Archaeologists Excited By 500,000-Year-Old Axe Find In Quarry

This image shows the axe head from different angles. Photo: Graham Norrie, University of Birmingham Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity.

A Stone Age hand axe dating back 500,000 years has been discovered at a quarry in Warwickshire.

The tool was found at the Smiths Concrete Bubbenhall Quarry at Waverley Wood Farm, near Coventry, which has already produced evidence of some of the earliest known human occupants of the UK.

It was uncovered in gravel by quarry manager John Green who took it to be identified by archaeologists at the University of Birmingham.

"We are very excited about this discovery," enthused Professor David Keen of the university's Archaeology Field Unit.

"Lower Palaeolithic artefacts are comparatively rare in the West Midlands compared to the south and east of England so this is a real find for us."

Despite being half and million years old the tool is very well-preserved and will eventually go on show at Warwickshire Museum.

Amongst other things, the hand axe would have been used for butchering animals, but what is perhaps most intriguing about it is that it is made of a type of volcanic rock called andesite.

Photo: Graham Norrie, University of Birmingham Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity.,

Andesite bedrock only occurs in the Lake District or North Wales and this is only the ninth andesite hand axe to be found in the midlands in over a century. Archaeologists are now trying to figure out how the tool might have got there.

Although it is possible the rock was transported to the midlands by glacial ice from the north west there is as yet no evidence for it, which suggests humans might have brought it into the area.

The lack of material for good quality hand axes in the midlands would probably have been known to our ancestors, therefore these tools could have been brought in ready made.

It may also be significant that all previous andesite hand axe finds have been made in deposits of the Bytham River, a now lost river system that crossed England from the Cotswolds via the West Midlands and Leicester to the North Sea.

This valley was destroyed in a later glaciation and seems to have provided a route into the midlands for Palaeolithic hunters.

Half a million years ago the area was at the edge of the human world, linked to Europe along the Bytham valley and across a land-bridge existing before the cutting of the Straits of Dover.

In addition to the hand axe the Smiths Concrete Bubbenhall Quarry has produced 18 other Palaeolithic tools, currently under investigation by the team at Birmingham Archaeology.

Other finds in the area include bones and teeth from a straight-tusked elephant, which are also set to be displayed at Warwickshire Museum.

[Wow, you're remarkably ignorant of dating methods]
Actually, I'm pretty well acquainted with the concepts and have debated them here on FR a number of times.

Actually, it's because I've watched your "debates" on FR that I make the observation that you are "remarkably ignroant of dating methods". I stand by that assessment. The claims you make on this topic are full of enormous amounts of misinformation and misunderstandings. You know very little of even the basics of dating methods. You do, however, seem to have read a great load of garbage about the subject from creationist sources. This is rather like "learning" about conservatives by listening to Air America.

The only thing you've really shown is that you can cut, paste and use ad-hominem.

I've also shown that you can't retract your falsehoods when you're shown clear evidence to the contrary.

You cite arctic ice layers as a sample of known age.

Yes I do, among other independent samples. And you have utterly failed to deal with the fact that age determinations from multiple, independent methods achieve MATCHING RESULTS. How do you explain this, if such dates are as wildly unreliable as you incorrectly claim?

Care to explain how that method places the lost squadron hundreds of years prior to WWII? No, you can't.

Sure I can. The answer is that *IT DOESN'T*. The only idiot who tries to claim that it does is creationist Carl Wieland, but he's being a total moron.

It makes you look bad.

How does it make *me* look bad when you cite a creationist being stupid about dating methods?

Nor can you account for how the sking of a beast could be dated 20k years apart from it's bones.

Sure I can, that's an easy one: THAT ISN'T TRUE EITHER. Creationist Kent Hovind was lying -- he falsely claimed that two different dates measured for TWO DIFFERENT ANIMALS were from the same mammoth, when they were NOT.

Nor, can you explain how two mammoths laying side by side could be dated 30k years apart.

Sure I can -- they probably died 30,000 years apart (if your claim isn't just a lie like the last two). If you provide an actual citation to your claim (if you even can), I'll be glad to get into the specifics for you.

It's called shining people on.

Yes it is, so why don't you stop it? Providing false claims by creationists hardly helps your case any -- quite the contrary, in fact.

I'm aware your information is highly technical.

Is that why you can't rebut it? Is that why you're apparently unable to see how it completely invalidates the overstated claims you made earlier?

So were the aircraft designs of many a man that was injured and or killed before the wright brothers flew.

If you think that's some sort of adequate rebuttal, you're quite mistaken. It's on par with the gradeschooler's, "you can't make me!"

Your methods don't work any better than theirs.

Sure they do. And all your handwaving and false claims by creationists won't change that.

Oh, a point I was intending to make, you might need to update history books to reflect that B-17 and P-38 lightnings were flying cover for the 1700s plate fleets or something.. Cause that's how far back the dating method would put Glacier girl and the rest of the squadron that went down with her.

Once again, the only person stupid enough to actually falsely claim that scientific dating methods would mis-date the planes is *creationist* Carl Wieland. The planes have *never* actually been scientifically (mis)dated to such an age, nor would any accepted dating methods actually produce such an age if applied in this case.

Wieland was lying or stupid, and you're coming in a close second by repeating his falsehoods here.

You can't correct for the known actual date because you don't have any fixed points in history to work against in ancient cases - none. It's a farce.

You didn't understand my post #133 AT ALL, did you? I explained to you a few of the *many* methods by which "fixed points in history" have indeed been determined and used to verify and calibrate radiometric dating (and each other) -- I even gave you links to much more information on the same topic. Furthermore, when objects of known historical age are submitted to radiocarbon labs without the labs knowing what the "expected" ages are, the results still come back correct -- which invalidates your slander that radiometric dating merely gives the answer that scientists "want" it to give. Such tests have been done regularly since *1949* -- what's your excuse for being ignorant of them? For that matter, the labs doing the dating *seldom* know what the "expected" age of the sample is. They don't know and don't care, and the procedures don't require them to. They just measure the 14C and report the *objective* calibrated age, contrary to your ignorant slurs.

So I just have to ask -- are you failing to admit that you're wrong because you're a) really that dense, or b) intellectually dishonest?

And why do I eventually end up having to ask that question of many of the creationists I talk with?

The claims you make on this topic are full of enormous amounts of misinformation and misunderstandings.

The which you state; but, cannot quantify. IE, you say it for the sake of saying it. It's an argument tactic.

You do, however, seem to have read a great load of garbage about the subject from creationist sources.

Actually, I don't need creationist sources. Nor is that the foundation, much less support for, my contentions with regard to your dating methods. I went through Highschool science. I've taken physics and Calc. I understand the basics of the principles involved. You, on the other hand, have a vested interest in looking the other way when it suits your purposes and pretending that bonified issues of contention are just "misunderstandings".

Yes, we all understand that you use different methods for dating things. We also understand that you have gauged the viability of each method off the other. Potassium Argon dating is calibrated to carbon dating so that the instruments are garaunteed to produce results close to each other. It's like tuning an engine. When you tune it, the results you get are expected from the quality of the tuning job. That doesn't address the overall flaw in thinking that goes with any of the methods. You don't, however, get matching results. You get results in a neighborhood given the margin of error for the equipment and how it's calibrated.

Fossils are dated first by where they lay in layers of sediment. The layers are dated by the fossils found in them. Circular; but, expected when you have nothing to back it up. Carbon dating is read in light of the former. Any result that doesn't match what is expected is eliminated or discounted as contaminated or just a mistake. Carbon dating works on a number of assumptions that present vast grounds for error. And it has not been found to consistantly date anything recent with a reliable margin of error. And that is working with known conditions. When the conditions are unknown, your margin of error increases exponentially - basically allowing you to say anything you want next to a complicated contraption - hoping that people will be impressed by the complicated contraption and just accept the result. Potassium Argon has similarly flawed assumptions. When both methods date material formed from fresh lava flows into tens of thousands of years in the past, Any idiot knows the method is nothing if not suspect. The same thing has happened with living trees, snail shells, etc. Countless examples.

I've also shown that you can't retract your falsehoods when you're shown clear evidence to the contrary.

Well, one, you haven't displayed a falsehood, you just make these assertions. Two, you can't display any clear evidence contrary to what I've stated. "Annual rings" are just that - annual - or yearly. Ice cores assume a good many things. And anyone here who's bothered to watch a Science program on tv that deals with them can attest to how they are read. One doesn't need to point to the ether for examples. As for the reaching claim that "annual rings" is dependant on knowing average snowfall or ice formation.. those things are unknowns beyond modern recorded results. And even in modern results, You have a major problem. Annual snowfall in Greenland has been 26 centimeters or 10.4 inches water volume per year. Actual snowfall is 5x that in volume or 52 inches. At the time Glacier Girl was brought up, she'd been idle in the ice for 48 years. Calculating on the averages, she should have been 208 feet down - She was 268 feet down. Anyone care to figure percentage on that margin of error. If we were to go on "annual rings", the margin of error is far greater.. belying the "science" of it. It isn't science. It's a guess based on moronic assumptions. The error is further compounded by the fact that ice is compacted over time by gravity, rain, etc. There are any number of random factors in nature that will foul the environment and throw a wrench into the theory of guessing age based on the number of rings in a core sample. You can't know what the rings in the core mean unless you know the circumstances that caused them. If you have a thaw that destroys multiple layers, then a freeze which consilidates more of them, you lose data. If layers become compacted into ice from weight and refreezing, they're largely indistiguishable from layers that were originally ice and didn't change. In any case, you can't speak to the volume of snow/precipitation, packing/sorting or the number of times it happened in any given year prior to recorded time. You use the layers themselves to make an "educated guess" about what caused them; but, absent actual data, it is nonetheless a guess. If you get 10 rings a year one year and only one the next, your system can't account for that. The same is true with the geologic column as you call it.

With sedimentation, you can't say how much ocurrs worldwide with any degree of accuracy, yet based on what we have been told since grade school, based on the norms defined for sedimentation and deterioration due to rainfall and the like, there should be no mountain ranges today.. they should have all eroded to nothing billions of years ago. And that's based on your assumption of "billions of years" as well. Something I utterly reject as science doesn't support it.

Back on sediment layers, you can observe where there is ash in a layer - ala a volcanoe blast in history. What you can't say is how many eruptions for sure - or how much sedimentation resulted from it. Further, you can't even say how the fossils in layers of sediment got there. Fossils are not formed under natural conditions save for in deserts tar pits and peat bogs. fossils are formed normally through rapid burial. You can say sedimentation happens at x amount of cm per year, but that doesn't account for natural disasters on local or worldwide scale.

The Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980 is a great example of this. You can point to a layer of ash; but, if you didn't know how tall the mountain were, you'd have no idea how much blew off, much less where it ended up and in what amounts - nor would you know the extent of the environmental impact. Mud flows closed the river there and backed it up - dammed it as it were. When the water finally overflowed that natural dam, it cut out massive amounts of that debris and shaped the sediment in much the same fashion observeable in the grand canyon and elsewhere in the world - but it did it in a matter of minutes - not millions of years. Interesting, isn't it, that the river flows through the base of the grand canyon. We're told that was carved out of solid rock by the river over millions of years. Come're spanky.. how do rivers flow up hill? Cause for that to happen, you gotta get the river up to the top of the canyon, and all evidence shows it's always been at the bottom of the canyon. so how'd you get it flowin up hill? Simple answer is you didn't. That canyon was carved out of soft sediment by fast moving runoff in a matter of probably minutes or at most hours - just like in the case of St. Helens. Occam.. Gotta love him.

Bottom line is gadgets don't make accuracy. Being able to account for unknowns makes for accuracy. And you can't account for the unknowns. Your best methods are guesses made on the basis of propping up evolution. Remove evolution from the picture, and you start getting some science and a bit more truth. No throwing out or covering up mort and pestles when they are inconvenient. No inexplicable disappearances of bones that are problematic - ala the bones of 9+ foot tall men in america buried with their armor. The bones and armor all just got "lost" when they became inconvenient to science.

Then we get to some REAL inconveniences to your methodologies in dating. The Ica stones for one thing. How do you suppose human beings knew what Dinosaurs looked like enough to carve them on stones in south america with men riding them, etc. And they're all there across the board - from triceritops, to T-rex, etc. Moreover, there is one find I've heard about and am researching on a bunch of clay figurines made representing all the dinosaur types.. hundreds of them. All artifacts made long ago. Dinosaur is a modern term cooked up to explain something a few couldn't account for in science. The half-baked notions about them have prolifereated till it's become a religion unto itself attempting to prop up evolution. Men have seen the dinosaurs first hand. The record of them worldwide even today is known. It's just that science can't allow their story to be screwed so publicly and so blatently by simple facts. It makes them out liars and worse.. One might think you'd all have good reason to CYA at every turn given the backlash inevitable to being found out on such a massive pile of fraud.

Give us a break and sell your charlatanism to yourself.

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