skims the articles quickly

Um, no.

Archaeoastronomy is a field that is borderline fringe science, in large part because it is really easy to overinterpret the data and find spurious correlations because there's just so many variables. To be taken seriously, you have to produce a lot of ancillary data to buttress the interpretation, for example showing that the claimed astronomical features have relevant cultural significance and hence would have reason to be specifically marked.

These papers aren't doing that. They're saying "hey, you can interpret pictograms as features of aurora," which is exactly the kind of argument you would make if you wanted to guarantee ostracization from the community. There's not an attempt to demonstrate a common source, there's not an attempt to analyze a complete context of petroglyphs (as opposed to individual ones) to demonstrate a coherent, single interpretation of a single event. Nope, it's just "some of these common petroglyphs look kind of like aurora features."

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michaelsbradley 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yep, clearly you didn’t read the papers. Shapes that appear spontaneously in laboratory plasma are carefully compared with shapes made/drawn by humans all over the world at various times and locations in the distant past.

“Directionality and source” is literally the sub/title of the second paper and it explores what theory and evidence-data suggest.

Although the second paper had the term “archaeoastronomy” (only) in its index terms, it is confusing (at best) to categorize it that way as the phenomena manifested in Earth’s atmosphere not in outer space among the planets and stars.

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jcranmer 3 days ago | parent [-]

I skimmed the papers, because I have not the time to read them in detail.

But let me tell you this: even as a non-expert, comparing the pictures of the claimed phenomenon with various pictures of petroglyphs it's pretty clear that the correlation is extremely loose. And there's nothing in the text I skimmed to address some of this misses.

Maybe you can tell me though. For the images that most identify as depictions of humans that the paper instead identifies as a toroidal flux tube around a plasma column because of the presence of two round dots: how does the presence of many similar human-like figures without those two dots match the same phenomenon?

To put it in really frank terms: this field is problematic in general because spurious correlation is really common. So any paper needs to start by demonstrating not merely correlation but something that makes it seem actually causative, some other factor to make me believe that it might be true. Without that link, Occam's Razor says it's just another thing on the heap of spurious correlations.

	▲	michaelsbradley 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> how does the presence of many similar human-like figures without those two dots match the same phenomenon Toroidal instability and shape-evolution is given considerable attention in the paper. The toroids fold and warp and what the human eye perceives will depend on the viewing angle. If you're looking at the toroid edge-on you get the "dot" effect, cf. Figure 31 in the first paper. The "double-dot" squatter petroglyphs are rarer, as that paper points out.