The value of HN is when people-who-know help curious folks understand the validity of a story. Surely someone here is more capable of assessing this story and I agree that skepticism is in order at first.
Do they want to test the claim to learn something, or to dismiss it, just to dismiss it?
If they're asking questions which are literally answered as part of the claim, they need to start over, and start with themselves.
I’m completely incapable of making sense of that claim because it’s so far outside of my expertise.
But my fundamental problem is that I don’t trust the source’s incentives to deliver reliable information and I want someone independent to help me understand if this is a how strong or weak this science is.
And my starting point for that is “it’s very hard to know anything specific about the deep past. And I’m tired of scientific retractions.”
There's no way to prove the past without doubt. It's always going to be conjecture.
What people do is that, they observe current phenomenon, and see what kind of artifact it produces and leaves behind. They then work backward from that, if we see the same artifacts, they connect that back with a similar cause from the past.
Generally, people consider this even more reliable than human written artifact, because, well, human write a lot of BS. But when there are also written texts or drawn glyphs, those are looked at for corroboration.
All of that is added up to gain some level of certainty, but it'll never be for sure, because we'll always be working with incomplete information, and we'll use today's assumption to interpret the information from the past, but even the wildest things might be possible, like that the very nature of physics was different 1 billion years ago, and the same phenomenon would not result in the same kind of artifact as they do today for example.
You have to decide for yourself if this inherent uncertainty makes you more skeptical of historical claims, or if you feel the methodology is still reliable enough for practical purposes.
And I'd like to contrast this with science about the present, where once we assume something to be true, we can test it by predicting the future with it, and then seeing if that future materializes. If it does, it reinforces the validity of our truths, the more it can accurately predict the future, the truer it is, and where it fails to do so, we know it's not as accurate as it needs to be.
Science is about using the best methodology to get us as close as possible to the truth as we can be. Historical sciences have less to work with, but this might still be the best methodology if you want to be as close to the truth. Experimental sciences are able to have even better methodology that allows us to be even closer to the truth.