It is possible that this is what is happening, but it’s also possible that our extreme desire for the data to exist is obscuring the dirty realities of its nature. I would encourage people to be skeptical on the details of all dating. Ask questions like: What is the claimed scientific process which creates the chronology? What assumptions go into the reliability of this process? How well does the data actually correspond with other data sources? And the one that tends to get forgotten is: What is the social process for formulating a case-by-case decision as to the validity of the data set? After all, at the end of the day, it is a group of people who possess worldviews which is deciding which sets of data to throw out.
If a person wanted to be even more rigorous than this, they would also question the uniformitarian assumption. However, asking that question probably leads to dark alleys, and since we tend to generally be biased away from uncertainty, there is generally a stigma associated with questioning this assumption today.
