Mantracks
January 10, 2025 12:40 PM Subscribe
The latest from Dan Olson (previously, and previously, and previously, and etc.) is "a True Story of Fake Fossils" - discussing how fossil hunter Roland Bird's chance discovery of some obviously-faked "fossilized human footprints" in 1938 lead to both a major discovery of actual dinosaur footprints, as well as a major expansion of creationist science.
Fair warning that like all Dan Olson's recent works, it's long. But only because it is incredibly exhaustive and well-researched. Some points addressed:
* The faked footprints in question were likely carved by a resident of Glen Rose, Texas, a community with an unusually large and rich trove of dinosaur tracks in the limestone flanking the Paluxy River. Residents of Glen Rose were so used to the tracks that they regularly chipped slabs of limestone up and tried to sell them to tourists during the Great Depression, with some going a step further and faking prints for the tourist trade.
* Roland Bird spotted a set of the fakes in a shop window in New Mexico while on a crosscountry trip, and instantly spotted them as fakes. But when he gently pointed that out to the shopkeeper, the shopkeeper brought out a set of dinosaur prints and asked if they were fakes as well. Bird realized they weren't - and head for Glen Rose to investigate further, ultimately excavating a rich set of tracks. A cast of some of those tracks is on display at the American Museum of Natural History.
* Roland Bird was not taken in by the faked tracks - but a gentleman named Clifford Burdick was. Burdick was a "young Earth Scientist" at a time when that movement was still largely regarded as a fringe movement - but Burdick continued to press his claims, as well as finding "evidence" of other human footprints alongside the dinosaur footprints at Paluxy River.
* Two other young-earth Creationists, John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris, cited Burdick's work in their book The Genesis Flood - a 1961 work that has ultimately cemented young-earth creationism as a point of fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy. They quietly removed this citation in later editions, however, when other scientists visited the site and weren't able to confirm his claims.
* Still other young-earth Creationists still believed, however, producing a film named Footprints In Stone in the early 1970s that purported to prove Burdick's claims. That film itself is somewhat spurious, but still inspired multiple believers - including Carl Baugh, ultimate founder of the Creationism Museum. Among the many examples of "fossil evidence" in the Creation museum are the original faked prints Roland Bird saw; Burdick purchased them at some point in the 1940s, and Baugh later obtained them for his museum.
Fair warning that like all Dan Olson's recent works, it's long. But only because it is incredibly exhaustive and well-researched. Some points addressed:
* The faked footprints in question were likely carved by a resident of Glen Rose, Texas, a community with an unusually large and rich trove of dinosaur tracks in the limestone flanking the Paluxy River. Residents of Glen Rose were so used to the tracks that they regularly chipped slabs of limestone up and tried to sell them to tourists during the Great Depression, with some going a step further and faking prints for the tourist trade.
* Roland Bird spotted a set of the fakes in a shop window in New Mexico while on a crosscountry trip, and instantly spotted them as fakes. But when he gently pointed that out to the shopkeeper, the shopkeeper brought out a set of dinosaur prints and asked if they were fakes as well. Bird realized they weren't - and head for Glen Rose to investigate further, ultimately excavating a rich set of tracks. A cast of some of those tracks is on display at the American Museum of Natural History.
* Roland Bird was not taken in by the faked tracks - but a gentleman named Clifford Burdick was. Burdick was a "young Earth Scientist" at a time when that movement was still largely regarded as a fringe movement - but Burdick continued to press his claims, as well as finding "evidence" of other human footprints alongside the dinosaur footprints at Paluxy River.
* Two other young-earth Creationists, John C. Whitcomb and Henry Morris, cited Burdick's work in their book The Genesis Flood - a 1961 work that has ultimately cemented young-earth creationism as a point of fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy. They quietly removed this citation in later editions, however, when other scientists visited the site and weren't able to confirm his claims.
* Still other young-earth Creationists still believed, however, producing a film named Footprints In Stone in the early 1970s that purported to prove Burdick's claims. That film itself is somewhat spurious, but still inspired multiple believers - including Carl Baugh, ultimate founder of the Creationism Museum. Among the many examples of "fossil evidence" in the Creation museum are the original faked prints Roland Bird saw; Burdick purchased them at some point in the 1940s, and Baugh later obtained them for his museum.
I can't wait to dive into this when I have the time. I do also like his older videos where he's just doing puppetry. Like it's Dan, but Dan is a puppet. The name of channel then also makes sense.
posted by alex_skazat at 1:29 PM on January 10 [3 favorites]
posted by alex_skazat at 1:29 PM on January 10 [3 favorites]
The opening, Lake Minnewanka, section of his flat earth video essay is worth watching all by itself, even if you can't get all the way through the rest of it.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 1:29 PM on January 10 [3 favorites]
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 1:29 PM on January 10 [3 favorites]
When there was only one set of tracks, my son; that’s when the Apatosaurus was carrying you.
posted by TedW at 2:40 PM on January 10 [19 favorites]
posted by TedW at 2:40 PM on January 10 [19 favorites]
Oh I've been waiting for a new vid from him. Thanks for the alert!
posted by Gorgik at 3:16 PM on January 10
posted by Gorgik at 3:16 PM on January 10
Love the subtitle: "Clickbait Title: Footprints in Stone III - The Reckoning".
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:24 PM on January 10
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:24 PM on January 10
So many of Dan Olson's big videos - Flat Earth, Line Goes Up, Financial Advice, and this one - are about people who have a belief that can't really be substantiated but are really afraid that it might not be true, because it would be psychologically (and perhaps financially) devastating to give up that belief. And so they get evangelical about it, maybe partly as a defense mechanism, maybe partly because their belief requires new believers. And you're left wondering, how much of this is grift and flim-flam, how much of it is sincere belief? How much does it actually matter which is which?
I don't really think that religious faith and the spontaneously self-organizing cults around cryptocurrency and meme stocks are the same thing, but I do find the similarities fascinating.
posted by Jeanne at 7:24 PM on January 10 [10 favorites]
I don't really think that religious faith and the spontaneously self-organizing cults around cryptocurrency and meme stocks are the same thing, but I do find the similarities fascinating.
posted by Jeanne at 7:24 PM on January 10 [10 favorites]
they are afraid, and afraid that they are under attack. it's the creationist phantasm.
a phantasm allows someone to soothe their anxieties about contradictions. "There is no logic to the phantasm...It allows one to imagine one's own corpse while still being alive."
Philiosophy Tube : [They are afraid because] "they are trying really hard to not think something."
this is what Olson is getting at:
"Readers didn't need to understand [the Genesis Flood], they didn't need to read it, they just needed to accept it" The Genesis Floodgates
"The 50th edition of the Genesis Flood hasn't been updated in 49 printings, but, why would it be? It doesn't matter.
...The Book doesn't need updates, it doesn't need revisions, it doesn't need to change with changing data. In fact to do so would be counter to the purpose of its existence.
The fact that science changes...is the very thing its audience sees as a weakness. So naturally, a science textbook for anti-science must never change."
posted by eustatic at 8:19 PM on January 10 [4 favorites]
a phantasm allows someone to soothe their anxieties about contradictions. "There is no logic to the phantasm...It allows one to imagine one's own corpse while still being alive."
Philiosophy Tube : [They are afraid because] "they are trying really hard to not think something."
this is what Olson is getting at:
"Readers didn't need to understand [the Genesis Flood], they didn't need to read it, they just needed to accept it" The Genesis Floodgates
"The 50th edition of the Genesis Flood hasn't been updated in 49 printings, but, why would it be? It doesn't matter.
...The Book doesn't need updates, it doesn't need revisions, it doesn't need to change with changing data. In fact to do so would be counter to the purpose of its existence.
The fact that science changes...is the very thing its audience sees as a weakness. So naturally, a science textbook for anti-science must never change."
posted by eustatic at 8:19 PM on January 10 [4 favorites]
After watching mostly videos about people trying to find a personal solution to the housing crisis and people losing their homes to things related to the climate crisis (combining aggressively with forty years of bad economic policy), this decades-long attack on science and truth is a nice change of pace.
posted by krisjohn at 10:53 PM on January 10
posted by krisjohn at 10:53 PM on January 10
Jeanne: And you're left wondering, how much of this is grift and flim-flam, how much of it is sincere belief? How much does it actually matter which is which?
I think that it's some toxic amalgam of both. I'm reminded of Theranos; Elizabeth Holmes seemed to believe that the end fully justified the means--"fake it until you make it" included the belief that they would eventually make it, even as the fakery reached staggering proportions. It was the secular version of "God will know his own."
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:10 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]
I think that it's some toxic amalgam of both. I'm reminded of Theranos; Elizabeth Holmes seemed to believe that the end fully justified the means--"fake it until you make it" included the belief that they would eventually make it, even as the fakery reached staggering proportions. It was the secular version of "God will know his own."
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:10 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]
I have a message, in advance, for that classic mefi member who clicks on a link, sees that it is a video, and that the video is a long one, and who then immediately rushes back to complain about it, because it is very important that we all know that you don't have time for watching a long video and is there a transcript. The message is as follows:
Nobody cares about your opinion on video length.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:05 AM on January 11 [6 favorites]
Nobody cares about your opinion on video length.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 3:05 AM on January 11 [6 favorites]
Mod note: Hi! Making a comment about how you think some MeFites might respond isn't necessary, as it can create the very dynamic you're trying to avoid. Let's just talk about the subject of the post and let the conversation go where it may!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:48 AM on January 11 [4 favorites]
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:48 AM on January 11 [4 favorites]
I was taken to Church of Christ as a kid (and I'm SURE I saw some of those mail order movies at church events), and then in the middle part of the 90s I was on the very atheist part of the internet, including an "errancy" e-mail discussion group so for once with a Dan Olson exposé there was not some unexpected depth (for me) for just how bad and intellectually dishonest it all is. Heck, to be honest I was still expecting 'the twist' when the video wrapped up. Still, a good video and a good reminder; and if you're just learning about YEC today, umm, I guess you're one of the lucky ones.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 5:25 PM on January 11
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 5:25 PM on January 11
I am now thinking of building a hyperbaric chamber for myself, I could use some regression.
posted by maxwelton at 6:55 PM on January 11 [1 favorite]
posted by maxwelton at 6:55 PM on January 11 [1 favorite]
Me, about 15 minutes in: "Huh, this all seems pretty reasonable, selling the footprints to tourists is kinda sketchy, but why is Dan making a video about this? Doesn't seem like his usual thing."
Me, at 21:36: "Oh."
posted by Frayed Knot at 8:23 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]
Me, at 21:36: "Oh."
posted by Frayed Knot at 8:23 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]
When Dan makes a video, I’m like an animal who finds a really good smell and rolls around in it so I can carry the smell for days and weeks. Praise unto tiny baby dino.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 10:46 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 10:46 AM on January 12 [2 favorites]
In college I had a couple friends who grew up under the shadow of the Southern Baptist church. They had some videos from Carl Baugh and we used to mock them. It became a vein of inside jokes. So when I started this video I kept thinking about Baugh and his manner of speaking, and his hyperbaric chambers, and his crystalline canopies, and all his hilarious fantasy worldbuilding with the antediluvian world (which was TBH also pretty Edenic which feels like a theological problem) where everything that seems bad now was actually good. For example most of all how snakes were actually nice little guys coming to inject medicine into you. We talked about going down to the creation science museum, but not seriously of course.
So when Dan Olson finally got around to Baugh in the video I was a-hootin and a-hollerin.
All that aside, even in kind of boring videos Olson has insightful things to say and a couple sharp observations, and it was nice to have it all put into context.
posted by fleacircus at 12:30 PM on January 12 [1 favorite]
So when Dan Olson finally got around to Baugh in the video I was a-hootin and a-hollerin.
All that aside, even in kind of boring videos Olson has insightful things to say and a couple sharp observations, and it was nice to have it all put into context.
posted by fleacircus at 12:30 PM on January 12 [1 favorite]
Okay this was fantastic, and I'm so glad I took the time to watch. At first I wasn't going to--I grew up a Baptist kid going to Baptist school, and so didn't expect to learn anything, but the history of the idea of these tracks is so interesting, and takes me back to some of those Stephen Jay Gould essays where he explores where some of our bad science came from.
The part about the book not being updated really struck me too. I know some kids who are spouting literally the same stuff I would've spouted as a good little private school student back then, and it's weird, because literally everything about the world has changed since I was a kid in the 70s, and yet this idea--"maybe a flood killed the dinosaurs!" will outlive me. Finding good current books on science for kids is such a challenge. All the books I devoured in high school are just outdated now, we've furthered astronomy and paleontology and our understanding of what makes up atoms to the point that the old books are little more than curiosities now. And yet "then they found a dinosaur footprint on top of a human footprint--checkmate, evolutionists!" is always going to be freely available in book form.
posted by mittens at 1:46 PM on January 12
The part about the book not being updated really struck me too. I know some kids who are spouting literally the same stuff I would've spouted as a good little private school student back then, and it's weird, because literally everything about the world has changed since I was a kid in the 70s, and yet this idea--"maybe a flood killed the dinosaurs!" will outlive me. Finding good current books on science for kids is such a challenge. All the books I devoured in high school are just outdated now, we've furthered astronomy and paleontology and our understanding of what makes up atoms to the point that the old books are little more than curiosities now. And yet "then they found a dinosaur footprint on top of a human footprint--checkmate, evolutionists!" is always going to be freely available in book form.
posted by mittens at 1:46 PM on January 12
This was fantastic. What a ride. Thanks go towards Folding Ideas yet again. He's really found a niche in "Grifts Through History", and the whole Creationism turn was WILD.
WILD.
posted by alex_skazat at 11:29 AM on January 13 [2 favorites]
WILD.
posted by alex_skazat at 11:29 AM on January 13 [2 favorites]
He's really found a niche in "Grifts Through History"
Heh; every time he releases a video, it inspires me to follow up with a rewatch his earlier two-part work about The Cremaster Cycle, which is absolutely a grift and I felt seen when I saw Olson's takedowns.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:53 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]
Heh; every time he releases a video, it inspires me to follow up with a rewatch his earlier two-part work about The Cremaster Cycle, which is absolutely a grift and I felt seen when I saw Olson's takedowns.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:53 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]
« Older It is written in the Book of Stimpy | what the fuck are we doing anymore (yes this is... Newer »
posted by skynxnex at 1:05 PM on January 10 [2 favorites]