Articles to 2017-07-25

Zum Seitenende      Übersicht Artikel      Home & Impressum

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

As a total layman I have to take archaeobotanical results on trust. From what I have picked up, though, it has become clear that identification always carries some risk of error and that pollen profiles gather their reliability from the large numbers involved. In Louderback & Pavlik on the other hand the whole main result hinges on two identified grains from the oldest stratum. Of a total of 323 grains 70 are possibly potato. We are not told what species the rest of them belong to and not shown any pictures at all of those non-potato specimens. It may well be that the result is as secure as claimed, but I would have preferred more data and less claims of authority.

***

Considering the year of 2014, Turck et al. use a highly destructive sampling method. They also get only one bulk value per tooth while the current state of the art yields a progress across the different layers. I am not sure if what they see is not just random variation and whether crossing some arbitrary boundary value really proves in-migration.

Strontium is included into the matrix as a calcium replacement. An important source of calcium may well have been milk products from transhumance, it is by no means certain that it was the people and infants that migrated.

***

Bock et al. confirm the existence and validity of anthropogenic climate change – beginning around the time of the last glacial maximum more than twenty thousand years ago.

***

Jarman et al. on the other hand throw some doubt on the notion of humans being as destructive as often assumed.

***

There is an ongoing debate about what to do about unprovenanced and privately sold antiques. One common response is the one cited in Bible History Daily : “Many associations and journals have already adopted rules that forbid publishing an unprovenanced manuscript or antiquity.” A more nuanced view taking into account the loss of knowledge incurred by deliberate disregard of data is the one offered by Földi.

***

Kolar et al.’s title is misleading. They are not dealing with the currently discussed Early Neolithic population collapses (Shennan, lists of 2016-09-01, 2013-10-14) but another, probably regional, decrease in the Late Neolithic. Their data are sound, but it’s unclear how meaningful they are in a wider context.

***

I’m impressed by Notroff, Clare et al.’s restrained and factual response to Sweatman & Tsikritsis. Non-specialist outsider views are usually ignored or summarily dismissed out of hand. This thoughtful and serious reply is in spite of the latter article bearing all of the hallmarks of a crackpot theory: they do protest too much, their so-called statistic is the result of cherry picking, and they lump all kinds of nonsense together with their stronger arguments. All that said, those arguments do carry some initial plausibility and deserve to be rebutted by good arguments as Clare and his coworkers have done.

Zum Anfang      Übersicht Artikel      Home & Impressum

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License Viewable With Any Browser Valid HTML 4.01! Valid CSS!