The mustachio’d buffoon evidently thinks he uncovered a major flaw in the discovery of “Ardi” (Ardipithecus ramidus), currently hailed as being our oldest known ancestor.
When I watched a documentary on the discovery of the famous fossil, I was amazed that they didn’t date the bones at 4.4 million years old. They instead dated the soil in which they were found. My immediate thought was, "How do they know that Ardi’s age was the same as what they perceive as the soil’s age, and how do we know that the dating system is accurate?"
Let’s say I died next week and I’m buried in soil that geologists say is 2.6 million years old. One hundred thousand years pass and new geologists dig up my bones. They want to know how old my bones are, but instead of testing them, they test the compacted now rock strata in which I was buried, and conclude that they are 2.6 million years old.
This seems like a good argument on the surface, and his explanation and example would be correct … unless he actually takes the nature of the soil itself, and the manner in which Ardi’s fossils were located in it, into account. From the National Geographic report:
The Ardipithecus ramidus fossils were discovered in Ethiopia's harsh Afar desert at a site called Aramis in the Middle Awash region, just 46 miles (74 kilometers) from where Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, was found in 1974. Radiometric dating of two layers of volcanic ash that tightly sandwiched the fossil deposits revealed that Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago. [My emphasis]
Did you get that? Ardi was discovered buried within layers of volcanic ash. Now, I’m not an expert, but unless her corpse was somehow deposited upon a preexisting layer of solidified ash (which would already need to be thousands, if not millions, of years old), and a later eruption buried her remains (which would have needed to remain perfectly exposed until then), the only thing this could indicate is that Ardi and the volcanic layers around her were of the exact same age (or at least, so close that any discrepancy would be so low as to be negligible). Her burial wouldn’t have been a long, drawn-out process spanning thousands of years, which would skew the results. Volcanic eruptions are short and violent events (on a geologic timescale, anyway), so the ash would’ve entombed her nearly immediately where she fell.
Put it this way: it’s the difference between dropping a bone on the ground and waiting for the winds to throw enough dirt over it to cover it and eventually have it fossilize, and plunging said bone into a mudflow, which would quickly solidify around it, preserving it. In this latter case, the earth and the bone would naturally be of a very close age, if not the exact same down to a few months or years. Which, at a timescale of thousands and millions of years, wouldn’t exactly matter all that much.
So, sorry, Ray, but once again, your words come off as false rubbish with a minimum of thought and logical reasoning.
![There is probably no [superstition]. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life](http://i933.photobucket.com/albums/ad171/crispianjago/Probably-No.gif "There is probably no [superstition]. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life")
![Joé McKen (18) [taken 07/13/10]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vHSSflyqB27Zmd9fVxDNHd4M2fh_7Azk3Ij3-DvNQSILSsNS-1Dn8_ojUAI8qNnAT2R_3C6O2Z_ve9rNzVAnc=s0-d "Joé McKen (18) [taken 07/13/10]")
