Prehistory Decoded

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...

Image of wildfire-induced megafaunal extinctions near the YD onset, from O'keefe et al. (2023). Does it look familiar? O'Keefe et al. (2023) recently produced the most accurate data on N. American megafaunal extinctions near the onset of YD cooling yet published. The title of their work published in the prestigious journal Science reads " Pre–Younger Dryas megafaunal extirpation at  Rancho La Brea linked to fire-driven state shift ", making it clear they consider these fires to occur before the YD climate change. Yet their data fully supports the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH). So where did they go wrong? And how did this get published? Briefly, they radiocarbon dated over 170 samples from animal bones in the Rancho La Brea tar pits, and then used a statistical model to estimate the extinction dates of 7 species found trapped in them. This is just a subset of all the species represented in these tar pits, but nevertheless is a reasonable sample. They compared...

                                    Image from Scijinks.gov Some YouTube commentators, like Milo Rossi of MiniMinuteman and Stefan Milo, have made ignorant comments about the astronomical interpretation of Gobekli Tepe and Pillar 43. Below, I make the scientific case for this interpretation. Q: What is science? A: Science attempts to create consistent models of reality. Q: What is a good model? A: One that has a lot of explaining power relative to its inputs. This is also known as Occam's razor, parsimony, and model efficiency. Q: How do we measure the 'explaining power'? A: There are many ways, but the best is to use statistical methods, including hypothesis testing. Examples of statistics in science Suppose 100 pills given to a random sample of people, of which 50 are placebos. Suppose all those taking the pill are dead by the next day, but none of those ta...