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Science Forum Index » Anthropology - Paleo Forum » The majority of the artifacts "did not demonstrate the chara
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| Roger Lee Bagula |
 Posted: Tue Mar 06, 2007 3:34 pm |
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Since artifacts in much more remote
and forbidding places
have been verified, this fellow's (Scott Anfinson) whole argument is
full of holes.
http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/abcde/anfinson_scott.html
Scott Anfinson: scott.anfinson@mnhs.org
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/breaking_news/16840053.htm
State archaeologist casts doubt on ancient find in Walker
Associated Press
MINNEAPOLIS - The state archaeologist is casting doubt on claims that an
archaeological dig in the northern Minnesota city of Walker has turned
up ancient stone tools between 13,000 and 14,000 years old.
Minnesota State Archaeologist Scott Anfinson , in a report released
Monday, said the materials found at the excavation site were more likely
to have been produced by natural forces such as flowing water or glacial
movement.
The majority of the artifacts "did not demonstrate the characteristics
that one would expect from humanly produced stone artifacts," he said in
his eight-page report.
Archaeologists found about 50 objects while investigating a route for a
planned road in Walker. The items were found beneath a layer of glacial
deposits that had been covered by windblown deposits, and experts said
they believed the objects were between 13,000 and 15,000 years old.
The Walker City Council has since voted to postpone any work at the site
so it could be preserved for more research.
Responding to the report, one of the lead scientists involved in the
excavation maintained that the site could contain evidence of very early
human habitation. Additional research at the site is scheduled for this
summer.
"As far as the artifacts, we do believe we have culturally related
materials," said Matt Mattson, a biologist and archaeologist working for
the Leech Lake Heritage Sites Program, which conducted the excavation.
"During the course of next summer's work, we would hope to recover some
materials that are more diagnostic than what we've recovered so far."
In his report, Anfinson also said it was unlikely that people lived in
the "very uninviting environment" of the Late Glacial age in northern
Minnesota.
If any of the objects really are stone tools from 13,000 years ago or
more, they would be among the oldest human artifacts ever found in North
America. Outside experts greeted the discovery with skepticism when it
was announced in January, but said much more research needed to be done
to allow firm conclusions.
The long-accepted theory was that people first arrived in the Western
Hemisphere 11,200 years ago - corresponding with the age of arrowheads
found in the 1930s near Clovis, N.M. But a consensus is emerging that
some humans arrived thousands of years earlier, even if scientists
disagree on when.
ON THE NET
Anfinson's paper is at http://www.admin.state.mn.us/osa
http://www.admin.state.mn.us/osa/
The Walker Hill site: comments on the possibility of a late glacial
human presence in Minnesota: an evaluation of possible evidence for
early humans at a northern Minnesota site (115K, PDF).
http://www.osa.admin.state.mn.us/documents/The%20Walker%20Hill%20Site.pdf |
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| Roger Lee Bagula |
| Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 10:33 am |
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This approach can go both ways in the case of approximate 15000 bp sites.
So far there are that I know of ( probably many more):
Calico
Canada
east coast
Monti Verde
In all cases the tools seem to be much more primitive
than the Clovis or other Native American traditions.
In all of these cases the pretty much same arguments have been used for
and against... only the last site seems to have won out,
but it appears the bid to suppresss data is loosing on the weight of
evidence long term.
Article: The Science of Getting It Wrong - How to Deal with False
Posted by: "Robert Karl Stonjek" stonjek@ozemail.com.au r_karl_s
Tue Mar 6, 2007 5:40 pm (PST)
February 27, 2007
The Science of Getting It Wrong: How to Deal with False Research Findings
The key may be for researchers to work closer and check one another's
results
By JR Minkel
Image: © WILLIAM TAUFIC/CORBIS
FALSE POSITIVES: Researchers poring over their samples for novel results
may be contributing to a flood of false research results. Tighter
collaboration between investigators may be one way to reduce such errors.
Talk about making waves. Two years ago medical researcher John Ioannidis
of the University of Ioannina in Greece offered mathematical "proof"
that most published research results are wrong. Now, statisticians using
similar methods found-not surprisingly-that the more researchers
reproduce a finding, the better chance it has of being true.
Another research team says researchers have to draw conclusions from
imperfect information, but offers a way to draw the line between
justified and unjustified risks.
Meantime, in a possible sign of change, some genetics researchers have
begun working more closely in an effort to prevent errors and enhance
the accuracy of their results.
In his widely read 2005 PLoS Medicine paper, Ioannidis, a clinical and
molecular epidemiologist, attempted to explain why medical researchers
must frequently repeal past claims. In the past few years alone,
researchers have had to backtrack on the health benefits of low-fat,
high-fiber diets and the value and safety of hormone replacement therapy
as well as the arthritis drug Vioxx, which was pulled from the market
after being found to cause heart attacks and strokes in high-risk patients.
Using simple statistics, without data about published research,
Ioannidis argued that the results of large, randomized clinical
trials-the gold standard of human research-were likely to be wrong 15
percent of the time and smaller, less rigorous studies are likely to
fare even worse.
Among the most likely reasons for mistakes, he says: a lack of
coordination by researchers and biases such as tending to only publish
results that mesh with what they expected or hoped to find.
Interestingly, Ioannidis predicted that more researchers in the field
are not necessarily better-especially if they are overly competitive and
furtive, like the fractured U.S. intelligence community, which failed to
share information that might have prevented the September 11, 2001,
terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But Ioannidis left out one twist: The odds that a finding is correct
increase every time new research replicates the same result, according
to a study published in the current PLoS Medicine. Lead study author
Ramal Moonesinghe, a statistician at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, says that for simplicity's sake his group ignored the
possibility that results can be replicated by repeating the same biases.
The presence of bias reduces but does not erase the value of
replication, he says.
"I fully agree that replication is key for improving credibility &
replication is more important than discovery," Ioannidis says. But he
adds that biases also have to be weeded out, otherwise replication may
not be enough. For example, researchers reported in a much touted 2006
Science article that they had discovered a gene variant that seemed to
confer a risk for obesity, and they replicated the results in four human
populations. Last month, they acknowledged that the finding was probably
wrong.
Ioannidis says that researchers have become increasingly sophisticated
at acquiring large amounts of data from genomics and other studies, and
at spinning it in different ways-much like TV weathercasters proclaiming
every day a record-setting meteorological event of some sort. As a
result, he says, it is easy to come up with findings that are
"significant" in the statistical sense, yet not scientifically valid.
To deal with this poverty of riches, Ioannidis proposes that researchers
cooperate more to confirm one another's findings Toward that end, he and
other genetics researchers two years ago established a network of
research consortia now consisting of 26 groups, he says, each with a
dozen to hundreds of members, for investigators studying various
cancers, HIV, Parkinson's disease and other disorders. The groups are
intended to help teams in each field replicate one another's work.
Networks or not, doctors and health officials also have to decide how to
treat patients based on published research that could be overturned,
notes oncologist Benjamin Djulbegovic of the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer
Center and Research Institute in Tampa. He and his colleagues contend in
a second PLoS paper that physicians' decisions should be based on a mix
of estimates of error for different types of studies (such as those that
Ioannidis calculated), the potential benefits of the treatments reported
in those studies, and how much of those benefits their patients can do
without (or how much harm they can live with) if the finding turns out
to be false.
"We can't work with 100 percent certainty," Djulbegovic says. "The
question is: How false is false?" A well conducted randomized trial is
more likely to produce correct results, but a less rigorous study might
still satisfy a physician if the risks are low and its potential
benefits are great, he says.
Ioannidis agrees that perfect certainty is impossible. "If you have a
severe disease and there is only one medication available, and you know
that it is only 5 percent likely to work, why not use it?" he says. But
implementing such a calculus is trickier than it appears, he adds,
because "we cannot assume that an intervention is necessarily safe in
the absence of strong data testifying to this."
Source: Scientific American
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=05C04C38-E7F2-99DF-3843F150B0DE1355&pageNumber=1&catID=1 |
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