> But the geological record is like reading the CliffsNotes version of a book, and he was frustrated by an “unconformity” in the sediment layers where thousands of years were missing, like someone had ripped out those chapters.

It’s an island and they’re not the most reliable for dating sediment layers - they’re not exactly closed systems.

I haven’t read his book but I can totally see a case for skepticism over the precise dating. It’s a common trick/error to play fast and loose with carbon dating calibration standards and sample collection to get better numbers. It’s hard to get right in the best of times and the results have to be taken in context.

Are you saying that: Effective, significant resistance to pre-Clovis theories wasn't a thing in the latter 20th cent ?

In chemistry, either the proposed path works or it doesn't.

In squishier sciences (econ? archaeology? history? long-term fields like dietary and environmental sciences?), there's less ability for things that fly in the face of conventional wisdom to be provably correct solely on their content.

Consequently, there's more ability to suppress them. Or at least apathetically ignore and not circulate them.

And, to the point here, there's a lot more rocks lobbed at you when you're challenging the status quo that careers have been built on, versus following or supporting it.

Nobody wants to be wrong about something they've staked decades on.

Referenced from https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/node/1496

We don't know what happened to the preclovis groups. It's likely they were absorbed/became ancestral to later groups like those behind Clovis culture rather than erased, but the evidence is too scarce to say anything definitive.

My understanding is that Clovis-first has been considered rejected by the anthropology community since the 90s. Yet it's somehow treated as the dominant viewpoint being challenged in every single popular anthropology article even now in 2024.

Also, Clovis isn't necessarily the genetic ancestor of modern Native Americans. Evidence of Clovis culture is predominantly based on tool type, and material that can infer genetic relationships is almost entirely lacking.

Extraordinary claims would be that humans were in this location far earlier than previous evidence suggested and they had mastered flight or were doing calculus or something.

I mean what else did you expect archaeologists to do?