unusual things came out of the woodwork without much comparative price discovery and a true bargain could be found every now and then.  By dumb luck I picked up a 1923 first edition, first printing, of Fifty Years on the Old Frontier:  As Cowboy, Hunter, Guide, Scout, and Ranchman signed by James Henry Cook for 25 or 30 bucks, heaven knows what it would go for now.  James was the much better known father of Harold, and great grandson of that Captain James Cook.  He had been involved in all manner of western activity for decades across the Plains and Greater Southwest and knew everybody, esp. close with Red Cloud.  I got the book because he was involved in the Apache campaigns of the 1880s not then knowing there was a close relationship with an archaeological site so important to the kind of work I do.  You can read it yourself here, which I highly recommend, parts of it are truly riveting: https://archive.org/details/fiftyyearsonoldf1923cook.  

A couple of years ago I decided to read 50 Years cover to cover looking for any information about the Chiricauhua that became prisoners with Geronimo and were sent to Florida throughout 1886 (77 arrived late in spring and another 380+ were sent to St. Augustine, Florida at the same time as Geronimo’s surrender and eventual imprisonment in Pensacola with a handful of other Chiricahua men.- I’ll come back to this topic for a bit near the end).  Unfortunately, after Geronimo’s capture Cook turns to other topics than the Apache.

One particular story Cook told stood out for the absurd clash of cultures amid the genuine horrors of this war. The prelude cost a man his life so it is hard to say this is a funny story but from the Apache side you can bet his companions teased him mercilessly. Let’s whistle past the graveyard a moment. Starting on page 177 Cook sets the scene in New Mexico during the summer of 1885:

“On the occasion to which I refer, he and his command were ordered to a point about fifty miles from the W S ranch, in the mountains along the Gila River, to pick up an Indian trail which a company of militia had lost in following it. I accompanied him, and we reached the place as quickly as possible, found the trail, and followed it until night. Just at dusk a courier arrived in camp and informed us that Indians had killed a freighter that morning near the White House ranch, on the road between Alma and Silver City. As the trail which we were following was several days old, and as it was finally determined that the savages whom we were following and those who had killed the freighter were one and the same band. Major Sumner decided to go and try to pick up the fresh trail where the murder had been committed. It was over twenty miles distant, but we moved there before daylight, and the command was hidden from view by camping down in a little gulch near the White House ranch. As the Indians kept a lookout for troops, great caution was at all times required.

After a short rest I went out with a white man whom Major Sumner had employed a few days previously as a guide. This man was supposed to have a pretty thorough knowledge of the Mogollon Range, having prospected for mineral and hunted game there for years. We went to the spot where the freighter had been ambushed and killed. He proved to be an acquaintance of mine named Sauborin, who owned a general store in the Cooney mining camp. As the parties who generally hauled his supplies did not care to undertake it during the Indian uprising, Sauborin had taken his own team, and was on his way back from Silver City with a load of such goods as he most needed. The Apaches had seen him coming and lain in ambush for him. At a distance of but a few feet they had riddled him with bullets. The team ran away with the load, followed by some of the mounted savages, and about a mile from the road they were caught. The Indians destroyed everything about the wagon which they could not carry away.

We took the trail of the Indians from this point and followed it to a point in the mountains about ten miles distant. The trail was not so difficult to follow as some others which I have traced over the barren rocks of the Mogollons. Among other goods found in Sauborin’s wagon was a lot of candies. The Indians carried a quantity of this away with them. The candies which did not suit their taste, such as those known as “heart mottoes,” they discarded. I picked up a number of these hearts. Some of them bore such mottoes as “I Love You,” “Kiss Me,” and “You Are My Honey.” A box of fancy toilet soap, delicately perfumed, doubtless mistaken for candy, had been carried along until the bearer tasted it. He had attempted to bite off a huge chunk from one of the cakes, which bore a row of deep tooth-prints on each side. A deep dent in this particular cake of soap, which had been hurled with considerable force against a sharp rock, told of the disgust with which it had been discarded.”

An understandable clash of cultures mistake unlikely to be repeated and I’m not sure anyone has ever liked to eat those chalky hearts.  Cook repeated this story in Longhorn Cowboy (James H. Cook and Howard R. Driggs. 1942:222) which can be found cheap online.

At this point I want to shift gears for a bit and tell a few stories about the Arizona Brewing Company’s (1-Prescott, 2- SE AZ, and 3- Phoenix), The capture, transport, and imprisonment of Naiche (or Nachez), Geronimo and more than 500 Apache in Florida by late 1886, and some incredible coincidences involving famous artists and researchers of this time in the Southwest.

The newly formed Arizona Brewing Company (#3) sprang to life in Phoenix in 1933 as soon as prohibition was repealed.  Being a new brewery they did not exactly have a signature brand to promote so they made several different ones of generally short lived names.  In June of 1934 they introduced Apache, first on draft, then in bottles, briefly in cans, and then more bottles until WWII curtailed things in 1942 (See Sipos 2013, cited below).  As you can see the labels and advertising were really spectacular.  In 1943 A-1 beer was introduced and that remained their flagship brand until they were bought up in the 1960s.    **edit: In the video I mistakenly said Apache porter- actually Brewing Arizona p104 says they made Apache Bock, must have been only bottles! Now that would be a tough can if only they had….

Famed Southwestern artist Alonzo “Lon” Megargee (1883–1960) was a long time fixture on the Arizona landscape.  His more formal early work adorns the capital in Phoenix (18 total paintings actually).   Between 1948 and 1951 he created a series of great Southwestern themed advertising images for Arizona Brewing and their A-1 brand.  Large framed prints of four of them are today highly collectible (and would look great at P2P’s headquarters if you have any available? see Sipos 2013:120-122)- I have postcards showing two of them- Black Bart is shown below. 

Prior to the commissions for the brewery Lon had purchased land in Paradise Valley in 1935 and built a southwestern gem of various buildings that today is thriving as the Hermosa Inn   https://www.hermosainn.com/about-hermosa-inn/history    A divorce in 1941 led to him selling the place with art and furnishings included and this is where the story gets interesting.  Then called La Casa Hermosa it was purchased by a then unknown middle aged English teacher and WWI widow named Eve Ball (14 March 1890 – 24 December 1984).

She ran the Hermosa Inn as a dude ranch very briefly and moved to Ruidoso, New Mexico in 1942, probably in part so she could write more.  Later she even wrote an article about Lon Megargee.  Over time she developed trust and rapport with the Mescalero and Chiricahua Apache living there and was able to interview descendants and relatives of Geronimo, Victorio, Nana, and Juh, among the many who helped her preserve their oral histories. Asa “Ace” Daklugie, Juh’s son and a nephew of Geronimo, became a particularly close, prominent friend whose involvement with her helped bring in other more reluctant informants.  All of which developed into three very famous books and more than 100 articles on the Apache, largely from their perspective.  Something unheard of when she began.  Ace Daklugie was 17 when the last of the Chiricahua surrendered in 1886.  He spent 27 years as a POW in Florida, Alabama, and Oklahoma before being allowed to return to New Mexico in 1913.  Please see any of a number of works by Lynda Sanchez for biographical information on Ms. Ball and her writings.

Late in August of 1886 Naiche, Geronimo and the other 30 or so Chiricahua Apache still actively fighting Mexican and American invaders of their land agreed to return to America and surrender to General Nelson Miles.  The formal surrender occurred Sept 4^th, 1886 at Fort Bowie in southeast Arizona.  Some accounts conflate different actions and have stated that these people were put in wagons and sent north for two weeks through the San Carlos reservation, adding 65 more POW’s and shipping them east from Holbrook, AZ.  This certainly happened to some Apache at the very same time but not Naiche’s band.

To this group of 32 Apache, were added to the train at the last minute, the two Chiricahua scouts, Martine and Kayitah, who actual found Geronimo and got them to talk of peace.  They were sent by train from Fort Bowie Sept 8, to San Antonio, Texas, arriving there at 1pm, September 10^th (San Antonio Daily Express, Sept. 11, 1886) where they were to be held until President Cleveland and the Army decided if they would continue to Forts Marion and Pickens of St. Augustine and Pensacola respectively, as POWs, or if they would be tried as civilians in Arizona or maybe Texas.  Naiche’s band spent six weeks at Fort Sam Houston outside San Antonio.  During this period they were considered something of a sensation and on occasion were treated well.  For some reason Geronimo, Naiche, and several others were brought on a tour of the Lone Star Brewery between the 11^th and 22^nd.  Meaning that they had been in Mexico, fully armed, fighting and raiding, “enemies” of Mexico and America, and less than 3 weeks later are in the middle Texas on a brewery tour.  It had to be one of the strangest culture shocks they experienced at the beginning of their shameful 27 years of captivity.

Finally, to come back to the beginning after a fashion, in one of those strings of historical connections that can only happen in real life because if it happened in fiction it wouldn’t be believable- About 1871 as a 13 or 14 year old teenager James Cook, remember him?, arrived in San Antonio, TX looking to make his way in cattle or however he could.  Somehow he was befriend by Bigfoot Wallace, and later received a fine horse from him.  About this time he started working for another famous Texan, then New Mexican, then Arizonan, John Slaughter. 

Slaughter is most famous in Arizona as the hard nosed Sheriff of Cochise Co from 1887-1890.  And….trying to form a brewery in the southeast corner of the state at the end of 1903, even selling and issuing stock in 1904, before the project fell apart, in what would have been the second Arizona Brewing Company going at the time (the one in Prescott was much more successful for 20+ years).  Cook’s story is told in Longhorn Cowboy (1942 w/Driggs) and the previously unknown tale (in the beer world I believe) of John Slaughter’s failed Arizona Brewing #2 was told by my friend Ed Sipos in his excellent book Brewing Arizona from 2013:68-70, which is my main source for Arizona Brewing Co #3 info as well.  So the take away message seems to be that anything interesting that happened in the history of Arizona is no more than one degree of separation from beer.  Yeah, that must be it!    

You are cordially invited to take a look at a companion video with some Arizona Breweriana, including Lon Megargee’s art, and original Apache photographs on my Paleo to Pioneer Youtube channel at  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFLm3k7KkstmNGXIl6oGb6A

Thanks for reading, and a special thank you to Dr. Clark Wernecke of the Gault School of Archaeological Research for lots of help chasing down original sources,  Andy 

* The correct name is Dead Horse Gulch, not Wild Horse Arroyo which was incorrectly applied years later.  Tony Hillerman was exactly right about the name.  The specific details of this minor controversy are documented within an article I need to revise for publication.

Lately I have been mulling over a number of things related to the Gulf of Mexico that I’ve seen since I first started diving off the west coast of Florida in 1992.  Waiting to head out the mouth of the Aucilla to dive off the Econfina a couple days before Thanksgiving probably made me a little nostalgic about when I got to work in this area on Michael Faught’s project in the early 1990s.  I thought I would talk about some of the underwater archaeological work out there and then some connections between long term changes to the environment and impacts to biotic communities.  The red tide today is a good example of the cumulative effect of all kinds of impacts.

A bit of a hodgepodge I admit but it will set the stage a little for issues I will eventually expand on in greater detail.  It might be easiest to think of the landscape as one continual property from the Last Glacial Maximum until now.  The obvious huge change is that from 22,000 years ago, until roughly 5,000 years ago a bit more that 50% of all Florida has been inundated with salt water.  What we think of as Florida has only existed for a little less than 5,000.  And it took the better part of 17,000 for Florida to turn out like it has.

I’ll break this up between some of what we know about the Pleistocene landscape, that is of course only seen in glimpses through the water column and the marine sands on top of it now,  and some discussion of that briny marine world and changes I have noticed in the last 30 years.  Because this process of sea level rise took so long there are some very important considerations we can address about how that rearranged all of the biotic communities.

I am not really sure how many total dives I have in the GOM, probably several hundred by now.  I’ve got something like 2,000 logged dives spread out in too many different formats to sort them out easily.  In addition to working on projects directed by several other researchers I spent most of my dive time working on our project locations well off the beaten path at sites between 40 and 130 feet deep from the Florida Middle Grounds and half a dozen places along the old Suwannee River channel.   

I got to dive the widest range of GOM locations between 2008 and 2015 as part of the work that Jim Adovasio and I have been doing along the PaleoSuwannee River channel and a dozen other areas where we collected side scan sonar and sub-bottom profile data and then dove to ground truth and sample a handful of the 2,500 karst features we saw in the remote sensing imagery.

Principle Investigators deep in aah, consultation about Ziploc burst strength, I think.  2009

Side scan sonar creates a map of the seafloor surface and a sub-bottom profiler, as the name implies, generates an electronic profile showing the different layers of sediment and bedrock directly below the tow-fish you drag around behind the ship.  Kind of like an electronic backhoe image.   Here is a Youtube video from Edgetech showing one of their better combined tow-fish packages from a couple years ago to let you see some remote sensing imagery   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRhN9zROsKI

The purpose of all the remote sensing and data gathering is to get a look at what the existing seafloor looks like with marine sands draped over Pleistocene sediments resting on ever older bedrock.  Much of the Pleistocene land surface is eroded and gone.  However, tucked within karst limestone features (sink holes, old recessed river channels, etc) there remains the possibility of finding preserved sequences of sediments that originally would have been land, freshwater river bottoms, brackish marine environments, and finally marine seafloor at the top.  Expressing the modern to prehistoric sequence in four words a couple of years ago I titled a paper Salty, Brackish, Fresh, and Dry.   In essence this is what happened to half of Florida.

As you may well expect the suite of plants and animals living at any one spot changes entirely through each stage of that sequence.  One particularly interesting example of location, location, location, remaining important, even for different reasons, is that the denser limestone bedrock that erodes much more slowly than the surrounding soft limestone was typically dolomite and in several cases knappable chert that could have been made into stone tools.  That exposed bedrock today serves as a solid substrate for marine organisms to live on, or in and under if there are holes or crevices.  So it turns out that places along the old shore of the PaleoSuwannee River with good quality stone that would have drawn people in the Pleistocene are the favored habitat for Grouper today.   If you know a good rocky Grouper spot, there is a sporting chance prehistoric people would have examined the stone for very different reasons long ago.

From an archaeological perspective then, with ample doses of geology, zoology/paleontology, and ecology, thrown in for good measure, we are looking at a Paleolandscape that was empty of people when the northern glaciers started to melt and sea level began to rise, again, circa 22,000 years ago.  Some time prior to 14,600 years ago the first people arrived in Florida.  This is my opinion based on early human occupation surfaces at Page/Ladson, Wakulla Springs, and Vero, which in my estimation have the strongest cases for dated human presences that early in Florida, though all of this is still quite debatable.  At various times I have been PI, Co-PI, or Field Director, at all three so I know them pretty well and will get around to talking about all of them more in the future.

Along the shore and slightly inland you get the greatest range of available resources from the neighboring ecotones (marine and terrestrial in this case).  This works for people and animals, and when combined with an understanding of the available freshwater being much lower at this time (essentially held above the salt water) you can see what a draw the nearshore areas would be to plants, animals, and at some point, humans. Geoscientists Faure, Walter, and Grant had an excellent article describing many aspects of this scenario in Global and Planetary Change #33 in 2002 titled: The Coastal Oasis: Ice Age springs on emerged continental shelves.  Available here as a pdf:  https://www.fandm.edu/uploads/files/12520708593016510-faure-et-al-2002-the-coastal-oasis-ice-age-springs-on-emerged-continental-shelves.pdf

At some point after sea level started to rise the animals and early human arrivals are being pushed inland and concentrated in a way that eventually makes them archaeologically visible- I.E. they should become dense enough on the landscape that we can detect them even 15,000 years later.  The mastodons, mammoth, bison, sloths, and even humans are slowly but surely being herded inland.  There are new dangers now too.  If you go the wrong way (stay on high ground and get isolated or cut off) or loose contact with others, you can suffer a personal extinction pretty quickly.  We are still essentially looking for needles in a haystack, but the haystack is only half the size it used to be.

Figuring out exactly when the landscape was covered is critically important to timing where the land was in relation to the first arrival of people (that we are aware of- sort of a minimum date really).  The latest and best sea level curve to date was done in 2018 by Shawn Joy at FSU  (his thesis is available here https://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu%3A650288/  

When the maximum amount of water was tied up in ice the sea level was 143m (~469ft) below today.  For most of the west coast of Florida that is about 230km offshore, a bit less, maybe 200km offshore for most of the panhandle.

The process of filling up the Gulf with meltwater was akin to filling a very large bathtub with a bit of sloshing around in the middle and at the end of the whole thing and took about 16,000 years in total (on average rising about 1cm a year or 3.25 feet (1m) every century). That seems pretty slow but where it matters out on the flat Floridian Continental Shelf is the horizontal distance cover, per yearly average, works out to about 15 feet a year.  During a steady period of sea water rise ten years after a campsite was used it could be 150 feet offshore.

 Keep in mind it was not a strictly steady rise for all 16,000 years.  At various periods things rose faster or slower and for over 1,000 years temperatures were cooler and sea level would have dropped perhaps as much as 10m.  The Younger Dryas cool period happened from about 12,800 to 11,700 years ago, depending on whose data you use, at a time critical to our story here.  At the start of this period people had already been demonstrably in Florida for the better part of 2,000 years and some of the most interesting landscape features stayed dry land for an extra thousand years because of the cooling: the Florida Middle Grounds and an intersection of the PaleoSuwannee and another ancient river (a site we called Thor’s Elbow- plotted on the Multibeam image).

The slosh at the modern end of the Ice Age sea level rise began about 6,000 years ago when modern seashores were breached, water rose about another meter (3ft above todays shore) and slowly settled back to the modern shore about 4,500 years ago, give or take.  All of the dates and sea level points are a bit mushy but in round numbers they are pretty close.

Slowly but surely I am coming around to things that would have been interesting landscape features during the Pleistocene to early humans and the exotic beasts around them, and now today are very important marine life sanctuaries (in the case of the FMG’s at least).

After identifying some very interesting features in the Middle Grounds we got to dive a few locations between about 85 and 120 feet on the eastern ridge.  Dave Naar at USF gave us a huge version of the Multibeam Side Scan Sonar image below before we went out so we picked what we thought might have been a good sized lake on top of an island as late as even 8,000 years ago to dive.  We dove inside what we decided to call “the Eye of Osiris” at 120 feet and up off the edge of the hole in about 90 feet.  It just sounded better than Target 122…

So there are some interesting questions that in my view neither the zoologists or geologists (and other unnamed interested parties) have solid answers to just yet.  I must confess that my close reading of this literature is probably 5 years old so maybe something conclusive has come out but I seriously doubt it.

First off- were the Florida Middle Grounds pronounced hills in the Pleistocene or did they form from tubeworm and/or coral biomantling- literally bioherms grown by huge colonies of marine invertebrates who lived from the time of inundation (roughly 13,000 to 8,000 years ago if you look at the various color levels in the multibeam image) and when they died out because they were too deep underwater to survive?  Some think they are bioherms and would not have existed in the Pleistocene. 

Having been able to dive in a few places and poke into the bottom a bit I strongly suspect the FMG’s were in fact hills when this was dry land and that the biomantling of coral and tubeworms occurred on the higher points after inundation.  The easiest way to test this would be a sub bottom profiler doing a test patch over the high parts.  A test patch is when you drag the towfish in multiple direction to give 100% overlapping data from different angles.  Then if a sediment core, up to even 30 or so, could be extracted you could see exactly what the hills are made of.  A second reason I believe the Middle Grounds were hills is that in the 27meg version of the Multibeam image you can pretty clearly see what should be erosional features along what appears to be an old river channel- literally, some ancient river was channelized between the two rows of hills.  Again, I am not certain I am right about this, but I sure know how we could go find out.  Knowing more about why the Florida Middle Grounds are so attractive to a wide range of fish and the whole suite of organisms out there should be very useful in helping us do what we can to keep the eco-system happy.

Dead tubeworm colony in 90ft of water, top edge of The Eye of Osiris

The Middle Grounds are world renowned for the incredible fishing, as are many locations along Florida’s Gulf Coast, or at least they used to be.   The loss of so much biota in the last few years from the nasty red tide blooms is devastating.  Certainly sport and commercial fishing people know this and instantly feel the environmental and financial costs (among others).

There is an area of biomedical research that is taking off all over the world, especially in those hard to reach places that are not yet well explored.  Within the world of Natural Products the varied environmental settings and conditions on the west coast of Florida are of great interest today.  Natural Products are naturally occurring compounds or genetic structures within living organisms.  When I say penicillin you should know exactly what I mean.  One of the interesting ones being worked on from Florida’s west coast now is a slime (I think it was a slime) that only lives within the tissue of a specific species of Bucket Sponge that could only be studied in the lab when they finally figured out exactly how to preserve it intact after sampling.

It is not clear how many organisms have never been identified, let alone the multiples of unexamined natural compounds within them.  It could be in the millions.  Wholesale destruction of marine biotic communities with polluted water, or whatever we are putting out there is a very very bad idea.  We are clearly starting to suffer because of conditions in the Gulf.  Whether human induced or natural we better get a handle on the causes, and potential ‘cures’ for the Red Tide and the flesh eating bacteria for starters.

In 2010 I did a little bit of work off Keaton Beach, FL the day after the Macondo Prospect/Deep Water Horizon oil blowout began on April 20th.  I took several vials of seawater that I’ve had in the frig since then in case anyone ever wants to take a look at them.  Immediately after the blowout we noticed that the larger grouper, who were ubiquitous in previous years among the bedrock along the western shore of the PaleoSuwannee, were nowhere to be seen.  In fact, there was very little moving in the water column at all. Plants and plantlike-animals seemed to be doing ok but fish especially seemed hard hit.  In 2012 we were very pleased to see lots of new little fish, especially the grouper, were making a comeback.   But if you think about how far we were from the oil, and Corexit they drowned it with, things had to be terrible for thousands and thousands of square miles.    And this was just a blip before the red tide took over.

If you can metaphorically stand back and see the longer term processes (think Pleistocene not just the 20^th Century- and even this is a very brief period in geologic time) it is clear that change is almost always the order of the day.  There is no mythical point in time when everything was just right.  Whatever is, is going to change.  I’m starting to hear “there is a season” in the back of my head as I type this.   That said, knowing that things will always continue to change should not make us think we have carte-blanche to do whatever we want to the environment. 

The DeepWater oil spill was a pretty straight forward example of cause and effect: nasty stuff gets in the water and bad things happen.  I suspect Red Tide and other systemic impacts are the cumulative consequence of a whole bunch of causes and are going to be that much harder to overcome because we can not stop doing the things that are hurting water and organisms that live in it.  We need fresh water, we create waste water by just being humans with aah, needs, we use nitrogen rich fertilizers that get into fresh and salt water, and all manner of other sporadic and/or continual introductions of other poisons.

One way to look at this is to say that what may seem as esoteric pure research questions about what exactly happened on that Pleistocene landscape in the last 22,000 years actually provide the best information on how and why things are the way they are today.  Knowing how we got here helps us understand better where exactly we are.  The natural and human induced issues that concern us

I guess if there was one take away I would hope to offer is that figuring out exactly what the world was like, and is like today better transcend politics.  Reality is what we are after and that should take precedence over everything else.  How we go about dealing with issues, that’s politics. 

Well, sorry to run so long. This did lay some groundwork for future discussions about assorted topics from when that seafloor was land with people on it, but perhaps more importantly, we (the royal we man) need to consider how little we really know about what lives out there… before we continue hurting it and lose our chance to find out, because for the moment, we dwell in ignorance.

Anybody else down here?  Photo by the renowned Jennifer Adler out at Thor’s Elbow between deep dives in 2012 (just east of the Florida Middle Grounds where the Suwannee and what I think is the macro Aucilla-St Marks came together).  I’m about 20 feet down making big circles, only 110 feet more to the bottom.

N.B.- 12.11.19  Just made our first official purchase as Paleo to Pioneer for what must be a giant pdf of scanned documents from the Pratt Papers at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Room and Library.   So a big Thank You! to our first donors who have helped get us off the ground.

Realizing my last post had exposed an awful lot of un-pulled threads I started pulling.  Because so many people were involved, and/or have written about it since, the primary and secondary information is widely scattered and voluminous almost beyond belief.  I’ve been focusing primarily on things related to Graybeard’s demise and other aspects of this whole saga that led to another, more pleasant incident in 1877 that will be the subject of an article I am working away on furiously these days. When I have a draft submitted I will talk about it. Because only historians seem to have written about it the archaeological community appears to be totally unaware of a really important story.  Will report on this as soon as I can but really need to avoid scooping myself if I hope to publish on it.

So ducking the really big find for the time being I thought I would write a bit of an update on several of the interesting topics involved.  This has a couple of pleasant twists and turns along the way, up to and including the forward pass in football, really.  Even this is probably a bit premature as I am getting a new book every other day or so.

As one might fear even the basic facts of this story are reported with considerable variation- including the exact number of people who left Fort Sill, OK (then Indian Territory) for Fort Marion which is not clear- 72 is the normal number presented but not always.  I think this is due, primarily, to whether or not an author decided to include Medicine Water’s wife Mochi (Buffalo Calf or Buffalo Calf Woman) and any number of the additional women and children who refused to stay behind as they were part of the group but not officially prisoners of war.  Because of Graybeards death (variously published as Greybeard and Gray Beard, I am using Pratt’s spelling as he is the only primary source I have from 1875) and the Cheyenne Lean Bear’s attempted suicide in Nashville probably only 70 arrived at Fort Marion on May 21, 1875. 

It is clear that on April 12, 1878 64 people were freed and I have names for 8 that died, but it is not clear if anyone is unaccounted for at this point because two men were released earlier in 1877.  Pratt published a list of everyone and two lists of prisoners (inexplicably dated 1874) are in the Pratt papers of the Beinecke Library at Yale and once I have those to compare to the published one it should be easy enough to figure out who exactly was held in Florida but clearly, what should be a pretty straight-forward issue, is anything but.

Somewhat harder to resolve is figuring out exactly who were the 26 younger men who drew “Ledger Art” while they were in St Augustine.  Images were only drawn by Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Comanche men from the youthful end of the range.  Making Medicine was the oldest artist at 31.  No Comanche or Caddo men, nor the one Cheyenne lady, drew any images that are known today.  I should say the 26 people are the ones who have surviving images that are known to historians and it is probable additional artists, and most certainly unknown art by known artists, exists.

In fact Heritage Auctions, Dallas, TX sold a previously unknown complete ledger of drawings only a couple of years ago.  I suspect Karen Peterson listed all 26 known artists in her 1971 book, Plains Indian Art from Fort Marion, but I do not have a copy yet.  If she did list them it is interesting to note that no new artists have been identified in the last 50 years.  One particularly interesting aspect of the art, that leads too far afield to mention more than in passing, is the drawings are really personal rather than overtly religious or strictly culturally significant as most all of the Plains art had been prior this time.  Much of it is thought to be nostalgic recollections with plenty of new experiences (shark hunting for example) depicted as well.

Having found several newspaper accounts, receiving a copy of Pratt’s unpublished manuscript about the prisoners from Yale and the slightly different version in his book Battlefield and Classroom (edited by Robert Utley, 1964 who has been very kind to me in our email exchanges), and reading at least a dozen published accounts of the Graybeard tragedy and Plains Indian incarceration, it is clear the story has more twists and turns than have been reported in any one source to date.  There are a surprising number of unpublished masters thesis and PhD dissertations, usually but not always from history departments, that contain information from original sources not elsewhere published.  Finding the originals then slows this all down as various libraries and historical societies are contacted.

The most surprising find to me (not necessarily to anyone else who knows about these things) is that Zotom (Kiowa) made at least two different drawings of the escape and killing of Graybeard.

Image copied from page 61: Figure 3.7 Gray Beard’s (sic) Escape and Killing, by Zotom, March, 1877, in Ann Updike’s English master thesis at Miami of Ohio, 2005.  She quotes Warrior Artist’s by the National Geographic Society, 1998 as her source.

So at present I am working on getting information and images from Pratt’s papers in the Beinecke Library at Yale, and need to visit the Castillo de San Marcos, St. Augustine Historical Society, and Jacksonville Historical Society.  Once I have my ducks in a row from the Pratt Papers I need to query the National Anthropology Archives and regular archives at the Smithsonian. 

I have hit a wall trying to get a copy of this article:  The St Augustine Prisoners by Arrell M Gibson in the Red River Valley Historical Review Vol. 3 No 2? Spring 1978:259-278.  Any help with that would be greatly appreciated.  So there is still plenty to do and lots of fact checking remains but the two larger pieces I am working on should generate quite a bit of popular and scholarly interest.

Sorry to be so vague about my big find but to try and make up for that I thought I would leave with two final stories that are much better known but not often directly connected to what I have been rambling about.  I will come back to this topic when I have more of the primary information sorted out and can present new data that has not seen the light of day for close to 150 years.

In a presentation made in 1902 Richard Henry Pratt is believed to be the first person to use the term “Racism”.  He was specifically speaking about the segregation of Indians and what was wrong with that in America.

Racism first used by Pratt in 1902. Did he coin the term?  Image from Wikipedia.

In 1879 a handful of the Plains Indian men that stayed east after they were released went to Carlisle, PA where Pratt was instrumental in founding the Carlisle Indian School.  In 1893 later students convinced Pratt to let them have a football team.  A team of small fast guys did not often fair well with other collegiate teams of the day.  Smash-mouth, always run up the middle and form a rugby like pile-up with big guys was the order of the day… for a while.  

On November 9, 1912 Carlisle’s on again off again coach had a number of surprises up his sleeve for their ultimate opponent.   Widely considered THE GAME, for a number of good reasons, the Carlisle Indian School versus the Army (West Point USMC) football game quite literally changed how the game was played and ushered in much of the modern format.  Pop Warner (yes that one) sprang trick plays, reverses, and the dreaded forward pass (which many failed to outlaw) allowing quickness to triumph over mass 27-6.  I’m in the process of reading two books about this game but will end with one interesting highlight.  At one point the toughest, hardest hitting Army player was injured trying to tackle the well known Carlisle phenom Jim Thorpe.  Despite this setback Ike did go on to make something of himself.

The image above is excerpted from a stereoview taken very quickly after they arrived May 21, 1875. Traditional dress and hair styles have not been forcibly replaced with Army uniforms and short hair yet.  Frustratingly, I have found less than 30 different Indian photographs from Fort Marion and probably less than 10 different individuals are positively identified in all of them.   From the collection of the author, curated at the InterGalactic Paleo to Pioneer Headquarters by the head bottle washer.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Greater Brooker-LaCrosse Metroplex you might be surprised to learn how much conflict in the Early American portion of Florida’s history happened right here, or very closely nearby.   I’m basically talking about the northern part of Alachua County from the northern half of Gainesville to the Santa Fe River, with forays to St Augustine and Baldwin just because the history is so fantastic.

For no clear reason I decided a couple of years ago I was tired of not really understanding the 2^nd Seminole War (there were 3 primary ones, and sometimes a 4^th but not everyone considers the last two distinct  https://www.seminolenationmuseum.org/history/seminole-nation/the-seminole-wars/ ).  Pulling that thread has turned into about 75 books and probably 500 pdfs that have stuffed my brain with more than I can process, but this is a start on that and many of the places and people discussed below are part of ongoing (and hopefully future) Paleo to Pioneer posts and publications.

Just getting to this point where I have to decide what to include I realize there will have to be a Part II to this topic.  Since, among other things I will not cover, are the 1702 raid of the Carolinians under John Moore into Florida (part of Queen Anne’s War or the War of Spanish Succession) where they attacked and pretty much destroyed Santa Fe De Toloca (what it is called on the Co. historical marker) aka San Tomas de Santa Fe Mission, on May 20.  There are probably additional names for this mission that I don’t know yet either. And somehow this episode doesn’t even get a mention in the Wikipedia Apalachee Massacre page.  But I’m not gonna get into this…;).   I also will not be talking about the activities of Daniel Newnan and the Patriot Army in and around Alachua County during the 1^st Seminole War in 1812, other than to say the Dell Brothers, of ye olde Patriot Army, settled just a mile east of present Alachua and formed Dell, which was changed to Newnansville in 1828.

Newnansville grew very quickly for a number of years, and at one point was the second largest city in Florida.  In 1824 when John Bellamy of Monticello was contracted to build the road from St Augustine to Pensacola it went through Newnansville, and turned NW pretty quickly headed towards Traxler.  Continuing west from there you can find it today often labeled as the Old Spanish Trail.  The poorly made and maintained road had innumerable trees cut off just below axle height and is truly said to be the origin of the term “Stumpknocker”.  So next time you pass below SR326 (the old Bellamy Road) on I75 you can be thankful that Stumpknocker now means a good beer and not a travelers nightmare.

East of Newnansville is a bit of a different story as the next established point on the road (that I can confidently find) is just south of Starke near old Fort Harllee (or Harlee).  The important point here, in the Greater Brooker-LaCrosse Metroplex, is that east from LaCrosse the road roughly paralleled State Road 235 for at least a few miles.  Part of me hopes it was on the north side and went through our cow pasture.

In 1835 when the 2^nd Seminole War began Newnansville was about the farthest south you could really safely stay in Florida, or so many of the roughly 10,000 people said to be living in tents around Fort Gilliland thought. What was likely being called Fort Newnansville was renamed for a murdered Lt. Gilleland (probably his spelling) in 1837.  The rough locations of F for Fort Gilliland and the cleverly labeled M for Newnansville are shown in a GoogleEarth image below.

One of the army’s approaches to this fight was to place a fort at the center of a patchwork of 12 square mile blocks.  Sometimes the forts seem to match these locations and other times not so much.  Three miles east of Alachua (not measured from Newnansville?) there was supposed to be a Fort Gillispie at a now unknown time and location.  I have a single reference for a Fort Mills in LaCrosse that no one else has ever referred to that I can find.  And finally, variously referred to as 5, 8, or 9 miles east of Newnansville was Fort 12.

In 1839 Lt. James Willoughby Anderson was tasked with erecting a small fort at the center of one of those 12 mile blocks, just east of LaCrosse.  Not very much has been written about the fort itself, though it is mentioned passingly by several authors, including several diaries or memoirs of soldiers.  One of the most interesting stories unfortunately explained a wagon that brought supplies to Fort 12 was attacked and all of the men killed about a mile west of LaCrosse on their return to Newnansville.  Anderson drew a detailed map that survives and the location is well known to those in the immediate area (it’s on private property so please leave them alone… I’d like to ask permission to try some non-destructive remote sensing sooner than later).  As the focus of warfare shifted south the post was abandoned in May, 1840 and the soldiers re-assigned to Fort King near Ocala.

Lt Anderson stayed in the army for several years, including coming to greater prominence in the Mexican-American war.  Alas, he was badly wounded at the battle of Cherubusco, which I believe was actually the last day of the war, and passed away the next day.  His son Edward went to West Point, and was very active for the Confederacy through the war and beyond.  He refused to surrender with General Lee, or Johnstone, and eventually turned for Texas and General Kirby Smith’s forces (it didn’t happen).  All of this is well documented because the family eventually donated the original correspondence to the library at the USMA at West Point and a book has been published that includes much of the surviving Fort 12 information.  There is considerably more to talk about here and in the area during the 2^nd Seminole War and both archaeological and archival work to do.

So far I’ve talked about fairly well documented, if nowadays somewhat obscure, Florida history.  I’d like to turn to other Indian War era stories from the 1870s and 80s that just feel tremendously out of place for having occurred at all, let alone in Florida.  I am still gathering information on both of these and eventually each should turn into a historic publication as wading through the mis-information is at least half the battle when trying to correct factually inaccurate publications.  The one consistent element of both stories is that each man is repeatedly said to have been held in St. Augustine and neither ever actually made it there, ever.

The Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, FL was known as Fort Marion for much of the 19^th and 20^th Century after it came into American hands.  From the 1830s into the late 1880s what happened there includes some of the darkest parts of American history.  It would be a very serious book length discussion to begin to do that justice and here I just hope to introduce parts of the lives of two individuals brought to Florida against their will.  Fort Marion served as a prison for Seminole captives in the late 1830s, a group of Apache in 1886-87, and for about 80 Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddo, people between 1875 and 1878.  The Plains Indians were transported and imprisoned under the watch of Lt Richard Henry Pratt, who later used his attempts at education to launch the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.  All of the original information about this story ultimately seems to come from Pratt and I am working on getting copies of his original papers.

A Cheyenne man named Graybeard (often spelled Grey Beard) was among those being brought to Florida by train.  He was very well known in his lifetime and had been involved in many significant fights and events (including surviving the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado).  Between Live Oak and Lake City, probably near Houston, FL in Suwannee County, the train slowed to 25 miles an hour and even though his feet, and possibly his hands, were shackled Graybeeard opened the window and dove out into the darkness.  The train was stopped and soldiers searched for him until the engineer indicated they were short of water and had to go if they wanted to make the next station.  As the train started to leave he was heard moving and one of the soldiers shot him, over the yelling not to by Pratt. 

Graybeard only survived about two hours and his body was left in Baldwin for burial.  That’s it.  End of story.  The whole horrific episode involving a famous western Cheyenne man comes to a tragic screeching halt in Baldwin, FL, where he should never have been, and has only been adequately told once in the last 140 years (much credit to Brad Lookingbill for this telling).  I suspect much of this will be revised in the near future, or hopefully expanded with greater detail.

What I know of this story at present comes from an uninformative 1940 article, a Carlisle Indian School Webpage created by Barbara Landis and Genevieve Bell at http://home.epix.net/~landis/graybeard.html and the book War Dance at Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners (2006) by Brad Lookingbill who has been incredibly helpful in my attempts to track down the four sources of information he cited.  Right now I am waiting to hear back from Dr. Lookingbill and also the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.  I will of course update this post when I have additional information.  Most of all I would like to find his final resting place, and find out if the Cheyenne feel it should be in Florida?

Eight years after the Plains people were released from Fort Marion several hundred Apache Indians were incarcerated there.  Mostly this was Chiricahua people but included members of other groups, some of whom had been the very Scouts the Army depended on to capture Geronimo and his band. 

Unpublished, unique image of Geronimo later in life at the 101 Ranch, Oklahoma. Real photo postcard in author’s collection, Paleo to Pioneer world headquarters.

This omelet of tangled information and incorrect sources is as dense as the two stories discussed above.  Geronimo was brought from Arizona in late 1886 and held in Fort Pickens in Pensacola (arriving October 25 ^th he was one of 16 or was with 16 more men left there).  Late in the spring of 1888 he was moved to Mount Vernon Barracks, north of Mobile, Alabama, and probably reunited with family at that point. A wife of Geronimo. and probably at least one child, were held in Fort Marion.  She-gha, one of his three wives, was with him at Fort Pickens and passed away there, being buried in Pensacola.  Later authors chronically state that Geronimo was held at Fort Marion which absolutely never happened.

I am not positive I have all of the details correct yet, as this is most certainly all work in progress, but when I do I will make a separate post on this.  Who was where, and exactly when is not as easy to determine at this late date even with all of the historic documentation available.  My goal is to get as many of the basic details of these stories correct and publish that information so people stop repeating things we know are wrong.  I have a very keen awareness of exactly how hard it is to get these things right.  This post took me two weeks to get together and I have had to just go with what I know is incomplete information, but hopefully I am not repeating anything that is wrong.

My synopsis here is intentionally very brief and does not do this story justice at all.  I am actively working on writing a publication intended to get the basic facts correct based on information gleaned directly from original, period sources.  That goal, and this post for that matter, are not the end though.  Getting the basic facts correct is the absolute minimum of accurate reporting.  Once that has been corrected we can talk about what all of these things mean.  To me, the most interesting, underexplored aspect is how extremely bizarre it is that both the Plains men of the 1870s, and the Apache in the 1880s (and into the 1890s), while actual enemy combatant prisoners of war of the United States, were put in US Army uniforms and charged with guarding themselves.  In the world we live in today that this ever occurred is incomprehensible. 

Well there you have quick a overview of some interesting and all too poorly known history across North Florida. More information and revision to follow soon.  And enough with the serious stuff… I’m telling jokes next time.

After writing most of what follows I think it is far less optimistic or upbeat than I have any intention of being again in my posts.  Please bear with me though as I think the topic is becoming more and more important for some of the reasons I give below.  That said, the other posts I have planned should be a lot of fun. Better stories with interesting intellectual developments or steps along the way to our current understanding of New World Pleistocene life. I intend for them to be a combination of missives on past, current, and future research with interesting asides that might not otherwise fit in more formal publications.  I think I’ll crib from the Mighty Boosh at the end of this post and go out on a high note….

One hideous product of the omnipresent digital age is fewer people read the old literature themselves anymore and instead rely on secondary sources, or worse, to tell them what is important. And no, I do not think it is a byproduct, to some degree I think it is demonstrably intentional.  If you are an interested student of anything (and I mean simply anyone interested in continuing to learn): read primary sources, handle original specimens, and learn these things for yourself.  What we know, and how we learned it, are both important aspects of understanding the world we live in. As a student at any level you must find a way to master the original data yourself.  In science, if you don’t know how we got here, you cannot properly understand where we are, thinking of Newton’s “standing on the shoulders of giants”.   I don’t want anyone to have to take my word for anything.  I can show you exactly, with proper credit, where any bit of information came from though, and point you on the track to observing and deciding for yourself.  

I find I am still being a bit more philosophical while setting up the website than I really intend to be down the line but while in the mood I wanted to tackle a seriously messed up area in academia today.  The era of citation indices has doomed us all!  Self and cohort citing cadres are legion now.  If you know me you have probably heard about this before, and you know the humor, and aah, colorful language, are coming.  It’s a triumphant testament of will that no bombs have been dropped this far.  The internet is rife with self-proclaimed experts and the fact checking is even less rigorous online, not me of course, I would never do that /sarc.  Kidding aside, if I get something wrong please let me know. It is far more important for me to be accurate than anything else.  One big point of launching P2P is to systematically tackle issues that we have gotten wrong prehistorically or historically and try to right them.  So this topic will be revisited in passing when the issue comes up again.

The problem is we chronically introduce or perpetuate errors by not referring to primary original sources of ideas or data.  Further, the era of the citation index and analysis of your ‘impact’ is lunacy.  The ONLY thing that now matters is how often your work is cited. It can be outright falsehoods and lies, but if everyone cites it, you are golden. 

We have incentivized writers who use sources close to them, or themselves, to bolster their own, and their friends, citation rankings- rather than insisting on giving credit where it is due.  This is utterly insane.  High citation rankings do not mean the work has any merit what-so-ever.  It could be unadulterated crap, and there is a lot of crap out there, but scores high, helps get performance bonuses or aids in getting tenure, for crap.

So rather than cite the author who first presented data or an idea the literature is stuffed with current reference to only the latest person to say something.  A terrifying example was in a front chapter of a recent edited volume of Paleoindian papers where someone cited a fellow graduate student for the 1936 excavations at Clovis, NM.  I would adamantly insist proper credit should be given for original data and ideas.  Especially for the first articulation of an idea as it does not need to be re-invented again once it is in print, if you have read it, and are aware that it existed before you did. Unfortunately that is NOT what is required to slide through peer review when number of citations matters considerably more than the original quality of the work.

Because I’ve spoken with one of my author friends about this next example I don’t mind mentioning a few years ago American Antiquity published an article that said as a statement of fact that a 9 year old boy living in Paris drew the first map of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky in 1729.  The authors repeated an error (almost surely an old typo) made by a historian in 1936, not realizing it meant they invented a pre-teen cartographer.  In this case it’s a minor silly error, until it is repeated yet again.  Once these kinds of things get into the literature they have a life of their own… Maybe we should call them Zombies because they just will not die.

Since I started with examples from 1936 I’ll stay in the mid 30s a moment longer.  I would say that if you have any real interest in Paleoindian archaeology you need to read Edgar Billings (E.B.) Howards 1935 U Penn dissertation.  He did an incredibly thorough job of compiling and modernizing what was known at the time and in many respects his thoughts on the topic have yet to be surpassed.  I have a hard copy but not as a pdf.  If you can get a pdf I’d love a copy.  Howard, E. B. 1935, Evidence of Early Man in North American. Museum Journal, University of Pennsylvania Museum 24: 2–3.

E. B. Howard with one of the bone points found in the 1936 Clovis Mammoth excavation (U Penn Museum photograph that I found on line somewhere, also shown in Clovis Revisited, Boldurian and Cotter 1999).

Another side project I have involves picking up trade cards and other old advertising that use Mammoth as an adjective.  I’m still working on this and will eventually do a post on it specifically.  Somewhere along the line I had heard that it was first used in a derogatory sense to mock Thomas Jefferson at the time of his inauguration as President because of a “Mammoth Cheese” that was created and sent to him by well-wishers from Cheshire, Massachusetts in 1801 (see Monticello.org for this story  https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/mammoth-cheese). 

There are several online posts about the adjectival use of Mammoth.  All purporting to demonstrate the 1^st usage.  One author even asserts that Jefferson himself used it as an adjective first (in a letter from August of 1801), which I thought was awesome so I started to dig deeper.  Well, it’s never so simple is it?  With only a quick search I found copies of period newspapers into May and even April 28^th, 1801 with mammoth (the adjective) referring to a giant Ox.  This means that anything you read about the use of a mammoth adjective that says it first occurred after April 28^th, 1801 is wrong.  And I’m sure earlier examples exist that I have yet to find.  Honestly is seems this is more about aah, non-rigorous scholarship than intentional deceit.  But when we all end up ‘knowing’ something that is wrong, who cares if we were misled intentionally or through laziness. 

This kind of thing becomes incredibly important in relation to governance in the use of terms in biology and geology and archaeology too where a hideous (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclature) defamation is repeatedly occurring- Namely, someone (looking at you David Anderson), with several co-authors has got a number of people calling all Pre-Clovis Early Paleoindian and moved Clovis to Middle Paleoindian, with everything else shuffled along in tow.  This should never have made it past the first editor.  It has introduced completely unnecessary confusion regarding Early and Middle Paleoindian usage without telling us anything new about the Pre-Clovis progenitors.  The usage of those terms has been pretty well established since Frank H H Roberts first coined the term Paleoindian in 1940.   To come along and reuse the term 70+ years later is simply not acceptable and should be stricken.  There are very clear rules of nomenclature and co-opting well established terms and usage is not cricket. F- to all of you.   I think I will bring an airhorn to the SAA’s in Austin and hit it every time someone uses this “revised” aah equine excrement.

I’ve intentionally tried to bring up older examples of shoddy scholarship to spare current researchers (and there are 100s of examples of this just in the last 10 years) but I do feel compelled to correct such factual inaccuracies in formal publications.  And fully expect others to call me out for the same.  I managed to call myself out for (and thankfully correct) one stupid error in an older issue of Current Research in the Pleistocene where I used the wrong group levels and old nomenclature for four different bats at Sloth Hole (ooh no, the old lit turned and bit me).  Mistakes happen, and our job is to try and figure things out and develop the best stories we can with correct information.  What is not acceptable is not giving proper credit for the work of others.  If you do not know the older works then you do not know what is already known- you have allowed yourself to take someone else’s word for it.  Heaven help you if your interpolator made any mistakes because you are about to make them your own now.  Forever.

One last example with one of my favorite finds of all time.  In doing background research and collections searches as part of the underwater work at Wakulla Springs through the Aucilla Research Institute over the last couple of years I have been on the trail of all the old mastodon bone finds that happened since maybe the 1830s on.   The first nearly complete mastodon recovered came up in 1850 and I’m pretty certain I figured out exactly where it went and what happened to it.  But every single publication that deals with pre 1900 finds in Wakulla ends up referring to the book Florida for Tourists, Invalids and Settlers supposedly written by George M. Barbour in 1882, which in point of fact was largely re-written from Barbour’s draft by Charles H. Jones (Graham wrote about this debacle in FL Historical Quarterly in 1973).  

Well the truth is Barbour had no idea what had become of the 1850 mastodon recovered by George King and associates so he made up a story about a shipwreck that has had a life of its own for 140 years, see a zombie. Now, there are two stories about phantom non-shipwrecks that occurred either off the Florida Keys or Cape Hatteras, NC.   Based on several 1850 newspapers and an 1855 magazine article it appears that the King mastodon was shipped to New York City late in 1850 where P. T. Barnum put it on display in his museum and it likely perished in the awful fire of 1865 that destroyed everything in the building that couldn’t run out.  The true story is far more interesting than the false narrative and yet no one alive knew the true story until earlier this year.

I’m still working on several details of the Barnum story but unlike my earlier examples that simply lacked proper intellectual rigor in fact checking of exactly what we think we know, this one is based on mendacity.  When one intentionally distorts facts, whether by commission or selective omission, you are lying.  And that should never be tolerated, especially when we are in the business of finding things out, and sharing them with everyone else.

Please feel free to leave comments and I am more than willing to discuss all kinds of things related to the Pleistocene.  Will moderate inappropriate things and if you feel compelled to cuss me out please do it in an email.   Otherwise, fire at will. 

Enough talk, let’s leave on a high note.  With tongue firmly in cheek I give you Dixon Bainbridge from the Mighty Boosh:

Thanks for reading, more to follow soon,  Andy