For those who want proof of the exodus

[athrock]

My point is simply that the crackpot ideas of today often turn out to be the bedrock of mainstream thought tomorrow.

No, the crackpot ideas of today often turn out to be the crackpot ideas of tomorrow.  The key word there being 'often'.  Crackpot ideas don't often turn out to have merit.  Period.  If you meant to say that they sometimes turn out to have merit, you would have been on firmer ground, the only question being how often is 'sometimes'.  I would argue that it is rarely.

Actually, no.

What I was trying to illustrate is that good ideas which go against the grain of the generally accepted views are often dismissed early on. They are called "crackpot" until they aren't.

There are lots of examples of this found here. This is one:

The Big Bang. Today the instantaneous emergence of the cosmos from a singularity known as the Big Bang is the preferred theory of the origin of the universe. But when this concept evolved as an explanation for Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the galaxies were moving rapidly away from each other, the Big Bang seemed unscientific, almost religious. This was in the 1920s when the orthodox view, held by most astronomers and physicists, was that the universe had existed in a “steady state” forever; there was no beginning.

The notion of the universe springing from nothing was immediately ridiculed by leading astronomers including Fred Hoyle, who originated the term “big bang” as a pejorative. Hoyle followed up with a very public radio tirade against the theory. Other physicists, including Einstein, opposed the Big Bang, even when their equations implied an abrupt beginning of the universe. It became the theory of choice only gradually, and only because no other explanation could explain the cosmos that scientists were beginning to study in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, other theories of the universe’s origin exist, but have not gained widespread support. Advanced methods and technology are expected to confirm or reject the Big Bang theory in the near future.

http://www.scienceforthepublic.org/blog/...-new-ideas


So, if Einstein can oppose the Big Bang, I'm okay with the possibility - possibility, mind you - that archaeologists can have resistance to ideas like those proposed by Mahoney.