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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: bill.rea AT canterbury.ac.nz
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Language Evolution
  • Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 01:25:52 +0100

On 22/09/2005 00:53, Bill Rea wrote:

Peter wrote:-


These Cornell people have published their interpretations
of the data they have discovered, but not the data itself. So their
results cannot be checked by their peers or anyone else. There is no way
to check whether their particular matches between different tree ring
sequences are the only possible ones, or just the possibility out of
several which fits best with their chronological presuppositions (see
the quotation below). This failure to publish one's data is bad science.
And yet everyone thinks they can depend on their results.


Oh, come off it. This is a ***WEB*** site not an article in a peer
reviewed journal. This is classic anti-science talk, quick and dirty
hand waving objections which require hours to rebut. I'm out of this
thread.


I am not referring to the website, but to all of the publications by this team including those in peer reviewed journals, none of which include raw data, only the team's own interpretations of the data. Believe me, I have looked at this in some detail in the last few months.

Or if you don't believe me, look at all of the articles in peer reviewed journals listed in their bibliography linked to at this site, and in the bibliographies in those articles, and tell me in which you find data to support their particular match between their Gordion and Porsuk data sets. They don't even give the t-value indicating the quality of their match, i.e. they don't provide the kind of useful data for this match which they provide for other, much older matches on the last page of http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/TUBA-ARCaptured.pdf.

They come closest to giving the data in http://www.arts.cornell.edu/dendro/Bochum%202005.pdf, but they give (as Table 1) a combined table of raw data for all of their sites put together, based on their presumed match. If they had published the same data separately for each site, it would have been possible to check for alternative matches, but with the combined data it is not. But this data does show that the total number of logs supporting their match between Gordion and Porsuk is no more than four, a dangerously low number for matching between two geographically remote sites and I think different species. There is no radiocarbon support for their match, because there are no published radiocarbon dates for Porsuk wood, only for Gordion.

Yet the match between Gordion and Porsuk is key to all of this team's dating of the Bronze Age and earlier. A match with a chronology several centuries shorter would fit better with some chronological theories, but might not have even been considered by this Cornell team. A longer chronology would be very hard to prove or to disprove because there would be even fewer, perhaps even zero, overlaps between the Gordion and Porsuk data. The chosen match is also suspiciously inconsistent with the ice core data on the issue of the dating of the Thera eruption. But that's another matter which I won't go into here.

Sorry to go so far off topic, but I do need to prove that there is substance behind my previous posting, not just "quick and dirty hand waving objections".


--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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