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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

I'm so sorry but I can't help myself: 01975 is the dialling code for somewhere in Aberdeenshire!

WP: "(However, no edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs; all such cases have been proven to be other substances or only chemical traces.[29])"

[29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented cases of ancient honey but not all of them.

I'm going to call out the WP article as being factually wanting on that point.

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Ha, I had no idea about Aberdeenshire!

I agree that in 01975 peer review was not a given, but it does seem to be academic work, as opposed to a children's book.

> [29] is https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf - this does not look like a peer reviewed paper. They do look to be reputable and they refute some rubbish documented cases of ancient honey but not all of them.

The Gwern link is just a PDF copy of an article from a 1975 issue of "Bee World": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0005772X.1975.11... I can't speak to the journal's rigor in the 1970s, but they seem like a more reliable source than any other mentioned in this discussion.

Also, peer review is almost unrelated to rigor. Plenty of sloppy crap gets peer reviewed, and, for example, none of Einstein's annus mirabilis papers did.

> I'm going to call out the WP article as being factually wanting on that point.

No, it's not. What is factually wanting is any case of an actual tomb honey.

When I looked into it, every single supposed tomb honey, not already debunked by Leek, deadends in a useless citation which is 'someone somewhere once found tomb honey trust me bro'. Clearly made-up. They don't exist.

The burden of proof is on anyone who still believes in tomb honey to name a single specific verified instance, with time and place and tomb, and someone actually witnessing it and analyzing or eating it and proving it's honey, rather than several other possible residues like the Leek examples. Otherwise, it's just more telephone game nonsense.

(Note: the Leek PDF is unfortunately not working right now, because Hetzner has temporarily disabled my account over torrenting alerts.)

Thank you very much! Maybe a real case will come to light one day, but "almost certainly don't exist" seems like a good default until then.

Condolences about the censorship.

Hi there, You mentioned us briefly. If you haven't already contacted us about getting your account unlocked, you can find some more info about how to do it here: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/troubleshoot... --Katie (Hetzner)

Since you evidently haven't looked up the account of the person you're replying to, whose website is linked in his profile, this is spam. Spam is not what this site is for.

gwern FTW!

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