Posted on 03/10/2004 6:10:11 AM PST by vannrox
Anthropologists Hail Romania Fossil Find
Sat Mar 6,11:27 AM ET
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By ALISON MUTLER, Associated Press Writer
BUCHAREST, Romania - Experts analyzing remains of a man, woman and teenage boy unearthed in Romania last year are convinced that the 35,000 year-old fossils are the most complete ever of modern humans of that era, a U.S. scientist said Saturday.
International scientists have been carrying out further analysis to get a clearer picture on the find, said anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis. But it's already clear that, "this is the most complete collection of modern humans in Europe older than 28,000 years," he told The Associated Press.
"We are very excited about it," said Trinkaus on the telephone, adding that the discovery of in a cave in southwestern Romania "is already changing perceptions about modern humans."
Romanian recreational cavers unearthed the remains of three facial bones last year, and gave them to Romanian scientists.
Romanian scientists asked Trinkaus to analyze the fossils, and he traveled to the Romanian city of Cluj this week with Portuguese scientist Joao Zilhao, a fossil specialist.
Trinkaus said a jawbone belonged to a man aged about 35. He said part of a skull and remains of a face including teeth belonged to a 14- to 15-year-old male and a temporal bone to a woman of unspecified age.
"This was 25,000 years before agriculture. Certainly they were hunters," said Trinkaus. He said the bones were discovered in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains.
Trinkaus said the humans would have had religious beliefs, used stone tools, and a well-defined social system and lived in a period in during which early modern humans overlapped with late surviving Neanderthals in Europe, Trinkaus said.
Scientists will not give the exact location for the cave, but Trinkaus said it the humans survived because the area was "ecologically variable."
"It was close to the Banat plain and close to the mountains. They didn't have to travel more than 50 kilometers (30 miles)," to hunt, he said.
A team of international scientists from the United States, Norway, Portugal and Britain will carry out more field work in the summer in the cave and surrounding area this summer, Trinkaus said.
Yes, there is radiometric dating, which suffers from several problems. Then's there is the location in the geologic column, which of course was dated using radiometric dating.
And always in the background is the certain knowledge that funding follows results and only spectacular finds get rewarded. Nobody rewards you for finding 350 year old remains. How much better if you can find 35,000 year old remains.
just try to find some LIVING intelligent humans NOW you got a problem... take Mexifornians as an example.. that state is bankrupt and they still LOVE taxes instead of spending less...
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.~Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
No, Danny, it's not that simple. You seem to think that there is only one form of radiometric dating...when in fact, there are multiple types of radiometric dating, with multiple methods of extracting answers.
Not only that, there are other, non-radiometric methods available that date within the past 100,000 years and give answers that agree with radiometric dating. Ice cores, varves, cosmic-ray exposure measurements are just a few. But don't just listen to me...check out this link by a scientist, who is also a devout Christian: Radiometric Dating
A worthy link.
I see it this way... The more the ICR peddles the same lies year in and year out, the more funding they can extract from the faithful sheep who have never learned to think for themselves, while making them think that they are the poor renegades touting the "truth". How much better if you can be the one to get the Bible taught in science classes? Think of the prestige and ministry income then!
[snip]..."As for the contamination issue, someone asserted that any C14 date of 30,000 years or more is due to contamination. If this is so, then why do they say the method is accurate to 50,000 years? If any C14 date has ever yielded a value over 30,000 years, this implies that such contamination is not ubiquitous. Of course, it could be that older measurement techniques were less accurate. Now, 30,000 years is about 5 half lives of C14, which means that a contamination of 1/32 (slightly less) would be required to achieve this date for a sample of infinite age. This is a substantial contamination.
Anyway, as for C14 dating in general, it seems clear that many, many results are much too young according to the standard view, and that explaining away one or two of them does not appreciably diminish the problem.
Here is another instance of an anomalously young carbon 14 date:
At the 1992 Twin Cities Creation Conference, there was a paper presented called Direct Dating of Cretaceous-Jurassic Fossils (and Other Evidences for Human-Dinosaur Coexistence). Among other things, the results of carbon-dating of Acrocanthosaurus bones are given.
The authors noted that dinosaur bones are frequently (as a rule) found with a black carbon residue of some sort on the bones. The authors speculated that this residue could be the leftovers of the decayed skin and flesh: they quote the Penguin Geology Encyclopedias definition of carbonization: Carbonization; the reduction of organic tissue to a carbon residue. An unusual kind of fossilization in which the tissue is preserved as a carbon film. Plants are commonly preserved in this manner, soft-bodied animals more rarely. Since this material is organic, it can be used to carbon-date the fossils.
The authors describe in detail the measures taken to ensure that no other source of carbon contamination was present inside or outside the bones. When the bones were ground up and carbon-dated, the dates they received from the lab from different methods were 9,890 to 36,500 years BP (before present)." source
Problems with Potassium-Argon dating are well known. Argon doesn't always boil which is the assumption that is made. 16 different recent volcanic flows were dated as millions of years old.
Here is a link showing similar problems with the Rubidium-Strontium dating method. Where one set of rocks are dated much older than they are known to be.
Whether such problems have been identified in all radiometric dating methods, I do not know. But it certainly casts significant doubt on it.
Because after 50,000 years there should be any Carbon 14 left. But if you had read the article you would have learned that many of the fossils that have been dated as very old, have significant amounts of Carbon 14 which shouldn't be there. Often 100 times more than should occur based on known sources of comtamination.
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