Just one century ago, earliest man’s age was set (reasonably) at around 100,000 kya. I believe this figure is very close to correct (see more on this in chapter 10). Marcellin Boule, in 1923, had man no older than 125 kyr; at this time the Paleolithic was thought to have begun only 50 kya, but in 1929 that was changed to 400 kya.4 What is going on here? Comparing these dates we soon find that man’s age has been increased in the past century by a factor of twenty! In the 1940s and 1950s, Australopithecus (who was the earliest hominid at that time) was dated to no more than 500 kyr. Then by the 1970s the first hominids were “at least a million years old.”5 And with American anthropologist F. Clark Howell’s finds in Ethiopia (just after the K-Ar method was brought out), that figure instantly doubled to 2 myr.
Nevertheless, Le Gros Clark (in 1955) noted that “all the australopithecine deposits in South Africa are not very widely separated in geological time.”6 But then after Leakey and Howell broke the Tertiary barrier, their new expanded dates became the gold standard, and everything must be fitted around this benchmark—even surpass it.
Now mtDNA says the mod type of man arose perhaps 130 kya: Ethiopia’s Omo I, originally dated at less than 50 kyr, is now offered as possibly the oldest Homo sapiens anywhere at 130 kyr.7 But this figure will not stay put; watch it change to 200,000 (to fit the African Eve theory). What is the oldest reliable date for the modern type? Back in 1955, Le Gros Clark dated AMHs to a modest 30,000 years ago. But since the 1990s, given the push for the out-of-Africa paradigm, date changes seem more politics, more agenda, than impartial science.
Long dating had a good head start, for it was advanced from the beginning by Darwinists in order to supply a plausible length of time for man to develop his great brain. British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (as we will see in chapters 7 and 9) thought at least 15 million years of evolution were needed to produce the human brain (or “the symphonies of Beethoven”). Evolution theory needs very substantial time also to get back to the less specialized pongids of the Miocene, from which both apes and humans presumably evolved (especially since the more recent Pliocene apes are not too different than today’s editions).
WORLD’S GREATEST FOSSIL: NE PLUS ULTRA
Let me ask you this: How many times have you read the phrase we now know—persuading the innocent reader to put his or her faith in the most recent findings of science? Let’s try to remember, though, that hominid discoveries in Africa have caused the family tree to be rewritten several times. Which one is right? “[A]ll the evolutionary stories I learned as a student . . . have now been ‘debunked,’” owned Derek V. Ager.8 What are the chances of today’s “breakthroughs,” with all their splashy fanfare, holding up to tomorrow’s surprises?
Let’s not be naive. Latest studies are not necessarily the best. It is nothing but the misleading rule of progress (forever onward and upward) that Darwinism itself inculcates. For example, American paleoanthropologist John Hawks in his weblog imperiously dismisses earlier work, criticizing authors who use “completely obsolete anthropological information” more than fifty years out of date. Objection! More often than we may suppose, the older theorists (using their brains and immense fount of knowledge) more closely skirted the truth than many of their modern replacements (using supercomputers and the latest vogue in their field).
And how would Charles Darwin fit in Hawk’s reproof? Isn’t Darwin 150 years out of date? I have come to suspect the vaunted claims that new or recent studies are automatically better. Franz Weidenreich, as an example, was on the money 75 years ago, when he rejected an out-of-Africa or any other single-origin theory of man, showing instead that H. erectus was followed by mods everywhere (not just Africa). As occasionally noted in these chapters, I frankly find the work of some of the self-made old-timers—like Weidenreich, Hooton, Dixon, and Coon—more impressive, reliable, and realistic than the smoke and drone of today’s generation of skin-deep theorists and sycophants.
But this is how it’s done: New finds are trumpeted as groundbreaking fossils, rewriting human history, seriously revolutionizing everything, and threatening to deal a major blow to previous concepts. Headline-seeking superlatives like “utterly dazzling find” and “oldest human ancestor” sound more like a marketing phenomenon than sober science. Feeding off the glamour of deep time, for example, Lee Berger’s Australopithecus sedipa, dated to a whopping 5.5 myr, “changes the game.”9 Don Johanson well knew the value of “the world’s oldest humans . . . to dangle before foundations and private funders.”10
Discovered (but in fact only rediscovered) in 2003, hobbit Flo made her flashy debut as the hominid that “overturns everything”11 (utterly disregarding earlier hobbits found in the 1950s). It was the same with Kenya’s Black Skull, which was touted as “overturn[ing] all previous notions of the course of early hominid evolution,” the swashbuckling posture answered by head-shaking critics who aver it was exactly “what you would expect to find . . . it isn’t even a new fossil” (the very same type had been found back in 1967 by French diggers).12
Combine the funds-seeking diggers with the sensation-seeking press and boom—each new specimen is an electrifying challenge to orthodoxy. The script: “Our assumptions were wrong, but we now know . . .” deceptively creates the impression of a humble, open-minded, self-correcting science.
How shall I account for the difference betwixt thy arguments now and the other time?
OAHSPE, BOOK OF FRAGAPATTI 9:17
In reality, such finds are blowback—exposing the bogus theories and pseudobreakthroughs of yesterday’s news. One disgusted observer commented facetiously: “Every new fossil hominid specimen is the most important ever found . . . and is completely different from all previous ones, and probably a new genus, and therefore deserve a new name.”13
I fear that much of this date changing, this time inflation, is a form of damage control, saving evolution from the wrecking ball of hard facts. It is difficult to get a footing here. Whose dates shall we believe? Some say Neanderthal and H. sapiens split off from an (imagined) common ancestor 300 kya, but others say that happened 800 kya.14 Was there an unstated reason for setting Neanderthal farther back in time? Yes, there was: Greater age is needed for Neanderthal, to account for huge differences in physiology between his lineage and all others. In the continuing chaos of dates for Neanderthals, analysts have dated them anywhere from 150 to 353 kya. Still others give Neanderthal no more than 100,000 years on this Earth.15
Robert Braidwood dated the earliest Neanderthal to 85,000 years.16 There is no undisputed documentation of Neanderthal, some say, before 75 kya. Neanderthal is basically man of the Mousterian age, most clustering around 40 to 50 kyr. He does not show up earlier than 50 kya in most parts of Europe, Russia, Siberia, and Iran17; and his tenure on Earth can be no more than 50,000 years altogether.18 His remains are found in largely organic state (not fossilized), indicating relatively recent time.
CONTROVERSY, CONTAMINATION, AND CONFUSION
These wide and indeterminate date ranges are called scatter. Vertesszollos Man, a problematic fellow for evolutionists, with awfully early AMH features, has been dated (scattered) anywhere from 100 kyr to 700 kyr! Petralona Man, another early European troublemaker, is dated anywhere from 70 to 700 kya19—the 70 kyr tag fits the modern aspects of his morphology, while the older date, 700 kyr, fits the primitive ones. Why even bother with such indeterminate ranges? In the case of Ihroud, Morocco Man, one method gave him 40 kyr and another method gave him 125 kyr—the older date favored, for it helped him fit the bill as a transitional species in the out-of-Africa theory. Dates changed for Africa’s Kabwe Man, too, scattered from 11 kya to 40 kya to 300 or 400 kya20—also to better fit the out-of-Africa model.
It’s a rollercoaster ride: Java’s Ngandong Man, found in 1931, has been dated anywhere from 77 to 170 to 300 kya. But consider the largely ignored report by zoologist Emil Selenka and zoologist and paleontologist Margarethe Selenka concerning Java’s deposits of Homo erectus. Here violent eruptions of
a nearby volcano and subsequent flooding changed the landscape dramatically: the Solo River actually changed its course. Those beds might have been less than 1,000 years old, for the degree of fossilization was the “result of the chemical nature of the volcanic material, not the result of vast age.”21 *81 Keith, a century ago, had cautioned that “the mineralized condition of bones does not signify much . . . [if] impregnated with iron and silica from the stratum in which they were embedded.”22
Modern man’s age has been scattered anywhere from 30 kya up to 500 kya. But don’t make any AMH too old, as that would put mods too early in the record, throwing off the whole evolutionary staircase, onward and upward. Let’s see how this works: The AMH Keilor skull from Australia was thought to be of very early (third interglacial) age, but being AMH, it was automatically elevated to “definitely postglacial times,”23 possibly as young as 15 kyr. Before the long-dating craze began a half century ago, if they found an AMH too early in the record (as indeed they are), they simply bumped up the date to make him more recent. Nowadays they’re more inclined to leave the old date as is and say the whole shooting match began earlier than we thought—in the Pliocene. Deep time. But man did not exist in the Pliocene (see discussion in chapter 10).
How do you like the scatter for China’s Choukoutien Homo erectus, variously dated anywhere from 200 kyr to 750 kyr? Good thing I used a pencil (with a stout eraser) during my note gathering for these dates. How does one know which guess is correct? They will shelve any hominid at mid-Pleistocene (say, 800 kya) automatically if the morphology is H. erectus–like. This is called dating by morphology; for example, “We must regard a small brain cavity . . . as an indication of antiquity.”24 But beware: That was before the “shocking” discovery of “too young” H. erectus types like Flores’s hobbit, with her pea brain of 380 cc, who lived as recently as 12 kya. Forget antiquity.
TABLE 6.1. EXAMPLES OF DEEP-TIME GAFFES
Item Date Originally
Assigned Subsequent Date
Assigned
Skeletons, United States 38–70,000 BP(AAR method) 7,000 BP*82
Neanderthal, Croatia 130,000 BP ca 30,000 BP†83
Fontéchevade Man, France 800,000 BP 100,000, 70,000, or 40,000 BP
Galley Hill Man, UK mid-Pleistocene, ca 1 myr Neolithic, less than 10,000 BP‡84
Hamburg skull, Germany 36,000 BP (carbon dated) ca 14,000 BP
KBS tuff, Africa 220 myr (K-Ar method) 2 to 6 mya
Krapina Man, Croatia Third interglacial Upper Paleolithic
Moab Man, Utah 65 mya Native American bones from the past few centuries
Olduvai Bed II 500 kyr (dated by Louis Leakey) 17,000 BP§85
Skull 1470, Africa 230 mya (volcanic rock test) 1.8 myr
Solo River H. erectus, Java 900,000 BP 30,000 BP¶86
THE DIFFICULTIES OF ACCURATE DATING
Radiometric Dating
Radiocarbon dating (C-14) was introduced in the late 1940s and works all right for relatively recent material only: “The men who run the tests would report that they cannot date with accuracy beyond 3,000 years.”25 C-14 analysis has actually given shells of living mollusks an age of 2,300 years. One of the problems is this—the decay rate of C-14 may not have been so constant in the past, particularly if you factor in the great abundance of vegetation on the landscape in earlier times. The globe was once more tropical with luxuriant plant life; without taking this into account, you get older ages from C-14 readings, which may also result from the proportion of C-14 isotopes in the atmosphere, which has not always been the same. There is also the problem of contamination by natural coal, slanting carbon dates in the too-old direction. The real question is: Does organic material take on C-14 at a constant rate? Open to debate, the C-14 margin of error, some say, is as high as 80 percent (up to 10 kya).26 *87
Potassium-argon dating (K-Ar), another radiometric method, enabled geologists and archaeologists to date very old materials. First developed in the late 1940s, it wasn’t used in an archaeological setting until 1959. This new method began to give astoundingly old dates. It was an instant media sensation, attracting headlines—and funding. Come up with a fossil specimen older than the record holder—and you’re a player. A 165,000-year-old shellfish dinner, for example “pushes back [e.a.] the earliest known seafood meal by 40,000 years”27—how about that! When Richard Leakey dated his Lake Rudolph Skull 1470 to 2.8 myr, he bragged that “our past has now been pushed back at least 10,000 centuries [by this] extraordinarily important [find] . . . the oldest skull of early man yet discovered.”28 Competition among diggers, even “science wars,” have become a game of breaking records, like Ardi who “smashed the 4 myr barrier.”29
In K-Ar dating, potassium, a leading parameter, is a radioactive element with a supposedly steady decay rate: apparently it takes almost 3 myr for 0.1 percent of “parent” K-40 to turn into “daughter” Ar-40. It is not the fossil itself that is dated but the potassium-bearing deposits in which it is found. However, collecting undisturbed and uncontaminated rock samples of indisputable association with the fossils is more iffy than we are led to believe. Too, we are relying on the constant rate of decay from potassium into argon: even though the margin of error is claimed to be less than 1 percent,30 decay rates are only statistical averages.
The story of K-Ar began in 1959 with Zinjanthropus boisei at East Africa’s Olduvai Gorge; at this time the University of California had just brought out the K-Ar method. Louis Leakey’s first guesstimate for Zinj’s age had been 600 kyr, which itself was looked on as extravagant, even outrageous, compared to a mere 10 kyr, presumed by other workers.31 But K-Ar now dated Zinj almost 2 myr. Quite a leap—from five to seven digits! An overnight sensation.
Let’s take a closer look: Radiometric analysis by the K-Ar method is used specifically to date lava and other volcanic rocks—despite the fact that volcanic ash is apt to be infused with much older crystals. Ash samples that are badly weathered are also useless. Consider this: The K-Ar method performs best on things 2 to 3 myr; in fact, K-Ar cannot date younger materials, that is, rocks younger than 100 kyr. Its capability extends to deposits only if they are older than 500 kyr, whereby it has more than tripled man’s age and inaugurated the wayward trend toward deep-time or long dating, back-dating genus Homo into the millions of years.
Given that the K-Ar method refers to the age of volcanic soils, not to the bones themselves, it is a poor method if the bones are not securely in place, and many if not most fossils are, indeed, surface finds, kicked up from who knows where. Since argon 40 is a gas, it easily migrates in and out; potassium is also mobile. K-Ar in certain minerals will therefore show bogus age if argon gets trapped inside; indeed, argon could have already been in the rocks before they solidified. How can we be sure of the ratio of parent: daughter elements in the original sample? The delusory K-Ar method has yielded dates ranging everywhere from 160 million to 3 billion years old for the same material—rocks actually formed fewer than 200 years ago!
First man Ardi was dated wildly at 23 myr by testing the basalt (lava deposit) closest to the fossils. They realized, of course, that was way too old for any hominid, so they sampled some other basalt a ways off and “selected” those samples that gave a comfortable age of 4.4 mya—because that would be about right in the current scheme of evolutionary dating. We find a similar scenario in connection with one very controversial Homo habilis–like specimen, a skull, for which early testing again gave a too-old date of 230 mya! But humans weren’t around then, of course, so they kept sampling volcanic rocks in the area, until settling on one that gave an age of 2.8 myr. Why? Because this age aligned with previous published studies and was assumed to be about right.
Radiometric dating, as David Pitman, Australia’s brilliant young cosmogonist, has explained (in a personal communication), makes the blithe assumption that
no (or very little) new material has been added to the earth since its initial formation. . . . But the planet has undergone periods when vast
amounts of new material, both organic and inorganic, have been thrown down to the earth. Apparently, this is where our fossil fuels came from (i.e., they are not fossils at all!). . . . And the age you are measuring is greater than the length of time that the material has been on the earth. . . . It probably spent a whole bunch of time rolling around in space before it was caught in the earth’s vortex and dumped on the surface. The accuracy of radiometric dates depends on these conditions. . . . It is impossible to know which particular measurements will be accurate without first establishing the vortexian history of the fossil location.
Figure 6.2. Genealogical tree (1929) shows estimated depth of deposits (left-hand column).
Our Earth is composed of material that gathered as it formed, whirled into shape by its powerful vortexian (field) currents*88; the tendency to accumulate outside (extraterrestrial) material increases the farther back we go. Nonterrestrial material could have been in space for millions of years before being pulled into the earth-forming vortex. Without factoring in the influx of very old interstellar particles, radiometric dates are distorted in the too-old direction. Are we measuring Earth’s age—or stuff that fell to the planet from dissolved stars and spheres?
As Pitman has observed,
decay rates are likely to change over time . . . [and are] highly subject to the change in atmospherean currents. Think of the meteoris belts where solid elements like iron are apparently held in solution and condense out to create meteorites. . . . At this altitude, iron would be radioactive because it would be capable of decaying into pure energy. These belts, their location and intensity, are controlled by the atmospherean currents, and these currents change over time. Therefore the decay rate of a particular sample will depend on its vortexian environment, and this environment changes greatly over time. . . . The decay rate [is] mostly tending to slow down over time. . . . Using it for dating becomes very very shaky the more distant into the past you go. . . . Yep, we just need to take a bunch of zeros off those dates! . . . Heavy elements will tend to decay faster; the degree of how much faster will get greater the further into the past we go (when the vortex’s rotation is proportionally faster). Thus there will be a direct relationship between the speed of the earth’s rotation and the rate of radioactive decay—and thus the degree of inaccuracy of radiometric dating.
Mysterious Origins of Hybrid Man Page 21