Oh, speaking of BS -- I take it the rest of your post here is an effort to demonstrate that the earth is less than one million years old? So we are back to basic basics...
Evidence supporting the 4.3 billion year age of the earth is all around us -- we see it every day, driving down the road are cuts through hillsides showing us dozens or hundreds of stratigraphic levels.
In some parts of the country you can see veins of coal amongst them.
These veins alone took many millions of years to form.
But the earth itself is 15 times older than those veins of coal.
- We begin to see this by simply digging down below the coal veins -- miles and miles into the earth, one level below the other, thousands of stratigraphic levels adding up to many hundreds of millions of years.
- Other ways we know this include dozens of different types of radiometric dating, beginning with carbon-14 which is good back to about 50,000 years ago.
Here is a listing of about two dozen other radiometric dating methods, each valid for different time periods, with considerable overlaps.
Some of these can take us back to the beginning of the solar system, 4.3 billion years ago. - Another way of confirming time scales for the age of the earth is to look back in time towards the beginnings of the Universe -- with telescopes.
Astronomical calculations show the beginnings of the Universe well over 10 billion years ago. So a solar system about 4.5 billion years old makes sense.
wendy1946: "Robert Bass, actually redid Lord Kelvin's heat equations for the planet WITH a maximal figure for radioactive materials, and got an outer bound of around 200M years,"
Well, 200 million years is still way more than Lord Kelvin's 20 million years, not to mention your one million years, so at least Robert Bass is moving in the right direction.
- In terms of geology and paleontology, 200 million years takes us back to the late Triassic, early Jurassic, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and our little mammal ancestors hid in the ground and trees, sneaking out at night to find insects. ;-)
- But 200 million years is off by a factor of 20, and we can start to see that by simply digging down below the levels of the Jurassic and Triassic to what came before.
- No doubt Bass's calculations are flawed somehow, though exactly how it would take a serious scientist to explain.
I would simply point to the fact that it is an outlier result, amongst many others which indicate older dates.
wendy1946: "The people claiming these "common ancestors(TM)" for us and Neanderthals are generally the same people still claiming a 60M year antiquity for dinosaurs DESPITE all the new evidence of meat, blood cells, blood vessels, skin cells and what not turning up in dinosaur remains as well as the one nearly complete hadrosaur..."
Of course, there were no dinosaurs 60 million years ago.
- Dinosaurs were killed off in a mass extinction 65 million years ago.
- And fossil remains of dinosaurs very rarely include small bits of organic material (no DNA), whose survival over the ages must be counted something of a miracle.
- Sadly, for those skeptics who don't believe in miracles, these very rare and tiny bits of organic material lead to other strange conclusions.
- "The one nearly complete hadrosaur" you mention was amazingly well preserved, but included no organic material.
wendy1946: "Note that Heinsohn is essentially providing maximal age figures which stratigraphic evidence could actually support.
That is not exactly the same thing as claiming that neanderthals arose a couple of thousand years before Christ but when you combine this picture with the dinosaur petroglyphs and the images from Harappa and Mohenjo Dara, then you begin to comprehend that the time for us to be descended from hominids is simply not there, and the claims of us and hominids having any sort of a common ancestor 700,000 years back are basically ridiculous."
Ridiculous?
Bass calculated 200 million years.
How does that not leave enough time for the descent of humans from pre-humans?
As for the entirety of pre-human history, I count nearly two dozen different ancestral groups:
