I am duty bound to report that a number of papers have recently been brought to my attention that reinterpret certain pieces of evidence I have cited in Genesis Unveiled to support the idea of a global catastrophe in the late Pleistocene. Here are links to the papers, along with some preliminary comments.

In his recent paper "An Evaluation of the Geological Evidence Presented by Gateway to Atlantis for Terminal Pleistocene Catastrophe", geologist Paul Heinrich questions a number of pieces of evidence used for the same purposes by my fellow researcher Andrew Collins. The main one that I also cite is the "Carolina Bays", a series of elliptical depressions found predominantly on the south-eastern seaboard of North America, and often thought to represent the fall-out from some sort of comet or asteroid breaking up as it crossed the land mass before crashing into the North Atlantic Ocean. Heinrich discusses evidence from geological  surveys that I did not consult that the radiocarbon dating of the bays provides a wide range of dates stretching back tens of thousands of years, suggesting that they were not formed simultaneously by one major catastrophic event. There is also a suggestion that they could have been created by purely terrestrial processes.

In another series of papers Heinrich and others discuss, among other things, the multiple frozen mammoth remains found in the permafrost of Northern Siberia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Catastrophists have regularly cited the fact that they were suddenly "flash-frozen", and that the contents of their stomachs indicate they had been occupying a temperate climate at the time of their sudden demise. It is clear that both of these assumptions are open to serious question once the original sources, and more recent expert research, are taken into account. The papers are as follows:

"Woolly Mammoth Remains: Catastrophic Origins?" by Sue Bishop

"Woolly Mammoths: Suited for Cold?" by Philip Burns

"The Mysterious Origins of Man: Atlantis, Mammoths, and Crustal Shift" by Paul Heinrich (This paper dates back to 1996. Although I had some communication with Heinrich when researching Genesis Unveiled - which for example made me question the "Alaskan Muck Deposits" often also cited by catastrophists, and which he also discusses in his more recent paper above - I was not aware of this paper that he had already written that discusses the mammoths.)

How does this rebuttive data affect my conclusions? There are various other pieces of evidence that I site in Genesis Unveiled that still support the idea that the Pleistocene came  to an abrupt and catastrophic end, as well as numerous others cited by other researchers over the years. There is little doubt that catastrophism is now accepted in mainstream scientific circles - especially with the realisation that the earth has been regularly bombarded by comets and asteroids in its past. The question is whether this specifically occurred somewhere around 11,500 years ago, and ties in with the ancient reports of such a catastrophe from across the globe. The rebuttals against particular pieces of evidence normally used to support this idea, as cited above, are persuasive and should not be dismissed. However, a totally comprehensive rebuttal of the entirety of the evidence has still not emerged. On that basis, at the very least the hypothesis of a late Pleistocene catastrophe still stands awaiting further scrutiny and research.