Do a google on "Civilization began 15,000" and you get a lot of hits. But it is still controversial, do a google on "Civilization began" and you get stuff all over the board including a lot of hits for 6000.
Of course, you already know what I think the first cities appearing 6000 years ago means.
They may have pushed the envelope a little, but it's not like there was noone else claiming 15,000 years ago to give them credence.
"This does not show creationist-style dogmatic inflexibility. "
No, but then since the scientific community doesn't have "the word of God", I wouldn't expect them to show complete inflexibility. Then again, this does show a tremendous amount of evolutionistic group think. That article presented no real evidence that the city was 15,000 years old. It's a date picked because of popular opinion, not hard evidence.
Again, I think 15,000 is out of the mainstream just now. From the evidence of a very sketchy article, the age of 15,000 for this Arabian settlement looks to me like some eccentric's W.A.G. (The first and last letters of that acronym are "wild" and "guess.")
The frustrating thing is that those Ethiopian and Mexican dates and all the others, probably had no more basis for the date than this one. But they build on each other, until some evolutionists will say "there are dozens of cultures known to be 15,000 years old, so the Bible must be wrong.
I for one remain unconvinced. I don't buy the Ethiopian dates, or the Mexican dates, or the Saharan dates.
I don't buy the date for the 150,000 year old fossil. At least they had Argon dating. But then you already know I consider Argon dating to be junk science because of the assumption of the starting amount of Argon, (which has been proven false with 16 different recent volcanic flows), and no way to measure contamination from non-atmospheric Argon.
Of course there are no shortage of opinions. Here is a link to a professor from a Catholic Jesuit university talking about 500,000 year old hand axes in India. He has no problem throwing out the Bible because the axes were probably dated using radiometric techniques.
Meanwhile, I think he's an idiot. I think the radiometric dating is flawed. I think the fossil records and artifacts that would be found had tool bearing humans roamed the earth for 500,000 years would be SERIES HUGH. Thus this professor's misplaced faith in radiometric dating has left him STEWNED.