Scientists Debunk themselves into a corner

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Just exactly how do archaeologists use the scientific method?

It would be surprising if there were any plant species anywhere in the world that have not been tried by humans in the past unless the plant species was observed to cause issues to animals or to humans. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if nobody ever tried to eat poison ivy.

They are clearly not getting together and saying "We would like to produce a psychoactive substance but, alas, we do not have the methods to scientifically analyze the compounds to make it."

Similarly, it is hardly inconceivable that someone would have stumbled upon that combination any more than that someone would have stumbled on the idea of mixing eggs, milk, baking powder, and flour together without doing an in depth analysis of the properties of each.

Doesn't it require an understanding of plant breeding to go from tetraploid to hexaploid? Southern turkey is the northernmost part of Europe which during the younger dryas would have been warm enough to continue planting crops. According to climatologists, southern Turkey experienced a cooling, although not as drastic as in other regions.
If you take that information then its possible the area was a Noah's ark for the re-spread of hexaploid wheat which may have been discovered by the people living there thousands of years before the agreed date for the emergence of hexaploid wheat.

Not at all. It is not even close. There are a number of cases of horizontal/lateral gene transfer that nobody would be crazy enough to think were done at all intentionally. For example, the human genome contains a variety of viral genes including genes from the Borna Virus. Do you think that was done at all intentionally?

Furthermore, horizontal/lateral gene transfer has nothing to do with breeding. In horizontal/lateral gene transfer one organism can acquire genes from other genomes.

In selective breeding, the genome does not pick up any new genes -- it mixes the genes that were already in the genome (or in case of mutations, mutations of genes that were already present in the genome). That is not at all how horizontal/lateral gene transfer works or what it does.

With horizontal/lateral gene transfer, the genomes of organisms can acquire genes from other species that had never before been present in the genome. You can also do that with genetic engineering. The advantage to genetic engineering is that you can select which gene or genes you wish to add to the genome. With horizontal/lateral gene transfer, you would most probably have zero success after trying for hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

As for the Younger Dryas, it was very much colder than today -- perhaps as much as ten degrees cooler on average for over a thousand years. Yeah, Turkey would have likely seen less cooling than regions further north, but it was still significant. Even the minor cooling from the period known as The Little Ice Age had very strong effects on the production of food in much of the world.

At the beginning and end of the Younger Dryas, the temperatures changed dramatically. It is thought that the temperature changes were much more pronounced in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere. It might have been possible to grow something in Turkey at that time, but not probably not much. I'm not sure that greenhouses would have even helped them and, of course, they didn't have greenhouses.

Keep in mind, too, that colder periods are generally dryer. Cold air cannot hold as much water vapor. It is no accident that the coldest deserts in the world tend to be the coldest deserts. For example, there are places in the Atacama that went centuries without rain.

Fortunately, not only did it warm up after the Younger Dryas, but to even higher temperatures than we have today. It is thanks to that warming that our ancestors could abandon their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and start to settle down and start farming. You could say that Global Warming enabled the civilization we see today.

Anyway, don't confuse selective breeding with horizontal/lateral gene transfer. They aren't the same at all.

Sure there is, it's the stuff that actually does proper hypothesis testing and designed experiments. String theory and any physics that doesn't bother to confirm findings experimentally or is built from untested theories. A good chunk of what gets called science lately is never replicated.

They build and test the proposed methods that ancient peoples were building or solving problems. It's just a branch of the field, not all of them are doing science.

Does it prove that those methods are the ones that were used? Or ones that might have been used?

It mostly proves if it was possible with the resources available and ideally does the best job of matching up with what was found on the site. Since, much of this involves things which predate books, there is only so much that can be done to say that this was specifically what was done as the only way to settle that 100% of the way would be a time machine. But, that being said, that as more of these things get researched, there should be various paths by which the technology developed that help to corroborate it. It's unlikely that people doing things in one way would be doing so in a way that was radically different from other people in the area or along related trade routes.

Ok thanks, plant breeding is an area I am particularly rusty. So hexaploid plants accidentally mutated from tetraploid right? is that the gist of how it arose? However the dating is questionable given the antiquity of Gobleke tepe and the high likelihood for the maintenance of a large workforce (not unlike the building of the pyramids. We know the pyramid construction teams were supposed to be fed on wheat to make bread/beer. Again, based on archaeoastronomy and the proposal the pyramids were constructed 12,000 years ago (like Gobleke tepe) then the issue of the locals not knowing how to grow wheat in the region might as a reason for not being able to sustain feeding workers for large scale construction projects might be under question too.

Qualitative research is considered a valid and important part of the scientific process. It's a methodology for scientific inquiry that in social sciences emphasizes understanding the meaning and context of social phenomena. While it differs from quantitative research, qualitative methods are systematic, rigorous, and can contribute valuable insights to scientific knowledge.
Qualitative methods are also used in exploratory botany, geology and astronomy.

What you are referring to as "proper science" is usually considered applied or measurable/quantifiable science. But even qualitative research can be action science, especially when dealing with public policy.

Forensic archaeology often involves quantification of samples and statistical modelling.

I find it difficult to believe that Gobleke tepe was a farming community prior to the end of the Younger Dryas which was still occurring 12,000 years ago.

As for the pyramids, weren't those built much later? I was thinking something like 5,000 years ago, not 12,000 years ago. If 5,000 years ago, hexaploid wheat had already been around for a few thousand years.

And "not knowing how to grow wheat" is a bunch of malarkey. Of course they had figured out how to grow wheat. The accidental mixing of tetraploid wheat and the related grass is the result of the available technology at the time, not the ability to grow wheat. If they did not know how to grow wheat, then they wouldn't have been planting it and the hexaploid wheat might easily have died out almost immediately.

Also, hexaploid wheat is not a mutation of a tetraploid wheat. To perhaps oversimplify, a mutation is when a gene does not replicate to be true to the parent gene. Mutations don't add new genes and they certainly don't add new chromosomes.

Diploid wheat contains two each of seven chromosomes for a total of 14 chromosomes. Similarly, humans are diploid with one set of 23 pairs of chromosomes for a total of 46 chromosomes. (In spite of the higher humber of chromosomes in humans, wheat has considerably more genes than do humans!)

Tetraploid wheat is a wheat with two sets of chromosomes. That two of each pair of chromosomes for a total of 28 chromosomes.

Hexaploid wheat is a wheat with three sets of chromosomes. Two sets come from the tetraploid wheat and one from a related grass for a total of 42 chromosomes.

To go from a tetraploid wheat to a hexaploid wheat is not the result of selective breeding. With selective breeding, you would end up with a tetraploid wheat. Rather, some wheat plant accidentally incorporated a set chromosomes from the related grass into its genome, thus increasing the total number of chromosomes from 28 to 42.

After that, selective breeding became involved. Farmers would save their best seeds to be planted for the next year. thus replicating the hexaploid wheat over and over again.

We see something similar in genetic engineering. In genetic engineering, we will either add a new gene to the genome of the plant, delete a gene from the genome of the plant, or replace one gene with another gene. The new gene doesn't even have to be from another plant -- in the case of bt-corn, the new gene is from a bacteria named bacillus thuringenis (sp?). In any genetic engineering, the first task is to replicate the genetically modified plant and test it heavily to see if it acquired the gene or genes you desire.

In other words, selective breeding becomes involved only after the horizontal/lateral gene transfer has taken place.

For what it's worth, even though genetic engineering is very new with the very first genetic engineering techniques being developed in the early 1970s, it is now being supplanted by something even newer -- gene editing.

There were two things that enabled civilization to develop. One was the warming seen at the end of the Younger Dryas less than 12,000 years ago to temperatures higher than today (global sea levels used to be something like 7 feet higher than today) and the other was the appearance of hexploid wheat which enabled mankind to spread out around the world.

Qualitative is one thing, the complete and utter inability to be replicated or make any future predictions is quite another. There's simply no excuse for doing all this theorizing on paper and then never bothering to go out and actually conduct the appropriate experiments to confirm or disprove the idea.

the walls of the Giza plateau surrounding the sphinx and pyramids were built concurrently with both structures show clear weathering from rain water which geologically has been dated to 12,000 years ago when the Giza Plateau was inundated with rain. Hard to pretend we can't see the weathering.

At that time two other things were happening
1. the sphinx was facing the constellation of Leo at the spring Equinox, indicating it was once a giant lion (the pharoah's head was crudely added much later).
2. the position of the three pyramids matches the constellation of Orion 12,000 years ago.

Archaeologists have said some silly things in objection to the above namely
a. the pyramid and sphinx were built by Cheops
this is bollocks because the pharoah's head chiselled over the original lions face doesn't resemble Cheops
b. the great pyramid is a tomb of cheops
the pyramid has no burial funerary cartouches found in tombs of contemporary pharoahs
third there is no "official" stamp anywhere inside the great pyramid suggesting Cheops never got to enter it himself

You can't rely on hunting and gathering and have time to build enormous structures in Gobleke tepe 12,000 years ago (apparently all the excavations are supposed to be 5% of what's buried). It's impossible to allocate manpower, they would all starve after a week. they must have been farmers.

I watched a documentary on a hunter gathering tribe living in Southern Africa and their entire day and much of the night is taken up hunting, the women have to spend their day preparing and everyone eats what is caught or gathered at the end of the night.

It's worth reminding you of Nan Madol


750,000 tonnes of stone built into walls and fortifications that even archaeologists admit would have taken thousands of years for the fishing/gathering tribes to supposedly build these structures working day and night. Absolute bollocks.

Last edited by cyberdora on 05 May 2025, 2:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

Archaeology is based on the premise that you can develop a theory based on the archaeological record. What is being dug up creates patterns of evidence that can be triangulated.

For example the peopling of England by the Anglo-Saxons has long been considered mostly myth in terms of the chronicles written by the venerable Bede. But recent archaeological excavations of pottery show patterns of pottery that match the stories told by the venerable Bede
Pottery excavated in Kent show clear Jute pottery from Jutland in what is Denmark
Pottery excavated in Mercia and Northumbria and east Anglia show pottery from Angles in what is Denmark
Pottery excavated in Wessex, Sussex and Essex shows Saxon pottery
In order for the patterns to be statistically significant there would be a need to create pattern models using statistical probability that the distribution of pottery artifacts confidently match the old Anglo-Saxon boundaries of yore.