Sometimes scientists don’t want to know

Anthropology involves puzzles that are thought to be unsolvable. If puzzles get solved by an outsider, anthropology will lose face and some of its funding, and the expertise of many scientists will no longer be valued. 

I think I have solved two major scientific puzzles in the last few years. But specialists will not communicate with me, and journal editors will not consider my manuscripts for publication. It's an example of NIMBY (Not In My Backyard): sometimes uncomfortable errors should be corrected, but scientists and journals don’t want to be associated with them. Therefore I have been documenting my research on personal web sites: Paleohuman.com and VikingRockArt.com. 

The first puzzle involves human origins — where and why did we evolve to be so different from all other primates? My heterodox suggestion is a Galapagos-like scenario. A few chimpanzees probably rafted and became stranded on Bioko, a barren volcanic island about 7 million years ago. They resorted to living on raw sea-turtle meat and seaweed. Their descendants lived mostly in the water, which can explain the evolution of all our unique human features, such as loss of fur, loss of strength and running speed, long canine teeth, large brain, subcutaneous fat (blubber), bipedal gait, protruding nose, loss of estrus signals and babies that are helpless on land but enjoy water. 

With no large predators, life was easy for about 6 million years on the 34 kilometers of beaches of the warm rainy island. The paleohumans had no need for fire, fur, clothes, or weapons. The population was dense, like with marine iguanas on Galapagos. The main activities were socializing and playing, singing, and talking, so the paleohumans also evolved a facility for language. Some left Bioko early (Erectus, Denisovans, Neanderthals), but many left only about 50,000-70,000 years ago. They needed to quickly invent clothes, weapons, and new vocabularies in order to survive. Most migrated around the coastlines of Africa and Eurasia. Those Pleistocene coastlines are now submerged due to sea level rise.

The second puzzle involves Scandinavian petroglyphs (helleristninger) — who made them and why? My heterodox suggestion is that they were made by only a few artists in the Iron Age, not the Stone Age or Bronze Age. They traveled by longship before sails were invented, and used hammers and iron boat nails to chisel their art in places they visited. Pointed rocks are too brittle to be used as chisels. 

Guus Wellesen ved NTNU ble verdensmester i en uvanlig gren

I think I can recognize the work of seven traveling artists, whom I name Stickman, Sydvester, Texter, Hjortmann, Whaler, Inliner, and Outliner. Stickman probably invented this form of wall art, working with the soft rocks of Stjørdal and Steinkjer, before moving to Østfold and Bohuslän southern Norway and western Sweden where he made helleristninger at thousands of sites in hard granites. He was also commissioned to make the art for the kings grave of Kivik. No petroglyphs are known in Aust-Agder, central Sweden, or Finland, probably because none of the petroglyph artists went there. 

Alternative paradigms always seem preposterous when they first appear. That was the case in the history of geology with Alfred Wegener's paradigm of continental drift (plate tectonics) in 1912. The strong evidence pointing to continental drift was ignored, and the model was kept hidden or ridiculed for 50 years. My previous research involved that history, which gave me insight into how and why scientists and journals avoid paradigm shifts. I have documented that research at Krilldrift.com. 

I think the first priority of most scientists and scientific journals is to maintain and promote their own reputations. Usually reputations are improved by publishing new evidence and interpretations. But paradigm shifts are a disaster for the establishment, so the evidence for them is typically ignored.