At https://malagabay.wordpress.com/2017/05/03/indian-impacts-hammerhead-geo… … which is a great post by Louis Hissink, an unconventional geologist from Australia. He begins by quoting Fred Hoyle who said that one of the reasons scientific problems persist was because scientists involved tend to think with one or two ideas, which infers the possibility of getting at the truth was limited. Hissink says that in geology the two ideas revolve around Lyellian Uniformitarianism (uniform settle science if you like) where the only force exerted on the Earth and the planets are gravity and its various manifestations, plus the energy associated with radioactive elements and minerals. He adds – we in the Plasma Universe camp have an additional tool, an electric arc welder. This then looks at craters on the earth as not entirely meteorite in origin, if at all, and the idea of bursts of plasma striking the surface of the earth. Various images and descriptions.
A perfect example of limited mainstream thinking is at https://phys.org/print413013107.html …. which concerns the demise of the Neanderthals (Middle Palaeolithic) and replacement by modern humans (Upper Palaeolithic), but from a limited microscope for the analysis. What caused the change from Middle to Upper Palaeolithic is viewed solely from a uniformitarian angle. Stagnation of Neanderthal culture is one input, and the arrival of more vibrant newcomers with a more advanced tool repertoire. This all sounds like ten years out of date as it has been found Neanderthals were far more advanced than previously believed – but never mind, the input into the computer model does not appear to include factors ambivalent to the outcome. They must have some evidence of a decline in Neanderthal numbers but why this may have occurred is not mentioned – as they assume the newcomers were more numerous (but at what point in the Upper Palaeolithic was this true?).
A non-uniformitarian person might look at the situation quite differently rather than at the same old data over and over again. For example, they might join the dots and realise the Neanderthal demise coincided with a mass die-off in the animal world, and that Neanderthals did not really disappear altogether as their genes have survived in modern humans (diluted over the millennia).