Prehistory Decoded

We have already  established that Holliday et al. is a Gish gallop, i.e. a (very) long series of weak or fallacious arguments. Now let's look at another of their  less interesting chapters that are quite superfluous, but it nevertheless illustrates the kind of rhetorical tactics that Holliday et. al are prepared to use. In this case, Section 6 concerns interpretation of the Younger Dryas (YD) black mat. It's a superfluous section because any misunderstanding of the YD black mat by YDIH proponents is irrelevant - it makes no difference whatsoever to the case for the YD impact as it's not evidence for or against the YD impact nor is it a predicted secondary effect of the impact. So this whole section is just pedantry. Before we start, let's remind ourselves of what Haynes (2008) had to say about the YD black mat. His abstract reads "Of the 97 geoarchaeological sites of this study that bridge the Pleistocene-Holocene transition (last deglaciation), approximately two t

Section 5.7 of Holliday et al. deals with the evidence for the end of Clovis. Specifically, its timing. Was it synchronous with an ET impact, a megafaunal extinction and the onset of the YD cooling? In fact, the YDIH doesn't claim the YD impact ended Clovis culture instantly. It merely proposes it affected the Clovis culture significantly, i.e. it was the beginning of the end for Clovis. Throughout their paper, Holliday et al. continually state that radiocarbon dating evidence for Clovis sites is inconsistent with the YDIH. Let's see what they have to say in Section 5.7 where we find the key evidence. My comments are in italics as always. 5.7. Improved Dating of Clovis Sites and Clovis Archaeology Clovis is a term given to the oldest well-dated, widespread, and recognizable archaeological technocomplex in North America (Haynes, 2002; Smallwood and Jennings, 2015; Meltzer, 2021). Proponents of the YDIH use their perceived connection between the disappearance of the Clovis lithic