One of the great things about science is that old orthodoxies regularly get overturned; it's not a bug, it's a feature. Of course the personal downside is that it means models which scholars have invested their lives and intellectual capital into may turn out to be unsupportable, but at the end of the day it's not about everlasting fame, but the real world as it was and is and will be. Paradigm shifts are kind of like a box of new chocolates, you never know what new inferences will be generated. Thinking deeply again becomes a surprise. In The New York Times John Noble Wildford has an excellent overview up of a new find which seems to definitively show that archaic Homo sapiens could travel long distances by water, On Crete, New Evidence of Very Ancient Mariners:
Crete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning that ...
