Hubris instead of science

If you want to know what "Hubris" means, just watch the infamous documentary about the Lost Circle, featuring MPP and many of his merry men and women, egged on by an "astonished" Alice Roberts. (it is still being pushed via BBC iPlayer, in spite of -- or maybe because of -- protests about the appalling level of the "science" nvoilved.)  Some clips from the documentary were shown by Coral and Jacky in their YouTube video about the Bluestone Debate.  The trouble with the brand of hubris promoted by the HTG (Human Transport Gang) is that it is dressed up as science, which means that it is much more likely to be picked up and perpetrated as "the truth" by an increasingly gullible media.  

Members of the gang have, over the past fifteen years or so, not been very backward in coming forward and telling the world how important their research is. They don't do modesty or caution.   Superlatives have flowed as freely as water.  The most accurate piece of geological monolith provenancing ever seen in the British Isles. The biggest, best and earliest Neolithic stone quarries.  The longest list of Neolithic stone quarrying "engineering features" ever assembled.  The most technically advanced and longest stone haulage expeditions ever attempted in the western world.  The best evidence ever produced to show where one particular Stonehenge monolith (which, by the way, has never been found) came from on a quarry rock face.  The clearest imprint ever found of a Stonehenge stone that was used in an earlier stone setting.  The second biggest stone circle ever found in Britain.  The site of "proto-Stonehenge" !!  The discovery of one of the greatest religious and political centres of Neolithic Britain..........  

So it goes on.  Extravagant media headlines of the "Stonehenge mystery finally resolved" variety, with many capitral letters, bold typefaces and exclamation marks.  All fuelled by carefully crafted press releases and quotes from senior researchers (called "experts" or "scientists") associated with top British Universities.  All wildly over the top, all based on extremely shaky evidence, and recently abandoned bit by bit under the pressure of scrutiny by independent researchers and sceptical members of the public.

Fast forward to the past month, and the paper on the Newall Boulder published by Bevins et al in the Journal of Archaeological Science.  I will dissect this paper with due objectivity in due course, but for a moment, just concentrate on the  outrageous claims made by the authors in press releases and statements to the media. They talk of "discoveries", "finds" and "new evidence" -- and claim to be "correcting the record" -- implying that they are bringing science to bear on a debate that was previously somewhat unscientific.  The debate is now  settled by our truth, say the scientists.  Then they claim (falsely, of course)  that "there is no evidence" to support the idea of glacial transport of bluestone erratics.  So we have claims of "the death of the glacial transport hypothesis" by at least one of the joint authors, and "human transport finally confirmed".........

Among the adjectives used by correspondents to describe the recent paper, we get the following:  arrogant.  disrespectful, insensitive, condescending, insulting, and complacent.  But what gets most people is the sheer arrogance of the eleven authors who seem to assume that this is the last word, and that I for one will have to accept defeat and go away, leaving Bevins et al in sole charge of the playing field.  No chance of that.  The eleven authors seem to have been incredibly naive and blind to the fact that their own evidence -- and their convoluted bluestone narrative --  has  no strong evidence to support it.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to back them up and that evidence is just not there.  Bevins et al do not appear to know how science works.  They have not corrected the record at all -- they have expressed  opinions on several relevant matters, and to claim anything more grandiose than that is simply to demonstrate that hubris is alive and well..