Rejecting a quotation from publication and erasing it from the record are two different decisions. This page is the record.
What this page is
Every source this article rests on was downloaded and read locally, so nothing failed on wording. Five items were held back for other reasons: one because it is a misprint in a good paper, one because its wording is verbatim but its units are wrong, two because the figures they carry are not what they look like, and one because the article must not print a number it has not seen.
Status words.
- REFUTED — the attribution or wording is demonstrably wrong. A better copy will not help.
- UNVERIFIABLE — no route to the named source has been found yet. A statement about this project's reach, not about the claim.
- NOT CITABLE — the wording is genuine and correctly attributed, but it cannot carry the weight the article would put on it.
- WRONG UNITS — the wording is genuine, and the number in it means something other than what it says.
- PRINTED WITH A FLAG — the substance is verified, but something about the citation is incomplete, so the article prints it as a paraphrase and says so.
Nothing on this page was established with an automated summarising fetcher. Every check was made against downloaded bytes.
1. "7925–7815 cal BC" for the end of Çatalhöyük East
Wording: the TP-area abandonment of the East Mound given as "7925–7815 cal BC".
Source: Roffet-Salque et al., PNAS 115 (2018): 8708.
Status: REFUTED (misprint).
Why it was held back. The model is in cal BP. 7925 and 7815 cal BP less 1950 are 5975 and 5865 cal BC, which is exactly the range Orton 2018 quotes from Marciniak 2015. The same authors restate it correctly in BC in PNAS 116 (2019): 3345, "the East Mound was uninterruptedly occupied until 5950 BC". Printed as it stands, the misprint would put the end of Çatalhöyük two thousand years too early. The article cites Orton instead and warns about the misprint in a footnote.
What would change this. Nothing; the arithmetic is settled. Recorded so that no future draft copies the sentence.
2. "9,990±30 years to 8,880±60 years BC"
Wording: "These gave a range of dates of 9,990±30 years to 8,880±60 years BC".
Source: Gavin Cox, CMI, 23 December 2021, summarising Dietrich et al. 2013.
Status: WRONG UNITS, and printed in the article as an audit finding rather than as a date.
Why it was held back as a date. Cox's sentence is verbatim from his article. The figures in it are Dietrich's Table 1 values in radiocarbon years before present, not calendar years BC. Dietrich prints "9984 ± 42 ¹⁴C-BP (9745-9314 calBC at the 95.4% confidence level)" on p. 36 and "sample IGAS-2658 (8880 ± 60 ¹⁴C-BP, 8241-7795 calBC at the 95.4% confidence level)" on p. 38. Note that the slip does not help Cox: 9990 ¹⁴C BP calibrates near 9500 cal BC, so printing it as "9990 BC" makes the site look older, not younger. The article quotes Cox's sentence in order to report the error and does not use his numbers as dates.
What would change this. A correction by CMI. None was found.
3. "over 450 fine white silty clay plasters" as 450 years
Wording: "Matthews (2005) has shown that the main room in Building 5 had over 450 fine white silty clay plasters on the walls".
Source: Ian Hodder, 2012, p. 305, citing Wendy Matthews's micromorphology.
Status: PRINTED WITH A FLAG.
Why the obvious use was held back. The count is verbatim and the article prints it. What the article refuses to do is read it as 450 years, because the same page describes the replastering as "annual, seasonal and monthly". Matthews 2005 is on JSTOR and was not read. Matthews et al. 1997, the same author on the same material, was obtained and gives a primary count instead: one 3 cm collapsed wall fragment carrying "160 layers of plaster", read as "80 couplets". That chapter assigns no periodicity either. The non-radiocarbon argument therefore rests on the measured house lives and on the tree rings, not on any plaster count.
What would change this. Reading Matthews 2005. If she gives a periodicity for Building 5's main room, the 450 count could be turned into a duration.
4. A radiocarbon date for Karahan Tepe
Wording: none. Press coverage of the 2023 finds gives dates for the site; the article prints only AiG's own report that it is conventionally 9500–8000 BC and 46 km from Göbekli Tepe.
Source: Necmi Karul's Taş Tepeler publications, not found open.
Status: UNVERIFIABLE.
Why it was held back. No primary excavation report with a radiocarbon series was obtained. The article does not print a number it has not seen.
What would change this. An open excavation report with lab numbers.
5. "these replasterings occurred annually" as a dendrochronological result
Wording: "Up to 40 layers of replastering were found on the walls and floors of Building 1. We believe, on the basis of correlations with dendrochronological sequences, that these replasterings occurred annually (Kuniholm & Newton 1996)."
Source: Ian Hodder, "Symbolism at Çatalhöyük," Proceedings of the British Academy 99 (1999): 180.
Status: NOT CITABLE as a dated layer count. The wording is genuine; the authority it names does not carry it.
Why it was held back. This sentence was the article's headline non-radiocarbon argument in draft, and it does not survive. Kuniholm & Newton 1996 is chapter 17 of Hodder's own volume On the Surface: Çatalhöyük 1993–95, pp. 345–348. It was obtained for this article by archive.org search-inside on the printdisabled item onsurfacecatalho0000unse, leaves 365–368, with the leaf-to-page map taken from the item's public _scandata.xml (constant offset 20 across all 371 numbered leaves) and confirmed against the volume's free contents list on the BIAA site. The chapter is a report on tree-ring chronologies built from charcoal timbers. It contains no correlation between plaster coats and tree rings, and does not mention plaster at all. Search-inside sweeps of the whole volume for "replastering", "annually", "plaster layers", "each year", "once a year", "periodicity" and "seasonal" turn up nothing of the kind anywhere in the book. Hodder's own 2012 summary calls the plastering "annual, seasonal and monthly". The article therefore quotes the 1999 sentence only in order to report the defect, and counts no years from plaster.
What would change this. A publication by Kuniholm, Newton or Matthews that actually reports a plaster-to-tree-ring correlation at Çatalhöyük. None was found. Note that the correction costs the young-earth side nothing: dropping the plaster clock raises the article's floor for the East Mound from 680 years to 850.