On the example of the story of these same supposedly human footprints, which remained next to the paw prints of dinosaurs and whose age is approximately 108-94 million years old, one can be convinced of how tenacious myths are. And also to understand why they are often provided with a long and happy life. As always, this mythological longevity is based on …
… one of the fundamental properties of the human psyche, which can be briefly formulated as follows: the simpler the explanation, the more people believe it.
This property, like many others, was formed in our ancestors in ancient times, when the life of primitive people was not particularly safe. Often there was simply no time for a long and thorough analysis of an event. Indeed, if a person during a fire in the savannah thinks for a long time in which direction to run, then he will simply fry before making the right decision. Therefore, in those days, natural selection supported the fastest systems of analysis that provided the simplest explanations for what happened.
Times have changed and the life of the human race has become more serene, but these ancient systems of analysis have remained in our subconscious. They quite often work in stressful situations (like the textbook "what is there to think - you have to run away"), as well as when people are faced with a non-standard or paradoxical phenomenon (after all, any paradox is a kind of little stress). This is exactly what happened with the so-called footprints of people and dinosaurs, which in 1909 was discovered by a Texas boy Ernest Adams, walking in the vicinity of the Paluxy River near the town of Glen Rose (USA).
As a matter of fact, the discoverer himself did not even stutter about any human tracks - he only informed the local science teacher that he saw strange three-toed footprints on the stones near the river. It was only in 1938 that the paleontologist Roland Bird was able to reach them, and he compiled the first scientific description of this find.
And he, most interestingly, also did not find any traces of a person there - according to his work, the coast of the Paluxy was all "trampled" by traces of herbivorous sauropod lizards, similar to the famous brontosaurus, but much smaller. Later, he found two-toed paw prints of a medium-sized carnivorous theropod dinosaur there, which, apparently, chased three-toed sauropods with an understandable purpose. It was Byrd who established the age of the footprints (later confirmed by isotope studies), and also found out that at that time the place of the dinosaur "walk" was not at all the coast, but shallow water, that is, the footprints were left in silty sediments.
Here I will allow myself to digress a little and emphasize what the supporters of the "man in the age of the dinosaurs" version stubbornly ignore - the traces were left in the liquid mud, which always deforms the imprint. I think there is no need to prove this - everyone himself has repeatedly had the opportunity to see what bizarre pictures dirt can turn the imprint of his own shoe into. Therefore, Byrd could not determine exactly which of the dinosaurs left these prints - the tracks were greatly deformed. In addition, later influences (water, for example, or wind erosion) also pretty much "repulsed" the picture.
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So, Byrd, having compiled a complete description of these tracks and published several articles, did not report any sensation - although the very discovery of traces of the chalk giants was already a sensation, because at that time they were found very rarely. However, it was from his publications that the very myth that we are talking about grew up. After seeing the photographs and drawings by Byrd, which served as illustrations for the article, one of the creationists (that is, those who deny biological evolution), the founders of the so-called Flood Society, Clifford Burdick, stated that he clearly sees human footprints in the photographs.
At the same time, the venerable creationist was not embarrassed by the fact that the size of these tracks in some cases exceeded 68 centimeters - just some kind of big foot (the average length of a human foot rarely exceeds 34 centimeters). The main thing is that the rumor was launched, and after that the other opponents of the theory of evolution were regularly replicating it for several more years. It is curious that for a long time none of those who defended the version of human existence in the Cretaceous period, did not bother to go to Texas and look at these traces personally - mostly creationists reprinted Byrd's photographs with Burdick's interpretation. It is clear that serious scientists did not pay attention to all these "arguments" - after all, their opponents did not have their own data.
It wasn't until 1968 that Baptist priest Stanley Taylor, owner of a small film company called Films for Christ, gathered a group of creationists to investigate the Paluxy bed. Research continued until 1972, and in 1973, Taylor released the film Footprints in Stone. The film quickly became popular and was shown in schools, churches, and creationist group meetings across America. Only then did paleontologists react to the "intrigues" of their opponents - in 1979, biology student Glen Cuban, with the light hand of creationists, became interested in mysterious footprints. The following summer, he traveled to Glen Rose with a friend to thoroughly examine all the prints.
Here, I think it would be logical to give the floor to Cuban himself. In his report on the conducted research (more details can be found here), he wrote:
“… My partner Tim Bartholomew and I took many measurements, photographs and rubber casts of the alleged 'man tracks.' We noticed that many of the 'man tracks' from the Taylor Site had a common elongated shape, a rounded heel and a patch of upward dirt around the rear and sides of the footprints, but differed in significant ways from what would be expected from genuine human footprints Most were widened in an open V in the front, and some bore long, shallow grooves in the front that were incompatible with the human foot. the edge of the footprints thus indicated a three-toed (dinosaur) foot, but the elongation at the back was enigmatic and seemed inconsistent with the Loma Linda team's suggestion thatthat these footprints are simply shattered specimens of the typical three-toed dinosaur footprint.
Based on the observed features of the footprints, I hypothesized that there may have been a dinosaur that, instead of walking in the normal digital walking (walking with only toes) position for most bipedal dinosaurs, perhaps walking in a plantigrade or semi-walkable position. position, distributing its weight on the tarsometatarsus (heel and foot), thus creating elongated imprints. She seemed to explain all the features of the footprints - and the lack of clear fingerprints is attributable to any of several possible factors, such as erosion of the fingerprints, or the initially fuzzy fingerprint (due to a hard substrate that could also explain the shallow depth of elongated tracks) …
So, Cuban's research, it would seem, finally dotted the "and" - everything that was taken for human tracks was simply the result of erosion, as well as the fact that dinosaurs that walked, bogged down in liquid mud, had to step on the entire surface of the foot (which is generally not very typical for these lizards). However, the creationists were unmoved. Three years after Cuban's work, former Baptist priest and anthropologist Carl Bauch began excavations in the Paluxy River area in order to refute his opponent's conclusions. True, it should be noted right away that the Monk Bauch appointed himself a doctor of anthropology - so far no traces of his doctoral dissertation and evidence that he ever defended it have been found. However, during the excavations, sensational finds suddenly began to pour on this pseudo-anthropologist,one more interesting than the other - he soon announced that he had found numerous human footprints, as well as human fingers and teeth and even … a stone hammer!
Cuban decided to check the shores of the Paluxy again and a year later surveyed all the places where Bauch worked. However, he quickly found out that he had not found anything new - all the same elongated dinosaur tracks appeared before the paleontologist, and in very poor preservation. Moreover, for testing, a human tooth turned out to be a fish tooth, a finger was just a well-polished pebble, and a hammer was a tool used by the Indians 200 years ago.
Moreover, the meticulous Cuban contacted the local rancher, Alfred West, who had originally assisted Bauch with the excavation. And he told the biologist in detail that the methods of the pseudo-anthropologist were completely unscientific - for example, under the pretext of "cleaning" human fingerprints in one of the tracks, Bauch, perhaps not fully realizing this, squeezed out these very prints himself. And then, without any doubts, he asserted that the footprint "cleaned" by him really belongs to man.
After a while, Cuban, apparently, began to get tired of this whole story, and he decided to put an end to it. In 1985, he personally invited the head of the Institute for Creation Research, John Morris, and other creationists who were spreading versions of Burdick, Taylor, and Bauch, to the Paluxy River. The biologist led them through all the excavation sites, pointed out the color of the tracks and their shape, and finally convinced his opponents that they were seriously mistaken in the past. All this made a strong impression on Morris, and a year later he published the book "Secrets of the Paluxy River", in the pages of which he admitted that everyone who considered some of the tracks in Glenn Rose human are mistaken. He also urged all readers not to believe the "evidence" of Bauch, who was caught in deliberate falsification.
It would seem that after this, the myth of people who lived with dinosaurs should have died once and for all - but this did not happen. Until now, many media outlets and sites continue to reprint the message about "people from the shores of the Paluxy" who allegedly lived with dinosaurs. Moreover, Russian television channels have recently joined the active spread of this nonsense. However, journalists can be understood - they always need sensations in order to raise their ratings. But why, despite the fact that this myth seems to have been thoroughly exposed once, people still continue to believe in it?
The fact is that in order to understand Cuban's argument, you need to be not only an expert on dinosaurs and their tracks, but also to understand such sciences as geology and geochemistry. Among the general readers (and viewers) there are, alas, few of them. Therefore, for most, the creationist version seems simpler - after all, anyone can understand it. It is here that the property of the human psyche, which was mentioned at the beginning of the article, is fully manifested …