Posted on 09/22/2010 2:35:51 PM PDT by billorites
Workers building a substation in California have discovered 1,500 bone fragments from about 1.4 million years ago.
The fossil haul includes remains from an ancestor of the sabre-toothed tiger, large ground sloths, deer, horses, camels and numerous small rodents.
Plant matter found at the site in the arid San Timoteo Canyon, 85 miles (137km) south-east of Los Angeles, showed it was once much greener.
The bones will go on display next year.
The find is a million years older than the famous haul from the tar pits at Rancho La Brea in Los Angeles, said Rick Greenwood, a microbiologist and also director of corporate environment health and safety for Southern California Edison.
"If you step back, this is just a huge find," he said. "Everyone talks about the La Brea Tar Pits, but I think this is going to be much larger in terms of its scientific value to the research community."
The number of skeletons found at the site may be explained by a marsh or lake bed that trapped animals looking for water, leaving them victim to predators, palaeontologists think.
Tom Demere, a San Diego Museum of Natural History palaeontologist, said the find was not directly comparable to La Brea, as it comprised different species from another era.
But he said it would be valuable.
"We have a fuzzy view of what this time period was like in terms of mammal evolution," Mr Demere said. "A discovery like this - when they're all found together and in a whole range of sizes - could really be an important contribution."
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
So what?
It's a complete refutation of your oft-repeated claims on this thread.
Such as?
I’ll answer your questions when you’ve found the time or the inclination to answer mine.
Practically all of them in that list were from prior to Darwin’s postulation of his famous theory. It would be interesting to discuss the individual stances of famous scientists who rose to fame before and after that occurrence.
Perhaps. Or maybe it wouldn’t matter, since they are all standing on the shoulders of those who sired modern science, ie Christians.
In any case, my point was in response to the poster who kept repeating the silly claim that “creationism is an idea with absolutely no use, an intellectual dead end that leads to no further data or discovery.”
The facts say otherwise.
Rather pitiful that your only defense for me pointing out that while scientific assumptions leads to further data and discovery, while “poof” creationism is an intellectual dead end - is to point out that belief in an ordered and rational and predictable universe (something you reject) was an invaluable philosophical contribution to science.
You are a waste of time.
But nice that you cannot address my arguments so bow out in silent acknowledgment of the utter uselessness of your Flintstone theology to actual knowledge and discovery.
I rarely engage with evolution cultists. But once in awhile one just has to, when they see these articles over and over and over again making unequivocal claims about things they can’t prove.
And you and your friends have done a fine job of illustrating once again just how arrogant the adherents of Darwin really are. Thanks.
“Can't prove”? Nothing in science is ever proven. I have told you that before, but you just cannot help to show how little you know, or care to know, about science or the scientific method.
Yes, we people who know and understand science are just so arrogant and MEAN! I mean how dare we look for physical phenomena to explain physical evidence and make useful predictions and discoveries! It just rubs the salt into the open wound of the utter uselessness of “poof” Creationism and how far behind it has been left in the dust!
Then why do articles like this one incessantly make arrogant claims like "these bones are from about 1.4 million years ago"?
They didn't say “we proved these bones were 1.4 million years old”, and if they did, they would be daft, because nobody proves anything in science. Later evidence, or a better interpretation of the evidence in light of new data, could suggest that they were 1.2 million years old.
What they said was that they “discovered 1,500 bone fragments from about 1.4 million years ago.”
All the evidence so far suggest they were 1.4 millions years old. Just because that upsets your Flinstone Yabba Dabba Do theology doesn't make it arrogant for them to say so. Sorry if it hurt your poor tender little feelings.
Baloney. You’re not basing that on science, in other words, things that are observable and measurable.
Sorry if actual science upsets your Yabba Dabba Doo theology, but it is not arrogant to say what the evidence suggests, rather than what a bunch of “poof”ter Creationists would prefer it suggested.
Sorry if actual science upsets your Yabba Dabba Doo theology, but it is not arrogant to say what the evidence suggests, rather than what a bunch of “poof”ter Creationists would prefer it suggested.
It is predictable, at current rates. But just because you clock the Chevy going eighty and heading west on I-80 in Omaha that doesn’t mean it was always going eighty, or that it necessarily started the trip in Chicago. It also doesn’t mean you can predict when it will get to San Francisco. You don’t know what its rate of speed is going to be, or even whether San Francisco is its destination.
But you do know that someone built the car, and that its rate of speed and its destination is going to be decided by the will of the driver.
Know what I mean?
Radiometric decay isn't a car with observable different speeds based upon the flow of gasoline into the engine, etc. It is more like a clock, based upon physical principles like water flow. You can say a clock based upon water flow that has always been observed to keep perfect time, may not have always kept such perfect time; but it is ludicrous to suggest that previously the time it would record to be a billion years is really only a thousand. Ludicrous unless you think that previously the water was magical water that could do anything you needed it to do to get the answer you wanted - i.e. the apologetics nonsense that “poof”ter Creationists prefer to science.
Again, the only rate you can measure or observe is the current rate. It is not possible for you to go back in time to see if the rate was the same, or to go into the future and tell us what the rate will be. That’s why the claims of millions or billions of years are ludicrous. You just don’t have enough data points.
The rates of atomic decay needed to fit those billions of years into a few thousand would fry the Earth.
Your CLAIM is that it is not possible to go back in time. We don't need to. We just need to assume that the constant rate we observe, a constant based upon the principles of the universe, is indeed constant (i.e. the ordered and predictable and rational universe that you reject). We can then TEST those assumptions, and darned if they don't lead to further data and discovery and useful predictions.
Meanwhile the idiotic suggestion that we cannot really know for sure, and thus shouldn't really even try, is an intellectual dead end leading absolutely nowhere.
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