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.
No way. Neanderthals were smart and advanced. Helen Thomas comes from the troll family.
Seven thousand years farther back is but an eyeblink...
The evidence and observation is Noah's record of rain for 40 days. It's an attempt to explain how that might of occurred. I think there is a lot more evidence for the flood, but whether a canopy existed I don't know. The reason I accept Noah's record is that the book speaks of a God that I know is real based on personal experience.
Good point. The phenomenon of "elephant graveyards" seems to support this idea. Elephants go back to the places where their relatives died and handle the bones of the dead. This behavior seems to suggest that elephants have some understanding of death and have the capacity to remember dead family members.
350 years = grave robbery
35,000 years = scientific research
That is a mischaracterization of what they are finding. (from the article)"The AMS method improved the sensitivity of the raw measurement of the 14C/12C ratio from approximately 1% of the modern value to about 0.001%."..."The big surprise, however, was that no fossil material could be found anywhere that had as little as 0.001% of the modern value!2..."Routinely finding 14C/12C ratios on the order of 0.1-0.5% of the modern value—a hundred times or more above the AMS detection threshold—in samples supposedly tens to hundreds of millions of years old is therefore a huge anomaly for the uniformitarian framework."..."When we average our results over each geological interval, we obtain remarkably similar values of 0.26 percent modern carbon (pmc) for Eocene, 0.21 pmc for Cretaceous, and 0.27 pmc for Pennsylvanian. Although the number of samples is small, we observe little difference in 14C level as a function of position in the geological record. This is consistent with the young-earth view that the entire macrofossil record up to the upper Cenozoic is the product of the Genesis Flood and therefore such fossils should share a common 14C age. "
"Nevertheless, this amount will be far below what any instrument can detect. That's where ICR gets their whiz-bang multiple of 100 and it's bogus." - vaderetro
Again this is a mischaracterization. They are finding Carbon 14 ratios 100 times higher than the sensitivity of the equipment after adjusting for known sources of contamination.
The results are not consistent with a YEC Earth at all, and yet ICR proudly waves it around as if it were. The Earth would be over 50K years old if there were no trace of contamination from any source.
It's a noise floor and nothing more. Deal with it!
I can't critique a paper when the authors are now trying to hide even the paper itself, but it turns out that Brad Lepper, a very reliable source (his other works that I've read have been solid) has already critiqued it for me. Here's a brief summary of his review...
In other words, it's the same type of fraud committed by Austin as described in my previous posts.
The author refers to Lepper's critique:
[snip]"...Some have claimed that this bone was covered with shellac, causing the carbon 14 date to be young. Concerning this issue, one individual sent me the following information:
The papers of Miller’s that are cited by Lepper are:
Fields, W., H. Miller, J. Whitmore, D. Davis, G. Detwiler, J. Ditmars, R. Whitelaw, and G.Novaez, 1990, “The Paluxy River Footprints Revisited,” in _Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Creationism held July 30-August 4, 1990, Volume 2, technical symposium sessions and additional topics_, edited by R.E. Walsh and C.L. Brooks, pp. 155-168, Christian Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh.
and
Dahmer, L., D. Kouznetsov, A. Ivenov, J. Hall, J. Whitmore, G. Detwiler, and H. Miller, 1990, “Report on Chemical Analysis and Further Dating of Dinosaur Bones and Dinosaur Petroglyphs,” same proceedings, pp. 371-374.
The above two articles are the ones that purportedly refer to carbon 14 dating of a dinosaur bone covered with shellac. The article I referred to is the following:
“Direct Dating of Cretaceous-Jurassic Fossils (and Other Evidences for Human-Dinosaur Coexistence)” (1992 Twin Cities Creation Conference).
In this paper, the authors describe in detail the measures taken to ensure that no other source of carbon contamination was present inside or outside the bones.
The fact that these are separate papers, and the fact that every attempt was made to avoid contamination, suggests that these are two different incidents. I also received the following information from another person:
As far as I can ascertain from the paper, the researchers responsible specifically mention that the dinosaur bones being dated were not coated with shellac (page 10). Otherwise, the details of the material at your website are as in the paper, and the comment about a black carbon residue around fossilised dinosaur bones is referenced in their paper to a secular source, so it is not simply their observation. The comments from the Penguin Geology Encyclopedia merely add to their case.
However, of the results they give in their paper, I personally would only be comfortable with the AMS results obtained on the same sample in two different laboratories - the one at 25,750+/-280 years BP and the other at 23,760+/-270 years BP. The other results were obtained on unspecified equipment or via the less reliable older beta technology and generally appear not to have been cross-checked in another laboratory.
Again I confirm that the claim about the shellac appears to be totally false and merely a smokescreen to avoid the implications of an uncomfortable radiocarbon date.
So, based on all of this information, it looks like there were two separate incidents, and the one I referred to involved a dinosaur bone that was not covered with shellac, but still gave a young carbon 14 date...."[snip]
It seems to me to be no small leap to conclude that due to the unpleasant and difficult research work of wading through TEN VOLUMES of the journal "Radiocarbon" or finding out-of-print or older sources, that the published result is due to some sort of deliberate fraud.
Cordially,
Applying the uniformitarian approach of extrapolating 14C decay into the indefinite past translates the measured 14C/12C ratios into ages that are on the order of 50,000 years (2-50000/5730 = 0.0024 = 0.24 pmc). However, uniformitarian assumptions are inappropriate when one considers that the Genesis Flood removed vast amounts of living biomass from exchange with the atmosphere—organic material that now forms the earth's vast coal, oil, and oil shale deposits. A conservative estimate for the pre-Flood biomass is 100 times that of today. If one takes as a rough estimate for the total 14C in the biosphere before the cataclysm as 40% of what exists today and assumes a relatively uniform 14C level throughout the pre-Flood atmosphere and biomass, then we might expect a 14C/12C ratio of about 0.4% of today's value in the plants and animals at the onset of the Flood. With this more realistic pre-Flood 14C/12C ratio, we find that a value of 0.24 pmc corresponds to an age of only 4200 years (0.004 x 2-4200/5730 = 0.0024 = 0.24 pmc). Even though these estimates are rough, they illustrate the crucial importance of accounting for effects of the Flood cataclysm when translating a 14C/12C ratio into an actual age.
I'll agree that ICR's model has some if this if that in it. But so does the evolutionist's model. We are both trying to look back 4200 to 1.5 million years and say what the earth was like and what the ratio of Carbon 14 was and what are the possible sources of Carbon 14 and Carbon 12 and how much was there at creation and how much leached into the fossil and how much leached out of the sample. A lot of if's on both sides.
Completely ad hoc, unsupported by any shred of evidence, and already falsified by available evidence. We have calibrated the decay curve of C-14 well past the projected age.
The carbon-14 dates have been carefully cross-checked with non-radiometric age indicators. For example growth rings in trees, if counted carefully, are a reliable way to determine the age of a tree. Each growth ring only collects carbon from the air and nutrients during the year it is made. To calibrate carbon-14, one can analyze carbon from the center several rings of a tree, and then count the rings inward from the living portion to determine the actual age. This has been done for the "Methuselah of trees", the bristlecone pine trees, which grow very slowly and live up to 6,000 years. Scientists have extended this calibration even further. These trees grow in a very dry region near the California-Nevada border. Dead trees in this dry climate take many thousands of years to decay. Growth ring patterns based on wet and dry years can be correlated between living and long dead trees, extending the continuous ring count back to 11,800 years ago.Your theory of accelerated decay rates in the past can't be right if those tree rings are right.Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective.
The Wiens link goes on to mention how extensive calibration against varves, stalactites, etc. has found that, while decay rates are of course constant, the ratio of C14 to other isotopes was once slightly different. That is, assumptions are not only checkable but have been checked and the appropriate adjustments made decades ago.
ICR's model was already detectably wrong when they came up with it. It's typical of creationism not to be deterred in the search for suckers by the transparent falsehood of its claims.
There is no documentation given in the link for the assertion of continuous ring count back to 11,800 years. I did find this:
[snip] ....These claimed “long chronologies” begin with either living trees or dead wood that can be accurately dated by historical methods. This carries the chronology back perhaps 3,500 years. Then the more questionable links are established based on the judgment of a tree-ring specialist. Standard statistical techniques could establish just how good the dozen or more supposedly overlapping tree-ring sequences are. However, tree-ring specialists refuse to subject their judgments to these statistical tests, and they have not released their data so others can carry out these statistical tests. 5
[snip]... The following message was sent to me by e mail on February 11, 1998:
As one who has taught dendrochronnology, I have a few opinions on this particular subject. Also, one of my graduate students went to work for Ferguson in his lab at U of A, and in fact was the curator of his work after his death, and is presently probably the only one who knows anything about how he [Ferguson] produced the bristlecone chronology. Another of my graduate students gave a seminar to the lab on dendrochronology of fossil trees and had ample opportunity to analyze the procedures there, and to work with Ferguson for a while. I can say on pretty firm grounds that the Bristlecone chronology before 4000bp is fraught with problems and unanswered questions. While Ferguson was alive, he never allowed anyone to analyze his original data or the bases for the many suppositions that went into the establishment of the chronology. Thus the chronology was not subjected to the normal rigors of science. This is regrettable, because I believe he was a careful and sincere scientist. Of course one could always excuse Ferguson for not revealing the bases of his decisions (for example, the most important rings in any chronology are the “missing rings” which have to be added by the investigator). But suffice to say the chronology before 4000bp is entirely dependent on C14 dates of the wood, and is thus tautologous. This does not mean it is meaningless or necessarily wrong, just that I wouldn’t base too much on it." source
Cordially,
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