The gullibility of the innocent.........

 

This image is doing the round in social media, on assorted nutty archaeology sites and Facebook pages galore.  Almost everywhere it is accompanied by serious discussions about how this mammoth was entombed in crystal clear ice and so on and so on.  It's all complete rubbish, of course.  The accompanying text was about the discovery of a baby mammoth in the permafrost  -- that's an old story anyway, now recycled -- and all regurgitated by people who skim science stories in learned journals, extract the spectacular bits and seriously misrepresent almost everything because of the obsesssion with "impact."  To hell with ethics.  The image has been created by somebody having fun with AI technology, which is contributing -- faster than any of us thought possible -- to the death of science.  It's now almost impossible to separate out the real images from the manufactured ones....... 

In reality, the remains of mammoths found in the permafrost are always scruffy, squashed and very dirty.  Permafrost ice does not look like crystal clear glacier ice or lake ice.  And when animals die in Arctic bogs they do tend to fall over in the process.....

Sounds familiar?  For years we have had nonsense press releases flagging up the wonders of Neolithic quarries, lost stone circles and heroic stone transport expeditions, and as we speak people are probably working on "photographs" of precisely what is supposed to have been going on.

Here is my contribution.  This, by the way, is a real, undoctored photo from Antarctica.

Breaking news!  Just discovered in Antarctica -- a pyramid which is far larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, and next to it a smaller pyramid is just emerging from the melting ice cap.  This proves that Ancient Egyptians discovered Antarctica and developed an advanced civilisation, well before the start of the Ice Age.  This of course transforms our understanding of the ancient world, and the history of the world must now be re-written.