Proposed Manuscript Chronology

[npcompl33t]

In order for the n properties of the style of burials to vary along a parabola in R^n space, with time as the parameter, there should be two significant factors whose influence dominates all those attributes; and one of them should increase monotonically with time, while the other should increase for a while then decrease.  Why should we expect such factors to exist?

This is not accurate, you still seem to be misunderstanding what is actually occurring with the horseshoe. I'm not really sure how better to explain this. Ill give it one final attempt below, but I would highly suggest reading up on this as you still seem to be misunderstanding what factors actually cause the horseshoe.

The horseshoe does NOT manifest as a result of two significant factors, one monotonically increasing and the other increasing/ decreasing, as you stated.

It happens because of distance saturation, combined with multidimensional scaling. It is an artefact of the MDS process, which is why hundreds of papers have been written about correcting it. 

When calculating distances between objects, particularly when certain features are not present across all observations, distances get warped. Points at the end appear more similar than they actually are, because they each lack features the other possesses. 

For example, in voynich, the bigram ED is completely absent in Early Herbal A compared to Bio, where it is prevalent. Pharma has things that 1a contains, but bio lacks and vice verca. So pharma,, 1a, and bio, all appear equally distant. Because 1a and bio cannot be compared on certain features, due to one simply lacking them. 

In the tomb example, this occurs because not every tomb contains every pottery style. In fact, any given tomb only contains a few.

No, he doesn't.  He identifies 8 possible geometric orderings, and one of them happens to coincide with the time ordering of the clusters.

And that is one case where the "horseshoe" theory sort of worked, kinda.  How many cases are there where it does not work?

So not only are my conclusions incorrect, but one of the most studied and cited cases, with over 120 citations on google scholar, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., is not correct. And not only this, but the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., across many different disciplines, are all written by people collectively experiencing mass horse shoe delusion?