Greg1234
In the beginning was El
These "theories" that you're talking about existed long before this controversy ever emerged and are based on common sense: if you have one rock with very durable crystals (it takes several days in one of the strongest acids in existence at 200-300 degrees Celsius to dissolved them for analysis) that erodes, with the mineral grains carried to a basin and deposited, then you'd expect to find those grains in the sedimentary rock found in that basin, right? That's just basic logic.
Yes that's the theory. The fact that the fossils dated the rock to be 540MA means "When scientists dated the Indian deposits, they may have calculated the age of 1.1-billion-year-old rock grains that washed into the ocean and became incorporated in much younger limestone and sandstone."
Thanks for the link. It's actually pretty interesting reading - just based on that, it seems like there's a reasonable possibility that her dates are right. Fission track dating is notoriously unreliable, but the ages she got were pretty old, even with the massive error accounted for. The one thing to note is that clays often contain high amounts of thorium, one of the daughter products used in U-series dating, and there was a lot of clay in the dig site. That would increase the amount of apparent daughter product, making the artifacts seem older. Of course, this can be accounted for, so it may be moot. The articles didn't say whether they had applied a correction.
http://pleistocenecoalition.com/steen-mcintyre/Szabo_et_al_1969.pdf (page 243)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1475-4754.00124/abstract
Honestly, if her data is right, that would be pretty cool.

Eh, reading the articles, it sounded like she did a pretty good job of verifying her dates. As a tephrochronologist, she was able to compare the ash with ash beds that had been previously dated to around the expected age and found no correlation.It would be better if she was able to get some older ash samples as well to compare to, but it sounds like those are nowhere near to being exposed.
We're dating them, remember?
In some cases, yes.
Ah, I see. There was an individual here saying that she dated the rocks. You should give him a good talking to.
Last edited:
Upvote
0