<HTML>Duncan:
A few points in Claire's favor...
1. Remember that the Bagdhad Battery sat on an archeologist's desk for years, labeled "ceremonial pot". When the physics professor came to take the archeologist to lunch, physics "trumped" archeology in a heartbeat. However much the archeologists DIDN'T want to accomodate the concept of 2000 year old electricity (and to this day they still only label it as a magician's whizbang neato thing) they have been forced to change their timelines and descriptions.
Same thing with the Antikythera mechanism. Atronomy trumped archeology in that case, by showing the device to be accurate and functional.
Let's not deny geology the same right.
2. Schoch's observation about the erosion may well be correct... the date is what we are contending. Geologists are NOT climatologists, however, and although they may be happy to say the erosion is precipitation induced, they may NOT be familiar enough with the situation to say WHEN that precipitation occurred. Hence, you don't get a lot of concensus on dates. Most geologists I have known work in periods of hundreds of thousands of years. Debating one or two thousand here and there are completely inconsequential.
3. I have seen JAW reply to the "where's the list" question, and his answer was good. I don't have it right off the top of my head, but it may have been something along the lines of a symposium with all the people and they asked if anybody disputed the markings as PI weathering, and nobody raised their hand. That, to me, says "concensus". I'll let you be the judge of that. (Please don't hold me to this... it's a vague memory from a post I read weeks and weeks ago).
Lastly, Duncan, your argument would have precluded Galileo from being right. Just because a fact is inconvenient doesn't mean we can ignore it.
Anthony</HTML>