XPost: sci.archaeology
From: p.alaca@purple.invalid
Daryl Krupa wrote:
>> Reagh@cogeco.ca wrote:
>>>> Here is what oppenheimer says and the HLA studies agree with.
>>>>
>>>> "
>>>> The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors
>>>> came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers,
>>>> between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago,
>>>> after the melting of the ice caps but before
>>>> the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands.
>
>>>> "
>
>
> Tom McDonald wrote:
>
>> But by what mechanism, exactly, does Oppenheimer suggest the
>> various islands 'broke away from the mainland?'
>> And how did they become 'divided into Islands'?
>
> Tom:
> Oppenheimer is unclear as to the mechanism.
> If, by "the melting of the ice caps" Oppenheimer means
> the melting of the glacial ice masses in what are now the British
> Isles,
> then a more technical way of putting it might have been,
> 'after Britain had been deglaciated, but before
> deglacial eustatic sea level rise
> submerged the land bridge between Britain and continental Europe'.
> I.e., after 15,000 years ago and before 7,500 years ago, except that
> ice caps in northern Britain would not have prevented occupation of
> the southern parts, and they didn't disappear 15,000 years ago.
>
> If, by "ice caps" Oppenheimer meant "ice sheets", i.e.
> the Fennoscandian and Laurentide Ice Sheets, then
> 15,000 years ago would have been about the time that
> they started to "rapidly" recede, but they took
> almost ten millennia to disappear completely, and
> also for eustatic sea level to rise to its present level.
>
> Also, IIRC & AFAIK
> (and I don't think that this has been worked out with precision,
> given the ups and downs of deglacial isostatic movement of
> the area around the English Channel,
> which aren't well-dated or well-measured),
> re: the statement that the British Isles
> "broke away from the mainland" 7,500 years ago,
> eustatic (global) sea level was only
> about 15 metres below the modern level then, and I think that
> the English Channel's sill is deeper than that, so
> the British Isles would have been isolated from the Continent
> before that date.
>
> Re: "divided into islands", I was under the impression that
> Ireland had divided from Great Britain before Great Britain was
> divided from Lesser Britain, i.e. Bretagne in France, and also
> before the English Channel sill near Dover was submerged.
>
> Whatever Oppenheimer meant, he could have
> qualified his dates a tad more, because
> nobody yet can say what was the span of the window of opportunity
> for walking (or even wading) into what later became the British Isles,
> and those dates do not relate directly to the events he attaches to
> them.
> 15,000 to 7,500 years ago might be the right time span, but
> that is not the span "after the melting of the ice caps but before
> the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands."
> that was not the time between
>
>> And is this the general level of his academic ability?
>
>
> Oppenheimer earlier claimed that the continental shelf between
> the western islands of Indonesia, i.e. the Sunda Shelf,
> suddenly flooded, which catastrophe supposedly caused
> a diaspora of relatively advanced agriculturalists from that area
> who established all of the Old World water empires,
> from China to Egypt, and all points in between.
> This claim, the basis of his book "Eden in the East", was
> apparently the result of a misinterpretation of the rapidity of
> the draining of a pro-glacial lake in North America at the time
> (it took at least three years, according to those who made
> the calculations of the rate of drainage through tunnels under
> the ice sheet, and maybe in two sates over a couple of decades),
> and an enormously exaggerated estimate of
> the effect of that lake drainage upon global sea level
> (a few metres over several years),
> and a side-stepping of the fact that the Sunda Shelf had already
> been almost completely flooded by the time that that lake drained.
> Oppenheimer imagined that that lake drainage caused
> a giant tsunami that swept away all the agricultural land base
> in the coastal lowlands of the Indonesian islands, but
> there is no evidence whatsoever for such a catastrophic event
> at that time.
>
> FWIW, 7,500 years ago is about the time that Oppenheimer
> claimed for his tsunami, and also about the time of
> the discredited Black Sea Flood (original version).
>
> Oppenheimer may or may not know something about genetic
> analysis, but he is not properly respectful of the problems of
> dating events in pre-history, and has a record of misrepresenting
> their extent in space and time, and of exaggerating their effects.
>
> What Oppenheimer says must be corroborated by reliable reporters
> before being believed.
>
> IM(not)HO,
> Daryl Krupa
Britain was finally disconnected from the European continent
somewhere between 7500 and 7000 BP (C14) or between
10000 and 8000 BP (depending on the model used) and Ireland
was disconnected from Britain after 14000 or 12000 BP.
The latest connection between Britain and the Continent probably
was not where the English Channel/Straight of Dover Str. is now,
but more northerly (c 53º lat), between Lincolnshire and the
(Northern) Netherlands (Norfolk Bank(s), Brown Bank, Broad Fourteens).
BTW, 7000 bp is a bit early for 'Celts' or Gaelic.
--
p.a.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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