Sterling Webb wrote:
The clustering I mentioned came from a
complete list of dated carcases. Most dates
were single and isolated times, but there
were several dates clustered around the
two time periods Firestone found (elsewhere)
anomalies for. It was a very weak association
and I probably shouldn't have even suggested it
supported even vaguely the isotopic timetable.
And it was the one from the talkorigins
website you recommended, Paul.
The fundamental problem. as I pointed out in my last post in
detail, is not that the clustering is weak. This problem is that
given few number of dates available, it is impossible to know
at this time if it exists at all. A few data points selected from
a larger population of data points can be and usually is quite
misleading. In case of the 30,000 to 35,000 BP period is
absolutely no clustering of dates in that time period.
Sterling Webb wrote:
When I referred to the megafauna extinction
at 13,000 to 11,000 years ago, I was referring
SOLELY to North America and said so. I
specifically mentioned that the extinctions took
place at other times on other continents. What
Paul called this old misstatement of the facts,
which has been endlessly recycled on various
catastrophist web sites despite having been
long known to be quite false was mostly taken
from the web site of the American Museum of
Natural History in New York, New York...
One problem is that just because something is posted on a web
page does not make it true. Unfortunately, even the web pages
of reputable museums are often **not** peer-reviewed and
sometimes prepared by publicists and other non-scientists, who
repeat what they learned years ago in school and not what is
now known about the subject. As a result, old, outdated
material is recycled with the best of intentions, regardless of
whether the information in it is still supported by the current
research.
Apparently, whoever wrote the Natural Museum of Natural
History web page, like the catastrophists and other people, who
also repeat this claim their web pages, mindlessly repeated
Paul S. Martin and H. E. Wright in their 1967 book Pleistocene
Extinctions when they stated:
A sudden wave of large animal extinction,
involving at least 200 genera, most of them
lost without phyletie replacement,
characterized the late Pleistocene.
Unfortunately for whoever prepared the Museum of Natural
History web pages, they, like various catastrophists, failed to
research what they were writing. Had the done this, they would
have found that in the 38 years since book Pleistocene
Extinctions was published, research has conclusively proved
that Paul S. Martin and H. E. Wright were totally wrong about
there being a single and sudden wave of extinctions. They
occurred at different times in different places over a period
of tens of thousands of years as demonstrated by the articles,
which I cited in my previous papers.
The disproved nature of Martin and Wright's 200 genera
statement is important because, the fact there was **not** a
single wave of extinction greatly contradicts the idea of using
a supernova to explain such extinctions. (Also, it reflects badly
one a person's scholarship to use antiquated and long discarded
and disproved ideas to support a person's hypothesis.) The
multiple waves of extinction, which occurred on different
continents at different times over a period of tens of thousands
of years is **not** the pattern of extinction that would be
expected from a supernova, which would have caused a single
synchronous extinctions event of global extent. An extinction
event associated with a supernova would have more resembled
the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary because of the amount of
irradiation proposed by Firestone and his colleagues based on
his chert data and many other nasty aftereffects of a supernova.
It is impressive that 15 genera of mostly megafauna became
extinct at the end of the Pleistocene in North America.
However, this is far too localized to have been caused by a
supernova. Also, as noted in papers discussed in my previous
post, i,e, Stafford et al (2005) paper in the same conference,
which found that it actually consisted of two waves of
extinction, which is inconsistent with a supernova or any
other instantaneous event. A supernova or similar cosmic
event also cannot explain why horses in Alaska were being
subject increasing environmental stress before they became
extinct in Alaska before elsewhere and why remnant
populations of mammoths survived on St Paul island a
couple of thousand years past 10,000 BP.
Sterling wrote:
Here is the problem with my attempting
to deal with the data (the isotopic anomalies).
People seem to consider me instead a
supporter of various theories, whacky or
not, Firestone's or any other's, about
extinctions. I have no brief for these
theories. I am interested only in what
exterior astronomical events created
these isotopic anomalies. They require
