Have you seen this article claiming, “Ancient stone carvings confirm how comet struck Earth in 10,950BC, sparking…

Have you seen this article claiming, “Ancient stone carvings confirm how comet struck Earth in 10,950BC, sparking the rise of civilisations.”? The paper behind this claim has some inconsistencies with established research. First, the authors are not experts in the field of archaeology nor astronomy. Second, the researchers base their interpretations on the works of discredited authors. Third, there is no evidence of the population decline they claim. Read more from +Jeff Baker, who argues: “This is a poorly researched paper that should not be getting the attention it is currently receiving.”

Originally shared by Jeff Baker

When I first saw this article in my stream, I was skeptical of the findings. The first thing I noticed was that the primary author is in an engineering department. Martin Sweatman is apparently a chemical engineer. There is nothing about his biography with the University of Edinburgh to suggest he has the background to discuss either astronomical theories or archaeological theories.

https://www.eng.ed.ac.uk/about/people/dr-martin-sweatman

His co-author on the paper is a bioengineer who has done research into Parkinson’s Disease. Again, his biography doesn’t suggest he has any expertise in astronomy or archaeology.

https://www.eng.ed.ac.uk/about/people/mr-dimitrios-tsikritsis

In the Telegraph article, they acknowledge that some of their interpretations of the images at Gobekli Tepe were originally made by Graham Hancock. Among Hancock’s other arguments are that Antarctica is Plato’s Atlantis. The civilization Plato described is, according to Hancock, buried under the ice sheet. Hancock claims that Antarctica was originally located in the mid-Atlantic, but, galloping plate tectonics shifted the location of the continent to the South Pole, in less than a generation.

Looking at the article (which you can read here: http://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/33194700/MAA_TEMPLATE_Decoding_Gobekli_Tepe_final.pdf ), they start out citing Clube and Napier for the astronomy portion of their paper. I had never heard of these two astronomers nor their Neo-Catastrophist theories, so I googled them. I came upon this critique of their theories:

http://contrarybooks.com/clube.php

Basically, it is a crap theory that doesn’t fit with any established astronomical model. Oh, and Clube and Napier cite Velikovsky, like Hancock he is a pseudo-scientist/charlatan.

After discussing Clube and Napier, Sweatman and Tsikritsis mention the Washington Scablands as evidence of rapid melting of the glaciers. The Scablands were created by a series of large scale floods involved with the release of water from the Pleistocene Lake Missoula. Geologists estimate these floods occurred between 18,000 and 13,000 years ago.

The carvings at Gobekli Tepe are thought to date to ca. 9,000 BCE, or 2,000 years after the beginning of the Younger Dryas (which Sweatman and Tsikritsis argue was caused by fragments of a comet hitting North America).

They further argue that the animals depicted on the pillars are similar to constellations that, according to a computer model, would have been visible in the sky ca. 11,000 BC. This is an extreme leap of logic. We have no way of knowing what constellations the inhabitants of that time period would have seen in the night sky. That people 2,000 years later would still use the same names is a stretch. Without a written language, which wasn’t developed for another 6,000 years, it is unlikely that the same names would have remained as the “constellations” changed shape.

These two authors also claim that there was a catastrophic population decline associated with the Younger Dryas. There is, to my knowledge, no evidence for such an event. Even in North America, the possibility of a large scale population decline is disputed.

This is a poorly researched paper that should not be getting the attention it is currently receiving.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/04/21/ancient-stone-carvings-confirm-comet-struck-earth-10950bc-wiping///cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js