Holliday et al.'s Gish gallop: the YD black mats
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...