{"id":4984,"date":"2010-08-22T17:41:10","date_gmt":"2010-08-22T17:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/08\/22\/credibility-is-easy-to-lose-pa\/"},"modified":"2010-08-22T17:41:10","modified_gmt":"2010-08-22T17:41:10","slug":"credibility-is-easy-to-lose-pa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/08\/22\/credibility-is-easy-to-lose-pa\/","title":{"rendered":"Credibility Is Easy to Lose: Paleo-Chemical Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was channel-surfing the other night, and stumbled across a History Channel program on paleoanthropology, talking about new-ish theories of how humans first populated the Americas. Coming off my recent read of 1491<\/cite><\/a>, this seemed like a good way to pass a little time.<\/p>\n

After a little bit, it started to talk about some guy’s theory that the Younger Dryas cooling and the mass extinctions at around that time were caused by an asteroid impact on one of the ice sheets. Which, you know, is a theory, I guess. The problem with this was, part of the evidence they were citing for the impact hypothesis was the presence of fullerene molecules at various Clovis sites. The narration explained these as (paraphrased):<\/p>\n

\n

Large organic molecules named “fullerenes” after Buckminster Fuller, the scientist who first discovered them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And, yeah, not so much<\/a>. And, really, that doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence in the subsequent explanation of how these molecules are only found in space.<\/p>\n

(I think the show in question was this one<\/a>, which apparently didn’t raise major anthropological red flags, but I’m not inclined to trust anyone who thinks Fuller was a chemist.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was channel-surfing the other night, and stumbled across a History Channel program on paleoanthropology, talking about new-ish theories of how humans first populated the Americas. Coming off my recent read of 1491, this seemed like a good way to pass a little time. After a little bit, it started to talk about some guy’s… Continue reading Credibility Is Easy to Lose: Paleo-Chemical Edition<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,11,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4984\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}