Chronology Incognito

The one issue that keeps cropping up in our ongoing perusal of the literature is that dating the past is fickle. A consensus slides into the literature and when overturned, taints all the prior work. I find myself constantly rechecking sources to get some comfort, and yes, making mistakes. We need to think about this.

For the past several thousands of years we are dependent on carbon dating. This method must be corrected by tree ring matching and that has been improving since its first discovery. That is why we know Hekla blew up in 1159 BC. Thank god we know something! On the other hand, the acknowledged error factor is significant in its own right and the wood itself can easily be decades old. This means that one sample can throw you all over the map.

Imagine dating Hekla on the basis of an ash collapsed roof. This sounds very straight forward. The assay will come back based on the apparent age of the wood which must be younger than the event. The house stood for a hundred years and the assay accounts for an error factor of one percent for ninety five percent of the time. That suggests that the date lies between 1300 BC and 1200 BC. You see how easy this is.

Now imagine trying to convince your peers that on the basis of other weaker evidence that the date is a hundred years too old.

The problem is that data does get written up and made to look convincing. This is hard to overcome. We have just reviewed the Vostok Ice Core. A marvelous chart lays out the apparent sequence of the data in clear chronological order. We have no way of confirming the reliability of the corrective factors used, if any, and thus are susceptible to been misled.

It is clear that hotspots occurred that were clearly significant and briefly countered the effects of the general ice age. The spacing is such that we can say that this is a periodic event that has yet to reoccur because the curve shape of the Holocene is radically different. The Holocene is the first stable climate regime in the past one million years because the Northern Ice Cap has been eliminated.

So what are these hotspots? They appear periodic. If they are periodic, then the probability exists that the cause is both cosmological and strongly periodic within a narrow predictable time range. If it is a solar event then it will be say 100,000 years plus or minus 10,000 years. If it is orbital then it will be say 100,000 years plus or minus 1000 years.

The data is showing three precisely similar events with a high degree of probability and clear apparent periodicity. So within the confines of our data we have clear unique and similar events that are separable from the ice age data. The probability of real periodicity is also very high and certainly approaching ninety percent plus.

If for example, the orbit were most of 150,000 years, then simple stretching of the data will preserve the near term data chronology and fit in the remainder handily giving us a 600,000 year chart. I would suspect that our weak present knowledge puts such an orbit well within the probability range. Right now we merely know that we are traveling in the right general direction and at a relative velocity that certainly supports an orbit hypothesis. We do not really know were we are on the curve of the orbit let alone a refined knowledge of the path of perigee.

Returning to the issue of carbon dating, we have illustrated just how controversial any single carbon dated data point must be. It also reaffirms the need for careful methodology and multiple samples to pin down chronologies. It also tells us that the documentary record needs to be disciplined by facts on the ground. This is slowly happening in the Mediterranean and other selected regions around the globe.

On the other hand there is still far too much ‘terra incognito’. Had the Maya built only in wood, what would we know? Millions lived in the Amazon and we have only just discovered them. And that is all within the past several thousands of years. Deeper and older, we have barely turned a spade.

When we dig down though a couple hundred feet of mud and discover man made stonework from seventy thousands of years ago, how will we explain it? Certainly our endeavors have raised the possibility.

Lost Millenium by Florin Diacu

I am working my way through a book written by Florin Diacu titled ‘The lost Millennium’. It tackles the fairly invisible debate over the accuracy of traditional chronology and the challenges to that orthodoxy. I had heard rumbles that our chronology may be a thousand years too long. I think that we all find that much too hard to swallow, simply because any point in history is described by a cloud of sources, objects, and dating tests that add up to a strong likelihood.

There are unsettling gaps, but we underestimate the difficulty in maintaining records and the existence of a regime interested in keeping records in the first place. We underestimate the loss of language. Can you imagine sitting in a Viking’s hall and taking notes in Latin, then getting a letter from a hundred miles away explaining local intelligence while your host has no ability to read any of it? How paranoid can you get?

Seen that way, any restoration had to take a lot of time.

The problem with gluing together chronology is the gaps, not just in time but in geography. The discovery of the importance of 1159 BCE as the effective end of the European Bronze Age stabilizes a whole group of regional chronologies by putting aside a lot of niggling concerns.

We can now say with assurance that Homer’s world was a couple of generations before 1159 BCE giving enough time for tale to be told and spread throughout the cultural area by sea and to reach Athens. It also puts the Argonauts in the Atlantic and opens the possibility of a completely new and more creditable interpretation. We now have access to the Amazon and the Mississippi as operational locales.

The problem is that we lack other such absolutes in the chronology game. We have far too many maybes.

We have had good global records for perhaps four hundred years. We have had good European and Chinese information for a thousand years. All this means is that records stop been lost outright. Further back, the inevitable gaps pop up and histories are simply missing.

For all of the Americas, we are now recovering fragments of Mayan history, and the same is true for the rest of the old world. It is also easy to get fooled by the depth of evidence of a regime or society. Look at the bible. This is the only extant historical record that survives from the Bronze Age. Other documents take the form of rituals, horoscopes and IOUs. We then must jump hundreds of years to the Greeks and their Roman successors. What happened to those other guys?

The archeological record is disclosing a global striving for civilization everywhere possible throughout the past 5,000 years. Everywhere a local chieftain built a palace and commanded his retainers. This made record keeping a true challenge and it obviously failed most of the time.

Diacu’s book surveys the research undertaken by a number of scholars including the original creators of our present chronology ` regime, and Newton in particular who all struggled with attempting to link written reports with astronomical probabilities. Everyone ever involved has been far too often inconclusive.

Most disconcerting are horoscopes depicting recent times yet associated historically a millennia earlier. If these types of time changes actually held up, history would be in for a massive rewrite.

What motivated the book were the writings of Fomenko and his associates who have argued that a thousand years are missing. Most of what Fomenko says is not too compelling and a lot is clearly wrong also. He does dig up a number of unresolved conflicts and also establishes the existence of a second conflict in historical methodology. That is that practitioners are discarding non conforming evidence. Over time, this bias will strip important evidence and patterns out of the data leaving only a self selected data set. This is not a problem in the physical sciences were replication soon catches up to you. This is a giant problem in history were the data cannot be easily be repeated.

The book is still an interesting read and introduces us to a lot of obscure history. However, I would advise reading the last chapter on consensus first to give you direction.

It is also clear that the issues raised are in the process of been resolved largely by modern carbon dating, that now can be extended to remnants of papyrus.

So we still can rely on our known chronology as long as we keep a weather eye out for unpleasant surprises and learn to ask why there is a lack of evidence when asking historic questions. I have asked this question many times while making a wide range of historic and archeological conjectures. I have then watched the evidence slowly emerge.