80 years later Amelia Earhart death spot might be found
Even though this is National Geographic the Bullshit-O-Meter runs high for me, but I know zero about these type of things and would like to be educated a bit.
80 years, really ? What say the collective wisdom of the SDMB ?
I had the same reaction. Haven’t seen the Earhart documentary but the one thing about cadaver sniffing dogs finding a scent from 80 years ago struck me as patently unbelievable.
This piece says 30 years is realistic: Etan Patz search renewed: Can cadaver dogs smell 30-year-old corpses?
Still hard to believe, but even if that’s true, 80 years is almost three times as long.
The joke I saw making the rounds concerns the article’s use of the odd term “bone-sniffing” dogs.
“You mean, just dogs, right?”
Bone-sniffing dogs, going by this article (a very bad one as no date or references) states that a dog found 600 year old bones:
http://history-talk.com/article/archaeology-s-new-tool-bone-sniffing-dogs
Also, this article pre-dates the Amelia documentary it seems.
Doesn’t surprise me at all though. Everything has a scent so just train the dogs for bones versus cadaver or what have you.
The guideline I always hear touted is “dogs sense of smell is as powerful as our ability to see.”
You can take dogs to graveyards to train them to locate old human bones. 80 years seems like a long time though. And they didn’t find bones, according to the article in the OP all they did was take soil samples for DNA testing.
Remember that National Geographic is now owned by Rupert Murdoch. The credibility of that magazine is lower, and will probably continue to sink.
Incidentally the photomentioned in that article has just recently been debunked - it was published in 1935, before Earhart went missing.
See here: Blogger discredits claim Amelia Earhart was taken prisoner by Japan | Amelia Earhart | The Guardian
There’s another thread about the photo. There’s no call for hyping these highly speculative ‘discoveries’ before a thorough examination, and so far nothing has been proven conclusive. This whole thing has moved into Bermuda Triangle territory.