I stumbled on a show called “America Unearthed” featuring a “forensic geologist” named Scott Wolter who pursues attractive theories of how the history we’ve been taught is all wrong.

The first episode I watched had to do with what is apparently a widely subscribed claim that ancient Minoans visited the upper Great Lakes thousands of years before Christopher Columbus Leif Ericson “discovered” the New World. Wolter claims to believe that the massive amounts of copper believed to have been mined from Isle Royale in Lake Superior were used by these Minoans to supply the Bronze Age demand for, well, bronze. He didn’t address how an ancient civilization based in the eastern Mediterranean would have known to go to an island in a freshwater lake deep inland on a distant continent no one back then seems to have admitted knowing about.

Wolter did display skepticism, though, when shown alleged Minoan symbols hidden under the waters of a lake in northern Wisconsin; the symbols were made of loose rocks that looked like they could have been piled in shapes as a casual prank by, well, the guy who showed them to him.

The next episode I caught had to do with the finding of a boulder in southern Arizona, at a site that, as it happened, was catalogued by the state in 1984. The boulder was carved with runic letters, but the 1984 survey, which noted a caveful of Indian petroglyphs, had no mention of it. Wolter himself observed that the boulder didn’t seem as weathered as he would have expected.

He saved the day, though, by noticing apparent vandalism of the site that might have resulted in the boulder being unearthed after the state survey; its having been buried for centuries could explain the lack of weathering, he suggested. With the premise of the episode revived, Wolter sent photos of the boulder’s inscription to a rune expert who found that the letters were Anglo-Saxon runes and the language was “12th-century” English.

Not “Old” English or “Middle” English, distinctions recognized by actual linguists—12th-century English.   :facepalm:   Even “Early Middle English” would have worked, though according to Wikipedia it was in use in the 13th century as well.

Even assuming a medieval Englishman wound up in Arizona in the 1100s, I didn’t think anyone was still using rune letters that late—and when I looked it up I found that Anglo-Saxon rune writing had been all but replaced with the Latin alphabet well in advance of the Norman Conquest in 1066. Anyway, Wolter’s rune expert identified a name on the inscription which he then traced to Staffordshire in England; conveniently enough the surname on the boulder disappeared from Staffordshire records around 1200.

I recently quit watching another show that aims to debunk (sort of) things like UFO sightings because sometimes I could run back (yay TiVo!) the submitted video that fuels some of their stories and see obvious explanations the show’s cast completely miss (other viewers, it turns out, see the same things I do and the comment boards on the show’s website can be more entertaining than the show). Another show I’ve also quit watching was “Decoded,” which I had found very interesting when it examined the story of “D.B. Cooper,” but many of the guests they interviewed about some of the subject matter were obvious cranks—yet Brad Meltzer treats them as credible sources.

I don’t know if I’ll keep watching this “America Unearthed” show. Wolter obviously Wants to Believe™, which would become a credibility issue in short order. The next episode being promoted is about bones of giant humanoids turning up in Minnesota. Still, it’s sort of diverting trying to anticipate what obvious question won’t be asked. If you don’t leave a hole for the plot to escape the whole episode might blow up.

Update: Reading about runes has got me interested in ðe rune-descended letters Þþ (thorn) and Ðð (eth), which correspond to ðe hard and soft sounds, respectively, expressed in ðe Latin alphabet wiþ ðe letters “TH.” Can you imagine getting used to using ðem?
 

What's On?