Passing Strangeness

By Paul Drye

If you're an aficionado of weird history you know about the Voynich Manuscript, but how about the Rohonc Codex? Care for something a bit different, something that explores things no-one has heard about? Unrepentant Rebels once tried to kidnap Lincoln's body, for example, and there's a copy of the Eiffel Tower under the foundations of Wembley Stadium. Meticulously researched and 100% historical.

Other topics include: the ocean-swallowed lands off the coasts of Cornwall and Italy, the colony set up by samurai fleeing the Japanese Civil War, the time the Ancient Chinese and Romans may have got into a pitched battle in Central Asia, the various times the Earth may (or may not) have had a second Moon, and many more.

No Atlantis or ghosts here! Passing Strangeness is a fascinating and factual journey into the truly odd bits of history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Drye
• Release date: Jul 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9780994780904

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Passing Strangeness

Copyright  © 2015 Paul Drye

All Rights Reserved. Please treat this book as you would a real book.

Baggage Books

505 Locust Street, Unit 707

Burlington, Ontario

Canada  L7S 1X6

First e-Book edition: July 2015

ISBN: 978-0-9947809-0-4

Preface and Acknowledgments

I’m a child of the 1970s. While that decade is primarily remembered for its disco and polyester clothes, one of its forgotten characteristics was an embrace of the paranormal. The late 1960s’ interest in alternative religions and ways of life had, under the pressure of oil shocks and the American retreat in Vietnam, taken a millenarian turn. It was everywhere. As old religions lost followers the market was flooded with mythology dressed up as science. There were comic books about close encounters, books about aliens who founded human civilization, movies about demonic possession. The Hardy Boys saw a UFO and the Bionic Man fought a Bigfoot from outer space.

I grew up steeped in this, and became fascinated by what can only be called Alternative History. By the early 1980s I also learned that it was also easily proven wrong. Ape Men did not wander the Himalayas, the airplane was not invented by Egyptians, and Ancient Peruvians did not build a spaceport for aliens—no matter how much I wished it were so. Nevertheless, I missed the stories even if I dismissed their facts.

I eventually found that there were small places where the largely separate worlds of the weird and the historical did overlap, in topics such as Nikola Tesla, the Maya, and the obsession with the occult in some parts of the Nazi government. What I noticed, though, was that only a small set of topics would be covered any time a book discussed the kind of history I found most interesting. Yes, Tesla was a fascinating character, but he gets less so the tenth time you read about him. History is a vast topic. Weren’t there other things to explore?

As it happens, there are—many of them. But they’re almost entirely scattered across the corpus of general history books. In pulling together the forty-five topics that make up Passing Strangeness I had to read all or part of literally hundreds of books, papers, and magazine articles. In many cases I was helped by the recent trend towards digitizing these sources and making them available on the Internet. I’m not sure that a book like this could have been written even as little as five years ago unless its author had, as Douglas Adams once put it, a brain the size of a planet. I’m grateful every day for resources like Google Books and JSTOR that can make up for that deficiency.

In numerous places I’ve been assisted by friends and acquaintances who brought their own skills, knowledge, and enthusiasm to bear on some part of the project. In particular I’d like to thank Randy McDonald, Kenneth Hite, Andrew Reeves, and Robert Prior. My family also deserves considerable thanks, since I had a bad habit of blathering on about whatever thing I was writing about at that given moment and they never once asked me to stop it. Besides these there are many others deserving, including the people who took the time to comment on the essays as they were written. They would always save me when I was suffering from that most insidious of authorial maladies, the conviction that everything you write is atrocious. For them and everyone else not specifically mentioned I say Thank you, you know who you are.

So here you have it. Forty-five essays on strange incidents and happenings during the long ride of the human race, the majority of which I’m hoping will be new or obscure to even the most ardent reader of history. Enjoy!

A Note for Readers Using iBooks

This book discusses quite a few places and people for which English and its standard 26-letter alphabet aren't quite sufficient to spell. While iBooks can cleanly handle minor variations such as the accents and special characters used in French and German, in the case of languages such as Turkish and Japanese it has more trouble. If you notice that certain characters are standing out from their words, you're likely using one of the iBooks fonts that is baffled by non-Western European languages. The author recommends switching to Palatino, which is much more resilient.

Early Origins

Where It All Began: Göbekli Tepe

The top of a carved megalith at Göbekli Tepe. Based on an image by Flickr user Verity Cridland, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

In the last few decades it’s become reasonable to think that our views on early civilization are stereotyped by events in ancient Mesopotamia. Since the 1960s, archaeologists studying civilizations elsewhere have made more than a few discoveries which are downright odd by the standards of the Fertile Crescent. To give you one example, there’s the controversial (yet still respectable) theory that Peruvian civilization invented farming not for food but for fibres. The Humboldt Current off the west coast of South America is the most productive marine ecosystem in the world, and it’s certainly possible to support a lot of people by fishing in it. So when archaeological digs in Peru keep suggesting that cotton may have been farmed before anything else, and that it was used to make fishing nets, people are probably right to be suspicious of the conventional idea that you can’t get the hallmarks of civilization—writing, organized religion, craftsmen, monumental architecture, and so on—without growing food first.

As it happens, the assumed sequence is being challenged even in the region that first led archaeologists to suggest it. Starting in the 1990s, the previously obscure archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey has been twisting the very beginning of history into a new shape.

Even though it was excavated nearly fifty years ago, Çatal Hüyük[1] is still the name that pops up most often when discussing the age of civilization in the Fertile Crescent. It was founded some time around 7500 BC, and no other site has pushed that age much further back. The earliest signs of permanent settlement at Jericho—a considerably smaller town—are around 8000 BC. So it came as some surprise about fifteen years ago when word started spreading of a monument site that was coming back with carbon dates in the vicinity of 8800 to 9100 BC. This was Göbekli Tepe (Potbellied Hill, in Turkish), previously dismissed as a medieval-era cemetery but that on close examination proved to be quite unlike anything seen before.

The tepe is a limestone hill about ten miles from the city of Şanlıurfa (better-known in the West as Edessa) and not far from the border with Syria. On top of the hill is a megalithic site, apparently a temple.

The main part of the site consists of rounded open courtyards with dry stone walls, up to twenty meters in diameter. The walls are punctuated with T-shaped pillars, made of one rectangular stone slab balanced (on edge!) on another; larger megaliths of the same type are inside the courtyards. The larger stone blocks weigh about seven tons; one, still attached to the native rock from which it was being quarried, would have been thirty tons and seven meters high. The sides of the rock slabs are elaborately decorated with carvings of animals, people, and geometric designs. Some of the interior pillars are topped or otherwise adorned by carved animal statues, including lions and lizards. The stone enclosures and their pillars are the most noticeable artifacts at Göbekli Tepe, but there are loose items of other sorts too, including the oldest known statue on Earth.

All of this work was done in the period immediately following the Younger Dryas, the final blast of the last Ice Age, which could be telling. One theory on the development of agriculture is that human populations grew quickly as the climate finally warmed and rains came more regularly to the Middle East. At first the local cultures could support themselves as hunter-gatherers—as they always had—but eventually it became necessary to develop agriculture in the face of a rising population freed from the effects of the distant ice fields. Others argue that this is putting the cart before the horse. Completely modern human beings are something like 130,000 years old. Glacial maximums have come and gone and populations had surely hit the limits of hunting and gathering in the local area any number of times before. What was different this time?

Göbekli Tepe sits prettily in the narrow window between the end of the Younger Dryas and the domestication of the Fertile Crescent’s important crops. The head of the excavation team, Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute, has suggested that this is not a coincidence. As the temple grew more complex, it was necessary to feed more workers and it outstripped what hunter-gatherers could bring in. Agriculture developed as a way of intensifying the amount of food produced and so the fraction of it that could be devoted to a spiritual construction.

That’s a big claim, so it’s worth examining more closely. There are some who argue that Göbekli Tepe is the product of farmers, not hunter-gatherers. If the temple’s people were farmers, though, they would have been growing rye; it’s controversial, but even at the hill temple’s distant era it may have been domesticated on a small scale in Syria to the south. Rye has generally been pooh-poohed by people studying the history of agriculture, as it was something of a dead end and quite a minor part of human diet until farming took hold in Northern Europe thousands of years later. Emmer wheat has always been the grain of interest to archaeologists, as it was the earliest one grown that had the yields to support whole civilizations; it was the primary grain of Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilization. But emmer comes onto the scene too late to help with the bulk of Göbekli Tepe’s building, somewhere around 8800 BC or afterward. Barring further discoveries that overturn the fairly well-established early history of cultivation, it’s rye or nothing.

That leads to the issue of the food remnants have been turned up in the few percent of Göbekli Tepe unearthed so far: plants and animals (including a large fraction of crows, whatever that might mean), all of wild types, and no sign of rye as a staple crop during the temple’s lifetime.

On the other hand, wheat might work out if you think it’s a response to a desire to build higher and better at Göbekli Tepe, after centuries of getting by without agriculture. In 1997 Science published a paper titled Site of Einkorn Wheat Domestication Identified by DNA Fingerprinting (einkorn being the other kind of wheat besides emmer that was grown in the early Fertile Crescent). The site identified was the Karacadağ Hills. Standing on top of Göbekli Tepe, one can see the Karacadağ Hills—they’re that close. Circumstantial evidence is not proof, but if the two events aren’t related that’s an amazing coincidence.

Besides agriculture it’s worth spelling out what the people who built Göbekli Tepe didn’t have, as it illustrates just how far back in the past they lived. There was no metal, except for rare natural bits of gold and copper that were used for jewellery, and bronze smelting was three thousand years in the future. The site’s carvers worked without metal tools. Further, they had another 4500 years to go before wheeled vehicles were invented, and there weren’t even any draft animals to drag their megaliths around; cows, and so oxen, were domesticated a mere five hundred years after Göbekli Tepe, but horses and donkeys were five thousand years away when the temple was at its height. Writing? Five thousand years to go too. The invention of writing is about as close to the 21st century, going in the opposite direction, as it is to these people.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that excavators have only hit the bottom of one Göbekli Tepe’s enclosures. There’s the distinct possibility that the hill’s religious significance stretched back well into the Upper Paleolithic, and that the monumental architecture is just the final flowering of a tradition older than anything this side of Lascaux; those famous cave paintings are, after all, only 7000 years older than the dates already being batted about for Göbekli Tepe.

And after thinking about the start of the temples, think of their end: it was just as mysterious as its beginning. Sometime not long after 8000 BC they were covered deliberately with several hundred tons of soil. There are no obvious signs of violence or displacement on any structure uncovered by archaeologists, so it seems the locals simply decided they wanted to bury it. With writing so far in their future there’s no hope of any inscriptions explaining why, so it’s likely we’ll never know what they were thinking. On the other hand, the change corresponds to when fields of emmer wheat were spreading rapidly across the area. It’s entirely possible that, having crossed one of the great thresholds in human history, they were drawing a line under their old way of life before embracing the new one they’d discovered.

L’Arbre du Ténéré and the Saharan Pump

L'Arbre du Ténéré, a now-gone tree that was more than 200 kilometers away from any other. Photograph taken by French government workers in 1939, now in the Public Domain.

There’s a strange scrap-metal sculpture deep in the southern part of the Sahara—the Ténéré Desert of Niger—with a base made of metal drums filled with concrete and covered with graffiti. A steel pole rises from it for about fifteen feet, and its top is a spiky accumulation of fake branches. It looks like the offspring of a street sign and a terminally ill tree, and the resemblance isn’t coincidental: it’s a memorial to the now-deceased Arbre du Ténéré, an umbrella thorn acacia tree that once stood there, the only tree for more than 200 kilometers. For at least a century it was a landmark of the approximate halfway point of the azalai, the salt-and-millet caravan between the towns of Agadez and Bilma.

That stretch of desert is as dry as any in the world. The water table is 35 meters below the surface, as discovered when the French government (which ruled Niger as part of French West Africa) dug a well for caravaners back in the 1930s. While doing so they discovered that the roots of the tree had delved that far as well, keeping it alive despite the desiccated conditions. That leads to the big question about L’Arbre du Ténéré: what did it do for water until it reached that level? The effort involved is clearly a sufficient barrier to prevent any other tree from growing in the region, which leads to the related question of how a seed even got several days journey from any possible parent let alone manage to take root.

That the Tree was there, and that it was alone, are clues to the solution of a lot of ecological mysteries. Start with the fact that modern human beings emerged from Africa some 130,000 years ago and spread to the rest of the world. This was once a controversial statement since creatures very much like human beings—Homo erectus—left Africa and colonized Asia and Europe in a very similar fashion two million years ago. It was once thought (and some anthropologists still argue) that we evolved from those original settlers, but DNA studies in the last few decades now strongly suggest that we replaced them after repeating the cycle of expansion they first introduced.

Either explanation runs up against the same problem, though. There’s evidence that the Sahara Desert is at least seven million years old. How did primitive people get across it? They had no way of knowing that Asia and Europe were on the other side and were nice places to live. The idea that we might have evolved from H. erectus does at least have the advantage of only requiring this unlikely event to happen once. Now the new evidence says it happened at least twice. Something is going on.

Don’t focus entirely on Homo sapiens sapiens. Dwelling on our own ancestors will keep us from realizing that there are numerous other species that have apparently developed south of the Sahara and made it north to the rest of the Old World. Lions are originally African, but spread north at about the same time as H. erectus; they were found in southern Europe and the Middle East until humans hunted them to extinction. Ostriches had a similar distribution, with the last known member of the northern species dying in Jordan in 1966. Note that the stereotypical tree under which savannah-dwelling lions lounge is an acacia, the same as the Tree of Ténéré. Oryx antelopes live on the southern and northern fringes of the Sahara, as well as Arabia. Old world cotton species are native to sub-Saharan Africa and, more familiarly, spread from the Indus River valley (in modern Pakistan) after the invention of cotton textiles.

So instead of one or two species of human making the trek across the Sahara, somehow all of these species made it. Some of them are plants, which are not noted for trekking. How did they do it?

The answer seems to be that they didn’t cross the desert at all. The Sahara is not always stone-dry, instead cycling back and forth between relatively hospitable savannah and the desert-like conditions seen today. Even now the desert is approaching a peak: it’s an open question whether or not Lake Chad will disappear entirely in the next few decades[2]. But for four thousand years until about 3000 BC the Sahara was in a greener phase, the Neolithic Subpluvial, that fed the lake. Since then the grasslands have been falling back, but the Ténéré Desert is not too far from the modern-day southern edge of the desert. The water table was higher than it is now, and sometime in the 19th century it would have been acceptable—just barely—to a particularly drought-resistant acacia seedling. There would have been others like it relatively nearby, but even under the best of conditions acacias are widely spaced. As the others would have been older than the new seedling too, they would have succumbed to age or drought over time, eventually leaving the Tree of Ténéré to its isolation.

This current climate cycle is not the only one, or even the only one named. Before the Neolithic Subpluvial there was the Mousterian Pluvial. Prior to it was the Abbassia Pluvial, which began 120,000 years ago. In other words, modern human beings left Africa during a dry period between the Abbassia Pluvial and the wet period that was in turn before it. This is the Saharan Pump in action: cycle after cycle, the changing climate sucks in sub-Saharan species then expels them into Asia. When northern Africa has enough moisture, it’s colonized by species from the south. When the rains go away some return south, but others are forced north. All the indigenous societies of Europe and Asia (and via Asia, the Americas and Australia) came to be because refugees from the Sahara had to escape in one direction or another when the rains failed them, and some of them picked the way opposite to the one from which their distant ancestors had arrived.

In the end, L’Arbre du Ténéré died and had to be replaced by a monument because of the Saharan Pump. It just wasn’t from lack of water as one might expect, but by a cause more indirect. After the pump pushed H. sapiens into the north all those millennia ago, those people eventually developed agriculture with the species they found there, then moved on to cities, writing, mathematics, and more. And in the north those people eventually developed industrial technology. A piece of this was the automobile, and the camels of the Agadez-to-Bilma azalai were replaced by trucks. In 1973 a driver ran his truck into the Tree, killing it. Its dead remains are now on display in a museum in Niamey, the capital of Niger.

The Land Beneath the Waves

Beneath Land’s End and Scilly rocks

Sunk lies a town that Ocean mocks.

—Unattributed rhyme from Legend Land, Volume 2, George Basil Barham, published in 1924

The Isles of Scilly barely enter into history. About the only major event associated with them was the Scilly Naval Disaster of 1707, when the gloriously named Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell sailed a significant fraction of the British Navy into their shallow waters, losing four ships and approximately 1,400 sailors’ lives—including his own[3]. The disaster led to the solution of the Longitude Problem by means of naval chronometers[4], and as these precise clocks spread they and their descendants revolutionized war, industry, trade, and science. Thank Admiral Shovell when the alarm clock wakes you tomorrow morning. However, the other particularly interesting thing about the Isles of Scilly looks back into the past rather than forward into the Industrial Age.

Britain is lousy with towns and even entire lands lost to the sea. H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by the story of Dunwich in Suffolk: one of the most important towns in medieval England, it was progressively swept into the ocean after a storm surge hit it in 1286. A bit further east the central part of the North Sea covers Doggerland, which was above sea level during the last Ice Age and only submerged about 6500 BC; the author owns a chunk of mammoth tusk dredged up from the area. The effect of the Ice Age on Britain hit Scilly too, but in a less obvious way. The southern half of Britain is further underwater than it should be after accounting for the melting of ancient ice caps, while the north is, in places, actually higher than it was at the Last Glacial Maximum, 20,000 years ago. This is because one of the ice caps was actually on Scotland and Northern England, and the weight of the ice pressed that section of the island down. Now that the ice has been removed, Britain has been slowly rebalancing itself, and the southern reaches are subsiding as the north rebounds, like a great tectonic see-saw.

This post-glacial rebound is continuing even now, so the Isles of Scilly—literally the most southern point of England—have changed significantly well into the last couple of millennia. The present-day Isles are