And here I thought the solution to pollution was dilution. Then all the better reason to stop going to Antarctica at all if the soot never goes “away”.

My point was that soot pollution in Antarctica is local, traced to local combustion by scientists and tourists and quantitatively dominates over what is deposited there from burning coal, diesel, and jet fuel in the far-distant populated parts of the world. At least that’s what The Guardian said, after you clicked past the headline. So giving up on trying to make human incursions into Antarctica sustainable would be a desirable policy goal because it would directly benefit that fragile environment, on the snow and on the sea bed, while doing minimal harm to the global economy. We talk about low-hanging fruit. Surely this qualifies.

We should keep our soot to ourselves, where we emit it at least for the noble purpose of keeping our supply chains running and the lights on.

We don’t hunt whales anymore

Except that “we” do, (including the Japanese government as members of the human species – which raises all sorts of other challenges) but it’s just called “population research”. What is more meaningful, hopefully, is that they’re starting to have problems getting the Japanese public to buy the stuff, after they’ve “researched” it.

[Diesel soot] Fortunately it’s highly local and would eventually wash away

Ummm, no, it will wash off the surface snow into multi-year ice (or firn) and then eventually out into the sea where it will settle onto the seabed, there to continue to wreak it’s PAH-ic damage on organisms in an otherwise extremely homogeneous environment.
There is no such place as “away”, to where you can send pollution to not be a problem ever again. There never has been, but these decades increasing numbers of people seem to understand that.
Small – 1/10th to 1/100 mm – grains of soot and charcoal are ubiquitous in sedimentary rocks laid down more recently than about 350 million years ago. From where they get broken into finer grains (micro-charcoal, to coin a phrase riffing on “microplastics”) and returned into the sedimentary cycle. If those have unpleasant chemicals adsorbed into their crystal structures, they’re going to be re-released into the environment.

Leaving aside the somewhat tendentious claim that the Pilbara is home to the oldest fossilized remains of life on Earth, I’m intrigued over this :

my own field, Ancient Near Eastern studies.

In your field, what proportion of cultures purport to know where the centre of the world is, where humanity originated, and where the first man and woman existed, and it’s always “just over there”. Not exactly “here” (for varying values of “here”), but not too far away, on “the mountains that you can see from the headwaters of the big river over there”, or “the other side of that desert”, or “the city of Ur of the Chaldees”, on the river the other side of this desert?
Is it not a very common thing that societies place their myths “not quite next door, but not impossibly far away”. Delphi as the omphalos ; Odysseus inventing pinball between Mediterranean islands ; the gates of Hell being (variously) in Southern Italy or Northern Macedonia? King Arthure being based variously in Wales, Winchester, or Northern France ; the Lady of the Lake and her minions taking the wounded Arthur to rest “in the West”.
Pilbara
There are very old, probable fossils from the Pilbara region, but it’s in quite specific, uncommon types of rocks. And the “title” has bounced between different outcrops on several occasions, with some of the early claimants being shown since to be pseudo-fossils, not actual fossils. Pilbara (how many Wales-worth of real estate is that?) definitely has very old rocks, “fossils” have been identified in them, and disputed. But regardless of those fossils, there are also claimants to the oldest evidence of life being from near the Pilbara’s antipode, and 200-300 million years older, preserved as “isotopic fossils” in the Akila Supracrustal group of Greenland. There, grains of graphite isolated in apatite grains formed more than 3.8 billion years ago, have a low 13-C to 12-C ratio which is normally interpreted as a sign of the carbon having been processed through the “rubisco” enzyme system that lays at the heart of photosynthesis. Which is … a challenge to the Pilbara’s claims.
It’s a fraught area ; “if, “but”, and “maybe” are your constant companions.

“Significant knowledge” – significant for what? Significant for enough calenderical understanding to plant next year’s crops at the right time for them to ripen and harvest before you staved? Or, If I remember Velikowski’s claims correctly, enough to assert that Sirius had a companion star, that it orbited Sirius, and the period (and possibly phase) of that orbit?
Very different claims.

OK, I’ll bite. How is the ecosystem of Antarctica incredibly important to all of the planet? We don’t hunt whales anymore and there are easier places to go for fish.

And how is it important that human presence be safe and sustainable there? To this, it would be better for the first if human presence can not be sustained in such a cold, fragile place so far from re-supply points. Diesel soot from exploration and tourism constitute much of what little pollution there is on the land. Fortunately it’s highly local and would eventually wash away once travel there ends. Indeed, from Jerry’s recent trip to the very edges of the place, it seems that many efforts to sustain human presence in even those more temperate zones have been abandoned. That’s the best definition, paradoxically, of sustainability!

Like jazz, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know!”
—Louis.Armstrong
(attribution added in edit, but a version appears in a Harry Potter book, too.)

Seems to be a spectrum between myth and reality in terms of perception. One people’s myth may later be deemed fact, and often known facts are found false and relegated to myth. Sometimes I wonder if the great attraction of the mythic voyage of discovery, involving hardship, ridicule and eventual justification is all a replay of the forty years the Israelites wandered in the desert, or most likely, that too is some kind of Jungian myth.
But it does appear the Vikings did discover Newfoundland, and maybe the Chinese Great Fleet made it round the Cape of Good Hope, but the Maori surviving the roaring forties and worse in dugouts and raftes with sails of matted palm fronds? A one way trip at best. Perhaps best filed with Professor Lindenbrock, Baron von Munchausen and Allan Quatermain.

Re “Mauri is present in all matter. All particles have their own mauri and presence as part of a larger whole, for example within a molecule, polymer, salt, or metal.”
Does anyone define or explain what this actually means?

I think their reasoning is that if “Western” represents everything the woke consider bad, then they are ready to embrace the label “Western” for science and everything else. Maybe the language is now so fraught that people are saying “go ahead and call me a racist, I don’t care anymore”?