First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Although the Solutréen hypothesis is unanimously condemned by the archaeological mainstream, John J. Shea is not someone whose opinion can be easily dismissed out of hand. As Stanford & Bradley point out in their reply to O’Brien et al., what counts is not the average state of ice over thousands of years, but a stable shelf for less than a century suffices to facilitate a successful migration. Westley & Dix’s variability easily allows this. Unfortunately quite a few of the sources cited are unavailable online.
I have always held philologists and linguists in enormous respect, still do, and contrary to some other scientists’ tend not to doubt their results. Seeing a tiny scrap with two and a half words on it as in Tov’s figure on p. 52 and having him not only identify the source and passage they come from but recognise one of the words as completely wrong (leaving one and a half to fit) begins to strain credulity, though.