DaveWells.us

I’ve spent much of today watch­ing over an empty or nearly empty com­puter lab. It’s between sum­mer school ses­sions, so there are hardly any FSU stu­dents around. The hordes of high school­ers here for sum­mer music camp is a dif­fer­ent story — but, they don’t get to use the lab.
As I’ve been sit­ting here, dur­ing my own shift and while cov­er­ing those of two of my cowork­ers, I’ve done a vari­ety of things to amuse myself: play­ing Text Twist, surf­ing the web, talk­ing to Jen­nie, and read­ing. My cur­rent book, as some of you have prob­a­bly noticed in my side­bar, is enti­tled “Colum­bus Was Last: From 200,000 B.C. to 1492, A Hereti­cal His­tory of Who Was First,” by Patrick Huyghe.
Warn­ing: from this point on, I’m going to get nerdy
Huyghe starts out with the true dis­cov­er­ers of Amer­ica: the peo­ples we now refer to as Native Amer­i­cans. Funny how that works, huh? The book talks all about Beringia, the once extant land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that has long been assumed to be the point of entry for early humans trav­el­ing from Asia. It also exam­ines evi­dence of entry by coastal sea travel. Huyghe then goes on to dis­cuss archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence that chal­lenges the old arrival date (ca. 11,500 years BP) of humans on this con­ti­nent.
This is where he started to lose me. Some of the evi­dence he presents is fairly com­pelling (but still con­tro­ver­sial), such as exca­va­tions at Monte Verde in Chile and the Mead­ow­croft rock­shel­ter in Penn­syl­va­nia. These sites seem to push human arrival back a few thou­sand years from the pre­vi­ously accepted date. As I was read­ing about these, I started doing rudi­men­tary online fact-checking. From what I was able to find (admit­tedly, not in any­thing so reli­able as peer-reviewed jour­nals), Huyghe is pretty much right on the mark. He tends, how­ever, to empha­size the more fan­tas­tic and con­tro­ver­sial dates and evi­dence — some­thing I bet the archae­ol­o­gists them­selves would hes­i­tate to do. But then, he starts talk­ing about Cal­ico Lake, a site in the Mojave Desert in Cal­i­for­nia. This site has been (he admits, not com­pletely reli­ably) dated to 200,000–300,000 years BP. How­ever, the only arti­facts the site has pro­duced are pieces of rock that some argue are prim­i­tive stone tools, and oth­ers argue are just pieces of rock. It’s very obvi­ous, how­ever, that Mr. Huyghe wants to believe.
The next chap­ter dis­cusses sim­i­lar­i­ties between pot­tery in Ecuador and Japan approx­i­mately 5,000 years BP. Huyghe makes good argu­ments of mor­pho­log­i­cal sim­i­lar­i­ties and the fea­si­bil­ity (based on weather and cur­rents) of a sea jour­ney from Japan to Ecuador with the Japan­ese mar­itime tech­nol­ogy of the period. But again, he grav­i­tates towards the more fan­tas­tic expla­na­tions with­out offer­ing much in the way of alter­nate the­o­ries. The next topic is sup­posed Chi­nese explo­ration — delib­er­ate, methodic explo­ration — of North Amer­ica about 4000 years BP. The evi­dence here seems quite weak and cir­cum­stan­tial. The inter­pre­tive stretches remind me very much of Gavin Menzies’s book 1421: The Year China Dis­cov­ered Amer­ica, which makes sim­i­larly dubi­ous claims for a more recent Chi­nese land­ing in Amer­ica.
It’s at this point in my inter­net fact-checking that I decide to get some facts on Mr. Huyghe. His bio on the book jacket is suit­ably vague, call­ing him only a “free­lance sci­ence writer” and list­ing some of the pub­li­ca­tions for which he has writ­ten — no list of other pub­li­ca­tions. So, I went to Ama­zon. Now I under­stand why he seems so dearly to want to believe even the least well-supported the­o­ries. I present to you rep­re­sen­ta­tive selec­tions from the oeu­vre of Patrick Huyghe, cour­tesy of Amazon:

•The Field Guide to Lake Mon­sters, Sea Ser­pents, and Other Mys­tery Denizens of the Deep
•The Field Guide To UFOs: A Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Of Var­i­ous Uniden­ti­fied Aer­ial Phe­nom­ena Based On Eye­wit­ness Accounts
•The Field Guide to Big­foot, Yeti and Other Mys­tery Pri­mates World­wide
•The Field Guide to Ghost and Other Appari­tions
•Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat

That’s it. His cred­i­bil­ity is gone. In my mind, he is now irrev­o­ca­bly assigned to the ranks of Erich von Daniken and Gra­ham Han­cock. These are the guys you see on the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel espous­ing the notion that early civ­i­liza­tions (ie: ancient Egypt and var­i­ous Mesoamer­i­can cul­tures) couldn’t pos­si­bly have built their great tem­ples and mon­u­ments with­out help from aliens or Atlanteans (who came from Mars, any­way). Every time I’m brows­ing the his­tory sec­tion of a book­store and I see one of their books, I’m over­come by a cold rage and the desire to cre­ate a sep­a­rate “Crack­pot” shelf for their ben­e­fit.
So, I’m going to fin­ish the book, even if I scoff the whole way through it. I’ve never delib­er­ately failed to fin­ish a book. Besides, he can’t butcher Leif Eric­s­son and the Viking voy­ages to New­found­land, can he? Can he?