Prehistory Decoded

Jim powell's new  website documents the poor rhetoric of Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH) critics. Their approach is often pseduoskeptical. In many other cases their approach either lacks scientific rigour or is possibly fraudulent. Here I summarize the poor rhetoric of most of the key critical YDIH papers. ----------------------------------------------- 1. Pinter and Ishman “Impacts, mega-tsunami, and other extraordinary claims.” GSA Today 18 (2008). doi: 10.1130/GSAT01801GW.1. As shown by Powell , this initial rebuttal of Firestone et al. (2007), in wich the YDIH is presented for the first time, contains no new field data and is full of anti-science rhetoric. 2.  Surovell et al. “An Independent Evaluation of the Younger Dryas Extraterrestrial Impact Hypothesis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, 18155–58 (2009). doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0907857106. Surrovell et al. (with Holliday and Claeys as co-authors) sampled the Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) at ...

Jim Powell, Emeritus Professor of Geology, has created another  new website  dedicated to informing the public about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH). Sites like Wikipedia, which feed into AI models like ChatGPT and Grok, cannot be trusted to accurately reflect the science. This time, Jim calls out the poor rhetoric, or pseudoskepticism, of some of the most prominent critics of the YDIH.

Three people were involved in the discovery of the lunar-solar calendar at Gobekli Tepe. Dr John Gordon, myself, and Claire Murdoch. John, a psychiatrist at the Turning Winds institute in Montana, USA, emailed me about how the top row of v-symbols on Pillar 43, shown above, likely represents a lunar cycle. I immediately saw that he was probably correct, as I had already read about a similar lunar tally-count in Alexander Marshack's work from the 1970s. However, I disagreed with his interpretation of the remainder of the calendar symbols. I soon worked out that the 11 little boxes likely meant "repeat the above count" and the 10 v-symbols in the bottom row were extra (epagomenal) days. Together, these symbols sum to 364 days. I was sure this had to be the correct interpretation, although I struggled to find a convincing way to complete the solar calendar count of 365 days. Surely, there had to be another v-symbol in the count? I described this interpretation to Claire Murd...

Holliday et al. (2023): Systematic Misrepresentations of Younger Dryas Impact Evidence Undermine the Reliability of their Critique – ScienceOpen Holliday et al. (2023) present a “comprehensive refutation” of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH), but in doing so make numerous incorrect or misleading statements about the studies they critique. Collectively, these mischaracterizations distort the scientific record and compromise the reliability of the reviewers’ assessment. In multiple cases, their review omits key caveats, exaggerates alleged weaknesses, or presents prior YDIH studies out of context, giving readers an inaccurate impression of the claims, methods, and evidentiary strength of the original work. For clarity and brevity, we examine representative examples drawn from six influential YDIH publications discussed by Holliday et al.: Firestone et al. (2007), LeCompte et al. (2012), Kennett et al. (2015), Moore et al. (2017), Wolbach et al. (2018), and Moore et al. (2019), a...