Articles to 2020-02-28

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

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Clarkson et al. together with e.g. Walsh & Schwalbe and several others this week not listed here is an example of a very disturbing tendency. Many recent articles seem to be written and published not to be read but for their titles and abstracts to be quoted in the secondary literature. They claim or hint at results that do not hold up to even casual scrutiny. In Clarkson et al. the populating of Europe by modern humans 200 ka ago is cited as an established fact. Even if the result by Harvati et al. (list of 2019-07-26) were far less doubtful than it is it would still be one single exceptional outlier – hardly the stuff to hang the population history of an entire continent on.

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If Langley et al. are right about their conclusions – and as far as I can tell, they probably are – then the current general substitution of children's play with passive consumption of visual media does not bode well for our society's future.

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I have never put too much trust in OSL datings especially not the overoptimistic error margins quoted for them. If modern human tools really span across the Toba eruption I want to see stratigraphic, i.e. below and above, proof for that not just OSL dates as given by Clarkson et al.

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Walsh & Schwalbe are absolutely right in their conclusions. Combined radio carbon dates tend to yield overly optimistic and far too small error margins. But why choose just that example for their test? Does the exact age of the shroud matter? What is the chance that the fabric might be more than three times as old as measured? Essentially zero, but is that point obvious from the title and abstract alone?

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Hand promises us a bright, wonderful, clean, and abundant future, like they all do. As of now Proton Technologies spend a lot of money for low efficiency, loss of energy and emitting more carbon dioxide than conventional technology does. There isn't yet any large-scale technology available that beats a clean-burning, high efficiency, modern coal burning power plant without wasting far more valuable resources that are sorely needed elsewhere. At least they promise their hydrogen to be cheap. Let's wait and see how that pans out.

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The Little Ice Age might have been an important proof for the power of carbon dioxide to affect anthropogenic climate change. As Boretti shows, it isn't.

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Grave depth is often touted as an important marker for social position. In all studies I have seen so far the association was weak at best, often driven by a single outlier alone and a predictive value nonexistent. Kempf & Brather-Walter have just driven one more nail into the coffin of that particular hypothesis. Let's hope it will finally be put to rest.

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