How is it better than the alternative "we have a set of symbol and we don't know what it means"? I really think there is a merit in saying "with this sample size, every theory we put out has low confidence level".
With 12 signals in total, it's very hard to show patterns that are in line with an alphabet. I don't think that with this sample size you can make a very strong claim that the chance that this is an alphabet is higher than the chance is that these symbol serve any other kind of purpose (including being a non-language). The main claim seems to be that repetition (what kind? I'm a quite disappointed the blog post has no transcritions, considering it's just 12 symbols we're talking about!) makes the chance that this is an alphabet higher. The rest of the claims (it doesn't resemble cuneiform, doesn't seem to be derived from hieroglyphs and doesn't seem related to any other script) are meaningless. The resemblence for later Canaanite alphabetic signs is interesting, and could probably be more convincing if we had a larger sample size.
So in the end, if we are convinced by these claims, we're basically saying something like "We have at most 1% confidence for every other theory, but we've got 2% confidence that this is an independent development of the alphabet that may have inspired the Canaanite alphabet we've seen 500 later". Higher confidence that is still far below the threshold doesn't cut it.
Now, I'm pretty sure the original article did not put the theory in these terms, but the headline is somewhat sensationalist, and the way it was picked up in newspapers is even worse, for instance:
Scientific American: World's Oldest Alphabet Found on an Ancient Clay Gift Tag
Stopping the press from misreporting science is a bit like trying to stop space rockets in midair with your bare hands, but even "Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city". The popular understanding of the word evidence is assumed to be "hard" evidence by default, not a weak evidence that bumps up the probability of a certain theory a little bit more.
I'll actually be quite excited if this turns out to be truly an alphabet encoding a Semitic language (it opens a lot of interesting questions and possibilities), but I'm not holding my breath for it.
With 12 signals in total, it's very hard to show patterns that are in line with an alphabet. I don't think that with this sample size you can make a very strong claim that the chance that this is an alphabet is higher than the chance is that these symbol serve any other kind of purpose (including being a non-language). The main claim seems to be that repetition (what kind? I'm a quite disappointed the blog post has no transcritions, considering it's just 12 symbols we're talking about!) makes the chance that this is an alphabet higher. The rest of the claims (it doesn't resemble cuneiform, doesn't seem to be derived from hieroglyphs and doesn't seem related to any other script) are meaningless. The resemblence for later Canaanite alphabetic signs is interesting, and could probably be more convincing if we had a larger sample size.
So in the end, if we are convinced by these claims, we're basically saying something like "We have at most 1% confidence for every other theory, but we've got 2% confidence that this is an independent development of the alphabet that may have inspired the Canaanite alphabet we've seen 500 later". Higher confidence that is still far below the threshold doesn't cut it.
Now, I'm pretty sure the original article did not put the theory in these terms, but the headline is somewhat sensationalist, and the way it was picked up in newspapers is even worse, for instance:
Scientific American: World's Oldest Alphabet Found on an Ancient Clay Gift Tag
Stopping the press from misreporting science is a bit like trying to stop space rockets in midair with your bare hands, but even "Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city". The popular understanding of the word evidence is assumed to be "hard" evidence by default, not a weak evidence that bumps up the probability of a certain theory a little bit more.
I'll actually be quite excited if this turns out to be truly an alphabet encoding a Semitic language (it opens a lot of interesting questions and possibilities), but I'm not holding my breath for it.