[Honest Nigerian]

FTA
“When speleothems form, tiny amounts of uranium—a radioactive element—are locked inside them. Over time, uranium slowly decays into the element lead. This occurs at a known, constant rate—which means we can use uranium in speleothems as a natural clock to date them.”

---

Pray tell, how do they know how “old” the uranium was when it was locked in the speleothems? They made an assumption?
I am sure they made lots of assumptions to arrive at their conclusion.

[MeganC]

“The reasons for the demise of these megafauna species are intensely debated.”

Easy. They were tasty and the Aborigines ate them all after they settled Australia.

[HighSierra5]

Did they find any fossils of Democratus Lowlifeses?

[Red Badger]

Even 500k years ago everything in Australia wants to kill you!.....................

[Boogieman]

“The reasons for the demise of these megafauna species are intensely debated.”

“Intensely debated” I guess because the likely cause is not politically correct to state anymore. But the fact remains, these animals were alive before the “aborigines” arrived, and went extinct shortly thereafter. The conclusions are pretty obvious.

[BipolarBob]

and the answer is up to 500,000 years older than previously thought.

So, they admit they were off by 500,000 years before BUT this time they're correct. I see.

[ShadowAce]

When speleothems form, tiny amounts of uranium—a radioactive element—are locked inside them. Over time, uranium slowly decays into the element lead.

So--this uranium was NOT decaying before being locked into these speleothems?

[stockpirate]

Ping

[BiteYourSelf]

And they had to close out the article with climate change 🐂💩.🤮

[csvset]

There's heated debate about whether the extinction of Australia's megafauna was the result of humans or the climate.

I’ll go with climate. Volcanoes, earthquakes, meteorite strikes, that sort of stuff.