Not sure if you listened to his explanation, but I took it to be a bit more nuanced. His main complaint is that the authors have in the past made big claims abo

Not sure if you listened to his explanation, but I took it to be a bit more nuanced. His main complaint is that the authors have in the past made big claims about their findings, making this in context appear that they are making the science fit a narrative, rather than using the science to construct the narrative. All this stuff could have happened, but it seems to ignore other evidence that doesn’t support the narrative, like that it is normal in ancient cities to have layers of burned out structure under others. He’s not fully dismissive, just critical of the leading narrative, and any scientist should have the same skepticism in their own work, these scientists don’t seem to work that way, if we are being a bit uncharitable (which seems OK in context). If they are right, they can address the concerns in future grant-funded research :) It may be helpful to add I worked and published in academic research. My leads always got giddy when a hypothesis we had wasn’t supported as expected by the data, much science is indeed initiated because of an existing opinion or bias, but we use our tools to find the true answers and construct a better understanding of our existence, and accept when we are wrong, or find better evidence to support our often strongly held intuition. Specific example, one project was to determine if the brightness of the Gegenschein was decreasing, indicating a rate of change of the contents of the outer solar system (asteroid belts), we had unique data that could prove it, and doing so would be exciting new science. No matter how we looked at the data, it was very stable. Itself useful to contribute, but not exciting and not something grants are excited to pay for.