The long awaited discussion between Graham Hancock and archaeologist Flint Dibble on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast is now available. Here are my thoughts after listening to the whole four and a half hour thing, and after following many more social media threads on this than I wanted to. First, people are interested in the…
Hopewell Airburst Paper Retracted (Why do retractions exist?)
Just this week, the journal Nature Scientific Reports retracted a paper published last year by Tankersley et al. about a hypothesized comet airburst that would have destroyed the Hopewell culture in the Midwestern US about 1500 years ago. This has been a rough few months for airburst and asteroid impact claims in archaeology. Earth-Science Reviews…
The narrative threads of the naledi Cave of Bones story
The central claims that initially got the naledi story much media hype, including the recent Netflix program Cave of Bones, have been strongly criticized by peers. In my view, they are not well supported at the moment. It isn’t certain at all that naledi buried their dead in the Rising Star cave system, or that…
Review of Netflix’s Unknown: Cave of Bones
Let’s get a few things out of the way. Cave of Bones is well worth watching. The entire team at the Rising Star cave system has been doing incredible and incredibly valuable work in a very difficult context. They are heroes of science, no doubt about it. The discovery and the recovery of naledi remains…
A quick note on Indiana Jones, the Dial of Destiny, and the power of archaeology
Ancient objects have power. In our real world, their possession gives us the power to tell stories about how the past relates to the present, and about how we got here. People who can show things in their museums have an advantage when it comes to telling a story their own way, for their own…