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Viking runes found in Oklahoma?
- ZanyProgrammer 4y agoScandiknavery. They aren’t legit.
- notart666 4y agoVandalism at its finest. Makes you wonder what a professional could do with the right motives.
- dontbenebby 4y ago> Vandalism at its finest. Makes you wonder what a professional could do with the right motives. Professional what exactly? (I pay closer attention to graffiti than I used to.)
- solmanac 4y agoProfessional shyster making something like the Georgia guides tones or golden tablets to "discover" and then use as the basis of a religion, is the first thing that comes to mind.
- bee_rider 4y agoIf I were going to do something like that, I'd probably come up with an invented language so I could translate it as I needed new commandments.
- GolfPopper 4y agoAh, you mean the Voynich Manuscript! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoNo, he means the Golden Plates found by Joseph Smith in 1823 in New York, which created the Mormon religion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates
- bee_rider 4y agoHmm, is it Poe's law or some sort of generalization thereof if I wasn't actually trying to mock any widely-followed religion?
- hattmall 4y agoOh, you mean dinosaurs! There's basically never been a full one found. The closest one ever was found under dubious circumstances. The process for extracting them is to make tiny chips in rock and casts as you go along pretty much allowing you to shape as desired. The sites are of course highly guarded. Of course the most complete was the ever popular TRex. Dinosaur paleontology is a religious racket. Sure there was lots of megafauna and their were some large flightless birds with various levels of feathering. Like anything though money corrupts and the money behind dinosaurs is huge. Every kid has toys, books, theres movies, TV shows, museums, etc.
- noduerme 4y agoThey're not carving stone when digging out the fossils. And the average fossil digger is not Michaelangelo or capable of sculpting a negative dinosaur skeleton out of solid rock. Just imagine hundreds of people on a dig trying to get the symmetry and proportions right. The answer is that the material inside the impression left by the decaying bones is softer than the rock it's encased in. Sure, dinos for kids are big money, but there's just a massive amount of proof they existed. The fact that an industry exists monetizing a natural phenomenon doesn't automatically mean the phenomenon doesn't exist. That's the "anything mainstream must be fake" conspiracy theory. Some mainstream things are real. What proof is there for the world being created in seven days besides a single book of stories invented a couple thousand years ago? And by the way, don't parents buy their kids a lot of religious things... way more than dinosaur dolls? [edit] if I'm just missing the sarcasm here, sorry, it's been a long day.
- GolfPopper 4y agoI think it's a joke, but it's the internet, so Poe's Law applies.
- NickNameNick 4y agoIf you have the opportunity, Dinosaur national monument in Utah is well worth the visit. They have an exposed fossil bearing rockface that you can get very close to, and you can see how the fossils differ from the surrounding stone.
- noduerme 4y agoJust give whoever a few hundred years to go from cult to religion, though, and they'll burn you at the stake for making fun of their silly tablets.
- CamperBob2 4y agoIf I were Musk or Bezos, the temptation to rig a Contact-style scenario would be well beyond merely overwhelming. Guessing the orbital mechanics needed to station-keep a signal source at a given apparent sidereal position, far enough from Earth to simulate parallax at infinity, are unworkable.
- rongopo 4y agoThere's surely a low cost version.
- theodric 4y agoTechnically, the Vandals were East Germanic, but these are West Germanic-inspired runes.
- bombcar 4y agoThe key to a great fake is to fake it NOW and leave it to be found two hundred years later. When the profit motive is removed it becomes harder to track down.
- teknolog 4y agoNope. Seems like a scam like the Kensington Stone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Runestone
- orionion 4y agoMost likely scratched by a Norwegian Blue Parrot... blown far off his normal migratory route... the sad text recounts extreme pining for the fjords...
- lupire 4y ago> However, historical evidence from the 19th Century… strongly suggests the stone is a 19th-Century creation of a Scandinavian immigrant (likely a Swedish immigrant working at the local train depot)."
- bragr 4y agoA reminder that there is no such thing as "the Vikings". Really. There's no specific culture or social group in a particular time and place you can point to and say they are "the" vikings. The idea of the Vikings is basically an invention of middle age scholars, and includes a huge variety of cultures and languages. You might compare the Vikings to the mythical "sea peoples" of the bronze age collapse.
- whatshisface 4y agoGrammatically, that's like saying "there's no such thing as tourists."
- asvitkine 4y agoI think they were getting to "there's no such thing as the tourists". The "the" is significant. But also it's not in the title of the article...
- acjohnson55 4y agoWhy can't there be "the tourists"? When I lived in NYC, at any given time, there was a significant population of people who were "the tourists". The fact that it's a highly dynamic group and not like an ethnicity doesn't invalidate their group validity or the use of the word "the".
- aksss 4y agoAsia is neither a country or a culture.
- acjohnson55 4y agoIs that really true? I agree that there's no ethnicity known as the Vikings, and certainly not "Viking runes". People really mean certain groups of Norse people who have taken up the Viking lifestyle or profession. It's more like being a pirate. But there were Vikings. I don't think Norse travelers to Oklahoma would have been Vikings, though. More likely traders or settlers.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoThere's a similar hoax in the Turtle Mountains in North Dakota. It seemed to me like a thing for white people to say "we were here first" https://www.walkermn.com/news/chapter-693-vikings-in-the-turtle-mountains/article_c176a909-2d1d-55da-bfcd-30a441380db7.html https://www.walkermn.com/news/chapter-693-vikings-in-the-tur... https://sites.google.com/site/stonebankorg/fabulous-nd/mooring-stone https://sites.google.com/site/stonebankorg/fabulous-nd/moori... https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/ndnotes/ndn17_h.htm https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/ndnotes/ndn17_h.htm
- gxs 4y ago
- goAw4y00 4y ago
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoMy analysis from growing up in the area and knowing the son of the landowner whose lawn this rock is sitting in.
- doodlebugging 4y agoI looked at the "mooring stone" example in your stone bank link. I had heard of these stones being possible mooring stones a long time ago but had never seen one. From memory, they were linked to Vikings as mooring stones due to the similarity between the holes found in the rocks here in the US and similar holes in rocks present in Scandinavia that are known to have been used as mooring stones back in the day. I had never seen an example from either place though. Recognizing the obvious glacial history of the region and the present absence of any large body of water in the region and after seeing this example, I wonder if the hole in that rock is a natural hole formed by weathering of one of the less-resistant minerals from the boulder. I ask because the boulder appears to be a granite pegmatite and there is a natural mineral that forms large roughly triangular cross-section minerals in granite pegmatites. That mineral is tourmaline. I think if you check that boulder and others like it you could rule out a natural origin if you find no evidence of tourmaline in the boulders. The lichens could also be used to date the weathered surface of the boulder since they have a fairly well-known growth rate and you could calculate the time since a fresh surface from that. Also, for the "mooring stone" hypothesis to hold any water one would probably need to know where each known example is in relation to known present-day waterways and to remnant erosional features and ancient shorelines. If they all can be established to have been located along a known ancestral shoreline, especially if you could do a geomorphological reconstruction similar to a palinspastic reconstruction and they all came out on a shoreline that would lend credence to the theory. From the things on your links, I'm not sure that any of them could be contemporaneous even within a few hundred years of the recent past when we know Vikings were in N America and free to travel and explore. Cool story though.
- Yawnzy 4y agoProject bluebeam
- JoeJonathan 4y agoRight, there’s no archaeological evidence of some ancient Scandinavian migration because… they were so eager to get to Oklahoma? You really have to be committed to some weird Viking romanticism (and to hate those gross Southern European Catholics) to buy something like this.
- bpodgursky 4y agoI don't think it's completely impossible that some kind of wild trip like this happened -- maybe the Norse were captive, sailed around the coast, whatever. Weirder things have happened. Reading any kind of greater significance into that is of course nonsense. The Vikings didn't settle NA in any meaningful way. If this happened, it's fascinating but just a weird quirk of history. (to be clear, it's almost certainly a fraud)
- AlotOfReading 4y agoI try to avoid framing things this way as a (former) archaeologist. Most human activities are possible in theory. If we don't limit our consideration to "things that are plausible given x, y, and z", the discussion either explodes with combinatorial possibilities or more commonly, we allow our imaginations to take flights of fancy towards the things we find interesting. The latter can be totally fine, but it's rarely (if ever) truth-seeking. As an aside, these sorts of "mysterious inland viking runes" are a common tale in the US. I've heard of similar claims from Washington, most of the Northeast, Minnesota, Georgia, and even Arizona.
- doodlebugging 4y ago>As an aside, these sorts of "mysterious inland viking runes" are a common tale in the US. I've heard of similar claims from Washington, most of the Northeast, Minnesota, Georgia, and even Arizona. I've also seen some of these stories. I think one could use Mandan tribal members to help determine whether there is a possibility that Vikings or Norsemen traveled to the mid-continent and left some runestones along their paths. Since later European explorers reported finding blonde members of the Mandan tribe one could have DNA analyzed to discover whether there is a link to Scandinavia. Personally I see no reason why those who settled and lived at L'Anse aux Meadows would've spent their entire lives holed up in the longhouses there instead of hopping in their boats and sailing the bays and rivers scoping out the territory. We know that they were explorers or they wouldn't have been there in the first place. We also know that it is not difficult for a person to cover a lot of ground if they decide to move somewhere else. They were there for several hundred years and since it only takes a matter of months to travel on foot from the east coast into the interior I see no reason to discount the possibility that it happened. People moved all the time for any number of reasons. Our problem today is that these people, both the Norse settlers in Newfoundland and the Native Americans or First Nations people they encountered, did not keep detailed written records like later European explorers did in their travels. This introduces a bias in the information used today to reconstruct the history of the exploration of North America. We know that the Spanish went all over the central and western US since they traveled with a large group of people and documented what they found. They even returned later to flesh out early discoveries and built a network of churches to serve as fortresses and supply points for future exploration. The record of anything that L'anse aux Meadows settlers did exists only in some sagas and a few royal records. Like the natives they encountered, the story of their travels would have been mostly an oral history to be recounted later to descendants and others who needed to know. I agree that most human activities are possible in theory and that we need to consider the likelihood as part of a well-formed conclusion. I see no reason why someone traveling with an eye to discovering what the world looks like over that far hill couldn't have covered the entire US on foot in a lot less than a lifetime. It would've been easier then than now especially if you travel in a small party.
- staplung 4y agoI may not be an expert but it seems intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that they were carved by a Sasquatch and describe when aliens visited Earth and taught the Egyptians how to build the pyramids. Sarcasm aside, in the top picture you can see tool marks flanking the downstrokes on the closest runes. Truly, I am no expert but they certainly don't look like they've withstood 1,000 years of Oklahoman weathering. Then again, "layman" is just a polite work for idiot.
- smitty1e 4y agoUFOs would like an FOUO word.
- fat_cantor 4y agoI visited these ruins with my grandfather (a geologist) when I was young. He rolled his eyes and said there's no way they were that old. In person it's easy to tell, even for a child, but how else are you supposed to attract tourists to Heavener, OK? For the BBC, it's a classic illustration of Betteridge's law of headlines.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y agoThat's the elder Futhark isn't it? It was out of fashion during the Viking age.
- twright 4y ago> The inscriptions are not a Viking script, but a combination of [runic languages] Elder Futhark and Younger Futhark, which predates when the Vikings would have been traveling Well there you have it, it's not from when it's claimed. There is a similar out-of-place rock in New Mexico called the Decalogue rock that has the 10-commandments carved into it in old hebrew. The problem is that it uses more modern punctuation and it's more likely the product of some UNM students who were messing around or Spanish settlers at the very least. Nevertheless, people use the rock to claim it's evidence of a lost tribe of Israelites.