It's incredible to me how some people will take one small find and use it as the foundation for a wildly extrapolated theory.

It usually comes down to ego... people's pet theories are so intertwined with their sense of self that they become aggressively resistant to anything that challenges it.

Either that, or there's contemporary racial politics involved. There's a constant battle going on amongst archeologists about who the original inhabitants of the Americas were from. There are quite a few Eurocentric paleontologists who got all excited about a single skull found in Washington state that had Caucasoid features, as if this single anomaly somehow proved that whites got here first (and by extension, their 'manifest destiny' to take the continent by force was somehow justified because of this!)

At the same time, some native groups were very obstructionist when it came to further examination of the skull, claiming ancestral dignity was at stake.

Even amongst the highly educated, there's still a tendency to embrace the evidence supporting one's bias, and discard that which doesn't.

Moss mentions reading that the figurine was a piece of pornographic neckware, which again seems to throw a very 'last century' approach to the matter. Pornography surely is a modern concept where the human body (usually female, though certainly not exclusively) is exploited for sexual titillation. I can't get my head round 'hunter-gatherer' clans being into pornography somehow.

There is an interesting comment on the link which was not there when I first saw it - worth a read.