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Perhaps you need to turn that skepticism inward. There are good answers to your questions. Yes the dating techniques are verified by corroborating it with a lo
by flukus 9y ago
Perhaps you need to turn that skepticism inward. There are good answers to your questions.
Yes the dating techniques are verified by corroborating it with a lot of other evidence such as tree rings as well as other dating methods, it's also well corroborated with entirely different fields like geology, history and physics.
As for being close to the surface, there are quite a few geological process that can come into play. There are places on earth that have fossils hundreds of millions of years old on the surface. This is not in any way remarkable.
> So I suppose a similar thing applies here in dating science, except, it’s impossible to validate for another thousand centuries
This sounds alarmingly like an argument you'd get out of Ken Ham. Are you a creationist that has trouble accepting an earth older than 6000 years? The debating style of asking seemingly probing yet actually well understood questions screams creationist (and climate change denialist) as well. You also fit the profile of creationist and climate change deniers, engineers that think they're smarter than the actually are and don't know what they don't know.
As for finds like this, despite the headline it's completely unremarkable and fits easily within what we know of human migrations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_migration_out_of_Africa.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Human_migration_out_of_Af...
- aetherspawn 9y agoThis kind of comment is flammatory and against HN etiquette (and should be removed).
- flukus 9y agoI know you claim to be skeptical but see evidence to the contrary. You're not skeptical of yourself and of your limited knowledge and your not skeptical of your need to be skeptical (there are no extraordinary claims in this discovery). I see no evidence that you are responding in good faith to any flaws in your reasoning, you're continuing to make an argument from incredulity. So I'm sorry if you're not a creationist (not as sorry as I'd be if you were), but when you look like a duck, argue like a duck and respond like a duck I start getting that duck vibe. How about you respond to the points in your post: > Not to be that guy, but I’m really starting to question the accuracy of dating techniques when they publish finds like this. Why when they publish finds like this? There is nothing extraordinary about these finds, they sit comfortably inside what we know of human migrations. > This finding is only significant because of the age, but have we ever verified our dating techniques over 5k years? 10k years? You're arguing against archaeology, geology, history and nuclear physics here. Do you think all these branches of science are being dishonest? > It seems further unlikely that such a bone from, 85k y/ago as they say, would be so close to the surface. Why do you find this surprising? There a quite a few geological process that can result in this. Nearly all fossils we find are quite close to the surface.