appears to be the confidence intervals for the maximum and minimum number of years ago the fossil could be from. I downloaded the data from the cases that are in the visual above, so I am missing some Alaskan fossils, but I don\u2019t want to spend the time to figure out how to include and, while I know I\u2019m going out on a limb here and while the Church has no position on the Book of Mormon locations, I\u2019m assuming they aren’t in the Arctic.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI’ve posted the cross-tab results for the number of fossils found under different time estimates below. I\u2019m assuming the clustering is from the commonly accepted stop and start time periods for the different fossil\/geologic layers. I ran the number in thousands of years to make it more comprehensible.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nA few observations:<\/p>\n
\n- If I am interpreting this right (which, again, I might not be), it does look like there are 18 fossil finds whose confidence intervals include the time periods of the BoM civilizations.<\/li>\n
- However, you can clearly see the die-off, since there is a huge cluster that is dated starting from 11,700 years ago.<\/li>\n
- I am surprised at how big these intervals are (again, if I’m reading this right). Years ago I envisioned some kind of distribution where we have thousands of fossils every thousand years, and we can delineate when the extinction happened from a clear stratigraphic census. It’s true that we can kind of sort of do that, but again the picture is much fuzzier and is based on many fewer data points than I believed earlier.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n\n\n| Date interval, thousands of years ago<\/span><\/td>\n | # Equus<\/em> fossils<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 0-11.7<\/span><\/td>\n | 2<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 0-129<\/span><\/td>\n | 12<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 0-2580<\/span><\/td>\n | 4<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 11.7-129<\/span><\/td>\n | 199<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 11.7-2580<\/span><\/td>\n | 112<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 11.7-300<\/span><\/td>\n | 27<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 11.7-4700<\/span><\/td>\n | 1<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 129-1800<\/span><\/td>\n | 1<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 129-2580<\/span><\/td>\n | 1<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 129-774<\/span><\/td>\n | 35<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 14-1400<\/span><\/td>\n | 14<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 14-210<\/span><\/td>\n | 24<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 1800-2580<\/span><\/td>\n | 5<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 210-1400<\/span><\/td>\n | 256<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 210-4700<\/span><\/td>\n | 6<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 300-1700<\/span><\/td>\n | 2<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 774-1800<\/span><\/td>\n | 2<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 774-2580<\/span><\/td>\n | 12<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n| 774-3600<\/span><\/td>\n | 1<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Distribution of Equus fossils in the Americas from the Quaternary, Paleobiology Database The fossil record for horses in the Quaternary in the Americas, a very niche topic, has had particular interest to Latter-day Saints for well-known reasons. At the outset I should lay my cards on the table and state that I hold to a loose translation model of the Book of Mormon production and simply think that horses and maybe even at times the very 19th century Christian language and themes in the Book of Mormon come from that daylight between what was inscribed on the plates and how it came out of Joseph Smith\u2019s mouth after he \u201cstudied it out in [his] mind.\u201d\u00a0 Still, the Pre-Columbian horses idea is intriguing, but I haven\u2019t really seen much in way of a very systematic take on the chance of a false negative: what are the confidence intervals for species extinction in the fossil record? Obviously the farther back you go the broader they are, so this is a very particular niche within a niche. I won\u2019t claim to resolve that question here, but I dove into the Paleaobiology Database to get a sense of the distribution across time and space […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":47424,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Americas.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47423"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50258,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47423\/revisions\/50258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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<\/p>\n