Yes, this is her thread. She has never said she does not want me posting here, she has just said that she did not want me sharing my "religious beliefs" in this thread. My last two posts to her did not mention my, or any, religious beliefs at all. The reliability and validity of dating methods is directly relevant to this thread, though - particularly, to the issue of whether or not the serpent rock mentioned in the original post is potentially evidence of, or a reflection of, "the most ancient creation story".

Whether or not you agree with Joy, this is her thread, and if she wants you to stop posting in it, you should comply. As she mentioned, I have just started a new open thread, where comments on all subjects are welcome.

Now for the second time, please refrain from further posts to this thread asserting your religious beliefs. Krauze has started an open thread, please use that for further remarks on the subject. Thanks.

Please point out to me exactly where and in what way my post dated December 5th, 2006 at 4:39 pm "assert[ed]" my "religious beliefs". And, I'm no geologist, but I spoke with Dr. Austin by phone yesterday, after having visited the links Andrea and Aagcobb gave (in stereo), and he said the first point at the link was a misrepresentation, because the lab to which he sent his samples did not claim, at the time he sent his samples, that their accuracy was limited to samples 2 million years old or older - he said that he specifically told the lab that he suspected/expected the samples would be much younger than 1-2 million years, and had to pay a surcharge for them to go ahead and test the samples, which they did. Regarding the second point at the Talk.origins link, Dr. Austin said that the whole dating method depends upon uniformitarian assumptions, and that they can't have it both ways - if they are going to use such dating methods, they have to assume they aren't contaminated, thus they would have to assume that what the dates they come up with aren't in actuality due to xenocrysts (or also xenoliths [spelling?]); if they are going to discredit the dates Dr. Austin's samples gave by appeals to "possibly contaminated by undetected xenocrysts", they thereby essentially discredit all dates arrived at by similar dating methods. (At least, this was my layperson's understanding of what Dr. Austin said - he did agree with me that this second point at the Talk.origins site could be compared to cutting off a branch one is standing on.)

Hope this post doesn't contain any religious preaching - I'm pretty sure I stuck to the science involved in dating methods.

Yet I find it strangely discordant that the dating coincides so closely with what geologists and geneticists have theorized about the Toba event. Douglas is correct that radiometric dating is not necessarily accurate, and geologists themselves admit there are sometimes unacceptably large margins of error due to a variety of causes. Considering that the charred spearpoints were most likely dated via radiocarbon [C-14 decay], it may be worthwhile to consider what specific fudge factors may have been present from the Toba eruption itself in the organic material forming the soot on the artifacts. Just to see if the dating is reasonably accurate, and what that may further mean for evolutionary assumptions.

I have a question about whether the catastrophic scenario attributed to the Toba eruption - 6 years of volcanic winter and a thousand years of intense mini-ice age - is independently evidenced by geographical clues (glaciation and its effects, mass extinctions of plant and animal life, etc.), or if it has been made out to be worse than it likely was due to evolutionary biologists trying to pinpoint cause for a near total extinction of just human beings. Which has been postulated to have occurred due to the glaring (and mysterious) lack of genetic variation in humans despite significant regional racial variation in features/traits.

Geneticists postulate a "bottleneck" ~70,000 years ago that reduced the human population to between just 5 to 15,000 individuals in the entire world. Even Wikipedia links the Toba event directly to the human evolutionary bottleneck. Why, one might get the impression that these scientific disciplines got together to support each other's theories on purpose! Did anybody ever suspect they might be wrong?

Are we to suppose that a hefty chunk of all human beings left on the planet 70,000 years ago lived within a couple hundred miles of the Tsodilo Hills and worshipped a stone python in this cave? Some of the artifacts come from this distance, thus can be presumed to represent different tribes of San ancestors (who by this theory are our ancestors too, just as distant from us as from modern Kalihari Bushmen).

But this isn't equatorial Africa - it's temperate South Africa, and arid to boot. Right there we've a challenge to the Volcanic Winter theory. Anthropologists maintain that the San have inhabited this region continuously for at least 40,000 years, and they themselves claim the Tsodilo Hills holy caves as their ancestral home (and site of creation by the python god in some misty prehistoric past). It doesn't appear that these humans were the ones evolutionary biologists tell us migrated to Austrasia southward or Europe and Asia proper northward in great waves. As if there were "great waves" of humans to do the migrating 70,000 years ago when there were no more than ~10 thousand human beings. Hmmm… Puzzle, puzzle, does any of this make sense?

Of course, we have also very recently come to find out that human populations are significantly more diverse genetically than was previously supposed when we were said to have only two copies of any given gene in our genomes. So it's now possible that there was no such drastic genetic bottleneck for humanity, and we don't need some catastrophic Volcanic Winter scenario to explain it.

Yet there is geological evidence of a gigantic eruption (I presume, since this is science). Surely they didn't make this all up out of whole cloth just to support a second out-of-Africa scenario. Such eruptions are known to release massive amounts of carbon dioxide as well as ash and other gases, which is what is supposed to cause volcanic winter. Thus we can further surmise that much of the carbon in the organic material used to burn offerings (artifacts) in the python cave was probably NOT carbon 14 caused by cosmic rays high in the atmosphere (particularly since organic material was so rare at the time, according to Volcanic Winter theory). This is one of those base assumptions critical to carbon dating that in this case could skew the results.

If Coulson's dates turn out to have been corrected for the carbon most probably present at the end of the volcanic mini-ice age - if there was one - more is wrong with current theories than just how many humans (and plants, and animals) were alive 70,000 years ago. And where they were alive, considering that European and Middle Eastern Neandertal populations made it through this supposed extinction event too. Their culture was no different from that of the modern humans they shared the regions with…

I'd say that if Coulson's dating is reasonably accurate, some serious revision in the whole human evolution/migration picture is due. The sooner the better.

Anybody want to start a betting pool on how long it takes for evolutionary biologists, geneticists, anthropologists, paleontologists, geologists, vulcanologists, etc. to get together and totally revise THEIR Creation Story?

Now for the second time, please refrain from further posts to this thread asserting your religious beliefs. Krauze has started an open thread, please use that for further remarks on the subject. Thanks.

With accuracy like that, it is hard to accept "70,000 years" as valid or unarguable.

There is a significant difference between the dating of the rock that Nick asked about and the charred artifacts used to date human ritual use of the site (and presumably the rudimentary carving of the snake rock). The rock would likely be dated by Potassium-Argon, as the St. Helens lava samples you mention were.

The artifacts in the python cave were dated by Carbon-Nitrogen if radiometric dating was used rather than spearhead knapping. C-N is reasonably accurate (40 year half life factor) from zero to 100,000 years. IOW, error would be 2,500 years at most in either direction at 100,000 years. Ideally, if the baseline calibrating assumptions are correct.

P-A is claimed accurate from 100,000 years to earth origin, but it's dealing with a half life factor of 1.277 billion years. Lots of room for very significant error, so they usually produce a series of tests and average the results. Still, all the heavy element radiometric dating methods are pretty shaky in their claims to accuracy for other reasons as well - we are no longer confident in our requisite assumptions of uniformitarianism over these time periods per the deposition of elements, or the particular isotopes deposited at given times from given sources (not to mention some questions about the constancy of alpha per decay). The only thing we're legitimately confident of are the chains of decay, as this can be physically calculated independent of observation.

Austin may not have been dishonest when he submitted the St. Helens lava to a lab for P-A dating, but as a geologist he would know as a matter of course that samples less than 100,000 years old would result in inaccurate dates. So nobody on the planet knowledgeable about such things would have been the least bit surprised by inaccurate dates.

This has nothing to do with the accuracy of the dating as it applies to human ritual use.

Bear in mind that recently solidified lava from Mount St. Helens has been dated by those methods at hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of years of age, when the theory behind the dating method says it should show an age of only tens of years, or at the most hundreds of years.

Another creationist misrepresentation.