I’ve been quiet on both the John Ansell front and with respect to my promised review of Martin Butler’s “Tunnel Vision,” mostly because I’ve been busy working on post-doctoral applications and because the denizens of John Ansell’s blog (including the man himself) are so immune to evidence-based reasoning (mostly because they don’t know how to weight evidence) that I’ve grown tired and cranky; I need some time out.
Still, that doesn’t mean the fight is in any way over. I’m waiting to hear back from local archaeologists about what we would expect to find if there were a pre-Māori in Aotearoa me Te Wai Pounamu. Whilst we wait on that information (and given that I’m waiting upon academics, it could be a while before someone gets back to me), here’s a lovely little article on some of the so-called evidence for pre-Native American peoples in North America. Indeed, one of the paragraphs could easily have been written about Martin Doutré.
[I]ndeed, Fell worked in a scholarly vacuum, not engaging with genuine experts, publishing in his own society’s journals and monographs not subject to peer review by professional linguists. Rejection of his ideas is not because other scholars are closed-minded and unwilling to accept such ideas but because the evidence on which he based his radical hypotheses about widespread contact between the Old and New Worlds long before Columbus does not stand up to even the slightest critical scrutiny.