The man in question may well have been Neanderthal. Fibre artefacts rot easily and the oldest remains found of a man-made, twisted, fibre “cord” or “string” dates from only about 30,000 years ago. A new paper describes perforations in upto 90,000 year old, stone and tooth artefacts as well as shells from Abri du Maras and other Neanderthal sites in France, indicating they had once been threaded on “strings” and worn as pendants.
This post has beeen shifted to 6,000 Generations
A new study suggests that men have larger noses than women because they have greater muscle mass to supply with oxygen. That is also possibly why archaic humans with greater muscle mass than modern humans also had larger noses.
Nathan E. Holton, Todd R. Yokley, Andrew W. Froehle, Thomas E. Southard, Ontogenetic scaling of the human nose in a longitudinal sample: Implications for genusHomofacial evolution. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2013; DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.22402
The University of Iowa’s news release:
Human noses come in all shapes and sizes. But one feature seems to hold true: Men’s noses are bigger than women’s.
A new study from the University of Iowa concludes that men’s noses are about 10 percent larger than female noses, on average, in populations of European descent. The size difference, the researchers believe, comes from the sexes’ different builds and energy demands: Males in general have more lean muscle mass, which requires more oxygen for muscle tissue growth and maintenance. Larger noses mean more oxygen can be breathed in and transported in the blood to supply the muscle.
The researchers also note that males and females begin to show differences in nose size at around age 11, generally, when puberty starts. Physiologically speaking, males begin to grow more lean muscle mass from that time, while females grow more fat mass. Prior research has shown that, during puberty, approximately 95 percent of body weight gain in males comes from fat-free mass, compared to 85 percent in females. ….
…. It also explains why our noses are smaller than those of our ancestors, such as the Neanderthals. The reason, the researchers believe, is because our distant lineages had more muscle mass, and so needed larger noses to maintain that muscle. Modern humans have less lean muscle mass, meaning we can get away with smaller noses.
“So, in humans, the nose can become small, because our bodies have smaller oxygen requirements than we see in archaic humans,” Holton says, noting also that the rib cages and lungs are smaller in modern humans, reinforcing the idea that we don’t need as much oxygen to feed our frames as our ancestors. “This all tells us physiologically how modern humans have changed from their ancestors.” ….
And by whatever strange associations that go on in my brain, Edward Lear’s explanation for how his heartbroken and stalwart Dong made himself a prosthetic, luminous nose (which I must have first read some 50 years ago) keeps going around in my head (extract from Edward Lear’s nonsense poem).
The Dong was first published in 1846 and maybe Rudolph, who first appeared in a 1939 booklet written by Robert L. May, got his glowing red nose, in a similar way to the Dong.
The period some 30,000 – 50,000 years ago is getting positively crowded with different branches of humans. The direct ancestors of modern humans lived and interbred not only with Neanderthals and Denisovans but also apparently with still another, as yet unknown, branch of humans.
Nature: New genome sequences from two extinct human relatives suggest that these ‘archaic’ groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known.
The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a different archaic human group, the Denisovans, were presented on 18 November at a meeting at the Royal Society in London. They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups living in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet unknown human ancestor from Asia. ..
… All humans whose ancestry originates outside of Africa owe about 2% of their genome to Neanderthals; and certain populations living in Oceania, such as Papua New Guineans and Australian Aboriginals, got about 4% of their DNA from interbreeding between their ancestors and Denisovans, who are named after the cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains where they were discovered. The cave contains remains deposited there between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago.
Those conclusions however were based on low-quality genome sequences, riddled with errors and full of gaps, David Reich, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts said at the meeting. His team, in collaboration with Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have now produced much more complete versions of the Denisovan and Neanderthal genomes — matching the quality of contemporary human genomes. The high-quality Denisovan genome data and new Neanderthal genome both come from bones recovered from Denisova Cave.
The new Denisovan genome indicates that this enigmatic population got around: Reich said at the meeting that they interbred with Neanderthals and with the ancestors of human populations that now live in China and other parts of East Asia, in addition to Oceanic populations, as his team previously reported. Most surprisingly, Reich said, the new genomes indicate that Denisovans interbred with another extinct population of archaic humans that lived in Asia more than 30,000 years ago, which is neither human nor Neanderthal.
It would seem that when the world was still in the grip of an ice age 30,000 – 50,000 years ago, the reality of human history was not so far away from Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Ancient history but it was only 1,500 – 2,500 generations ago. Middle Earth was where men could breed with elves and hobbits were an off-shoot of men. The Druedain were also off-shoots of men and some – if not all – orcs were deliberately bred from elves while all trolls and dragons were artificially bred.
From the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment
from The biology of Middle Earth – JRR Tolkien Encyclopedia
Viking slaves were apparently decapitated and buried with their owners as grave gifts, new research shows. The slaves were buried headless. Moreover their diets differed. High status individuals who were accompanied by their – presumed – beheaded and sacrificed slaves, had much more meat in their diets. Their slaves along with other less exalted commoners had a predominantly marine diet.
Meat for the Viking Lords and fish for all the others but slaves had the dubious privilege of accompanying their masters, headless, into the after life!
Elise Naumann, Maja Krzewińska, Anders Götherström, Gunilla Eriksson Slaves as burial gifts in Viking Age Norway? Evidence from stable isotope and ancient DNA analyses Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 41, January 2014, Pages 533–540 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2013.08.022
The burial site of Flakstad is situated on Flakstad Island
PastHorizons reports:
Six Late Iron Age (AD 550–1030) graves were discovered in the northern Norwegian island of Flakstad and partially excavated in the period 1980–1983. There were ten individuals making up three single burials, two double and one triple and unusually for this region the bones were in a good state of preservation.
Although much of the contextual information had been lost due to farming activity, the double and triple burials contained one intact individual in each, along with the post-cranial bones of the other occupants. This situation has been interpreted as decapitated slaves buried with his/her master and the theory is supported by a number of double burials found within Norse societies indicating this practice.
Elise Naumann from the University of Oslo led a study to investigate stable isotope and ancient mitochondrial DNA fragments in order to better understand the social status, geographical and/or familial links within the Flakstad group
Graves with two or more individuals occur relatively frequently all over the Viking World. The choice to bury people together is not coincidental, but rather a deliberate action based on specific relationships between these individuals, which could either be:
- Family members or people with other close connections.
- Sacrifice, where one or more individuals are intended to accompany the “main” burial.
The research has revealed some intriguing results and indicates that the intact person in each grave had distinct isotope values from the other individuals with missing crania; the former having a predominately meat based diet, while the latter – in common with the single grave occupants – had consumed a much higher percentage of marine foodstuffs.
The research study noted that ” in a society where most of the daily activities were dedicated to the acquirement and preparation of food, where food shortage and harsh winters are assumed to have been a constant threat, it would seem likely that a different diet should be detectable in people of low social standing compared to the common population. However, isotopic data in this study show quite the contrary. Despite indications that the headless people in multiple graves might represent low-status members of the population, their diet was equivalent to those in the single burials who are interpreted as representatives of the free population. ”
he ancient DNA results suggest that maternal relations between the individuals buried together are unlikely and backs up the isotope evidence. Therefore, the complete individuals from the multiple burials stand out as a distinct group and may be perceived as having a special social status. This is emphasised by a diet distinctly different from the slaves and the rest of the population and along with the lack of high status artefacts in the multiple burials could indicate that they were not necessarily wealthy, but special in another sense, who were treated differently than others in death as well as in life.
Why the slaves were deprived of their heads is a little unclear. Perhaps it was to make sure that they stayed in the service of their owners in the after-life and didn’t just go wandering about on their own.
The authors conclude:
Results from stable isotope analyses show that individuals in multiple burials most likely were intentionally placed in the same burial, given the pattern in which the only person buried intact in each burial, had distinct isotope values. Thus, persons sharing a grave had distinctly different diets during their lifetime and were unlikely to share maternal kinship. A reasonable explanation for these observations could be that persons buried headless may have been slaves accompanying their masters in the grave. This interpretation corresponds well with other double burials from the Norse World with similar features, where decapitated and sometimes headless people were deposited as grave gifts. The resemblance in diet between headless persons and individuals buried in single burials was unexpected and calls for further investigation in the future. The present study indicates that also other double burials should be investigated using a bioarchaeological approach.
The German language has long had 3 genders. The rules are deceptively simple but I did not find it easy when learning the language.
German, besides capitalizing all nouns, goes them one better and adds a third gender: neuter. The masculine definite article (“the”) is der, feminine is die, and neuter is das.
It gets confusing when a girl can be masculine as in das Madchen or a boy can be feminine (die Junge) or when the sea can be all three genders – der Ozean, das Meer, die See. The sun is feminine (die Sonne) while the moon is masculine (der Mond).
If you’re going to guess, guess der. The highest percentage of German nouns are masculine. … All German nouns, regardless of gender, become die in the nominative and accusative plural. So a noun such as das Jahr (year) becomes die Jahre (years) in the plural. Sometimes the only way to recognize the plural form of a German noun is by the article: das Fenster (window) – die Fenster (windows).
Rivers can be masculine (der Rhein) or feminine (die Donau) but never neuter. But rivers outside Europe are always masculine! Most chemical elements are neuter but some are particularly virile and masculine (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorous). Names of cars are masculine (der Mercedes, der VW, der BMW) but names of motorcycles, ships and aircraft are feminine (die BMW, die Titanic, die Boeing 787).
One in about 2,000 births is a transgender birth to some extent. Germany is now the first European country to acknowledge this legally. The view is growing that the gender paradigm is not the simple dimorphic view but represents a bimodal continuum.
Gender continuum blackless et al
BBC: Germany has become Europe’s first country to allow babies with characteristics of both sexes to be registered as neither male nor female. Parents are now allowed to leave the gender blank on birth certificates, in effect creating a new category of “indeterminate sex”.
The move is aimed at removing pressure on parents to make quick decisions on sex assignment surgery for newborns.
As many as one in 2,000 people have characteristics of both sexes.
The seven-day week must go down as being one of the most “unnatural” yet persistent creations of man. It is very practical of course, but why do we have it?
There are no discernible periodicities that we have been able to find outside ourselves which take 7 days. There are no periodicities within ourselves either that are 7 days or multiples of 7 days. There are no celestial or astronomical cycles in tune with 7 days. There are no movements of the sun or the moon or the stars that give rise to a 7-day period. There are no weather or climate phenomena that repeat with a 7-day period. There are no human behavioural patterns that dance to a 7-day tune. There are no living things that have a 7-day life cycle. (There is a branch of pseudoscience which claims that living cells may be associated with a weekly or a half-weekly cycle – a circaseptan or a circasemiseptan rythm – but this is still in the realms of fantasy).
It would seem logical that our ancestors must have first noted the daily cycle long before they were even recognisable as human. As humans they probably then noted the lunar cycle of about 29 days and the yearly cycle of about 365 days. Our distant ancestors would also have noted that the period of the yearly cycle was a little more than 12 lunar cycles. By about 35,000 years ago we have evidence that the lunar cycle was known and was being tracked. This evidence is in the form of a tally stick with 29 marks – the Lebombo bone.
The development of beliefs in gods of light and separate gods of darkness is not so difficult to understand. The gods of winds and fires and mountains and rivers are equally understandable. The fact that the lunar cycle was rather badly synchronised with the annual solar cycle could well have led to the concept of sun-gods and moon-goddesses, each with their own areas of influence. (In fact, considering the imperfection of the design of the universe which is manifested in the lack of synchronisation between the various celestial cycles, it is difficult to understand how a concept of a single all-powerful creator ever arose. Why would such a poor design be the product of an all-powerful creator? Surely he could have managed the simple 3-body problem to synchronise the various rotations of the earth, the moon and the Sun?)
The invention of the seven-day week can best be dated to be at least 5,000 years ago to the time of the Babylonians. It was certainly long before the Old Testament came to be written to fit with the 7-day week which had already been invented and established. The story goes that
the seven-day week was actually invented by the Assyrians, or by Sargon I (King of Akkad at around 2350 B.C.), passed on to the Babylonians, who then passed it on to the Jews during their captivity in Babylon around 600 B.C. The ancient Romans used the eight-day week, but after the adoption of the Julian calendar in the time of Agustus, the seven-day week came into use in the Roman world. For a while, both the seven and eight day weeks coexisted in the Roman world, but by the time Constantine decided to Christianize the Roman world (around A.D. 321) the eight-day weekly cycle had fallen out of use in favor of the more popular seven-day week.
The idea that the 7-days originates from a division of the lunar cycle into 4 seems improbable. The lunar cycle (synodic period) is 29.5305882 days long. Three weeks of 10 days each or five 6 day weeks would fit better. That the annual cycle of 365.2425 days comes to dominate is not so surprising. Our calendar months are now attuned to the annual cycle and have no direct connection to the lunar cycle. But it is our 7 – day weeks which remain fixed. We adjust the length of our months and have exactly 365 days for each of our normal years. We then add an extra day every 4 years but omit 3 such extra days in every 400 years to cover the error. We make our adjustments by adding a day to the month of February for the identified leap years but we do not mess with the 7 days of the week.
It is far more likely that the 7 days comes from the seven celestial objects visible to the naked eye from earth and probably known to man some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. They were familiar with the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn by then. Naturally each was a god in his own heaven and had to have a day dedicated just to him/her/it. The same 7 celestial objects are used for the days of the week not only in the Greek/Roman Western tradition, but also in Indian astrology. The Chinese /East Asian tradition uses the Sun, Moon, Fire, Water, Wood, Gold and Earth to name the seven days of the week. But this must have come after the 7 day week had already been established elsewhere. (For example, to name up to 10 days they could just have chosen to add days named for the Air, Beasts, Birds ….). Some languages use a numbering system and some use a mixture of all of the above. Rationalists and philosophers and dreamers have tried to shift to 5 and 6, and 8 and 10 day weeks but none of these efforts has managed to challenge the practicality or to dislodge the dominance of the seven-day week.
And now the whole world lives and marches – socially, culturally, politically – to the inexorable beat of the 7-day week.
Just because some long-forgotten astrologer/astronomer decided that he would dedicate each day to one of his seven known celestial gods (and he only had seven)! Even if he (unlikely to have been a “she”) worshipped an Earth-goddess, she must have been considered inferior to the celestial gods. Otherwise we would have had an 8-day week!
An alien race could be excused for concluding that humans must have evolved from once having seven fingers on each limb. Or that we once had seven limbs and have lost 3. Or that humans have an innate circaseptan rythm requiring extra rest and sleep every 7 days. Or that humans have a physiological need to go binge drinking on the sixth day and need the seventh day to recover!
But if the 7-day week is a Divine creation then the aliens will also have a 7-day week and will not be in the least surprised.
The number seven does have a few special properties:
Not forgetting the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But they only came after the seven day week had been invented and introduced.
This is published in PLOS ONE.
Wagnild J, Wall-Scheffler CM (2013) Energetic Consequences of Human Sociality: Walking Speed Choices among Friendly Dyads. PLoS ONE 8(10): e76576. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0076576
I am still trying trying to decide whether this work is incredibly profound or incredibly trivial.
The authors conclude that “When walking with female romantic partners, males tend to slow down by about 7%,”. They claim that “these findings could have implications for both mobility and reproductive strategies of groups, and could help interpret fossil footprint trails and hunter gatherer strategies”.
Their results.
From their Discussion:
….. The data do show however, that there is a decrease in the speed choice between males walking alone and males walking with females; the degree of this speed “accommodation,” however, is linked to the relationship status of the male-female pair, such that males will nearly match the females’ paces only if they are in a romantic relationship. In friendships, the male slows down, but to a lesser (non significant) degree. Furthermore, the differences found between male-male dyads and female-female dyads are also consistent with the hypothesis that social closeness will be mirrored by speed choices. ……. In recent hunter-gatherer populations, males and females often travel similar distances making the energetic consequences of daily mobility an important selection pressure on both sexes. When people of both sexes walk together, either both sexes must pay an energetic penalty by compromising speeds (as seen in the Partner-Friend dyad) or the male must pay an energetic penalty to accommodate the female’s speed (as seen in the Partner-Partner dyad). To alleviate this energetic penalty, many populations travel in single-sex groups in which males travel alone or in pairs and females travel together ……
So I suppose I should conclude that when hunter-gatherers moved from one place to another, the men went first, the women followed and romantic couples followed last – whether holding hands or not?
When walking with female romantic partners, males tend to slow down by about 7%, according to new research published Oct 23 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, by Cara Wall-Scheffler and colleagues at Seattle Pacific University.
People have an optimal walking speed that minimizes energy expenditure. This optimal speed varies with physical features like mass and lower limb length, and therefore males in any given population tend to have faster optimal walking speeds than females. Given this difference, it is not clear what happens in walking groups of mixed-sex. In order to walk together, someone in the pair will need to pay the energetic cost of deviating from his or her optimal speed.
The authors here examined individuals’ speed choices when they walked around a track alone, with a significant other (with and without holding hands), and with friends of the same and opposite sex. They found that males walk at a significantly slower pace to match the females’ paces, only when the female is their romantic partner. The paces of friends of either same or mixed sex walking together did not significantly change, suggesting that significant pace adjustments occur only for romantic partners.
These findings could have implications for both mobility and reproductive strategies of groups, and could help interpret fossil footprint trails and hunter gatherer strategies.
The view that calcified plaque found on Neanderthal teeth came from medicinal plants and vegetables, conjuring up visions of a smart, cultured, sensitive race of homo erectus is being challenged. Laura Buck and Chris Stringer believe these remains have a much more violent source. They came from eating the stomachs of prey which in turn were vegetarian. Neanderthals were only vegetarian by proxy.
Hah! We can now go back to the older vision of Neanderthals being brutal, brutish, insensitive, blood-thirsty carnivores!
(Just as an aside, my grandmother was not only a confirmed vegetarian but a devout Hindu for whom the very thought of eating beef was anathema. She couldn’t quite come to terms with the fact that her grandchildren were carnivorous and that they ate gentle things like chickens and goats. I once tried to convince her that I was more of a vegetarian – by proxy – by eating beef rather than chicken since cows were more vegetarian in their diet than chickens. Chickens after all were known to eat worms and other horrible stuff. She gave up any hopes that I would escape everlasting damnation at that point!).
Past Horizons carries this revisionist view of Neanderthals:
It was the tell-tale tartar on the teeth that told the truth. Or at least, that is what it appeared to do. Researchers – after studying calcified plaque on Neanderthal fossil teeth found in El Sidrón cave in Spain – last year concluded that members of this extinct human species cooked vegetables and consumed bitter-tasting medicinal plants such as chamomile and yarrow.
These were not brainless carnivores, in other words. These were smart and sensitive people capable of providing themselves with balanced diets and of treating themselves with health-restoring herbs, concluded the researchers, led by Karen Hardy at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona. Our vision of these long-extinct people needs adjusting, they argued.
But now this tale of ancient tartar has taken a new twist with two researchers at London’s Natural History Museum challenging the Barcelona group’s conclusions. Dental research does not prove that Neanderthals were self-medicating, vegetable-eating sophisticates, one told the Observer. There are other, equally valid but decidedly more grizzly explanations to account for those microscopic fragments of herbs and plants found in Neanderthal teeth.
In a paper by Laura Buck and Chris Stringer and published in the latest edition of Quaternary Science Reviews, Stringer argues that the tiny pieces of plant found in Neanderthal teeth could have come from a very different source. They may well have become embedded in the stomach contents of deer, bison and other herbivores that had then been hunted and eaten by Neanderthals.
“Many hunter-gatherers, including the Inuit, Cree and Blackfeet, eat the stomach contents of animals such as deer because they are good source of vitamin C and trace elements,” said Stringer. “For example, among the Inuit, the stomach contents of an animal are considered a special delicacy with a consistency and a flavour that is not unlike cream cheese. At least that is what I am told.” ……
…… Stringer and Buck stress that they are not arguing that Neanderthals definitely did not eat vegetables or could not have used certain herbs as medicines. “What we are saying is that the evidence of plant fragments in Neanderthal teeth is simply not strong enough to prove that they did so. There are other explanations, including the proposal that they ate these organs of the animals they killed. They had the stomach for it, if you want to put it that way.”
Many people today seem to like to live in the fear of an impending catastrophe. The fears are all artificial and always include fanciful predictions of doom. Fears of uncontrollable population explosions, food shortages and starvation, of energy crises and depletion of all resources and of course of catastrophic global warming. And they give rise to such utterly useless bodies as the IPCC.
The period from before the last interglacial, the Eemian and through to the current interglacial in the Holocene has seen the rise of Anatomically Modern Humans and, starting from Africa, the peopling of the world. Anatomically modern humans make their appearance in Africa during an even earlier interglacial at around 250,000 years ago. They saw a descent into glacial conditions with global temperatures dropping about 6 °C and sea levels dropping by some 150m. Then around 130,000 to 135,000 years ago a very rapid (relatively) climate change ocurred as the conditions of the Eemian were established. Global temperatures increased by some 7 °C and sea levels rose by upto 170m. Temperatures were warmer than today and sea levels were higher.They didn’t just survive this change – they thrived. They made their way through the Sahara (perhaps through ancient green river corridors) and established themselves in the North and North-East of Africa. At this time sea-levels were high and crossing over into Europe or to Arabia would not have been possible. Both these crossings would have been made at earlier periods by the precursors of AMH and such groups would have given rise to the Neanderthals in Europe and the Denisovans in Asia. When sea levels allowed and perhaps driven by desertfication they crossed into Arabia. From Africarabia they moved across the globe – again perhaps driven by desertification of Arabia.
All these predecessors of ours – some ancestors and some distant cousins – not only survived but actually thrived. They had no IPCC to warn them of looming catastrophe if sea levels rose by 20 cm or temperatures rose by 1.5 °C. Not realising their dangers they still coped with changes of 7 °C and sea-levels of 170 m. Of course they were not without their resources. They had fire. They could probably speak but they had not been contaminated by the written word and were not corrupted by IPCC reports. They may have had some primitive form of rafts but they had no boats and the wheel was unknown. They had stone tools and their version of WMD consisted of many spears. They just coped with the weather and whatever it threw at them. They didn’t waste time predicting the climate and living in the fear of their own predictions. They had other more real fears to worry about.
Former interglacials
The period after the Eemian and upto the present day is particularly interesting. For most of the time the world was in the grip of glacial conditions. Even as the climate changed and the world started warming up, there were sudden spikes of climate in the reverse direction as with the Younger Dryas. It was in this glacial period that AMH left Africa and then peopled the entire globe. It was not a period of stable climate and their expansion and growth took place in an environment of frequent and violent change. Real population increase started some time before the neolithic when we were still hunter-gatherers or semi-nomadic herders.
Age of Human Expansion
Of course in North Africa and the Middle East and Asia where much of the action took place for AMH there was little danger of advancing ice sheets. But there was the constant risk of sudden desertification, the drying up of fresh water resources and the sudden loss or appearance of new coastal land as sea levels increased or decreased. Rainfall patterns would have changed. Landscapes would have been transformed from forests to savannahs to deserts and back again. The only recourse available to humans of that time was to move to a more viable location whenever their survival was threatened.
And as they did that they populated the world and they prospered.
But they could have been stopped in their tracks if they had had the benefit of an IPCC.
After the unmasking of the massive scientific misconduct committed by Dirk Smeesters, Don Poldermans and Diedrik Stapel, the Netherlands can ill afford yet another scandal. But that would be living in hope. Now comes this scandal involving an anthropologist, Mart Bax, which appears to be just as massive a fraud.
It does seem that Dutch Universities are cleansing their academic stables. And by the amount of excrement being found it seems to be quite a task! I don’t think that attitudes and pressures in Dutch scientific research are much different to those in other parts of Europe. Which only suggests that while the Dutch are cleaning house, there is a great deal of muck waiting to be found in other countries.
(The picture in the earlier posting was not of Mart Bax but of the journalist who exposed him. The picture has been removed. My thanks to thinkerandtinker for pointing out my error and my apologies to Mr. Frank van Kolfschooten).
Bax retired as a Professor from the Free University (Vrije Universiteit) of Amsterdam in 2003. But for 15 years – at least – he has been making up data. He has invented places where he has claimed to have carried out research, he has made up titles for himself along with claims of non-existent teaching at prestigious universities. Some 64 papers of his 161 claimed publications do not exist.
Retraction Watch: Bax, who studied an Irish town he called Patricksville, a Dutch pilgrimage site he called Neerdonk, and Medjugorje, a Bosnian pilgrimage site, retired from the Free University in 2002. The university began investigating Bax’s work last year after science journalist Frank van Kolfschooten published Ontspoorde Wetenschap (“Derailed science”). In that book, van Kolfschooten raised questions about Bax’s work into an alleged massacre at Medjugorje during the Bosnian War.
NRC Handelsblad: Again fraud in science is exposed by a university inquiry. Former professor of political anthropology Mart Bax from the Free University has invented research, published nonexistent items put on his list of publications and committed forgery in university documents. That concludes a commission of inquiry headed by historian Prof. Michiel Baud from the University of Amsterdam.
Volkskrant: The retired professor of political anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Mart Bax has committed at least 15 years of serious scientific misconduct, forgery and plagiarism itself. That is the conclusion of the inquiry led by historian Michiel Baud in a report released today. ….
The committee also calls it “very likely” that Bax has made up much of his fieldwork in Brabant and the Bosnian pilgrimage site of Medjugorje from his imagination. But the committee can not formally call it science fraud since Bax insists he was misled by informants themselves. Notes have been destroyed and the informants themselves are untraceable or deceased. The Committee therefore holds it as “serious scientific misconduct “,” deception” and “unethical scientific behavior”.
The k2p blog 