by Arlos » Tue Aug 23, 2005 12:03 pm
Did you miss the part where they pointed out that you can't carbon date stuff more than about 60,000 years old? Lucy is FAR older than 60,000 years. How then could an "initial carbon dating" be wrong, if it would be impossible for them to have ever done one?
To be fair, there are situations where external factors can throw off carbon dating results, ie, if the sample you want to test is in a situation where it could be effected by more modern carbon deposits onto the surface of the material. Fortunately, based on the conditions necessary for bones to fossilize, they're mostly immune to such influence; it applies more to stuff we pull out of glaciers and suchlike, as I recall.
Oh, and saw something recently that showed how the theories of human evolution were revised recently. For a while, since we hadn't found any other potential ancestor hominids (hominids are a really rare fossil, we weren't that common back then), it looked somewhat like humans had a unique family tree that was more a straight line, where all other animals looked like a complex bush. Well, the same paleontologist who found Lucy back in the 60s recently figured that theory was wrong, and went out and managed to find an entirely new species of homnid that could potentially be our ancestor, that was contemporaneous to other hominids we alerady knew about. So, turns out our family tree is no different than any other animal.
-Arlos
Thanks man... I needed that!.gif){kind=small}
