The power of patience

Sturt Manning is still at it. I think that his tree-ring chronologies are bearing fruit - finally - for the Bronze Age. h/t Cornell and, er, my mum.

Over the 1990s I ran across a skeptic who warned his readers from getting too excited about the VERY precise dates which the tree-ring labs were claiming. Kuniholm was the main target but Manning was implicated. The skeptic had issues with the labs releasing data to the outside (Reich's lab has been hit with the same critique, for DNA). But mostly there was a problem with the date-ranges being such a moving target from one publication to the next. I had to agree with the skeptic.

[And yes, the author of one book titled Throne of Glass can appreciate the irony.]

That an event might work different in one latitude than in another was what Baillie found for the late 17th century BC downturns in the Greenland ice record: that the tephra was Alaskan Aniakchak and not Aegean Thera. Manning is finding the same in the vegetation. By the way they are right that the growing-season is inverted in the Southern Med: Old European Culture taught us that last month.

As recalibrated, the Thera explosion might be a 1580 BC event. Still too early for the Hittites to write it down. But there's possibilities that the Egyptians caught it.

All I can say about Manning and his team is: well done, and thank you for sticking with this until it worked. As for the skeptics... also, well done, for trying to tamp down citations of Kuniholm-Manning before the work was ready.