Hannah Farrell's team at Haifa University used a 700,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant molar to reconstruct wetland and oak woodland in northern Israel. The tooth covers a few years of one animal's life at one site, so the evidence fits a wet stopover on the route out of Africa.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap−5
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
Hannah Farrell's team used a 700,000-year-old elephant molar from Israel's Gesher Benot Ya'aqov to reconstruct woodland and wetland around early toolmakers. The idea that the wet valley eased travel along the Africa-Eurasia land bridge is the authors' inference from one site and one elephant.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives40
- Confidence50
Southampton and OGS have mapped 5,000 years of drowned coastline in the northern Adriatic from sediment cores and new geophysical data. The fastest published rate is a peak inside a much slower millennial average.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives45
- Confidence55
A Quaternary Science Reviews study redates Jebel Katefeh-1 to 60,000-50,000 years ago and reads its prepared flakes as Neanderthal work, at a median likelihood of 78 percent.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives32
- Confidence52
A statistical study of tool shapes puts Neanderthals in the Saudi desert about 55,000 years ago. The inference is careful, the climate story is tidy, and the skeletal evidence is nonexistent.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+14
- Incentives42
- Confidence55