Posted on 09/24/2001 1:40:07 PM PDT by blam
September 23 2001 MIDDLE EAST
Galilee drought uncovers oldest village in the world
Dina Shiloh Tel Aviv
ISRAELI archeologists have found what could be the world's oldest village on the dried-out bed of the Sea of Galilee. The settlement, dating back 20,000 years, came to light in one of the worst droughts in recent years.
Thousands of items including huts, tools and fireplaces found at Ohalo, on the southwestern shore, give a unique insight into the semi-nomadic people who lived there towards the end of the early Stone Age.
"We found what every researcher dreams of finding," said Dani Nadel, who leads the Haifa University excavation team, "items used in everyday life, and small artefacts that tell us things we never even dreamed about in regard to the technology, society and environment of these people."
The items are in almost perfect condition because the water that covered them prevented decay. Nadel said the large quantities of seeds and other organic materials meant carbon-14 testing could be used to date them accurately.
"Usually dwellings from this period are not preserved, and we do not know how many they were, where they stood, the number, size, and orientation of their fireplaces, or how the living area was arranged," he said. "Here we found the most ancient huts in the world."
The brush huts - less than 2ft apart - were made with branches of oak and tamarisk trees, with the cracks stuffed with shrubs and grasses.
"These nomads ate mostly fish and fruit," Nadel said. "We are talking about 9,000 years before the beginning of agriculture, before the domestication of animals or plants. But we did find hundreds of thousands of fish bones, so they were fishermen. They also knew how to hunt water fowl, ravens, birds of prey, and even animals like the gazelle, fallow deer, fox, hare and turtle."
The team also found the skeleton of a man. Aged about 40 when he died and just over 5ft tall, he had his hands folded across his chest. Only one other skeleton from this period has been discovered in Israel.
Haifa University intends to display some of the treasures from Ohalo next year. The excavation ended last month and the team has left plenty of material for other archeologists to find when scientific techniques have become more developed.
"The finds unearthed by our team could serve as research material for each and every one of us until we retire," Nadel said. "But we should leave future archeologists things to discover, too."
Most of my dates have been carbon lifeforms.
Nothing as long as someone took and recorded the measurements of the relative amounts of carbon 14 and carbon 12 when the items were alive. Otherwise, we must make assumptions about the ratio in order for us to calculate the age based on the ratio now.
As an illustration, consider this problem: A candle is burning and the height of the candle is 4 inches. If you know the candle burns and melts the wax away at a rate of 1 inch every two hours, how long has the candle been burning?
There are many people who don't believe in it, primarily because its accuracy cannot possibly be verified. Think about it: in the big scheme of things, this dating technology is brand new, yet its ability to determine that something is millions of years old goes unquestioned in the scientific community at large.
It was not intended that way. It was merely a warning that these threads usually wander far away from the original subject and devolve into mud slinging attacks between creationists and evolutionists.
This "science" tells us that Earth is also 16,000-to-20,000 years old.
The Jewish scientists will come back with results showing it was the Jews, the Palestinian scientists will come back saying it was the Arabs. Of course, we know which side tells the truth regularly and which side does almost nothing but lie, so it shouldn't be hard to see who's telling the truth.
But it doesn't. Carbon dating goes back 50,000 years maximum, the relatively short half-life of C14 doesn't allow dates further back than that.
There are two ways to do this. We can date things for which historians know a "right answer". And, we can date things that have been dated by some other method.
Historians don't have "right answers" for really old things. However, carbon dating has done well on young material like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Minoan ruins, and acacia wood from the tomb of the pharoah Zoser.
Some corals can be carbon dated, and also dated by another radioactive material, Thorium-230. Pollen found in the Greenland icecap has been carbon dated, and also dated by counting ice layers. The three methods confirm each other.
Trees grow a thick ring in a good year, and grow a thin ring in a bad year. It is sometimes possible to match up tree-ring patterns between different trees. When enough suitable trees are found, living or dead, the matching is completely accurate. Then, we have wood for which we know the right answer.
So, carbon dating has been calibrated against the rings of California bristlecone pines, and Irish bog oaks, and the like. When this was first done, it turned out that carbon dating had been giving too-young dates for early civilizations. Apparently, the production of C14 by the Sun has changed by several percent across the last 10,000 years. We know (from other measurements) that the Sun hasn't fluctuated by more than 10 percent in the last million years. However, even this small an adjustment was a bit of a shock. For example, Stonehenge suddenly became older than the Pyramids, instead of younger.
Since then, several other calibrations have been done, which confirm and extend the tree-ring one. Some were done by finding lakes with atmospherically derived carbon in their annual layers of silt (called varves). In those particular lakes, the varves can be counted, and the varves can also be carbon dated. See below for details about the 45,000 annual varves in Lake Suigetsu.
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Are There Inaccurate Carbon Dates?
Yes. There are three kinds.
The first kind are datings of things that should't be carbon dated. For example, polar bears that eat seals aren't getting their carbon from an atmospheric source.
The second kind are datings on contaminated samples, or on samples which are a mixture. Old samples contain much less C14, so the measured date of older samples is strongly affected by even small amounts of contamination.
The third kind are dates which were measured before the 1970's. In the 70's:
* much better measurement equipment was introduced. the tree-ring calibration eliminated the assumption about the Sun being constant.
* procedures for avoiding and recognizing contamination were established.
In short, all carbon datings published in the 1950's and 1960's are suspect.
Is this an ironic term or is it real?
If the latter, please explain, as I've never heard of it.
Unfortunately, some of mine were not....I think was was once married the The Great Bug Blatter Beast of Trall.
LOL. That pretty much sums up their mentality.
Bible scholars and scientists agree that the earth is millions of years old, at least the Bible scholars that I've studied with. The finding of the village is believeable, but finding a human skelton is not.....
I believe in God and creation.....
In His Service
What kind of creature would you suppose built the village, if not human?
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