NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2018 Mar 1, 01:43 -0800
Here is a link to the Janz paper:
http://journals.upress.ufl.edu/fa/article/view/525/519
He relied on Glickman who claims that he can tell, UNDER CLOTHING, exactly where the ends of exactly where the ends of Earhart's arm bones are and then bases conclusions about the lengths of her arms and thereby he height. Such ... (you fill in the blank.)
Here are some of Professor Wright's comments:
"The punch line is in the final sentence: "If the castaway was not Earhart, who was it?"
This question only makes sense if you assume Nikumaroro was a remote island, unreachable by nobody but Earhart and Noonan.
An answer is of course that the 'castaway' could have been one of an unknown number of people. An islander voyager, Arundel times, the Norwich City wreck, or Gallagher's times. Jantz dismisses having to consider the Norwich City event because those people are undocumented. Therefore he sets up, as it were, an identity parade with only one suspect"
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"I have just seen that Gillespie has today posted mention of the "infamous Cross/Wright critique."
Infamous as defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary:
Of ill fame or repute; notorious, esp. for wickedness, evil, etc
Deserving of infamy, shamefully wicked or vile; abominable
I didn't know Pam and I had this evil in us, but we should be prepared to be humble and see ourselves as others see us. In fact we should model ourselves on Gillespie perhaps."
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"I see no reason to distrust Hoodless' written observation on the pelvis and sexing. Nor do I see any reason to distrust his statement on comparing length and width of the long bones - to him they indicate a robust person.
So I would say: "The most I would give them is that the bones match a tall and robust American man reasonably well. Or in Tighar's favorite parlance, 'are not inconsistent with' a tall, American man."
I doubt that Tighar would accept my gift, especially if I also added (as I imagine you would, judging what you correctly state about the lack of locals in the analyses) that the bones of the castaway are not inconsistent with those of millions of geographically relevant persons."
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It is pity that Pam and I made some historical errors. They don't affect the anthropological issues, but deserve a mea culpa, or whatever the Latin plural is.
Jantz's conclusions are logically rather than technically weak - the context is rather like the setting up of an identity parade, in which only the suspect appears.
Gillespie underplays the amount of anatomy that Hoodless had in his head. Indeed it was an anatomical textbook that first drew Hoodless to medicine. And I don't think anatomically ignorant administrators would have known how to use regression formulae to calculate height!
Tom King still does not acknowledge the importance of subjecting organic materials to radiocarbon dating for bomb effect, which could determine whether the forlorn material dated from before or after 1955.
The hatchet job on Lucas overlooks the potential innocence of his not wishing rumours to be spread until the bones had been examined."
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Professor Wright has not had the time to write a detailed response yet, but will shortly.
OK, I'll shut up now.
gl