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Impact Proxies, Reviewing the Evidence and Praising Intellectual Honesty, Ft Dr Marc Defant
Description
In 2017, geochemist Dr. Mark Defant appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast alongside Michael Shermer specifically to argue against Graham Hancock's lost civilisation hypothesis and, by extension, to express scepticism toward the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. He had been asked to join the show the night before, spent that evening reading up on the subject, and went in unconvinced.
What followed over the next few years was something that almost never happens in public scientific discourse. Defant went back and actually read the papers. He worked through the data accumulated by the Comet Research Group over more than a decade - the micro spherules, the platinum group elements, the nano diamonds, the fire markers, the population drop-offs in the archaeological record. And then he said, out loud, that he had been wrong.
He is now a voluntary contributor to the Comet Research Group's active research, joining weekly sessions with Allen West, Malcolm Lecompte, and Dallas Abbott to analyse samples under electron microscopes. He describes the experience of looking at the spherules and the melted glass as making it hard to imagine any other conclusion. George Howard documented the reversal on the Cosmic Tusk blog in a post he titled simply - In Praise of Intellectual Honesty.