Fact-Checking the Torah: the third clue

As part of the original thread, I wrote about the plagues of the Exodus which sound like the effects of a Plinian eruption, and tagged the date of the Exodus to 1628 BCE when Thera exploded in a cataclysm 20 times worse than the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius that is so famous.

More recently, I pointed to an occultation of the superior conjunction of Venus, something unheard of in a thousand years of Babylonian astronomical history. This pegged the Exodus as occurring in March 1628 BCE.

Nevertheless, people I got in touch with assured me that the Thera explosion occurred in June or July. But one of those people gave me the exact clue I'm writing about now.

In his book, Santorini: Volcano, Natural History, Mythology (https://archive.org/details/santorinivolcano0000frie/page/70/mode/2up), Walter Friedrich has a number of interesting photos, but none more interesting than the two on book page 69. The top one shows a pupa and the bottom an adult, of a parasite found on leaves buried in the stuff Thera put out when it blew up. 

So I looked up the life cycle of that parasite. Fethi et al. told me that the adults emerge in June or July and, if the weather be what it ought, there will be a second generation of adults who may survive the winter and lay eggs.

Fethi, Abbassi and Benzehra Abdelmajid and Achouche Abderrahim, “Study of the Bioecology of Aleurolobus olivinus Silvestri (1911) (Homoptera, Aleyrodidae) on olive Trees in Algeria,” November 2019 Bioscience Research 16(4):11

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338212224_Study_of_the_bioecology_of_aleurolobus_olivinus_silvestri_1911_homoptera_aleyrodidae_on_olive_trees_in_algeria

They lay eggs as soon in the spring as the olive trees show signs of activity. There are several pupa stages, so the pupa in the top photo could be part of the spring laying.

But obviously there are also pupae in late summer and early autumn. So the question is, whether the pupa in the photograph was left from the autumn generation, or is it evidence that Thera blew up in the spring?

The Fethi article doesn't give me much of a clue. It doesn't go into how fragile the pedicle is that attaches a pupa to a leaf. The adult that overwinters is alive and can hang onto that leaf for all it's worth so it has a chance to lay eggs in the spring. The pupa's pedicle is a perfectly passive attachment. Rain might dissolve it; wind might break it. 

Mr. Friedrich did not give me a link to the Fethi article. He didn't look into whether a pupa can overwinter, all he did was caption the photo to include the name of the parasite. 

This is one of the problems with academic work. It's myopic. Mr. Friedrich was satisfied to know that the parasite showed up when you used an electron microscope. He didn't think about what it meant that they found a pupa as well as an adult. It takes an inquiring mind to go that extra step. How many academics really have inquiring minds, and how many just do the research their department steers them to for whatever reason?

How many discoveries has humanity missed out on because people in universities don't really have inquiring minds? If you've read much of my blog, you know what I think.