In Brief: A New Paper Again Rebuts the Younger Dryas Comet Impact Hypothesis

​I appeared today on the Forgotten Hollywood podcast to discuss my new book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean. You can listen below, at this link, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

Meanwhile, a new paper offered yet another rebuttal to the supposed Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. The paper, published in Earth-Science Reviews, represents another round in the ongoing dispute between Martin Sweatman (the chemical engineer who claims a pillar at Göbekli Tepe records a comet strike) on one hand and archaeologist and geologist Vance T. Holliday and his colleagues on the other. Holliday had published a refutation of one of Sweatman’s pieces on the comet impact hypothesis last year, and Sweatman then attempted to rebut it. Now Holliday is refuting Sweatman’s rebuttal:

We stand by our original review. There is no support for a cosmic-origin catastrophe at ~12,850 cal years BP. There is also no support that at ~12,850 cal years BP human populations diminished, late Pleistocene megafauna were wiped out or reduced, and an unique global climate change occurred. The comments are largely built around the same claims we previously rebutted (and rebut here again) based on a broad range of scientific research published in long-standing and recognized journals on impact cratering and mineralogy/geochemistry, as well as late Quaternary geology, paleoclimatology, paleobiology and archaeology. Evidence and arguments purported to support the YDIH involve flawed methodologies, inappropriate assumptions, incomplete comparisons, overgeneralizations, misstatements of fact, misleading information, unsupported claims, irreproducible observations, misinterpretation of fundamental data, logical fallacies, and selected omission of contrary information. These issues are discussed within broader themes in the conduct of scientific research. The burden of proof is on the developers and supporters of the YDIH to critically test their own hypothesis and to fully respond to a large, diverse body of critiques, observations and contradictory evidence. To date, they have failed to do this.

​While this might seem like minor scientific infighting, it’s important both in terms of how science is conducted and also in terms of understanding the fundamentally unscientific ideas behind the comet impact claim. It is, at heart, a new effort to justify the story of Noah’s Flood and to provide an origin story for civilization in a cataclysm that (as in Graham Hancock’s telling) destroyed an antediluvian high civilization in a quasi-biblical fall from grace. This is, of course, an old idea—Edmund Halley first proposed it in the 1700s and Ignatius Donnelly popularized it in the 1880s. Increasingly, it seems that there is a group that needs some kind of cataclysm in the past to fulfill a religious (in all but name) narrative they have dressed up in the guise of science.