Prehistory Decoded

Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe Holliday et al. is highly misleading . In section 5.2 of their Gish gallop, Holliday et al. take aim against the astronomical interpretation of Gobekli Tepe's symbolism. Let's see what they have to say. My comments in italics. 5.2. Pseudoarchaeological Divined Date of the Impact Event Sweatman and Tsikritsis (2017a, p 233) ask in their abstract, “Is Göbekli Tepe the ‘smoking gun’ for the Younger-Dryas cometary encounter, and hence for coherent catastrophism?”  Correct. No evidence or arguments are provided by Holliday et al. against this. Sweatman in his 2019 book Prehistory Decoded (see also Sweatman andTsikritsis, 2017a,b; Sweatman,  2017; Sweatman and Coombs, 2018; Sweatman 2020) claims the date of the impact event is actually recorded on a carved stone pillar at the archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe, Turkey, “Given what is now known about the Younger Dryas impact event, summarised in Chapters 3 to 5, dated by the platinum spike in the GISP2 ice c

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH) is first defined in Firestone et al. (2007). “We propose that one or more large, low-density ET objects exploded over northern North America, partially destabilizing the Laurentide Ice Sheet and triggering YD cooling. The shock wave, thermal pulse, and event related environmental effects (e.g., extensive biomass burning and food limitations) contributed to end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions and adaptive shifts among PaleoAmericans in North America.” Furthermore, in their text we read; “A number of impact-related effects most likely contributed to the abrupt, major cooling at the onset of the YD and its maintenance for ~1,000 years. Cooling mechanisms operating on shorter time scales may have included (i) ozone depletion, causing shifts in atmospheric systems in response to cooling, with the side-effect of allowing increased deadly UV radiation to reach survivors on the surface (46); (ii) atmospheric injection of nitrogen compounds (NOx), s