Oldest Remains of Modern Humans Are Identified by Scientists

New York Times (AP Wire) ^ | February 16, 2005 | AP Wire

[Alter Kaker]

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new analysis of bones unearthed nearly 40 years ago in Ethiopia has pushed the fossil record of modern humans back to nearly 200,000 years ago -- perhaps close to the dawn of the species.

Researchers determined that the specimens are around 195,000 years old. Previously, the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens were Ethiopian skulls dated to about 160,000 years ago.

Genetic studies estimate that Homo sapiens arose about 200,000 years ago, so the new research brings the fossil record more in line with that, said John Fleagle of Stony Brook University in New York, an author of the study.

The fossils were found in 1967 near the Omo River in southwestern Ethiopia. One location yielded Omo I, which includes part of a skull plus skeletal bones. Another site produced Omo II, which has more of a skull but no skeletal bones. Neither specimen has a complete face.

Although Omo II shows more primitive characteristics than Omo I, scientists called both specimens Homo sapiens and assigned a tentative age of 130,000 years.

Now, after visiting the discovery sites, analyzing their geology and testing rock samples with more modern dating techniques, Fleagle and colleagues report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature that both specimens are 195,000 years old, give or take 5,000 years.

Fleagle said the more primitive traits of Omo II may mean the two specimens came from different but overlapping Homo sapiens populations, or that they just represent natural variation within a single population.

To find the age of the skulls, the researchers determined that volcanic rock lying just below the sediment that contained the fossils was about 196,000 years old. They then found evidence that the fossil-bearing sediment was deposited soon after that time.

Paul Renne, director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, which specializes in dating rocks, said the researchers made "a reasonably good argument" to support their dating of the fossils.

"It's more likely than not," he said, calling the work "very exciting and important."

Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, said he considered the case for the new fossil ages "very strong." The work suggests that "we're right on the cusp of where the genetic evidence says the origin of modern humans ... should be," he said.

G. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York, said he believes the Omo fossils show Homo sapiens plus a more primitive ancestor. The find appears to represent the aftermath of the birth of Homo sapiens, when it was still living alongside its ancestral species, he said.

[WildTurkey]

I have never been attacked so much for being educated and inquisitive and innovative since I showed up at FR. Sometimes it's depressing.

Perhaps if you education included some science you would not be so depressed.

[Ichneumon]

Thank you for this excellent, scientific survey, which unfortunately doesn't answer the real question. So lithostratigraphy dates rocks in similar strata similarly, and biostratigraphy dates undisturbed rocks containing similar fossils similarly, both with exceptions but general convergence; and we can roughly order similar types of rocks into geologic systems. You never mentioned: What makes them billions of years old?

Various pieces of evidence, including multiple lines of radiometric (and other) dating methods, minimum times necessary for the formation of various layers (e.g., some strata contain multiple overlaid layers of fossil forests which obviously each had to have time to mature, others have more shells of sea life than could possibly have lived in just a few thousand years, etc.), seafloor spreading rates coupled with the times of the multiple magnetic reversals recorded in them, etc. etc. etc.

If creationists invented this science, the rock and fossil evidence did not indicate to them the billions of years. So it still doesn't.

Um, WHAT?!? If I understand this incoherent assertion properly, it's quite simply wrong -- the rock and fossil evidence most certainly *did* indicate to the "creationists" before Darwin's time of the great age of the Earth. This is why the accepted age of the Earth was raised well beyond "a few thousand years" back during the *1700's*...

Because Darwin required long eras, he changed the dating, and neo-Darwinism changed it much further;

ROFL!!! You're clearly vastly ignorant of the history of these fields of science. Sorry, but the fact that the Earth was extremely old was already well established before Darwin came along:

Estimates of the Age of the Earth

In Europe the issue of the age of the Earth was not a serious one prior to the rise of science; the history of the Earth was assumed to be accounted for in Genesis. The rise of science produced a major change in attitude.

In the pre-scientific world view the issue of the age of the Earth was a theological question. The account in Genesis is replete with miracles that do not stand up under rational analysis. This did not matter; the theological perspective did not require physical rationalization. It was not ruled out, per se, but it was not necessary. It was not part of the attitude. In the new science, however, rational explanation was desirable. Ussher and Descartes illustrate the difference.

In 1640 Ussher produced his famous calculation that the Earth was created in 4004 BC. In 1637 Descartes produced a cosmogony that was highly influential for more than a century. What was the difference?

It was not in their estimates of the age of the Earth - Descartes retained the biblical date. Ussher accepted the Biblical account at face value, relying on the Biblical genealogies and on extant historical records. He implicitly assumed that the world was created much as it is now. Descartes, however, attempted to discern a physical history of the Earth. His account was plausible by the immature standards of the Science of his times; however it quite definitely did not match the Biblical account of a completed creation in six days.

In the 1700's belief in a 6000 year old Earth crumbled. Attempts to calculate the age of the Earth from physical considerations yielded estimates that ranged from 75,000 years (Buffon, 1774) to several billion years (de Maillet, Buffon).

The physical models were open to question and, in retrospect, were naive. The geological evidence was more serious. It became quite clear that many areas of the Earth had alternated between being land and being covered by seas, that there had been extensive slow sedimentation, that the mountains had not been created in situ as is but rather had a long history of slow deformation, and that long periods of erosion had shaped the Earth everywhere.

By the early 1800's it was generally accepted that the Earth had a long history. Its age, however, was scarcely settled. The uniformatarians (Hutton 1788, Lyell 1830) pictured the Earth as being indefinitely old.

The catastrophists (Cuvier 1812, de Beaumont 1852, Buckland 1836) accepted that the Earth was old; they disagreed with the kind of change and the rate of change that had occurred over that long history.

There was no single estimate of the Earth's age in the mid 1800's and no good way to arrive at one. There were various attempts to estimate the Earth's age, working back from sedimentation rates and other geophysical phenomena. The attempts produced estimates from about 100 million years up to several billion years. There were two major problems with such efforts. The first is that the geological history was still being reconstructed. The second is that the rates of the physical processes in question are variable and knowledge of them was incomplete.

In the late 1800's physicists, armed with a more advanced physics than that available to Descartes, made new estimates of the age of the Earth and the Sun. There were two basic questions they asked: How long would it take for the Earth to cool from its initial heat of formation to its present temperature and, given the energy sources known at the time, how long had the Sun been shining.

In 1862 Kelvin estimated the age of the Earth to be 98 million years, based on a model of the rate of cooling. This was a minimum acceptable age consistent with geology. Later in 1897 he revised his estimate downwards to 20-40 million years. This was too short for the geologists to swallow. Estimates of the age of the Sun were also too small to be consistent with geology.

Kelvin did not know about radioactivity and heating of the Earth's crust by radioactive decay; for this reason his estimates were completely wrong. Likewise, it wasn't until Einstein's theory of relativity was developed that there was a good explanation of how the Sun could have been shining as long as it had.

Prior to the development of radiometric dating geologists established the relative ages of rocks using stratigraphy (the geological column) and made crude estimates of absolute ages by taking into account sedimentation and erosion rates. Radiometric dating permits the accurate determination of absolute dates. The first radiometric dating was done in 1905; it and subsequent measurements confirmed that the Earth was several billion years old. Currently the best estimate of the age of the Earth is 4.55 billion years. An extensive chronology of the development of the radiometric dating is given below in the section Chronology of radiometric dating.

It should be understood that estimating the ages of rocks using radiometric dating is an entirely separate technique from the radiocarbon (C-14) method for dating organic remains. Radiometric dating of rocks is based on the decay of long lived isotopes of Potassium, Thorium, and Uranium. Radiocarbon dating is based on the decay of the short lived C-14 isotope and is irrelevant to determining the age of the Earth.

-- [From: Changing Views of the History of the Earth]

From the same link, here are some key discoveries during the 1700's:

1705	Robert Hooke: Lectures and Discourse of Earthquakes and Subterranean Eruptions. Hooke believed that the fossils were the remains of extinct species and could not be accounted for by the Flood. "Asking himself how the present areas of land came to be dry, he answers 'it could be from the Flood of Noah, since the duration of that which was but about two hundred natural days, or half a year could not afford time enough for the production and perfection of so many and so great and full grown shells, as these which are so found do testify; besides the quantity and thickness of the beds of sand with which they are many times found mixed, do argue that there must needs be a much longer time of seas residence of the seas above same, than so short a space can afford."
1748	Benoit de Maillet: Telliamed, or Conversations between an Indian Philosopher and a French Missionary on the Diminution of the Sea. Using Descartes's cosmology, the assumption that the earth was once entirely flooded, and the observation that the sea level was dropping three inches per century near his home, he calculated the age of the earth to be greater than 2 billion years.
1771	Peter Pallas: Observation sur la Formation des Montagnards.... Pallas made extensive observations of Russian mountains. He observed the results of processes that acted on mountains, e.g. weathering, erosion, deposition, and the fracturing and upheaval of strata. He argued for occasional catastrophic events as an origin for mountain building.
1774	Comte de Buffon: Epochs of Nature. Buffon assumed that the earth started molten, measured cooling rates of iron spheres, scaled up, and calculated the age at ~75,000 years. He himself was suspicious that this was much too young and, in manuscripts published after his death, suggested longer chronologies, including one estimate of nearly 3 billion years.
1778	Jean de Luc: Lettres Physique et Morales sur l'Histoire de la Terre et de l'Homme. De Luc's work is "transitional between the armchair speculation of the seventeenth century and the hard-nosed empiricism of the nineteenth century." De Luc accepted the biblical account, including the Noachian flood; however, he assumed that the six days of creation were six long periods of indefinite duration.
1778	John Whitehurst: An inquiry into the Original State of the Earth. Whitehurst added the notion of drastic tidal action of the moon to Woodward's cosmogony.
1779	Horace-Benedict de Saussure: Voyages dans les Alpes. De Saussure made extensive observations of the Alps. He appreciated that curved strata had originally been laid down as horizontal sheets and were later deformed.
1787	Abraham Werner: Kurze Klassification und Beschreibung der verschiedener Gebirgsarten. Werner recognized the importance of successive advance and retreat of the oceans for creating the layers of the Earth.
1788	James Hutton: Theory of the Earth; or, an investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution and restoration of land upon the globe. Hutton is traditionally credited with being the father of modern geology. He was the first modern uniformitarian. Hutton argued that the Earth was of immense antiquity, cycling through changes via slow processes sans catastrophes. The last sentence of Hutton's 1788 work is famous and is widely quoted: The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end.
1794	Robert Townson: Philosophy of Mineralogy. Townson was one of the many catastrophists of the late 18'th and early 19'th century. He pointed out that fieldwork had revealed that the features of the surface of the Earth could not be accounted for by a single Creation and catastrophic flood but rather successions of formation and dramatic change.
1794	Richard Sullivan: A View of Nature. Sullivan was another catastrophist. He wrote: Thus succeed revolution to revolution. When the masses of shells were heaped upon the Alps, then in the bosom of the ocean, there must have been portions of the earth, unquestionably dry and inhabited; vegetable and animal remains prove it; no stratum hitherto discovered, with other strata upon it, but has been, at one time or another, the surface. The sea announces everywhere its different sojournments; and at least yields conviction that all strata were not formed at the same period.

Here are several good FAQs on the age of the Earth, and various creationist attempts to argue against it: The Age of the Earth

"systems" may be contemporaneous but "eras" may not. So since "biostratigraphy is independent of evolutionary theory" it cannot evidence the great ages needed. What does?

Along with all the other indications that the Earth is at **least* on the order of millions of years old (see above), the real nail in the coffin for "young earth" believers is radiometric dating, which gives (though multiple indepedent methods) the same highly precise answer for the age of the Earth:

How Old Is The Earth, And How Do We Know?

he generally accepted age for the Earth and the rest of the solar system is about 4.55 billion years (plus or minus about 1%). This value is derived from several different lines of evidence.

Unfortunately, the age cannot be computed directly from material that is solely from the Earth. There is evidence that energy from the Earth's accumulation caused the surface to be molten. Further, the processes of erosion and crustal recycling have apparently destroyed all of the earliest surface.

The oldest rocks which have been found so far (on the Earth) date to about 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago (by several radiometric dating methods). Some of these rocks are sedimentary, and include minerals which are themselves as old as 4.1 to 4.2 billion years. Rocks of this age are relatively rare, however rocks that are at least 3.5 billion years in age have been found on North America, Greenland, Australia, Africa, and Asia.

While these values do not compute an age for the Earth, they do establish a lower limit (the Earth must be at least as old as any formation on it). This lower limit is at least concordant with the independently derived figure of 4.55 billion years for the Earth's actual age.

The most direct means for calculating the Earth's age is a Pb/Pb isochron age, derived from samples of the Earth and meteorites. This involves measurement of three isotopes of lead (Pb-206, Pb-207, and either Pb-208 or Pb-204). A plot is constructed of Pb-206/Pb-204 versus Pb-207/Pb-204.

If the solar system formed from a common pool of matter, which was uniformly distributed in terms of Pb isotope ratios, then the initial plots for all objects from that pool of matter would fall on a single point.

Over time, the amounts of Pb-206 and Pb-207 will change in some samples, as these isotopes are decay end-products of uranium decay (U-238 decays to Pb-206, and U-235 decays to Pb-207). This causes the data points to separate from each other. The higher the uranium-to-lead ratio of a rock, the more the Pb-206/Pb-204 and Pb-207/Pb-204 values will change with time.

If the source of the solar system was also uniformly distributed with respect to uranium isotope ratios, then the data points will always fall on a single line. And from the slope of the line we can compute the amount of time which has passed since the pool of matter became separated into individual objects. See the Isochron Dating FAQ or Faure (1986, chapter 18 ) for technical detail.

A young-Earther would object to all of the "assumptions" listed above. However, the test for these assumptions is the plot of the data itself. The actual underlying assumption is that, if those requirements have not been met, there is no reason for the data points to fall on a line.

The resulting plot has data points for each of five meteorites that contain varying levels of uranium, a single data point for all meteorites that do not, and one (solid circle) data point for modern terrestrial sediments. It looks like this:

Pb-Pb isochron of terrestrial and meteorite samples.
After Murthy and Patterson (1962) and York and Farquhar (1972) .
Scanned from Dalrymple (1986) with permission.

Most of the other measurements for the age of the Earth rest upon calculating an age for the solar system by dating objects which are expected to have formed with the planets but are not geologically active (and therefore cannot erase evidence of their formation), such as meteorites. Below is a table of radiometric ages derived from groups of meteorites:

Type	Number Dated	Method	Age (billions of years)
Chondrites (CM, CV, H, L, LL, E)	13	Sm-Nd	4.21 +/- 0.76
Carbonaceous chondrites	4	Rb-Sr	4.37 +/- 0.34
Chondrites (undisturbed H, LL, E)	38	Rb-Sr	4.50 +/- 0.02
Chondrites (H, L, LL, E)	50	Rb-Sr	4.43 +/- 0.04
H Chondrites (undisturbed)	17	Rb-Sr	4.52 +/- 0.04
H Chondrites	15	Rb-Sr	4.59 +/- 0.06
L Chondrites (relatively undisturbed)	6	Rb-Sr	4.44 +/- 0.12
L Chondrites	5	Rb-Sr	4.38 +/- 0.12
LL Chondrites (undisturbed)	13	Rb-Sr	4.49 +/- 0.02
LL Chondrites	10	Rb-Sr	4.46 +/- 0.06
E Chondrites (undisturbed)	8	Rb-Sr	4.51 +/- 0.04
E Chondrites	8	Rb-Sr	4.44 +/- 0.13
Eucrites (polymict)	23	Rb-Sr	4.53 +/- 0.19
Eucrites	11	Rb-Sr	4.44 +/- 0.30
Eucrites	13	Lu-Hf	4.57 +/- 0.19
Diogenites	5	Rb-Sr	4.45 +/- 0.18
Iron (plus iron from St. Severin)	8	Re-Os	4.57 +/- 0.21
After Dalrymple (1991, p. 291); duplicate studies on identical meteorite types omitted.

As shown in the table, there is excellent agreement on about 4.5 billion years, between several meteorites and by several different dating methods. Note that young-Earthers cannot accuse us of selective use of data -- the above table includes a significant fraction of all meteorites on which isotope dating has been attempted. According to Dalrymple (1991, p. 286) , less than 100 meteorites have been subjected to isotope dating, and of those about 70 yield ages with low analytical error.

Further, the oldest age determinations of individual meteorites generally give concordant ages by multiple radiometric means, or multiple tests across different samples. For example:

Meteorite	Dated	Method	Age (billions of years)
Allende	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.52 +/- 0.02
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.53 +/- 0.02
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.48 +/- 0.02
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.55 +/- 0.03
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.55 +/- 0.03
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.57 +/- 0.03
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.50 +/- 0.02
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.56 +/- 0.05
Guarena	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.44 +/- 0.06
	13 samples	Rb-Sr	4.46 +/- 0.08
Shaw	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.43 +/- 0.06
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.40 +/- 0.06
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.29 +/- 0.06
Olivenza	18 samples	Rb-Sr	4.53 +/- 0.16
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.49 +/- 0.06
Saint Severin	4 samples	Sm-Nd	4.55 +/- 0.33
	10 samples	Rb-Sr	4.51 +/- 0.15
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.43 +/- 0.04
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.38 +/- 0.04
	whole rock	Ar-Ar	4.42 +/- 0.04
Indarch	9 samples	Rb-Sr	4.46 +/- 0.08
	12 samples	Rb-Sr	4.39 +/- 0.04
Juvinas	5 samples	Sm-Nd	4.56 +/- 0.08
	5 samples	Rb-Sr	4.50 +/- 0.07
Moama	3 samples	Sm-Nd	4.46 +/- 0.03
	4 samples	Sm-Nd	4.52 +/- 0.05
Y-75011	9 samples	Rb-Sr	4.50 +/- 0.05
	7 samples	Sm-Nd	4.52 +/- 0.16
	5 samples	Rb-Sr	4.46 +/- 0.06
	4 samples	Sm-Nd	4.52 +/- 0.33
Angra dos Reis	7 samples	Sm-Nd	4.55 +/- 0.04
	3 samples	Sm-Nd	4.56 +/- 0.04
Mundrabrilla	silicates	Ar-Ar	4.50 +/- 0.06
	silicates	Ar-Ar	4.57 +/- 0.06
	olivine	Ar-Ar	4.54 +/- 0.04
	plagioclase	Ar-Ar	4.50 +/- 0.04
Weekeroo Station	4 samples	Rb-Sr	4.39 +/- 0.07
	silicates	Ar-Ar	4.54 +/- 0.03
After Dalrymple (1991, p. 286); meteorites dated by only a single means omitted.

Also note that the meteorite ages (both when dated mainly by Rb-Sr dating in groups, and by multiple means individually) are in exact agreement with the solar system "model lead age" produced earlier.

The above is from: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-age-of-earth.html

[WildTurkey]

Since you have no argument, there is nothing to respond to.

[Havoc]

LOL. Nice rant. Doesn't pass for an argument; but, did you get it off your chest. I said it before and I'll say it again. Claiming piles of evidence doesn't make it so. Claiming something is evidence for a specific thing requires more than claiming it so. When it's evidence in support of a one or more other possibilities, it is hardly specific support. I'm saying nothing that first week logic students don't know; but, y'all sure don't act like you've ever been acquainted with it. I understand why you're reticent to just admit it's your "belief"; but, that doesn't make your endless claims any less dishonest or more scientific.

[bobdsmith]

Seeing as moon rocks, meteorites, martian rock, as well as various rocks from earth itself all show dates of well over 1 billion years old, I'd say that point 3:

"3. Systems were closed or isolated so that no parent or daughter isotopes were lost or added."

is actually more than an assumption in the absense of known mechanisms to take or remove daughter isotopes for each case. It's would just be too much of a coincidence for all those different sources from different locations to all be messed up the same amount by their different environments.

[WildTurkey]

AIG throws in some science then throws some false science in the middle to conclude that their point is valid. They hope to impress the ignorant that don't know the difference.

[Havoc]

Since you have no argument, there is nothing to respond to.

I took issue with the concept of "evidence" - a term that seems to be loosely thrown about and defined in your camp. And when sticking to proper definition and application of the term, it leaves you empty handed. Kinda gets lost in the shuffle when you want it to - course, that's the whole point of the shell games being played.

[general_re]

(Great, now I'll be all self-consious when I decide which book to pull from the pile next. :-)

You should grab some titles from the Monty Python "Book Shop" sketch, if you're familiar with that one ;)

[PatrickHenry]

the list was never claimed (nor implied) to consist only of hominids which are actually ancestral to modern humans. It's a list of the hominids which appear in the fossil record between the times of "Lucy" and modern man.

Personally, I don't know which of those pre-humans is directly ancestral to us. Not everyone in my own personal family tree, going back five generations -- all human! -- is in my direct ancestral line, but they're all related. What I'm posting with those links is information about hominid fossils. (None of which should exist at all, according to "creation science," because after the beasts, we were specially created, with no intermediate steps along the way).

[Pagey]

bttt

[Pagey]

bttt

[LiteKeeper]

YEC INTREP - Origin of Man - fossil record - dating

[Stultis]

Thank you for this excellent, scientific survey, which unfortunately doesn't answer the real question.

It did answer the first question you asked:

The evolutionists dated the fossils by the rocks. They also like to date rocks by the fossils. Who wants to try to prove they didn't?

Later you asked:

Would you like to evidence the bald claim that biostratigraphic standards prove common descent independently, not circularly?

To that I concentrated on answering the "not circularly" part, which is hopefully settled. As to the rest, "biostratigraphic standards" is simply a methodology that generates (or organizes) data. The method itself doesn't "prove" anything. It's the data that matters. But data doesn't "prove" anything either. Data just is what it is. A theory is tested by deducing implications from the theory as to what facts should be observed and what facts should not be observed. IOW it's the logical relationship (of implication or prohibition) between the theory and the data that is important.

As to how the data of the fossil record tests common descent, you can profitably consult many of the sections from this page. For instance (among others):

Prediction 1.4: Intermediate and transitional forms: the possible morphologies of predicted common ancestors

Prediction 1.5: Chronological order of intermediates

Prediction 2.6: Past biogeography

Prediction 5.4: Earth's strange past and the fossil record

You never mentioned: What makes them billions of years old?

You hadn't asked. This is a different and additional question. Stratigraphy gives relative dates. Absolute dating in dependable form has only been available since the 1950's (I believe) primarily utilizing the decay of radioactive isotopes as clocks.

If creationists invented this science, the rock and fossil evidence did not indicate to them the billions of years. So it still doesn't.

I don't follow the logic there. Why would you restrict people in the 21st century to the limitations of scientific instrumentation and knowledge in the early 19th?

Also, as above, "this science" (bio/litho-stratigraphy) is inherently not capable of indicating numbers of years. (Excepting that various ancillary considerations might sometimes allow us to estimate a minimum age, as for instance when the laws of thermodynamics set a maximum rate for a given mass of magma to cool and harden to rock.)

Your objection is a bit like saying that if microbiologists can't possibly cure aids, then virologists can't do it either, or that it's a poor vaccine that doesn't kill a staph infection.

Besides, even for creationists, your assertion is factually untrue. Many creationists today (even where creationist=antievolutionist) do accept that the earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old, and the universe older. And by the third decade or so of the 19th century, most creationist scientists (and literally all who were also leading geologists) accepted the contemporary equivalent: that the earth was vastly ancient relative to human history, even if they had no firm or particular figures to attach to it. (Many creationists themselves aren't aware of it, but the adoption of a "young earth" view by significant numbers of creationists, held as a putativley scientific position, is a recent phenomena, on going back to the 1960's or 70's.)

Because Darwin required long eras, he changed the dating,

It's true enough the Darwin "wanted" as much time as the earth could give him, and that he tended to argue for longer spans of time for the various geological systems. But he didn't "change" dating in any fundamental manner. The arguments he made were of the same type and nature as preceding geologists had made.

[Dimensio]

In other words, you made a false statement, you were corrected on the false statement, and then you ignored the correction (and the supplied evidence for it) so that you could pretend that you weren't lying when you repeated the false statement.

Darwin did not revise the age of the earth. The earth had already been dated as being far older than YECs believe before Darwin published anything. At the very least you can look at the fact that there have been naysayers regarding an ancient earth since no later than 1825 -- I can't see how Darwin could have had any influence there.

[Stultis]

The article above also doesn't describe in detail how it dated the fossils. Well, yeah, it's a news article from a newspaper. The issue of Nature with the article reported on is out as of today, however, so you can go to your nearest academic library and read it. Only the first paragraph is available for free online, but fortunately in the standard format of a research paper that is an "abstract" which provides a brief summary of the whole paper:

Stratigraphic placement and age of modern humans from Kibish, Ethiopia

IAN MCDOUGALL¹, FRANCIS H. BROWN² & JOHN G. FLEAGLE³

¹ Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
² Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112, USA
³ Department of Anatomical Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York 11794, USA

Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to I.McD (ian.mcdougall@anu.edu.au).

In 1967 the Kibish Formation in southern Ethiopia yielded hominid cranial remains identified as early anatomically modern humans, assigned to Homo sapiens. However, the provenance and age of the fossils have been much debated. Here we confirm that the Omo I and Omo II hominid fossils are from similar stratigraphic levels in Member I of the Kibish Formation, despite the view that Omo I is more modern in appearance than Omo II. ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar ages on feldspar crystals from pumice clasts within a tuff in Member I below the hominid levels place an older limit of 198 14 kyr (weighted mean age 196 2 kyr) on the hominids. A younger age limit of 104 7 kyr is provided by feldspars from pumice clasts in a Member III tuff. Geological evidence indicates rapid deposition of each member of the Kibish Formation. Isotopic ages on the Kibish Formation correspond to ages of Mediterranean sapropels, which reflect increased flow of the Nile River, and necessarily increased flow of the Omo River. Thus the ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar age measurements, together with the sapropel correlations, indicate that the hominid fossils have an age close to the older limit. Our preferred estimate of the age of the Kibish hominids is 195 5 kyr, making them the earliest well-dated anatomically modern humans yet described.

[furball4paws]

Oh Yeh??

Just because they say it's true doesn't mean it is. We need an eyewitness!

Sigh, you could take these guys out, let them collect the samples, prepare them, analyze them and collate the data and they still wouldn't believe it.

But if some guy in a robe appeared in a dream and said "Believe", they'd fall right into line.

Beer time.

[Tribune7]

It's would just be too much of a coincidence for all those different sources from different locations to all be messed up the same amount by their different environments.

Yeah and that's pretty much why I go with the Old Earth at least as far as science goes.

BUT while I most certainly want OEC being taught in science class -- or the methodology behind radiometric dating, anyway -- I appreciate the AIG contrarians.

[Alter Kaker]

Yeah and that's pretty much why I go with the Old Earth at least as far as science goes.

How is creationism, whether old or new earthish, science? I understand how you can believe in creationism, or that science is wrong, but not that it itself is science. There's no there there.

[Tribune7]

I understand how you can believe in creationism, or that science is wrong, but not that it itself is science.

How are you defining creationism?

[Messianic Jews Net]

Stultis is right that I asked a fresh question when he promptly answered the first question. I will continue looking at that evidence of age. See also below.

Dimensio says I made a false statement, apparently something like "Darwinism transformed [creationist interpretation of] 'geologic systems' or zones into 'geologic eras'", or "Because Darwin required long eras, he changed the [creationist] dating [into the million-year range], and neo-Darwinism changed it much further [into billions]". I trust the bracketed additions make my statement admissible; if not please back up the accusation.

Ichneumon perhaps did not endorse Patrick Henry's statement on his list of links: "7. Decorum: We will endeavor to be considerate to other posters and Lurkers. For instance, we will avoid large, difficult to load graphics, excessively long or irrelevant posts and annoying repetitions." Maybe I will have time to analyze them around work. Since we're both detail people, I trust that'll suffice.