Prehistory Decoded

Holliday et al.'s "comprehensive refutation" of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH)  is a highly misleading Gish gallop . Their arguments against megafaunal extinctions and extensive wildfires at or near the YD onset are undermined by the recent paper by O'Keefe et al. (2023) concerning megafaunal extinctions in southern California.  Even though those authors attribute the wildfires to human behaviour in a warming environment, their data is fully consistent with the YDIH and strongly supports it. See an earlier  blog post for a discussion of this point. Similar conclusions concerning the YD onset megafaunal extinctions are obtained by Stewart et al. (2021) generally for N. America and Conroy et al. (2020) specifically for the region of Alaska and the Yukon. That is, when only the most accurate radiocarbon dates and modelling are used, the data typically supports the YDIH. Remember, the YDIH only proposes the event 'contributed to' these extinction event

In this presentation I describe some of the supporting evidence for the astronomical interpretation of Gobekli Tepe. Many other presentations at Cosmic Summit 2023 are also available on YouTube, courtesy of George Howard who organised the whole thing. Here's the playlist .

The location of several Greenland ice cores, from Steffensen et al. (2008). Over the next few months/year I'll post a regular series of blog posts that deconstruct Holliday et al.'s (2023) (henceforth, just Holliday et al.) "comprehensive refutation" of the YDIH. Some common themes will become apparent. Essentially, there are no refutation arguments at all in it, so their title is misleading. Remember, the meaning of 'refute' is to 'disprove', but there are no arguments in Holliday et al. that disprove the YDIH. It's also worth looking up the  'Gish gallop' fallacy, because that is what is happening here. Holliday et al.'s paper might be extremely long, but it is lacking in serious arguments, and there are certainly no refutations. First up in this blog post is the timing of the YD climate change (specifically its onset) and the Greenland platinum spike. The relevant sections of Holliday et al. are 3.3 and 5.1. My comments are in itali