The Archaeology Thread

[Fake Messiah]

Retraction Watch just announced the pending retraction of the Comet Research Group's Sodom & Gomorrah pseudoarchaeology paper.

Sodom comet paper to be retracted two years after editor’s note acknowledging concerns

Reports will retract a controversial paper claiming to present evidence an ancient city in the Middle East was destroyed by an exploding celestial body – an event the authors suggested could have inspired the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The decision comes two years after Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature title, published an editor’s note informing readers the journal was looking into concerns about the data and conclusions in the work.

Criticism of the article, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” began soon after its publication in September 2021.

The authors’ response reiterated the “high-temperature melted pottery and melted surficial sediment” they had reported at the site. An earlier Matters Arising, published in March 2022, questioned whether those findings could be the result of ancient smelting technologies rather than a fireball from space. “The observations and data presented here do not meet the well-established criteria for documenting evidence of an extraterrestrial event,” the critics concluded.

https://retractionwatch.com/2025/04/23/s...-concerns/

[TheWhiteMarten]

Interesting.

An airburst event seems pretty unlikely; the area of damage seems way too spread out and there doesn't seem to be any real historical precedent for similar events.

Geological seems to be the most reasonable answer, and sites like Bab Edh-Dara and Numera, as well as the evaporated pools where rivers and lakes once would have sat still contain sulfur balls that were likely thrown up from a major seismic event and deposited over the valley. To me, the simplest answer seems the most reasonable.