|
Well, Big, we are familiar with Homo Sapiens dating back to about the beginning of recorded history, as we have discussed. Neanderthal man is clearly nothing like that. If (s)he were contemporaneous with HS, some remains would have been found which dated as such. As for the various layers of remains at Gotha, once again, I would ask, if the top layer is clearly Homo Sapiens, and dates back 6000 years, more or less, how would you deal with all the layers underneath? There are very few things known to science that are more accurate than the decay rates of radioactive isotopes. Show me someone who disputes that and I will show you, invariably, someone with a fundamentalist religious agenda, someone whose mind was already made up. It is true that samples may be contaminated in one way or another and produce a false result. That can be overcome by redundancy, that is, testing a number of samples. It's also true that the accuracy of C-14 dating decreases with age; nonetheless, we are talking here about time frames long, long before the supposed 'creation' according to Ussher's and other similar computations. If there's not enough C-14 to be tested in a sample of reasonable size, you're back 100,000 years or more. How much more proof do you want? Fundamentalists seem to accept the decay rate of C-14 back 6-10 thousand years, then claim that it 'must' have decayed at a much faster rate prior to that, because if it did not not, the Bible would be proven unfactual, and this is, according to them, impossible. Does that make sense to you? At that point of absurdity, it seems to me the burden of proof is on them.
|
