Hitchens's Razor and a century of scientific fraud

Today I came across a rather interesting piece in Wikipedia, about Hitchens's Razor:

Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor asserting that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, the claim is unfounded and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. It is named, echoing Occam's razor, for the journalist and writer Christopher Hitchens, who, in a 2003 Slate article, formulated it thus: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

This is rather timely, since it is exactly 100 years since HH Thomas invented one of the great British myths -- namely the human transport of bluestones from Preseli to Stonehenge.  (I reckon he formulated his idea during the First World War, prior to publication in 1923.)

If you put "Herbert Thomas" into the search box you will find a string of previous posts on HHT and his theory,  which was essentially an assertion without evidence.  Evidence concerning the Preseli sources of "bluestones" found at Stonehenge is simply evidence of provenance -- it has nothing whatsoever to do with mode of transport.

I'm still rather convinced that Thomas was involved in a hoax which has fooled the archaeology establishment (and the British public) for the last century.  Because his mad theory is now treated as orthodoxy, the people who are currently treated as heretics are Geoffrey Kellaway, Olwen Williams-Thorpe and others (including me) who have dared to argue the case for glacial transport and who have questioned some of the assumptions underpinning the human transport hypothesis.

But hang on a moment.  Isn't this a grotesque distortion of something that should be amenable to scientific testing and debate? 

What do we know?  There are many different rock types represented in the "foreign stone assemblage" at Stonehenge.  Many of the rhyolites, and maybe all of the spotted dolerites, come from the eastern end of the Preseli Hills and from the outcrops of Fishguard Volcanics between there and the north Pembrokeshire coast. The stones are heavily abraded and weathered, and they come in all shapes and sizes.  Most of them are boulders and slabs -- not pillars.   From abundant evidence from many different disciplines, we know that during the Ice Age the great Irish Sea Glacier flowed across Pembrokeshire approximately from NW towards SE, and that on at least one occasion the ice pressed all the way up the Bristol Channel to the coasts of Devon and Cornwall and into the low-lying depression of the Somerset Levels.  The bluestone assemblage at Stonehenge seems to have come for the most part (probably including the Altar Stone) from a very narrow band of countryside, where glaciological theory tells us that entrainment of erratics should have occurred, maybe between parallel-flowing streams of Irish Sea and Welsh ice, as argued by Lionel Jackson and myself in an article in EARTH magazine.

The inevitable conclusion from all of this must be that the Stonehenge bluestone assemblage is an assemblage of glacial erratics, maybe deposited in conjunction with other glacial deposits, and maybe not.  If one uses the principle of Occam's Razor, there is simply no need for any other theory, and geologists, glaciologists and geomorphologists simply need to concentrate on finding the solutions to two crucial questions: exactly when did this event occur?  and exactly where was the ice edge located when the erratics were dumped? (There are other questions as well, relating to glacial dynamics and sedimentation processes, but don't let's complicate the issue.....)

Seen in this context, and given the recent geological findings by Rob Ixer, Richard Bevins and their colleagues, if anybody was to come along today and suggest, out of the blue, what HH Thomas suggested in 1923, he or she would simply be laughed out of court.

Back to the Bluestone Heresy.  The real heretics are not Geoffrey Kellaway and Olwen Williams-Thorpe, but Herbert Thomas, Richard Atkinson, Tim Darvill, Geoffrey Wainwright, Mike Parker Pearson, Richard Bevins, Rob Ixer and a myriad of others who have led the world off on a wild goose chase, based upon the entirely false premise that glacial transport of the bluestones was and is impossible.  This heresy has even been perpetrated by geomorphologists including James Scourse, Chris Green and David Bowen, who should have known better.

The real heresy is the story of the human transport of the bluestones, as a result of which the scientific community has wasted many years of research effort and dressed up a crazy myth as an article of faith.  Much of the recent effort has to do with the search for non-existent bluestone quarries.

Back to Hitchens's Razor.  The HH Thomas human transport myth was asserted without evidence.  It can therefore be dismissed without evidence.  The burden of proof regarding the claim rested initially with HH Thomas.  It was not met, and it should therefore have been dismissed in 1923.  After a century of naive acceptance and elaboration by several generations of myth-makers, the claim is STILL unfounded and its opponents (people like Olwen Williams-Thorpe, Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd and I) are under no obligation whatsoever to argue further in order to dismiss it.

POSTSCRIPT

I have been thinking further about the "other" part of the quote from Hitchens featured at the top of the post:  "... extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...."....... on the basis that this is an elementary rule of logic.  Well, from every possible angle, Thomas's idea about the human transport of the bluestones was "extraordinary", since there was and is no evidence from Wales that the bluestones (of many different types) were considered special in any way; since there are no other records of the long-distance transport of megaliths for use in ritual or other settings anywhere in the British Isles; since there are no radiocarbon or other dates which can verify the haulage of the stones at the time required by the archaeologists; and since no ropes, sledges or rafts have ever been found which might demonstrate that the haulage project was technically feasible.

From the very beginning, this has been a hoax or a scientific fraud, and it is truly amazing that the archaeological establishment and even a section of the science community has gone along with it for so many years.  We don't even have any "ordinary"evidence in support of it, let alone the "extraordinary" evidence demanded by logic.