@article{crossref1937cavemen, title = "Cavemen", year = "1937", journal = "Design", url = "https://doi.org/10.1080/00119253.1937.10741419", doi = "10.1080/00119253.1937.10741419", number = "6", pages = "1-1", volume = "39" } @article{doi1010029781444300369, author = "Rhodes, F. and Stone, R. O. and Malamud, B.", title = "Language of the Earth", year = "1980", url = "https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781444300369.fmatter", doi = "10.1002/9781444300369", is_oa = "true", semanticscholar_citation_count = "3", semanticscholar_id = "165e32f64e4bf1bb10f680537768c83e8a8cd3d8" } @misc{czerkas1982dinosaurs1, author = "Czerkas, S. J. and Glut, D", title = "Dinosaurs, Mammoths and Cavemen", year = "1982", howpublished = "The Art of Charles R. Knight: New York, E.P. Dutton, Inc", note = "talkorigins\_source = {true}; raw\_reference = {Czerkas, S. J., and Glut, D., 1982, Dinosaurs, Mammoths and Cavemen: The Art of Charles R. Knight: New York, E.P. Dutton, Inc.}" } @article{hayden1983thermodynamics, author = "Hayden, Howard", title = "Thermodynamics for cavemen", year = "1983", journal = "The Physics Teacher", url = "https://doi.org/10.1119/1.2341206", doi = "10.1119/1.2341206", number = "1", pages = "64-64", volume = "21" } @article{norman1992dinosaurs, author = "Norman, D. B.", title = "Dinosaurs past and present", year = "1992", journal = "Journal of Zoology", url = "https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7998.1992.tb04440.x", doi = "10.1111/j.1469-7998.1992.tb04440.x", number = "1", pages = "173-181", volume = "228" } @article{s21d35947319227d6598a68aea38701601fc60f9b4, author = "Shedd, D. H.", title = "Into Thin Air", year = "2000", url = "https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1d35947319227d6598a68aea38701601fc60f9b4", is_oa = "true", semanticscholar_id = "1d35947319227d6598a68aea38701601fc60f9b4" } @article{doi101353con00033, author = "Sommer, Marianne", title = "The Lost World as Laboratory: The Politics of Evolution between Science and Fiction in the Early Decades of Twentieth-Century America", year = "2009", journal = "Configurations", abstract = "The essay focuses on the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950)—the creator of Tarzan—and his contemporary and president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935). These historical figures are of interest as multimedia-versed shapers of collective fantasies of human evolution. Both men created and drew on science and fiction to produce vraisemblance in their reconstructions of human prehistory, and thus to achieve suspension of disbelief. Their main tools were arguably very different: one organized expeditions to collect fossils and installed a staff of artists and technicians at the museum to reconstruct the fossil creatures; the other turned himself into a writing-factory, producing as large an amount of words per day as possible. As is shown, the two cultures nonetheless interacted on the level of structure as well as content when bringing the dinosaurs and cavemen to life in fully equipped prehistoric worlds. The resulting windows into the human deep past were meant to educate the public through entertainment. Osborn and Burroughs engaged in “interesting experiment[s] in the mental laboratory which we call imagination” when they made different races, sexes, and national types compete in prehistoric struggles for existence. The laboratory setups were to reveal natural hierarchies, but they were also intended to transform the reader/viewer. The verbal and visual reconstructions of lost worlds served Burroughs’s and Osborn’s conservatism: the true American/Anglo-Saxon type had to be preserved, if not recovered.", url = "https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e7b2a8f784786aa8fea25bc0c5567d7b44c3229", doi = "10.1353/con.0.0033", is_oa = "true", number = "3", pages = "299-329", semanticscholar_citation_count = "10", semanticscholar_id = "3e7b2a8f784786aa8fea25bc0c5567d7b44c3229", volume = "15" } @article{davis2010cavemen, author = "Davis, Hank", title = "Cavemen Fooling Themselves", year = "2010", journal = "The American Journal of Psychology", url = "https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.123.4.0492", doi = "10.5406/amerjpsyc.123.4.0492", number = "4", pages = "492-495", volume = "123" } @article{kemp2013walking, author = "Kemp, Christopher", title = "Walking with cavemen", year = "2013", journal = "New Scientist", url = "https://doi.org/10.1016/s0262-4079(13)62965-6", doi = "10.1016/s0262-4079(13)62965-6", number = "2948-2949", pages = "64-66", volume = "220" } @article{castellani2014the, author = "Castellani, Victor", title = "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times", year = "2014", journal = "The European Legacy", url = "https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2014.876209", doi = "10.1080/10848770.2014.876209", number = "2", pages = "263-266", volume = "19" } @article{doi101086676062, author = "Dixon, P.", title = {Review of "A Primer of Ecological Statistics. Second Edition"}, year = "2014", journal = "The Quarterly Review of Biology", url = "https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0bbb40a40d873b82c4b98f490a1bc1649455f08", doi = "10.1086/676062", is_oa = "true", number = "2", pages = "168-169", semanticscholar_citation_count = "21", semanticscholar_id = "f0bbb40a40d873b82c4b98f490a1bc1649455f08", volume = "89" } @article{doi101021acscentsci6b00058, author = "Lockwood, D.", title = "Aboard the Isotope Time Machine", year = "2016", journal = "ACS Central Science", abstract = "Several years ago, paleontologist Shaena Montanari was doing field work in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert when she noticed fragments of dinosaur eggshells in the sand. She knew them by distinctive lines and bumps on their surfaces. Montanari, then a graduate student at the American Museum of Natural History, and now a Royal Society fellow at the University of Edinburgh, realized she could use the fragments to understand the climate that these dinosaurs lived in about 80 million years ago. That’s because an isotopic signature in the calcium carbonate shells—the ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16—can tell researchers about the same signature in the water the dinosaurs drank. Such water isotopes, geochemists have shown, depend on how wet or dry a certain climate is. Montanari eventually found that the oviraptorid theropod dinosaurs that made those eggshells lived in arid conditions, much like the Gobi has today. Stable isotopes found in fossilized dinosaur eggshells (left), bones and teeth like mammoth tusks (top right), and insects like chironomids (bottom right, 1 mm across) can provide clues to past climates and the diets of extinct animals. Credits: Shaena Montanari, Optimarc/Shutterstock, Matthew Wooller. Montanari wasn’t the only one to use these fossilized shells as a window to the past. Chemist Robert Eagle, then of California Institute of Technology, realized that the eggshells might also shed light on an ongoing debate in paleontology: whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded like birds and mammals or cold-blooded like reptiles. Eagle, now at the University of California, Los Angeles, was inspired by a relatively recent advance called clumped isotope analysis, which can accurately predict the temperature at which a carbonate mineral was formed. Pioneered by John M. Eiler and colleagues at Caltech, it has been used to more accurately reconstruct temperature deep into the past by analyzing carbonate in ancient corals and shells in ocean sediments. Though scientists have long been analyzing the stable isotopes of fossils to study the past, recent advances like clumped isotope analysis are helping push the boundaries of what paleontologists, archeologists, and paleoanthropologists can learn about life thousands to millions of years ago. Through signatures preserved in eggshells, bones, teeth, and even the molecular remains of primeval plants, researchers are piecing together the physiology and diet of ancient animals and humans, and figuring out how climate and environmental changes might have influenced evolution and extinction events. Eagle thought clumped isotope analysis on the oviraptorid theropod eggshells could tell him about the body temperature of the creature that formed them. In clumped isotope analysis, scientists use a mass spectrometer to simultaneously measure the stable isotopes of carbon and oxygen in carbon dioxide derived from a carbonate sample. They then determine how often the different isotopes are paired together in the carbonate material. The temperature at which carbonate is formed influences how often certain carbon and oxygen isotopes join up in the crystal, a phenomenon called isotopic “clumping”. Eagle first validated his hunch by analyzing eggs laid by modern birds. He then visited Montanari at the museum and worked with her to study the Gobi eggshells, as well as ones from titanosaurid sauropods, plant-eaters that resemble Brontosaurus, found in Argentina. Paleontologist Shaena Montanari (shown holding fossilized bones) collected dinosaur eggshells in the Gobi Desert and analyzed them to understand ancient climates. Credit: Courtesy of Shaena Montanari. Their results show that the titanosaurids had a body temperature of about 38 °C, similar to modern birds, which are warm-blooded. In contrast, the oviraptorid dinosaurs had body temperatures of about 32 °C—not quite as warm, but warmer than their environment by about 6 °C, meaning they weren’t cold-blooded either. Thus, they may have had an intermediate metabolism called mesothermy, like modern great white sharks and echidnas, Montanari says.", url = "https://doi.org/10.1021/acscentsci.6b00058", doi = "10.1021/acscentsci.6b00058", is_oa = "true", number = "3", pages = "121-124", semanticscholar_citation_count = "1", semanticscholar_id = "4401b5b295b8be02a426f0f772ca990a4c9d1b5b", volume = "2" } @article{doi105204mcj2793, author = "Guimont, Edward", title = "Megalodon", year = "2021", journal = "M/C Journal", abstract = "In 1999, the TV movie Shark Attack depicted an attack by mutant great white sharks on the population of Cape Town. By the time the third entry in the series, Shark Attack 3, aired in 2002, mutant great whites had lost their lustre and were replaced as antagonists with the megalodon: a giant shark originating not in any laboratory, but history, having lived from approximately 23 to 3.6 million years ago. The megalodon was resurrected again in May 2021 through a trifecta of events. A video of a basking shark encounter in the Atlantic went viral on the social media platform TikTok, due to users misidentifying it as a megalodon caught on tape. At the same time a boy received publicity for finding a megalodon tooth on a beach in South Carolina on his fifth birthday (Scott). And finally, the video game Stranded Deep, in which a megalodon is featured as a major enemy, was released as one of the monthly free games on the PlayStation Plus gaming service. These examples form part of a larger trend of alleged megalodon sightings in recent years, emerging as a component of the modern resurgence of cryptozoology. In the words of Bernard Heuvelmans, the Belgian zoologist who both popularised the term and was a leading figure of the field, cryptozoology is the “science of hidden animals”, which he further explained were more generally referred to as ‘unknowns’, even though they are typically known to local populations—at least sufficiently so that we often indirectly know of their existence, and certain aspects of their appearance and behaviour. It would be better to call them animals ‘undescribed by science,’ at least according to prescribed zoological rules. (1-2) In other words, a large aspect of cryptozoology as a field is taking the legendary creatures of non-Western mythology and finding materialist explanations for them compatible with Western biology. In many ways, this is a relic of the era of European imperialism, when many creatures of Africa and the Americas were “hidden animals” to European eyes (Dendle 200-01; Flores 557; Guimont). A major example of this is Bigfoot beliefs, a large subset of which took Native American legends about hairy wild men and attempted to prove that they were actually sightings of relict Gigantopithecus. These “hidden animals”—Bigfoot, Nessie, the chupacabra, the glawackus—are referred to as ‘cryptids’ by cryptozoologists (Regal 22, 81-104). Almost unique in cryptozoology, the megalodon is a cryptid based entirely on Western scientific development, and even the notion that it survives comes from standard scientific analysis (albeit analysis which was later superseded). Much like living mammoths and Bigfoot, what might be called the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ serves to reinforce a fairy tale of its own. It reflects the desire to believe that there are still areas of the Earth untouched enough by human destruction to sustain massive animal life (Dendle 199-200). Indeed, megalodon’s continued existence would help absolve humanity for the oceanic aspect of the Sixth Extinction, by its role as an alternative apex predator; cryptozoologist Michael Goss even proposed that whales and giant squids are rare not from human causes, but precisely because megalodons are feeding on them (40). Horror scholar Michael Fuchs has pointed out that shark media, particularly the 1975 film Jaws and its 2006 video game adaptation Jaws Unleashed, are imbued with eco-politics (Fuchs 172-83). These connections, as well as the modern megalodon’s surge in popularity, make it notable that none of Syfy’s climate change-focused Sharknado films featured a megalodon. Despite the lack of a Megalodonado, the popular appeal of the megalodon serves as an important case study. Given its scientific origin and dynamic relationship with popular culture, I argue that the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ illustrates how the boundaries between ‘hard’ science and mythology, fiction and reality, as well as ‘monster’ and ‘animal’, are not as firm as advocates of the Western science tradition might believe. As this essay highlights, science can be a mythology of its own, and monsters can serve as its gods of the gaps—or, in the case of megalodon, the god of the depths. Megalodon Fossils: A Short History Ancient peoples of various cultures likely viewed fossilised teeth of megalodons in the area of modern-day Syria (Mayor, First Fossil Hunters 257). Over the past 2500 years, Native American cultures in North America used megalodon teeth both as curios and cutting tools, due to their large size and serrated edges. A substantial trade in megalodon teeth fossils existed between the cultures inhabiting the areas of the Chesapeake Bay and Ohio River Valley (Lowery et al. 93-108). A 1961 study found megalodon teeth present as offerings in pre-Columbian temples across Central America, including in the Mayan city of Palenque in Mexico and Sitio Conte in Panama (de Borhegyi 273-96). But these cases led to no mythologies incorporating megalodons, in contrast to examples such as the Unktehi, a Sioux water monster of myth likely inspired by a combination of mammoth and mosasaur fossils (Mayor, First Americans 221-38).  In early modern Europe, megalodon teeth were initially referred to as ‘tongue stones’, due to their similarity in size and shape to human tongues—just one of many ways modern cryptozoology comes from European religious and mystical thought (Dendle 190-216). In 1605, English scholar Richard Verstegan published his book A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities, which included an engraving of a tongue stone, making megalodon teeth potentially the subject of the first known illustration of any fossil (Davidson 333). In Malta, from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, megalodon teeth, known as ‘St. Paul’s tongue’, were used as charms to ward off the evil eye, dipped into drinks suspected of being poisoned, and even ground into powder and consumed as medicine (Zammit-Maempel, “Evil Eye” plate III; Zammit-Maempel, “Handbills” 220; Freller 31-32). While megalodon teeth were valued in and of themselves, they were not incorporated into myths, or led to a belief in megalodons still being extant. Indeed, save for their size, megalodon teeth were hard to distinguish from those of living sharks, like great whites. Instead, both the identification of megalodons as a species, and the idea that they might still be alive, were notions which originated from extrapolations of the results of nineteenth and twentieth century European scientific studies. In particular, the major culprit was the famous British 1872-76 HMS Challenger expedition, which led to the establishment of oceanography as a branch of science. In 1873, Challenger recovered fossilised megalodon teeth from the South Pacific, the first recovered in the open ocean (Shuker 48; Goss 35; Roesch). In 1959, the zoologist Wladimir Tschernezky of Queen Mary College analysed the teeth recovered by the Challenger and argued (erroneously, as later seen) that the accumulation of manganese dioxide on its surface indicated that one had to have been deposited within the last 11,000 years, while another was given an age of 24,000 years (1331-32). However, these views have more recently been debunked, with megalodon extinction occurring over two million years ago at the absolute latest (Pimiento and Clements 1-5; Coleman and Huyghe 138; Roesch). Tschernezky’s 1959 claim that megalodons still existed as of 9000 BCE was followed by the 1963 book Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas, a posthumous publication by ichthyologist David George Stead. Stead recounted a story told to him in 1918 by fishermen in Port Stephens, New South Wales, of an encounter with a fully white shark in the 115-300 foot range, which Stead argued was a living megalodon. That this account came from Stead was notable as he held a PhD in biology, had founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia, and had debunked an earlier supposed sea monster sighting in Sydney Harbor in 1907 (45-46). The Stead account formed the backbone of cryptozoological claims for the continued existence of the megalodon, and after the book’s publication, multiple reports of giant shark sightings in the Pacific from the 1920s and 1930s were retroactively associated with relict megalodons (Shuker 43, 49; Coleman and Huyghe 139-40; Goss 40-41; Roesch). A Monster of Science and Culture As I have outlined above, the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ had as its origin story not in Native American or African myth, but Western science: the Challenger Expedition, a London zoologist, and an Australian ichthyologist. Nor was the idea of a living megalodon necessarily outlandish; in the decades after the Challenger Expedition, a number of supposedly extinct fish species had been discovered to be anything but. In the late 1800s, the goblin shark and frilled shark, both considered ‘living fossils’, had been found in the Pacific (Goss 34-35). In 1938, the coelacanth, also believed by Western naturalists to have been extinct for millions of years, was rediscovered (at least by Europeans) in South Africa, samples having occasionally been caught by local fishermen for centuries. The coelacanth in particular helped give scientific legitimacy to the idea, prevalent for decades by that point, that living dinosaurs—associated with a legendary creature called the mokele-mbembe—might still exist in the heart of Central Africa (Guimont). In 1976, a US Navy ship off Hawaii recovered a megamouth shark, a deep-water species completely unknown prior. All of these oceanic discoveries gave credence to the idea that the megalodon might also still survive (Coleman and Clark 66-68, 156-57; Shuker 41; Goss 35; Roesch). Indeed, Goss has noted that prior to 1938, respectable ichthyologists were more likely to believe in the continued existence of the megalodon than the coelacanth (39-40). Of course, the major reason why speculation over megalodon survival had suc", url = "https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2793", doi = "10.5204/mcj.2793", is_oa = "true", number = "5", semanticscholar_citation_count = "4", semanticscholar_id = "58804e1705bb7ba03d839eb38d26ec3ec9f2b91c", volume = "24" } @incollection{murphy2022bombproof, author = "Murphy, Brian Michael", title = "Bombproof Cavemen", year = "2022", booktitle = "We the Dead", abstract = "This chapter discusses a new stage in the data complex, emerging during the early Cold War through the founding of businesses like the Iron Mountain Atomic Storage Company, and the expansion of Civil Defense architecture and exercises. At that time, the data complex intensified in response to the atomic bomb, and a booming industry of bombproofing and securitization made possible the expansion of “open time capsule” design to a nationwide network of data preservation facilities. Long before the cloud, corporations and state agencies created a backup culture for data that still shapes data preservation practices in the digital age. If the goal of the time capsule was to condense an entire culture into a relatively small amount of data, then the aim of the constellation of open time capsules that emerged during the Cold War was to amass and preserve all the details, all the data that documented individual American lives, that materially grounded identity and certified citizens’ existence by the authority of powerful institutions, and to make it accessible both before and after the end of the world.", url = "https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469668284.003.0004", doi = "10.5149/northcarolina/9781469668284.003.0004", pages = "91-125" } @misc{westaway2022curious, author = "Westaway, Kira", title = "Curious Kids: did humans hunt and eat woolly mammoths or dinosaurs?", year = "2022", url = "https://doi.org/10.64628/aa.mfuwd5vg7", doi = "10.64628/aa.mfuwd5vg7" } @article{doi1058782flmnhdtxe7925, author = "Santucci, V.", title = "Conservation Paleobiology and the Stewardship of U.S. National Park Service Paleontological Resources", year = "2023", journal = "Bulletin of the Florida Museum of Natural History", abstract = "Conservation biology, and the descendent discipline conservation paleobiology, are philosophically aligned with the mission of the National Park Service (NPS), including near time and deep time frameworks. As defined in the Organic Act of August 25, 1916, the purpose and mission of the NPS is “…to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations”. This conservation mandate is broadly inclusive of grizzly bears, redwood trees, and dinosaur bones equally, throughout the 424 officially designated parks, monuments, and other areas managed by the NPS. Although conservation paleobiology is reported by some to be a new and integrated field of study, there are remarkable similarities to traditional and old school perspectives which embraced natural history more holistically during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notably, the written contributions by Charles Darwin, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey synthesize observations at the global and landscape scales, promoting conservation advocacy of the natural world, past and present. U.S. National Park Service areas preserve some of Planet Earth’s most globally significant natural resources, ecological systems, and biosphere reserves. Discoveries of fossil condors and mummified bats within caves of Grand Canyon National Park, the co-occurrence of human and megafaunal footprints preserved in Late Pleistocene strata at White Sands National Park, and pygmy mammoth remains on Channel Islands National Park, collectively demonstrate how valuable temporal and historical biological perspectives contribute to science, stewardship, and resources management in parks and beyond. The paleobiology community is cordially invited to join in the holistic study and conservation of the near time and deep time resources in the national parks.", url = "https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2023/02/Vol60No2archival.pdf", doi = "10.58782/flmnh.dtxe7925", is_oa = "true", number = "2", pages = "59-59", semanticscholar_id = "828f56128a4257f3a41e5a95da7f33658604725b", volume = "60" } @article{yarull2023instructions, author = "Yarull, Miguel", title = "Instructions for Cavemen", year = "2023", journal = "Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas", url = "https://doi.org/10.1080/08905762.2023.2195289", doi = "10.1080/08905762.2023.2195289", number = "1", pages = "61-64", volume = "56" } @incollection{crossrefNoneastronauts, title = "Astronauts and Cavemen", year = "None", booktitle = "Matter Transmission: Mediation in a Paleocyber Age", url = "https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501339493.0011", doi = "10.5040/9781501339493.0011" }