news.nationalgeographic.com— the group of early humans whose 1920s discovery gave a big boost to the theory of evolution—lived hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously believed, a new study says.
Mar 12, 2009View in Crawl 4
You're studying to become a Peking man? Ah but the important question to ask would be how does the age of the rock strata accurately give a date of how old the bones are? It will surely only give you a date of how old the rocks are or more accurately the radioactive decay of the isotopes in the crystals you mention.. so all you have is how old the rocks are.. not how old the bones are.. so come up with a way of testing the bones.. yes.. and everyone will be pleased.
Kirado: You clearly don't know the first thing about natural history. I'm guessing you're religious, but that's beside the point. Anyway, it's usually a very safe assumption to say that a fossil or artifact is the same age as the rocks it was found in, otherwise, how would it have gotten there? The last time I checked, rocks are very hard and unforgiving, and it's not the easiest thing to plunk a fossil right in the middle of a formation after it has formed. Still, geologic processes like uplifting and redeposition can and occasionally do displace fossils out of their original context, but this more often than not destroys the fossil and leaves obvious signs that these processes have occurred. No evidence for this has been associated with the Zhoukoudian hominid fossils (plural as in Peking Man is far from being the only individual discovered there, just one of the first) meaning that we can accurately guage the age of these fossils from the age of the rocks they were found in.To answer your other question, of course there are techniques to directly date fossils. It's called radiocarbon dating and can be even more accurate than the methods they use on rocks. The problem with radiocarbon dating is that the couple main carbon isotopes it measures, C12 and C14, decay rapidly and are really only affective at dating material that is younger than about 60,000 years. Peking Man is much, much older and the fossil no longer contains measurable amounts of these isotopes to make the procedure viable, hence the method the scientists performed instead.Class dismissed. You lose. Tell your churchie friends.
pillar007Mar 14, 2009
Lies. The results were manipulated by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He was there with his noodly appendage altering the results.
lewieMar 14, 2009
Faith never tasted so good!RAmen
tonytheterribleMar 14, 2009
guns, germs and steeltheres only one earliest of anything. theres always going to be claims like this.
murquizaMar 14, 2009
And the problems with the chinese and their reported age continue! The Olimpics was just the tip of the iceberg!!!!
sarcasmMar 14, 2009
But when did Thought occur?
Closed AccountMar 14, 2009
You're studying to become a Peking man? Ah but the important question to ask would be how does the age of the rock strata accurately give a date of how old the bones are? It will surely only give you a date of how old the rocks are or more accurately the radioactive decay of the isotopes in the crystals you mention.. so all you have is how old the rocks are.. not how old the bones are.. so come up with a way of testing the bones.. yes.. and everyone will be pleased.
mystcnurseMar 14, 2009
Yeah, but everyone knows that the Earth is only 6000 years old, so there's no way this can be right. Geez!
itstwentybelowMar 14, 2009
Kirado: You clearly don't know the first thing about natural history. I'm guessing you're religious, but that's beside the point. Anyway, it's usually a very safe assumption to say that a fossil or artifact is the same age as the rocks it was found in, otherwise, how would it have gotten there? The last time I checked, rocks are very hard and unforgiving, and it's not the easiest thing to plunk a fossil right in the middle of a formation after it has formed. Still, geologic processes like uplifting and redeposition can and occasionally do displace fossils out of their original context, but this more often than not destroys the fossil and leaves obvious signs that these processes have occurred. No evidence for this has been associated with the Zhoukoudian hominid fossils (plural as in Peking Man is far from being the only individual discovered there, just one of the first) meaning that we can accurately guage the age of these fossils from the age of the rocks they were found in.To answer your other question, of course there are techniques to directly date fossils. It's called radiocarbon dating and can be even more accurate than the methods they use on rocks. The problem with radiocarbon dating is that the couple main carbon isotopes it measures, C12 and C14, decay rapidly and are really only affective at dating material that is younger than about 60,000 years. Peking Man is much, much older and the fossil no longer contains measurable amounts of these isotopes to make the procedure viable, hence the method the scientists performed instead.Class dismissed. You lose. Tell your churchie friends.