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NOVA does another illogic science show-- Ice Age Death Trap
Posted:
Jan 17, 2013 1:54 AM
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NOVA's Ice Age Death Trap of Snowmass Colorado.
I posted some long time ago how the interpretation of these
scientist's was awfully bad. Maybe NOVA can only film scientists these
days provided the scientist is free to make any zany conclusions.
On last week's NOVA of Decoding Neanderthals, they announced that the
first modern humans to enter Europe from Africa was 60,000 years ago,
and here, Daniel Fisher is speculating that a mastodon fossil with a
few scratches is due to ancient human meat cache in a lake some 45,000
years ago. So in last week's NOVA, they had humans coming out of
Africa into Europe to battle Neanderthals some 60,000 years ago and
then showing up in North America for Daniel Fisher to make meat caches
in a Colorado Lake. According to my math, that would give those
traveling African Homo sapiens just 15,000 years to get across the
Atlantic Ocean and out to Colorado to make meat caches.
Can you see why I belittle NOVA for not having a "editor of logic"?
Because if you allow scientists like Daniel Fisher to waffle on about
their pathetic speculations, NOVA may as well host Ed Conrad with his
"man as old as the Devonian coal theory".
Most scientists are not required to take a course in logic when in
school, and that is a pitiful shame and it shows on NOVA programs that
most scientists are very weak in logic. Let me enumerate many errors
of logic of this particular show:
1) Occam's Razor says the easiest solution is usually the true
solution. You have an alpine lake which probably was dammed up by
beavers or beaver like creatures and the water is frozen in winter
time. Much like what Jackson Lake in Grand Tetons at the dam usually
has about 3 or 4 or 5 moose fall into the thin ice near the dam in
winter and drown. So Occam's Razor would say the easiest solution is a
frozen lake and thin ice and entire groups of mastodons breaking the
ice and falling in.
2) Now Dan Fisher is worried that there are no predator bones, only
mastodons, giant sloths, and a few prehistoric bison. Just like at
Jackson Dam there are only moose fallen in, no bears since they are
hibernating and no predators for they could probably swim and climb
out.
3) Now Dan finds a few bones at another site of the lake that is
surrounded with boulders that appear out of place. Well, in natural
lakes, some years they have flooding from mountain streams and those
boulders fit the profile of those 1 in a 1,000 year flooding stream
carrying boulders. Instead, Dan does not like natural explanations and
so he imagines 45,000 years ago that Homo sapiens had been there.
Another possible explanation is that there used to live giant beavers,
whether in North America, I am not sure, and whether a giant beaver
could have rolled a large boulder to his dam construction.
4) Dan sees some markings on a mastodon bone and ascribes that to man
with a meat cache in the lake water. Someone with commonsense would
ascribe the situation of boulders among bones as the boulders tumbled
over the bones that they would leave a mark on the bones. Or to the
frozen bones with ice making the marks.
5) Science and Hollywood imagination is not usually compatible, but
Dan seems to prefer the glitz and glammor of Hollywood rather than the
need for science to "get it correct". I speak of the silly theory of
"Shake and Kill followed by Shake and Bury" proposed by Daniel Fisher
and demonstrated by Eugene Schwieg and Kirk Johnson. I am guessing
that they came up with this theory because the plain truth of a frozen
lake and animals falling in and drowning is not Hollywood glitzy
enough. Perhaps being a Colorado Museum director requires glitz and
glammor to allure the crowds rather than the honest science truth of
what happened. Why were those bones not showing evidence of predators
eating them while stuck in the mud or sand? The answer is that they
were never stuck, and Earthquake Liquefaction never killed them, but
rather the lake was frozen over and when you have too many mastodon on
the ice they break it, fall in and drown and there are no evidence of
predation.
6) Since the last time I saw this NOVA show, a year ago, maybe longer,
they reported some new findings. Fisher had the mastodon tusks
analyzed for when they died at Snowmass and not to my surprise it was
between winter and spring season that these animals died. Further
supporting the idea that they simply fell through the ice.
It is my opinion that if NOVA continues to show science shows where
they fail miserably in logic, that the best scientists will begin to
refuse to be on a NOVA show, because the quality of NOVA is no quality
at all, but just the fanning of silly opinions and speculation.
--
Google's archives are top-heavy in hate-spew from search-engine-
bombing. Only Drexel's Math Forum has done a excellent, simple and
fair archiving of AP posts for the past 15 years as seen here:
http://mathforum.org/kb/profile.jspa?userID=499986
Archimedes Plutonium
http://www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies
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