Dysphagia Blues

Dysphagia Blues

To the tune of "Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel.

Hello, regurge, you evil trend,

You've got me by my throat again,

With the meal that I was eating,

you insist on my repeating.

And my stomach wonders why it's just not full.

I can only drool.

You're an evil thing, dysphagia.

All I can eat is baby food.

I can't swallow what's been chewed.

It wanders up and down my throat.

There isn't any antidote

to a misery I can't blame on a fishy bone

stuck to my to backbone,

You're an evil thing, dysphagia.

It's not as if I've no appetite,

My stomach's roaring at midnight,

But if I eat, you clutch me in a choke.

You make certain that I remain awoke,

You're an evil thing, dysphagia.

The doctor doesn't think it's much

to warrant my unhappy fuss.

But it's clear he's never suffered so,

He's never not been able to swallow,

You're an evil thing, dysphagia.

I've lost too much needed weight. 

I'm looking so very skeletate.

I don't know how much longer I can live like this.

Waiting on a definite diagnosis.

You're an evil thing, dysphagia.

You're an evil thing, dysphagia.

"Out of Australia", a book review

Book Review..”Out of Australia”, by Steven and Evan Strong

I’m an open minded scientist. I’m willing to listen to people who come up with new ideas and different explanations of things that puzzle us.  It’s not at all unusual for a bedrock concept in science to be overturned by new information. That’s what science IS.

So when I read “Out of  Australia”, it was in a frame of mind that says “Okay...let’s hear what you’ve got.”

In the case of “Out of Australia”, the answer is: not much. And what there is is nonsense.

I admit that DNA samples of Aborigines...in the book called “Originals’, indicate that Australia was settled by them about 65,000 years ago.

The authors insist that humans...Homo Sapiens...evolved there, rather than in Africa, the current (and strongly backed up with fossils) dogma.

There is plenty in the literature, in fossils, and in the geological record of Olduvai Gorge and caves in South Africa that show hominid species leading up to and including H. Sapiens originated in Africa. With the advent of DNA analysis of hominid fossils, we know now that there was plenty of interbreeding between the many hominid species inhabiting Africa...and later, Eurasia.  

These specimens are, in some species, over 1.2 million years old. The current theory is that hominids (of several species) spread into Europe and the Far East. There, Homo habilis or erectus or one of them then made the jump to New Guinea and Australia.

The authors divert the argument by saying that some people doubt that the early hominids were smart enough to make boats to carry them over the sea to Australia...and on to the Americas. They claim that an archeologist named Graham Walsh discovered cave drawings in the Kimberly that depicted Egyptian style boats. But he refused to say where the drawings were. Later on, a man named Wilson decided to track them down and found them. In Walsh’s case, he took pictures. Wilson did not. The authors decided not to include them, too.

But at least in the case of the Eurasian and Asian continent, hominids didn’t need boats. They walked. They walked into Europe, sometimes across a dry savannah that is now called the Mediterranean. They could have followed the coast line clear from Africa all the way to Southeast Asia. Once they got to what is now the Malay archipelago, IF it wasn’t connected to Australia and N. Guinea, a boat could have easily covered the gap. If we are talking about at least a million years, sea levels were lower then and quite possibly, a land bridge between the two continents could have  persisted. We know that there was a connection.  

There is no doubt whatsoever that somehow, hominids did make it to the Australian continent.

But to insist that  Australia was the ONLY place where earlier species of hominid evolved into H. Sapiens, and NO WHERE else in the world is, bluntly, not backed up by anything but wishful thinking. Stories from Aborigines from perhaps two hundred years ago tend to...change into something the current teller wants them to say. Remember, there are still millions of people on this planet who believe that a deity created humans out of mud and that female humans were created from a male’s rib. There are even people who believe that all one needs to do is count a skeletons ribs to be able to identify it’s gender.

Desperately trying to buttress their theory, the authors work backwards from there, insisting that hominids moved to Australia THEN evolved into H. Sapiens. Again, that is not unthinkable.

But the authors show nothing backing up their assertions. Throughout the book they make some incredible claims, but without a single picture, map, drawing, or even citation, they make it hard to take them seriously. Instead, they whine and complain that the OAT (Out Of Africa) backers have conspired to kick any other theory off the playing field. While the OAT theory has plenty of solid evidence in the way of photos, fossils, rocks and geological verification, the authors of “O of Australia’ use...oral history, stories from the original Aborigines. 

They mention fossils, tools and artifacts from Australia found in the early 1900s. One, a complete skull, was sent to a museum in Leipzig, Germany, was said to be destroyed in the bombings of WWII. Notes on an amazing carving on bone, found in 1959 near Lake Valsequillo in Mexico (the authors claim that Aborigines rode their boats to North America) purportedly showed mammals from the Pleistocene as well as a gompothere, an elephant like mammal that went extinct over a million years ago. Why didn’t the archeologist take pictures of it? Display it to the world? In “1990, ...personal papers, photographs, thousands of slides and evidence.....(was) promptly lost or misplaced.” (pg 31).

What of the bone carvings? The authors don’t say. Throughout the book, the authors imply a hidden agenda, a cabal of the archaeologists and anthropologists of the world, who somehow have all agreed to squash any challenge to the Out of Africa theory. The authors make it sound as if any evidence whatsoever supporting an Australian birthplace have been systematically hunted down, removed from museums, and data erased throughout the world.  

The problem is, most of the data and evidence claimed by the authors happened or was discovered in the late 1920’s and just before WWII.

Louis Leakey did not find his African specimens until the late 1950’s and the actual Out Of Africa theory was not even posited until the 1990’s.

How can they claim a conspiracy when the Australian ‘data’, such as it is, was discovered BEFORE the African fossils were found?

Either every person who made any sort of discovery supporting Australia as the birthplace of humans were incredibly incompetent, lazy, or jealous, or....the authors are full of baloney.

The “Out of Australia” theory of human evolution is an intriguing concept. But there are too many convenient losses of genuine artifacts, fossils, photographs, notes, and data. Too many unsubstantiated cases of theft, subterfuge, or outright suppression of evidence. There are too many claims of refusal of Aborigines to allow data collection. All there is in the way of citations in the book come from a few magazine articles (amazingly, written by the authors) and, believe it or not, the Bible.

The lack of any truly scientific citations, not a single photo, map, drawing or graph, and an emotional claim of stonewalling, make this book merely one of sensationalizing conjecture.

The authors of “Out of Australia”, instead of showing me a credible and believable alternative to the Out of Africa theory, have merely reinforced it.